Answers to Awkward Problems: Ingenious Weapons from the Spear-Thrower to the Cutlass

The atlatl solved the limit of the human arm. It is a hand-held lever that launches a dart or light javelin much faster and farther than an unaided throw, and the earliest confirmed example is a roughly 17,500-year-old antler atlatl from Combe Saunière in France.

The Helepolis was built for Demetrius I Poliorcetes at the siege of Rhodes in 305 and 304 BCE as a many-storied wheeled tower armored with iron plates and carrying catapults. The Rhodians flooded the ground in front of the walls, mired the tower and repelled the assault.

The polybolos answered the slow reload of a single-shot torsion ballista. A windlass-driven chain drive cycled bolts into position, drew the string and released it in sequence, though the entry notes that evidence for how widely it was fielded is limited.

The corvus solved Rome's weakness at sea. A hinged gangway with an iron spike dropped onto an enemy deck and locked the ships together, so Roman legionaries could fight a boarding action instead of a ramming contest. Its weight made ships top-heavy in rough seas, and it is associated with the storm losses that ended its use.

At Syracuse in 213 BCE the Romans lashed pairs of ships together and raised a hinged ladder from the joined hulls against the harbor walls. Polybius says the name came from the resemblance to a stringed instrument, and the defense led by Archimedes forced Marcellus to turn to a blockade.

The estoc answered plate armor. It is a stiff thrusting sword with little or no cutting edge, whose narrow point could force its way into the gaps and joints of an armored opponent, and it was in use from roughly the fourteenth to the seventeenth century.

The falconet is a light cannon from the family of bird-named guns such as the falcon and the saker. Its small size let it be mounted on smaller warships, on field carriages or on fortress walls, where a handier gun was more useful than a heavy siege piece.

The Great Turkish Bombard is the opposite answer: a huge bronze siege cannon cast for Mehmed II before the 1453 siege of Constantinople to a design credited to Orban. It hurled stone balls at the Theodosian land walls and helped to breach them in the final assault.

The petard solved the problem of a closed gate. This small explosive charge in a case was placed against a gate or wall and fired, and the risk to the petardier gave English the phrase hoist by one's own petard, taken from a line in Hamlet.

The cutlass fits the crowded deck. Its short, slightly curved, broad blade was easy to swing among rigging and in tight quarters and needed little formal training, which suited sailors, privateers and pirates, and navies issued it for boarding well into the age of sail.