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A Scud It's Not, But the Trebuchet Hurls a Mean Piano
(Reproduced without permission 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
Glynn Mapes, Staff Reporter, 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, fling-
ing 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 eccen-
tric.
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, shim-
mers 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 cata-
pult, 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 engrav-
ings 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 tre-
buchet was poorly balanced and barely managed to hurl the mis-
siles - 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 antici-
pation 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 counter-
weight 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 por-
celain 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, volunteer-
ing 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 prison-
ers 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-tonne 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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