Trebuchet (long)

[dennis grace]

Greetings, Cosyns,

Lyonel here.

I pulled this one off the An Tir list.  Thought Gnith et alia would
appreciate this even if it has little practical application in our war
engineering.


>_A Scud It's Not, But the Trebuchet Hurls a Mean Piano_
>
>Giant Medieval War Machine Is Wowing British Farmers And
>Scaring the Sheep
>
>By Glynn Mapes, Staff Reporter of the Wall Street Journal
>
>
>ACTON ROUND, England--With surprising grace, the grand piano sails
>through  the sky a hundred feet above a pasture here, finally
>returning to earth in a fortissimo explosion of wood chunks, ivory
>keys and piano wire.
>
>Nor is the piano the strangest thing to startle the grazing sheep
>this Sunday morning. A few minutes later, a car soars by - a 1975
>blue two-door Hillman, to be exact - following the same flight path
>and meeting  the same loud fate. Pigs fly here, too. In recent months,
>many dead 500-pound sows (two of them wearing parachutes) have passed
>overhead, as has the occasional dead horse.
>
>It's the work of Hew Kennedy's medieval siege engine, a four story
>tall, 30 ton behemoth that's the talk of bucolic Shropshire, 140 miles
>northwest of London. In ancient times, such war machines were dreaded
>instruments of destruction, flinging huge missiles, including plague-
>ridden horses, over the walls of besieged castles. Only one full-sized
>one exists today, designed and built by Mr. Kennedy, a wealthy
>landowner, inventor, military historian and - need it be said? -
>full-blown eccentric.
>
>At Acton, Round Hall, Mr. Kennedy's handsome Georgian manor house
>here, one enters the bizarre world of a P. G. Wodehouse novel. A
>stuffed baboon hangs from the dining room chandelier (`Shot it in
>Africa. Nowhere else to put it,' Mr. Kennedy explains). Lining the
>walls are dozens of halberds and suits of armor. A full suit of
>Indian elephant armor, rebuilt by Mr. Kennedy, shimmers resplendently
>on an elephant-sized frame. In the garden outside stands a 50-foot-
>high Chinese pagoda.
>
>Capping this scene, atop a hill on the other side of the 620-acre
>Kennedy estate, is the siege engine, punctuating the skyline like an
>oil derrick. Known by its 14th-century French name, trebuchet (pro-
>nounced tray-boo-shay), it's not to be confused with a catapult, a
>much smaller device that throws rocks with a spoon-like arm propelled
>by twisted ropes or animal gut.
>
>Mr. Kennedy, a burly, energetic 52-year-old, and Richard Barr, his
>46-year-old neighbor and partner, have spent a year and #10,000
>($17,000) assembling the trebuchet. They have worked from ancient
>texts, some in Latin, and crude wood-block engravings of siege
>weaponry.
>
>The big question is why?
>
>Mr. Kennedy looks puzzled, as if the thought hadn't occurred to him
>before. `Well why not? It's bloody good fun!' he finally exclaims.
>When pressed, he adds that for several hundred years, military
>technicians have been trying fruitlessly to reconstruct a working
>trebuchet. Cortez built one for the siege of Mexico City. On its
>first shot, it flung a huge boulder straight up - and then straight
>down, demolishing the machine. In 1851, Napoleon III had a go at it,
>as an academic exercise. His trebuchet was poorly balanced and barely
>managed to hurl the missiles - backward. `Ours works a hell of a lot
>better than the Frogs', which is a satisfaction,' Mr. Kennedy says
>with relish.
>
>How it works seems simple enough. The heart of the siege engine is a
>three-ton, 60-foot tapered beam made from laminated wood. It's pivoted
>near the heavy end, to which is attached a weight box filled with 5
>tons of steel bar. Two huge A-frames made from lashed-together tree
>trunks support a steel axle, around which the beam pivots. When the
>machine is at rest, the beam is vertical, slender end at the top and
>weight box just clearing the ground.
>
>When launch time comes, a farm tractor cocks the trebuchet, slowly
>hauling the slender end of the beam down and the weighted end up.
>Several dozen nervous sheep, hearing the tractor and knowing what
>comes next, make a break for the far side of the pasture. A crowd of
>60 friends and neighbors buzzes with anticipation as a 30-foot,
>steel-cable sling is attached - one end to the slender end of the
>beam and the other to the projectile, in this case a grand piano
>(purchased by the truckload from a junk dealer) .
>
>`If you see the missile coming toward you, simply step aside,' Mr.
>Kennedy shouts to the onlookers.
>
>Then, with a great groaning, the beam is let go. As the counter-
>weight plummets, the piano in its sling whips through an enormous
>arc, up and over the top of the trebuchet and down the pasture, a
>flight of 125 yards. The record for pianos is 151 yards (an upright
>model, with less wind resistance). A 112 pound iron weight made it
>235 yards. Dead hogs go for about 175 yards, and horses 100 yards;
>the field is cratered with the graves of the beasts, buried by a
>backhoe where they landed.
>
>Mr. Kennedy has been studying and writing about ancient engines of
>war since his days at Sandhurst, Britain's military academy, some 30
>years ago. But what spurred him to build one was, as he puts it, `my
>nutter cousin' in Northumberland, who put together a pint-sized
>trebuchet for a county fair. The device hurled porcelain toilets
>soaked in gasoline and set afire. A local paper described the event
>under the headline `Those Magnificent Men and Their Flaming Latrines.'
>
>Building a full-sized siege engine is a more daunting task. Mr.
>Kennedy believes that dead horses are the key. That's because
>engravings usually depict the trebuchet hurling boulders, and there
>is no way to determine what the rocks weigh, or the counterweight
>necessary to fling them. But a few drawings show dead horses being
>loaded onto trebuchets, putrid animals being an early form of
>biological warfare.Since horses weigh now what they did in the 1300s,
>the engineering calculations followed easily.
>
>One thing has frustrated Mr. Kennedy and his partner: They haven't
>found any commercial value to the trebuchet. Says a neighbor helping
>to carry the piano to the trebuchet, `Too bad Hew can't make the
>transition between building this marvelous machine and making any
>money out of it.'
>
>It's not for lack of trying. Last year Mr. Kennedy walked onto the
>English set of the Kevin Costner Robin Hood movie, volunteering his
>trebuchet for the scene where Robin and his sidekick are catapulted
>over a wall. `The directors insisted on something made out of
>plastic and cardboard,' he recalls with distaste. `Nobody cares
>about correctness these days.''
>
>More recently, he has been approached by an entrepreneur who wants
>to bus tourists up from London to see cars and pigs fly through the
>air. So far, that's come to naught.
>
>Mr. Kennedy looks to the U.S. as his best chance of getting part of
>his investment back: A theme park could commission him to build an
>even bigger trebuchet that could throw U.S.-sized cars into the sky.
>`Its an amusement in America to smash up motor cars, isn't it?' he
>inquires hopefully.
>
>Finally, there's the prospect of flinging a man into space - a
>living man, that is. This isn't a new idea, Mr. Kennedy points out:
>Trebuchets were often used to fling ambassadors and prisoners of war
>back over castle walls, a sure way to demoralize the opposition.
>
>Some English sports parachutists think they can throw a man in the
>air *and* bring him down alive. In a series of experiments on Mr.
>Kennedy's machine, they've thrown several man-sized logs and two
>quarter-ton dead pigs into the air; one of the pigs parachuted gently
>back to earth, the other landed rather more forcefully .
>
>Trouble is, an accelerometer carried inside the logs recorded a
>centrifugal force during the launch of as much as 20 Gs (the actual
>acceleration was zero to 90 miles per hour in 1.5 seconds). Scient-
>ists are divided over whether a man can stand that many Gs for more
>than a second or two before his blood vessels burst.
>
>The parachutists are nonetheless enthusiastic. But Mr. Kennedy
>thinks the idea may only be pie in the sky.
>
>`It would be splendid to throw a bloke, really splendid,' he says
>wistfully. `He'd float down fine. But he'd float down dead.'
>
______________________________________________________
Dennis G. Grace
Postmodern Medievalist
Division of Rhetoric and Composition
Department of English
University of Texas at Austin
amazing at mail.utexas.edu
___________________

Si hoc legere scis, nimium eruditionis habes.