3! 2! 1!
Ding ding ding. And thus begins my quest to
build the perfect marshmallow launching machine.
This is a catapult model, and it would be
extremely dangerous if you were...this tall
or like an angry squirrel.
And this model is inspired by the drawings
of this genius. Leonardo da Vinci.
The same guy who painted the super famous
Mona Lisa.
It’s overrated, but still, pretty good.
A catapult launches something in the air using
power from tension or gravity instead of using
gunpowder.
There are different types — this one’s
called a mangonel. It’s what you usually
think of.
There’s also a ballista — think of a crossbow.
And a trebuchet.
This part is super heavy and the cow — I
mean the stone — you throw goes here. Then
the stone gets released and the heavy stuff
helps shoot the stone up and out, like a big
slingshot.
Catapults were invented in China and Europe
around the 4th century BC. And it was actually
a breakthrough. They could launch big heavy
stones at walls and enemies.
You could break through a wall with it.
Did I mention we have cicadas here? Can you
hear the cicadas?
In the 1300s, people said catapults were even
used to launch dead bodies over walls, because
people wanted to spread the plague to their
enemies on their corpses.
But Leonardo’s catapult? It was as elegant
as one of his paintings.
Bah.
Oh the first thing is to assemble the drum,
let’s go do that.
Today, Leonardo has a reputation for inventing
things.
But when we look back, a lot of his inventions
were just improvements on things that already
existed, like this drawing of a ladder to
scale castle walls
He even made a few things that just didn’t
work. This helicopter looks awesome, but it
probably wouldn’t fly.
His catapults weren’t some totally new thing.
He took tried-and-true elements from other
catapults and made the design his own.
Our catapult is actually a mash up of these
two drawings Leonardo made.
Let's switch to something that makes it easier
to see exactly what Leonardo was thinking…
That’s better.
OK, so the drum and ratchet are gonna be how
we wind up the catapult. They’re kinda like
the charger to the battery that gives us all
the power.
For this one, you turned the handle here to
wind up this drum, That winds up and pulls
the rope, which pulls back the wood pieces
here. Now they hold a lot of energy that you
used winding up the drum.
And that is pretty much how this catapult
works too. See how when I pull this back,
the drum turns and pulls back these rods.
All that tension lets it launch payload.
In our case, that’s a marshmallow. In Leonardo’s
it would have been a large stone or some other
projectile that could just bash into castle
walls.
In Leonardo’s you probably wacked this thing
here with a hammer to set the gear loose and
fire.
In ours, you lock it by hooking this bar right
here to this gear. It stops it in place.
That’s taken from Leonardo’s second design.
You wound the gear by sticking a bar in one
of these holes and pulling everything more
taut over and over again.
Then, see the bar that locks to a gear? It
holds the gear in place. That is what ours
does too.
When we pull this release rope, the bar comes
loose, the drum unwinds, and the catapult
fires. It’s pretty easy.
A good catapult can hold that tension for
as long as it has to.
It requires all those elements to work in
tandem, and the person firing it to have the
right touch. Which I do.
If one thing goes wrong — like right here,
where the bar is out of place, the energy
is lost.
And after a few tries, I believe that I will
be able to get this catapult to do something
amazing — to fire the perfect marshmallow.
This is a crossbow Leonardo designed. See
that dude there? That’s how big this thing
was.
And here’s Leonardo’s trebuchet and his
ideas for sweet shields to protect soldiers.
He was a genius — he drew a baby in the
womb, and imagined a parachute, and made a
crazy accurate overhead map.
But he was also a guy doodling in a bunch
of different notebooks.
His catapult was probably never used in war.
But his designs mashed together some really
clever ideas.
People are still tinkering with the design
of catapults - this is being launched off
a carrier by a kind of catapult.
And from looking at them, we can still be
inspired to create a replica.
And I am no Leonardo, but that is something
we can do too. We can adapt stuff. I’m gonna
attach this to the ground and make the release
rope a little longer so that I can launch
it myself and get that sweet marshmallow arcing
in the air.
That’s something we all can do.
We can’t all draw, or instantly understand
physics, or get people to build weapons.
But we can all imagine something amazing.
3! 2! 1!
You’re 22 years old, Phil. Get it together!
3, 2, 1. Ow!
