TechStuff is Under Siege

History Class. I'm not going to tell you the episode title because I don't remember it off the top of my head, but I do appear in it, so it's a classic episode. I think might have been Sarah and Dablina as the hosts back in those days. Anyway, I'm performing at the Georgia Renaissance Festival this year season, and the opening day for the Renaissance Festival is the day after this podcast airs, so I thought, why not do

an episode inspired by ye olden times? And yes, I know he is actually the We're going to go back quite a bit before the Renaissance because today I'm going to talk about siege engines. I thought it'd be kind of fun and sort of in the theme of looking back on history as I prepare to don my tights and doublet I'm sorry for that mental image anyway. 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 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 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 uh 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 gonna 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 nights 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 sederre, 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 fortified 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've 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've got to find a way to speed

things up a little bit. You've 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 siege 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 a 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 siege 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 act us 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 zer rushes, 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. Uh. 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 pe frasm No 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 fifty b C. And his 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 you're defending city was using flaming arrows or burning oil or something on those lines, it would it would reduce the possibility that your brand new, shiny battering ram would just become kindling and uh. You would also protect yourself from other just basic projectiles and allow the operators of the battering 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 engineer during the first century, the first person to create a fireproofed roofed battering ram was Kros the Carthaginian

sometimes called Garross with a G the Carthaginian. Modern historians believe this person was alive sometime around the fifth century b C. 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. Uh. The iron would give the battering ram even more weight and resilience, and it would make it more effective. The animals would and you know it forms made it look more interesting. But they also could help with bashing through the the material, depending upon the shapes you were using, and uh, yeah, it was a pretty effective means of knocking down your

basic city walls. Uh. They 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 uh, the pulley system would counteract that dency 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. Uh. At the Renaissance Festival, there was a moment in a dance dance in which it is possible to steal the partner of another person um, 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 impressive mass, and this 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 wrists and my ankle

in that incident. So with battering rams, your desired outcome is to have a very large mass, and you wanted to move really quickly so that you can result in this large amount of momentum that transfer to a stationary object like the wall or the gate, and thus caused damage to it. So once battering ram 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. I like grond Grand was the battering Ram and Lord of the Rings. It was from Suron's army. They used it in the siegeen mins Tira, and it was ont long and had a metal cap that was shaped like a wolf. And the most of the depictions I've seen the wolf is also got some sort of fire or lava coming out of its mouth, making it pretty intimidating. Awesome image. Really.

Another ancient season gen 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 uh 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 your force just goes through the siege tower, across the gang plank and into the city.

Then you bipass the wall. Entirely very basic idea. Uh. 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. Uh. 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. Uh. It meant that it was much harder to get something like a siege tower up against the castle walls, because he 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 fort 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 moats, 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. You know, it's because it sloped away from the out side. 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, you know, drenching them in water as 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 there standing over the height of the wall.

There's probably a moat below them. The gang planks probably not incredibly sturdy or 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 towards the end of this episode. Cannon's 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 from much further away. So next I'll talk about some of the massive projectile weapons that were used. Uh 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 projectile siege engine I really want to talk about is the ballista. And if you were to take a casual glance at a ballista, 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 two different types of tension. Uh, 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 two loop either end over the two pegs. Then you 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 hortion. This this twisted tension. You look 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 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 will 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 the 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 the 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 ballista, 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 counter clockwise if you were looking at it from above. That means that when the tension releases, it's going to spend 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 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 is almost parallel with the front of the ballist, of the right one is almost parallel with the ballista, and you have a device called a wind us. The windlass 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 that they've bend backwards, although the torsion the throwing arms themselves are not bending. It's just the torsion springs are are rotating as you're twisting them. Uh, so they've been 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 that rope forward as well, transferring the energy to your projectile and shooting it at your target. It's a 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 siege engine, and you could also just build this thing when you needed it. In fact, most siege engines were constructed at site where 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 siege engines right there on site, wheel them in a place so that they're generally pointed at the thing you want to shoot at, and then you start firing. Uh. And the blister was an early version of that the earliest ones were in the BC era. Uh 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 could 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. Um it kind of came out horizontally that way. It didn't fire in an arc the way catapults and tributches did. And it also did comparatively less damage than catapults and tribushes, 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 tributsche. 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 tortion spring um 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 seige engines, particularly different types of catapults. Now, the nomenclature here 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 Manganell and the Tribuche, which are often both lumped under the general category of catapult, but they operate in very different ways. So let's start with the Manganell, which was that before the Tribute. The Mangonell was a siege engine of the Middle Ages, so it came to into development after the Ballista.

Ballista we're still being used in siegeons 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 you know has the horizontal bow, but if you were to wield an actual bow, like the kind you fire arrows from, you would hold it vertically. Well, the manganell is like that. It's vertical, but it only has one arm. You don't you don't have a lower half

to it. Uh, 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 mangonell. 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 will 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 mangonel could have this bowl like end to it, and that's where you would put your various projectiles. They might be rocks or firepots, 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 let's just

run up the white flag and stop this. The manganell 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 uh. 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, Manganelles would be next, and then Tribute Chase would be nice high arcs Now, according to the resources I looked at, Manganelles could hurl projectiles as far as feet, which is a pretty fair distance to throw a massive stone using pure mechanical power. And like other season Jin's, the real genius by the manganell was that it was pretty simple

to construct. You could again just build it on location. Next I will talk about tribouches 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 Tribute Shade. It was a very different beast than the Manganel. It was named after a word an old French which means to throw over,

and that's kind of what the Tribute Shade did. It through projectiles in a high arc, they could be used to attack defensive walls, or just bypass the walls completely and hurled pload into fortified cities. Having massive rocks raining down on your homes as a powerful motivator when it comes time to consider surrender. The Tribute shade didn't depend upon torsion springs the way Ballista and Mengonells 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 see saw, 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 pretty good analogy. If you have a seesaw balanced in the center, too identical weights will balance out. You put two kids on there the way the same the seesaws 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 of 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 tribute she 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 gonna sit on the ground and the counterweight would just dangle in the air. It would not have the weights 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 the tribute shay beam that allows that 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 affairs wheel are hinged so that people inside the right 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 mangonel 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 cords coming from those two sides, one chord on each side. Uh 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 onto 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 shame. 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 chord, 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 certain angle, I mean you determine what the angle is when you build the tribute shame, 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 slings 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 places. 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 too, 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 centrigal centrifical force pushes the sling outward um 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 tribute shape. When it slips free of the finger, it releases the payload, throwing it in that high arc, and it sales majestically overhead

towards your target. And because the counterweight is heavy enough, it descends very quickly, so the 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 shape.

So if you want to change the release angle, you change 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 cannons were in use, although the definition of cannon has changed dramatically over the centuries, so some of those accounts are difficult to um verify, simply because the cannon that's being referred to in one battle maybe a significantly different kind of weapon than one from

another battle. Uh. There's definitely some evidence of cannons being used in sieges though, and in the Hundred Years War in northern France. England employed some cannons in a battle in thirteen forty six. How many cannons, well, that kind of depends upon which historical account, and 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 death stuff. I'm sorry, cannon's probably not.

In fact, the English cannons 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 cannons. And besides, that's not even really a siege, so I'm not really gonna talk anymore about it. By sixteen seventy, you'd actually see the word cannon 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 cannon Royal, and typically cannon Royal would weigh around eight thousand pounds or three thousand six ms if you prefer and it could fire cannonballs weighing at around sixty three pounds or rams. That's massive. Then you had whole cannon and dimmi cannon guns. Those were of decreasing size and weight and could fire smaller cannonballs, and by smaller I mean that the smallest

gut down to be about twenty eight pounds. They're still really heavy, particularly if you compare them to the types of cannon you'd find on sailing ships a century later. Eventually we would refer to cannon by the the weight of the shot they fired. What kind of cannonball would they fire? So if you hear about a ten pound gun, it meant that the shot it fired aired weight ten pounds. The gun itself didn't weigh ten pounds, it weighed weigh

more than that, but the cannonballs weighed ten pounds. So if you're about a twenty pounder, that meant that the cannonballs weighed twenty pounds. So the bigger the pound edge, that just means the heavier the shot, and thus the more damaged the cannon would do if you hit what you were aiming at. Well, the cannon made earlier 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 pawned 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. Cannons themselves are fascinating all the way, from the early bronze guns to the steel guns that redefined warfare yet again, but that warrants its own episode. For now, I need to say farewell, and I need to get ready for the Renaissance Festival. If you're in the Atlanta area,

you should really come out and see us. It's pretty entertaining day out. And if you guys have suggestions for future episodes of tech Stuff, you should write me and let me know about them. The address is tech Stuff at how stuff works dot com, or drop me a line on Facebook or Twitter. My handle at both is tech stuff h s W now talk to you again really soon for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works? Dot com W