Date: Wed, 18 Sep 1991 15:13 EDT
From: Esmeralda is watching you! <JPELLAND@LUCY.WELLESLEY.EDU>
Subject: I hear Peter the Red wants to build one...
To: carolingia@bloom-beacon.mit.edu
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From: NET::"kirschbaum@netcur.enet.dec.com" "Awkward" 18-SEP-1991 10:34:57.00
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Subj: The funniest thing since the whale story
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From: Awkward <kirschbaum@netcur.enet.dec.com>
Subject: The funniest thing since the whale story
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From The Wall Street Journal
_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.
A Pagoda, Too
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
(pronounced 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 counterweight
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 it. 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-tone 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). Scientists
are divided over whether a man can stand that many Gs for more that 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.''
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