This episode of Nova (narrated by actor Stacy Keach) and part of the "Secrets of Lost Empires" series is well worth the viewer's attention for the hour's running time. In 1304, Edward Longshanks, King of England and a ruthless warrior-monarch, set out to bring the ever-difficult (for the English) Scots to bay by attacking and investing the formidable Stirling Castle. And this was emphatically the day of the castle, when a well-located fortified castle (for example one that could be supplied by water), manned with a relatively small garrison could command a region and resist the longest seige--a string of such castles could control a realm. So Edward employed not his bold and gallant knights but the more humble, far more prosaic engineers of his army to solve the problem of how an attacking army could defeat a such a fortress. Presumably unequipped with advanced degrees from presitious engineering schools, these relatively low-ranking members of Edward's military set out to build a large and deadly catapult of the type known as a trebuchet ("tre-boo-shay"), after the French for "throw over" but often corrupted by the English soldiers as "treebucket." The catapult, like gunpowder, had made its way over time from China via the Middle East and had eventually by the 13th century arrived in Western European warfare. Now, at the dawn of the 14th century, Edward Longshanks's great trebuchet was constructed by 50 carpenters working day and night on the site. It was said that the pieces of the monster filled 30 supply wagons. When finished, the huge catapalt, dubbed the "War Wolf," readily reduced Stirling Castle by pulverizing the walls by hurling carefully rounded sandstone balls (boulders makes the projectiles sound too random) of up to 300 pounds through the thick walls. The Scots were defeated. That's the history.
But this is Nova, not the History Channel, and that's only part of it. At the turn of the 21st century, two teams of modern day catapult designers traveled to Loch Ness, where they created a portion of thick stone castle wall and two similar but differing in detail trebuchets to knock it down with. The blurb on the dvd case says they were competing teams, but they were more properly collaborative groups of friendly rivals. The key element of the trebuchet was that it was no simple flinger of objects that worked as simply as, say, a spoon that you'd use to hurl mashed potatoes across the cafeteria in a food fight. This mechanized weapon used a counterweight box on the shorter front end of the catapult arm to allow the attackers to adjust their range by adjusting the weight they put in the box. The trajectory of the toss could also be fine-tuned by lengthening/shortening the rope on the throwing end of the catapult. In the end, after a bit of interesting tinkering, both teams are able to reach the wall portion with their machines. That's the physics of it.
One previous reviewer, in somewhat panning this video, said it's just grown men playing. And while that isn't "all" it is--lots of history and science here too--it is undeniably grown men playing. That, for me, is part of the charm of the video. Here we see guys strapping a grand piano onto a catapult arm and shooting it out into an open field and then cavorting over to see if, indeed, the thing is smashed to smithereens (it is). But more than frivolity, here is historic re-enactment of the best sort. There were no schematics left by Edward Longshanks's engineers, so these teams used what scant records did exist, combined with historical detective work and good engineering problem-solving to create these two weapons of mass destruction (if you will). I bought the dvd to show to a class in "American Wars," not because this sort of weapon was in use ever in America but in specific to show the ever-changing subtle shifts in strength between offensive and defensive warfare. On a related note, perhaps for physics teachers, elsewhere on the Amazon site, one can purchase a scale model of the War Wolf. Just don't use it to reduce the walls of your school the way Edward Longshanks reduced Stirling Castle.
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