Back into the futureEngineering competition features Blue Tooth-capable trebuchet

Trebuchet in classic Google colors // Source: blogspot.com

During the first Storm the Citadel Trebuchet Competition in Charleston over the weekend, Google employees combined Android cell phones, a computer the size of a credit card, and a Blue Tooth receiver to trigger a medieval weapon used in the twelvth century to destroy enemy fortifications.

More powerful than the ballistas and catapults of ancient empires, the trebuchet used a long swing arm, triggered by the pull of gravity on a counterweight placed at the other end, to slingshot its payload into the air.

“They also threw dead people,” remarked Dennis Fallon, dean of engineering at The Citadel, a military college with about 2,100 male and female cadets.

The brutal weapon played a large part in the medieval Crusades. According to histories of the time, Richard the Lionheart called his best weapon “Malvoisine.” Edward I supposedly brought about the surrender of Scotland’s Sterling Castle in 1304 with a giant trebuchet named “Warwolf.”

The trebuchet made a comeback in the late twentieth century among medievalists, college professors and fans of the movie “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” (1975) in which a cow is hurled over a castle wall.

In the 1990s in Britain, armament enthusiast Hew Kennedy built a massive machine on his Shropshire estate and used it to throw compact cars and flaming pianos across his field.

Saturday’s Google-sponsored competition took place during The Citadel’s National Engineering Week to support science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) programs in the schools, local employees said.

In November 2009 President Obama announced a major initiative to support STEM education over the next decade to keep Americans globally competitive in innovation and technology.

South Carolina high school students competed along with engineering majors and corporate teams in designing, building and firing the trebuchets.

Jeff Stevenson, a manager at the Google Data Center in nearby Berkeley County said that “There’s a lot of engineering principles involved. There’s a lot of math principles involved. And it’s just fun.”

Competing teams launched oranges and colored balls at a target, and with a larger machine Google built for demonstration purposes, squashes, melons and bags of flour.

“We’re playing real-life Angry Birds,” said Eric Wages, data center operations manager, referring to the puzzle video game developed by Finland-based Rovio Mobile, in which players use a slingshot to launch birds at pigs stationed on or within various structures with the intent of destroying all the pigs.

The Citadel Cadet Chapter of the American Society of Civil Engineers won the trophy for the best of the college and professional teams.