From: neilb@scs.leeds.ac.uk (Neil Bowers)
Subject: Trebuchets and Dead Cows
Keywords: nutter trebuchet piano corpse
Organization: School of Computer Studies, University of Leeds, England
Date: Wed, 9 Sep 1992 10:42:55 GMT

We haven't had this episode in the UK yet, but descriptions of it reminded
me of an article from the desperado mailing list.  Was the trebuchet mentioned
in the credits?  Or rather the trebuchet's builder.

-neilb

	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 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-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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