Product Code Database
The polybolos (the name means "multi-thrower" in Greek) was an Ancient Greece repeating ballista, reputedly invented by Dionysius of Alexandria (a 3rd-century BC Greeks engineer at the Rhodes arsenal,) and used in antiquity. The polybolos was not a crossbow since it used a torsion mechanism, drawing its power from twisted sinew-bundles.Needham, Science and Civilization in China, Volume 5, Part 6 (1995), pp. 172-173. However the earlier and similar oxybeles employed a tension crosbow mechanism, before it was abandoned in favor of torsion.
Philo of Byzantium ( 280 BC – 220 BC) encountered and described a weapon similar to the polybolos, a catapult that could fire again and again without a need for manual reloading.Philo of Byzantium, "Belopoeica", 73.34 Philo left a detailed description of the that powered its chain drive (the oldest known application of such a mechanism) and that placed Crossbow bolt after bolt into its firing slot.
Once the string is held firm by the trigger mechanism, the windlass is then rotated clockwise; pulling the mensa back and drawing the bow string with it. At the same time, a round wooden pole in the bottom of the magazine is rotated via a spiral groove being driven by a rivet attached to the sliding mensa; dropping a single bolt from a carved notch in the rotating pole. With the drawstring pulled back and a bolt loaded on the mensa, the polybolos is ready to be fired. As the windlass is rotated further back to the very back end, the claws on the mensa meets another lug like the one that pushed the claws into catching the string. This one causes the claws to disengage the drawstring and automatically fires the loaded bolt. Upon the bolt being fired, the process is repeated. The repetition provides the weapon's name, in Greek language πολυβόλος, "throwing many missiles", πολυβόλος, Henry George Liddell, Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, on Perseus Digital Library from πολύς (), "multiple, many" πολύς, Henry George Liddell, Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, on Perseus Digital Library and -βόλος () "thrower", in turn from βάλλω (), "to throw, to hurl", βάλλω, Henry George Liddell, Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, on Perseus Digital Library literally a multithrower.
|
|
