Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeartRadio and how the tech are you. It's time for a tech Stuff classic episode. And this episode is titled tech Stuff Is Under Siege. And I had to look it up just to make sure that it wasn't about that one Stephen Sagal movie.
It is not.
It is about siege engines, as in the giant types of military hardware used in the Middle Ages and thereabouts in order to lay siege to a fortified position, typically something like a castle or fortress. This episode originally published on April twelfth, twenty seventeen. Hope you enjoy today.
I'm going to talk about siege in I thought it'd be kind of fun and sort of in the theme of looking back on history.
Well, what is a siege engine? While it's a device meant.
To allow an attacking army to gain entry to a fortified space, typically a fortified city or a castle, something along those lines, they're used to penetrate or destroy fortress walls or gates, and they tend to be enormous and they exert tremendous force in their operation. I'm going to focus on siege engines from ancient times to medieval history, but you should know that siege engines continued to evolve even after medieval era, even after the invention of gunpowder
and the distribution of gunpowder. To be fair, gunpowder had been invented for a very long time before anyone over in medieval Europe figured out how to use it as a means for weaponry. And also, gunpowder ended up making a lot of the traditional city defenses ineffective. I'll talk about that more later on in this episode, but siege engines were used in both world Wars, actually, but I'm
going to save that for a different episode. We're going to talk about the old stuff, this kind of stuff you might see in a movie about knights and royalty and stuff like that. So siege weapons were necessary to penetrate a fortified position, typically, like I said, a city or a castle. So why would you lay siege to such a place at all. Essentially, it's an effort to make the people inside surrender to the people outside. It
seems pretty simple. Usually the people inside would include someone of importance who kind of had the authority to hand over the rule of law for that region to somebody else. And the word siege comes from a Latin word sidare, which means to sit, And that's pretty much what a sieging force does. It sits outside a fortified area and it waits. It also usually attempts to cut off supplies that are heading into the foried location, both food and water and other things, to push the people inside to
the point of desperation so that they surrender. But sometimes a long wait just isn't convenient. You got places to go, people to meet, lands to conquer, so you can't really wait around for people to eat that last apple or to draw the last water from the well. You got to find a way to speed things up a little bit. You got to convince them that they need to give up, and maybe force them to give up, and that requires
getting access to the place that's fortified. Thus seize engines. Now, archaeologists have uncovered evidence of fortified city walls from ancient cities all around the world, and in a way, you could say that human history is marked by innovations in ways to keep people safe and other innovations designed to overcome those protections. It gets a pretty grim when you start thinking about specifics and you get down to brass tacks, as it were. But if ancient people had fortified walls,
what did the ancient attackers use to breach those walls. Well, there are a couple of different tactics that don't involve seize engines at all. For example, you might try and use fire to weaken walls. You might tunnel under walls, either to collapse the wall so that they just fall down, or you end up just bypassing the wall entirely in tunnel into the place that you're trying to get access to. Or you might just use ladders to try and access
the top of the wall and scale it. Obviously, that could be dangerous if there are soldiers up at the top of the wall to push the ladders down. So you've got to hope that you can zerg rush it use a whole bunch of people all at once. If you don't know what a zerg rush is, you need to go listen to the Tech Memes episode that published not too long ago. So the ancients would start to construct massive tools to break through barriers. These are the
siege engines. They're bigger than things like just a tunnel or a ladder. And arguably the oldest version of the siege engine is the battering ram. So I'm sure you're all familiar with the concept, but just in case. A battering ram is a large mass that can be swung so that it has its impact against a surface and that causes that surface to become damaged. In other words, it's like an enormous hammer breaking through a wall or
a door. And an example could be just an enormous log, and the earliest battering rams were held by people, but that was problematic. People can only hold weight up to a certain limit and then it's just too heavy to move. It slows them down and they remain unprotected and can be picked off by archers or people with slings or other projectiles. So you want to improve upon this idea.
So another example would be a log that is hung from a wooden frame by various ropes, and the ropes allow the log to swing horizontally so that the end can crash into that vertical surface like a.
Wall or a gate.
This would allow you to have a much heavier battering ram than something you would have to carry by hand, because you could put it on this rope system and just swing it and as opposed to having to lift it.
According to ancient.
Historians, the earliest example of this technology was the brainchild of a certain Pefrasminos of Tire, And I apologize for absolutely butchering the pronunciation of that name, because I'm certain I did. Anyway, This particular engineer would have lived sometime between five hundred and three hundred and fifty BCE, and his main invention was suspending a cross beam from a transverse beam for the purposes of swinging it as a
battering ram. In other words, that design I was talking about hanging a wooden beam in a frame so that you can bash down a wall or a door. Now, typically you would also find that the frames holding these battering rams would be shielded by a roof, and often that roof would be covered with dampened animal skins. That
would help cut down on the potential for fire. If your defending city was using flaming arrows or burning oil or something along those lines, it would reduce the possibility that your brand new, shiny battering ram would just become kindling. And you would also protect yourself from other just basic projectiles and allow the operators of the battering ram to continue hammering against the wall or the door.
Obviously, this was risky.
You had to get access to the actual wall, and according to Vitruvius, who was an author and engineered the first century, the first person to create a fireproofed roofed battering ram was Keros the Carthaginian, sometimes called Geros with a G the Carthaginian. Modern historians believe this person was alive sometime around the fifth century BCE, and this was after the Iron Age that had happened several hundred years earlier.
So it was very common for the attacking party to cap a battering ram with a large iron or otherwise metal cap, often shaped in the form of a battering ram like a literal ram, like a goat's head with horns. The iron would give the battering ram even more weight and resilience, and it would make it more effective. The animals would, you know, forms made it look more interesting, but they also could help with bashing through the material,
depending upon the shapes you were using. And yeah, it was a pretty effective means of knocking down your basic city walls. You also would see other improvements like pulley systems that would allow the battering ram to remain horizontal as it swung instead of tilting upward. So imagine a
swing set swing. You know, when you're swinging on a swing, your feet tilt up in the air instead of staying horizontal unless you're actively moving your legs down, and the pulley system would counteract that tendency so that way you wouldn't be hitting the wall or door on an upward swing. It would be translated into a horizontal motion, so that that momentum that you're transferring would be in the proper direction. And that's what we're talking about. The working principle behind
the battering ram is the transfer of momentum. Momentum quick recap for people who don't remember their physics. It's the quantity of motion and a moving body. And the way you arrive at the quantity of momentum is by multiplying the mass of a moving body by its velocity, So that means momentum of a small object that's moving very very very fast can be the same as a large object moving much more slowly if the numbers work out the right way. But if something is really big and
really fast. It has a whole lot of momentum to it, and I've got some funny stories about momentum. I had to explain this to a friend of mine at the Renaissance Festival. There was a moment in a dance, a dance in which it is possible to steal the partner of another person, in which I was trying to steal the queen from the king. The king being played by a guy who looked an awful lot like Henry the Eighth, including Henry the Eighth's impressive mass. Fellow collided with me.
He gave me a little hip check, and he wasn't moving fast, but he did outweigh me by a significant amount, and so I went flying, And thus the transfer of momentum was demonstrated in a very real and ultimately painful way. I have since forgiven him. It actually was pretty funny, but I did sprain both my wrist and my ankle
in that incident. So with battering rams, your desired outcome is to have a very large mass, and you want it to move really quickly so that you can result in this large amount of momentum that you transfer to a stationary object like the wall or the gate and thus cause.
Damage to it.
So once battering rams started getting better, obviously cities needed to respond and they began to reinforce their walls, making them thicker at the base and trying to create new strategies to repel battering ram assaults. My favorite battering ram is actually a fictional one, like Grand Grand was the battering ram in Lord of the Rings. It was from
Sauron's army. They used it in the siege on Minas Tirith, and it was one hundred feet long and had a metal cap that was shaped like a wolf, and in most of the depictions I've seen, the wolf has also got some sort of fire or lava coming out of its mouth, making it pretty intimidating.
Awesome image. Really.
Another ancient siege engine similar to this in the sense that you had to get super close to your target, was the siege tower. This is a pretty simple concept. It's usually it's like a tower that's on wheels, and you push this tower up against the city wall that you want to you want to get past, and you have a gang plank at the top of the tower that you lower so that it rests on the city wall, and then your force just goes through the siege tower, across the gang plank and into the city and you
bipe past the wall. Entirely very basic idea. Obviously, things could go wrong. The tower if it were set on fire, could end up causing you to lose quite a few of your men.
And also there.
Are lots of different ways to create obstacles to make it more difficult to get the tower up against a city wall.
One of those would be.
Moats, So your basic moat around a castle was really a defense against siege engines. Like this, it meant that it was much harder to get something like a siege tower up against the castle walls because you had to get across the moat first, and the moat might either be dry or it could be filled with water. Not all moats were water. In fact, most of them weren't.
Most of them were essentially just a very big ditch around the fortified area, so you would have to find a way to bridge that gap if you were an attacker to allow your siege engine to roll over the moat, So you had to build like essentially a temporary bridge to allow the siege engine to roll over it and get access to the city wall, and another defense was
to redesign city walls. In the first place, Engineers began to make walls that were very thick at the base and would slope from the top down to the base, and that slope meant that the top of the wall would be further away from a tower than the base of the wall because it sloped away from the outside. So that meant that your gang plank had to be longer in order to reach from the siege tower to the top of the city wall. And gang planks were
really the weak points of the siege towers. Assuming that you've major siege tower as fireproof as you can manage, which again mostly involved putting the hides of animals on the outside of the tower and wetting them down, drenching them in water as much as you possibly can. Then, once you set down the gang plank and you have attackers going across, their most vulnerable when they are on that gang plank. They're standing over the height of the wall.
There's probably a moat below them. The gang plank's probably not incredibly sturdy or stable. So the further away the top of the siege tower is from the top of the wall, the harder it is for the attackers to get over. So that was just a basic defense mechanism, was to build these sloping walls for cities to help protect against siege engines. Now, both siege towers and battering rams were made obsolete by the invention of cannons later on. I'll talk about cannons toward the end of this episode.
Cannons actually made those high city walls obsolete in the first place. Higher walls were more vulnerable to cannon fire, and so the design of city fortifications had to completely change once those became a major element in warfare. At that point, those siege engines began to fade into history. You didn't really see them anymore. But I'll get more
into cannons a little bit later in the episode. And I'm sure you've already noted that the major disadvantage to both battering rams and siege towers is that you have to get close to your target for them to work. If the defending city has set up other defenses like those trenches or pits or spikes, and they have stuff like hot oil or flaming weapons, getting close isn't terribly attractive.
You would much prefer to batter the city from a distance, and so attackers began to design new engines, things that could allow attacks for much further away.
So next I'll.
Talk about some of the massive projectile weapons that were used, and they relied purely on mechanical physics to hurl objects at walls.
They're pretty cool.
Before I do that, let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor. So the first project al seize engine I really want to talk about is the ballista. And if you were to take a casual glance at a blista, you might think it's an enormous crossbow, and it does resemble a crossbow. But they crossbow and the ballista work
on two different principles, two different types of tension. The operation of the ballista depends upon two torsion springs, whereas the crossbow depends upon the natural tension of the bow itself. So let's talk about torsion springs. Torsion springs work by twisting. They store mechanical energy when you twist the torsion spring, and when you release the spring, it unleashes that mechanical energy through untwisting, So it's winding and unwinding when you
wind it up. You've got the mechanical energy, and when you let it go, it unwinds itself and releases that mechanical energy.
To make a.
Ballista, you need a pair of torsion springs that you can twist tightly so that when you release them, they unleash that mechanical force in such a way as to throw a projectile, typically a large dart with an iron tip at a target. Now, in ancient times, a torsion spring might look like a loop of some stretchy elastic material.
That material was often either hair from animals sometimes humans, all woven together to make really strong ropes, or sometimes it was ligaments and other tissue that was turned into this kind of elastic material and then looped around a frame like a skein that's inside a frame. So imagine a loop of material. In fact, just imagine a rubber band, and imagine that you've got two pegs that are a
few inches apart from each other. They're further apart than the length of the rubber band, so you have to stretch the rubber band a little bit to loop either end over the two pegs. Put more rubber bands that are the same length over those two pegs, so you've got a few of them, maybe four or five. These
rubber bands represent an unwound torsion spring. If you then inserted a throwing arm, what would be considered like the shaft of a throwing arm, into that gap the middle of all those rubber bands, and then use it to twist the rubber bands in a circle, either clockwise or counterclockwise, you would create the torsion. This twisted tension. You loop them over and over again. You can do this with
a pencil, so again, just have a rubber band. You can even have maybe someone stand in front of you putting their two thumbs up, and you loop the rubber bands around their two thumbs so that they're stretching them together. You put a pencil in there. You twist the pencil around a few times so that it's twisting the rubber bands, and you'll start building up that tension. If you let go of the pencil, then it will unleash all that mechanical energy and it'll make the pencil flip around like crazy.
Make sure you use an unsharpened pencil, and be very careful with this sort of stuff because it might fly up and hit you in the face. But this is the basic principle of the ballista. Now, with the ballista, you have two of these torsion springs, and that meant
that they're actually vertically aligned, not horizontally aligned. In other words, you would have imagine you have one thumb higher than the other thumb directly in front of you, and you put the rubber bands on so that you were holding the loop that way.
That's the way the ballista.
Torsion springs are aligned. You have to have those that vertical alignment, and they're parallel to each other. And between the two torsion springs you have your stock or channel. That's where the projectile moves through. So with a crossbow, this would be where the bolt would slide through as it's being launched from the crossbow. Same sort of thing with a ballista. It's got that stock with a channel in it. That's where the projectile moves through it, and
it's between these two vertically aligned torsion springs. So you've got your enormous dart loaded into your blista, and you've got your two vertically aligned torsion springs. In each torsion spring, you have a throwing arm. Now the torsion spring on the left side is wound counterclockwise if you were looking at it from above. That means that when the tension releases, it's going to spin its throwing arm in a clockwise direction. The torsion spring on the right side is the opposite.
It's wound clockwise, so that when you release the tension, it will spin the throwing arm counterclockwise. And on the opposite end of the throwing arm, you have a line attaching the two together, a rope if you will, or a string. This rope is looped around the end of your projectile. This is the thing that's going to transfer the force to the projectile and make it fly at your target. So just imagine you've got this crossbow looking
thing in front of you. The two arms of the ballista in its rest position you haven't wound it yet, are extended outward to the side, so the left one is almost parallel with the front of the ballista, the right one is almost parallel with the ballista, and you have a device called a windless. The windless is what allows you to crank back those arms. It's creating tension in those torsion springs, so it starts to twist the torsion springs, and as a result, the two throwing arms
start tilting back towards you. It's they bend backwards, although the torsion the throwing arms themselves are not bending, it's just the torsion springs are rotating as you're twisting them, so.
They've bend backward.
Now that means that you start getting slack in that rope that's between the two ends of the throwing arms. You can use that slack to put it behind your projectile. And when you release the tension on those torsion springs, they untwist. That pulls the throwing arms forward, and that pulls that rope forward as well, transferring the energy to
your projectile and shooting it at your target. It's pretty cool to see this, I mean, it's interesting to see this as two torsion springs as opposed to a crossbow, which would just use the tension of the material itself, the wood, if you will, of the bow. It's all due to mechanical physics. You don't need any chemicals to do this kind of seige engine, and you could also just build this thing when you needed it. In fact, most seiege engines were constructed at site the siege was happening.
Because they were so big and heavy that moving them from one place across country to another place was not really practical. So usually we just go to the closest forest, cut down some logs, and have some workers start to build seage engines right there on site, wheel them into place so that they're generally pointed at the thing you want to shoot at, and then you start firing. And the blista was an early version of that. The earliest
ones were in the BCE era. You would later see them go all the way up through the Middle Ages. They were, however, not terribly mobile. You could put wheels on the cart for a ballista so that you could at least wheel them into place, but it wasn't It's not like you could easily move them once you planted them. They were pretty much stationary once you were firing, and that meant that they were pretty attractive targets. They were very accurate, but they didn't hurl things at incredible distances.
You can get a decent distance with them, but they fired in a very low arc like. Essentially it was a straight line from the ballista to the target. It kind of came out horizontally that way, it didn't fire in an arc the way catapults and tribuchatse did, and it also did comparatively less damage than catapults and tribuchase, largely because the projectiles it fired didn't have a lot of mass to them compared to the rocks that you
could fire from a catapult or a tribuchet. And like I said, crossbows or bows in general work in a very similar way, but this case it's just tension of the material itself as opposed to a torsion spring, So it's your basic spring action, but it's the actual tension of the wood itself. Torsion springs are also very important
in other types of seize engines, particularly different types of catapults. Now, the nomenclature here it gets a little confusing because a lot of people use the word catapult to refer to a very specific type of siege engine, and other people use catapult to describe an entire family of siege engines, including ballista in some cases. But essentially, catapults were meant
to hurl massive objects through the air. So in order to avoid confusion, I'm going to talk about the manganel and the trebuchet, which are often both lumped under the general category of catapult, but they operate in very different ways. So let's start with the manganel, which was invented before the tribuchet. The manganel was a siege engine of the Middle Ages, so it came into development after the ballista.
Ballista were still being used in siegees at that time, and it's kind of like a one armed ballista but popped on its side. So the ballista looks like a crossbow, which has the horizontal bow, but if you were to wheel an actual bow, like the kind you fire arrows from, you would hold it vertically. Well, the manganel is like that. It's vertical, but it only has one arm. You don't
have a lower half to it. There's just the throwing arm and the torsion spring, and the torsion spring is aligned horizontally instead of vertically, so it's like that first example of the rubber bands I was talking about, where you're holding your thumbs side by side as the torsion spring. Same thing with the manganel. So the throwing arm when it's in its rest position is vertical more or less there's actually typically a stop so that it can't go
completely vertical. It'll usually be at a pretty high angle. When you wind the torsion spring, you pull the throwing arm back until it's practically horizontal, and then you latch it in some way so that it stores that mechanical energy. It doesn't just release it. You load your manganel, typically with heavy stuff, and then you release the torsion spring and that twists back to the rest position, which means the throwing arm goes vertical and releases its projectile.
So a manganel could have this bowl like end.
To it, and that's where you would put your various projectiles. They might be rocks or fire pots, or, at least according to some accounts, dead stuff. The dead stuff was meant to hurt defenders in two ways. First, it's pretty psychologically devastating to have corpses thrown at you, true story. Second, it was thought of as a way to introduce disease into a fortified location, so it's a kind of biological warfare.
You just throw bloated corpses into a city. It's pretty gross, and the whole idea was just to weaken defenses and also increase the chance that the defenders would just give up, like they're throwing dead stuff at us. Let's just run out the white flag and stop this. The Manganel fired projectiles at high velocity and at a low arc, so it was a higher arc than the ballista, which again was pretty much a straight line, so there was a slight arc to it.
But it was still fairly low.
It would aim stuff at walls, not typically over walls. It could hurl heavier and therefore more devastating projectiles than the ballista, but it was also less accurate than the ballista was it was meant to destroy defensive structures rather than go around them. If you look at the arc of projectiles from siege engines, ballista are the lowest, Manganels would be next, and then tribuchetes would be nice high
arcs now. According to the resources I looked at, manganels could hurl projectiles as far as thirteen hundred feet, which is a pretty fair distance to throw a massive stone using pure mechanical power. And like other seas engines, the real genius behind the manganel was that it was pretty simple to construct. You could again just build it on location next I will talk about trebuchets and then lead
it with some cannon talk. But before I get into all of that, let's take another quick break to thank our sponsors, and now to talk.
About the Tributet.
It was a very different beast than the Manganel. It was named after a word in Old French which means to throw over, and that's kind of what.
The tribute did.
It threw projectiles in a high arc that could be used to attack defensive walls or just bypass the walls completely and hurl payloads into fortified cities. Having massive rocks raining down on your homes is a powerful motivator when it comes time to consider surrender. The Tributeha didn't depend upon torsion springs the way Ballista and Menganelles did. Instead, it used a massive counterweight to provide the mechanical force
to hurl payloads. So it's essentially a lever or if you prefer a seesaw, so think of a seesaw, but it has a long end and a short end. The counterweight is on the short end and the long end is what hurls the payload. So seesaws are a pretty good analogy. If you have a seesaw balanced in the center, two identical weights will balance out. You put two kids on there, the weigh the same. The seesaw's right there in the middle. They should even out and just balance
each other. But if you move the seesaw so that the pivot point is off center, then the equal weights on either end will change the actual orientation of the seesaw. The shorter end will end up sticking up in the air and the longer end will rest against the ground. Now, because your typical treviche uses a short arm to hold the counterweight, that means by this little experiment we just talked about, you would actually need a lot more weight
in the counterweight than you're going to have in the payload. Otherwise, your payload just is going to sit on the ground and the counterweight would just dangle in the air.
It would not have the weight.
Sufficient enough to pull the lever so that it flings your payload at your enemy. The counterweight was also typically hinged, meaning that it could swing around on the end of this short side of the tribute shay beam.
That allows it.
To swing around so it doesn't risk hitting the ground and mucking everything up. It's kind of like a ferris wheel ride. The compartments on a farris wheel are hinged so that people inside the ride are always in an upright orientation with regard to the ground. The same is true for tribute shay counterweights, at least with most of them.
Anyway.
Now, the huge throwing arm hurls payloads that are placed in a sling, so it's not like it has a bowl at the end of it, the way a manganel did, at least not your typical tribute shay.
Typically you would.
Use a sling instead. So if you don't know what a sling is, imagine a pocket and you have two sides of this pocket with chords coming from those two sides, one cord on each side, and typically the way you would use a sling, As you put a rock in the sling, you swing the sling around your head, you let go of one of the chords while holding on to the other one, and that releases the rock, slinging it at your target, hopefully and not behind you unless
you're me, in which case it goes wherever it wants to go. Because I can't use a sling in.
A tribute shay.
One of those two chords is permanently attached to the long end of the arm, so you've got one end of the sling permanently affixed to the tribute shay the other cord. The other end has a large ring at the very end of it, and on the very end of the throwing arm itself there's a little projection called the finger that extends outward at a certain angle from
the end of the beam. And by a certain angle, I mean you determine what the angle is when you build the tribute shape, so if you like it, you should have put a ring on it.
So that's what you do with the tribute shay.
You slide the sling's ring over the finger.
So when you want to.
Fire a payload, you have to raise the counterweight into the upright position and lock it in place, as typically you have a mechanism there to keep it from sliding back down or to swinging back down is the better way to say it. And then you load your sling with whatever your payload is, like a giant rock.
You then take.
The ring that's on one end and you slide it over the finger of the throwing arm. When you fire the tribute shay, you remove the block that allows the counterweight to or locks the counterweight in place. I should say this allows the counterweight to fall. It forces the short end of the lever down. The long end is forced upward, and as it moves upward, centrifugal force, which is not really a force, but never mind that centri
centrifugal force pushes the sling outward. And so then as the arm moves through this arc, the ring on the end of that finger slips free once it hits the proper angle as you determined when you were building the tribu shape. When it slips free of the finger, it releases the payload, throwing it in that high arc, and it sails majestically overhead toward your target. And because the
counterweight is heavy enough, it descends very quickly. So this means there's a very high increase in linear velocity for the throwing arm and thus the payload. The release angle of the payload is dependent upon the angle of the finger. That little projection, relatively little projection at the end of
your tribute shap. So if you want to change the release angle, you changed the angle of the finger, and then the ring will come off at a different point in that arc, and thus the payload will fly in a different arc towards your target. Of course, you're probably not using perfectly uniform stones, so it's not an exact science. You might be using stones of slightly different weights, which means that that's gonna change the arc as well, but
still the principle is fairly sound. And then we get to the invention, and more importantly, the employment of gunpowder in siege weaponry. Gunpowder was actually invented in Asia centuries before it became a useful tool in warfare, but it really wasn't until about the fifteenth century that you would see massive artillery guns regularly utilized in medieval Europe.
There were a lot of earlier.
Examples and a lot of historical accounts that at least say that canons were in use, although the definition of canon has changed dramatically over the centuries, so some of those accounts are difficult to verify, simply because the canon that's being referred to in one battle maybe a significantly different kind of weapon than one from another battle.
There's definitely some.
Evidence of canons being used in sieges, though, and in the One Hundred Years War in Northern France. England employed some canons in a battle in thirteen forty six. How many canons, Well, that kind of depends upon which historical account you believe. It's somewhere between five and twenty six. And the English won the battle. So was that because of the devastating power of their fully operational deaths I'm
sorry canons. Probably not. In fact, the English canons likely did very little actual damage against the Genoese mercenaries they were fighting. The Genoese mercenaries were fighting on behalf of France, but it really scared the pantaloons off those guys, because the Genoese were really rattled by those loud, smoky weapons, and they were soundly defeated. But the actual defeat came at the hands of traditional English soldiers wielding stuff like
swords and axes and bows, rather than the canons. And besides, that's not even really a siege, so I'm not really going to talk any more about it. By sixteen seventy you'd actually see the word canon being used to describe specific types of guns. Mounted guns, typically stationary ones like you could roll them into place, but they weren't meant
to be moved around rapidly. The biggest one at that time was called the Canon Royal, and typically a Canon Royal would weigh around eight thousand pounds or three six hundred and thirty kilograms if you prefer and it could fire cannon balls weighing at around sixty three pounds or twenty eight kilograms. That's SIEV. Then you had whole Canon
and Dimi cannon guns. Those were of decreasing size and weight and could fire smaller cannon balls, And by smaller I mean that the smallest got down to be about twenty eight pounds. They're still really heavy, particularly if you compare them to the types of Canon you'd find on sailing ships a century later.
Eventually we would refer.
To canon by the weight of the shot they fired. What kind of cannon ball would they fire? So if you hear about a ten pound gun, it meant that the shot it fired weighed ten pounds. The gun itself didn't weigh ten pounds, it weighed weigh more than that, but the cannon balls weighed ten pounds. So if you hear about a twenty pounder, that meant that the cannon balls weighed twenty pounds.
So the bigger, the poundage.
That just means the heavier the shot, and thus the more damage the canon would do if you hit what you were aiming at. Well, the canon made early your city defenses completely useless. High walls were not good protection against cannon fire, which typically fire in a pretty low arc at a very high velocity, so instead new defenses were invented. Essentially, new walls were built, and these were
lower walls and thicker walls. Defensive walls were made to withstand high impacts from cannon fire, and because defenders would often have guns of their own, traditional methods of breaching walls were pretty bad choices. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense to wheel a siege engine slowly toward a wall if you're being fired upon by cannon, you'd be a sitting duck. So it completely changed warfare from
that moment forward. You also saw other changes as well, from armor to swords and all sorts of stuff, all because gunpowder had entered the scene. Canons themselves are fascinating all the way, from the early bronze guns to the steel guns that redefined warfare yet again, But that warrants it's own episode. That was tech stuff is under Siege, which originally published April twelfth, twenty seventeen.
I hope you enjoyed that.
Hope you learned.
Something about, you know, sort of an old kind of technology. I really enjoy doing those kinds of episodes, Like I love doing the stuff that's cutting edge and bleeding edge tech. I really like learning about that and talking about it. But I also like looking back on old technologies. It is unfortunate that a lot of old technologies were mostly dedicated to how to, you know, make someone else not be alive anymore. But you know, not all of them
were like that, just a lot of them. So maybe I will look back and see if I can find some interesting technologies that were not meant to just hurt or may more kill people, but to do other things as well or instead, I guess I should say. And that would be fun to kind of look up some other old technologies because I'm missdoing those. It's been a while since I've done one. Hope you are all well, and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff
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