Professor Edmund Richardson
speaker
621 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 30 Jul
Professor Edmund Richardson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
He grows up in the greatest school of engineering the world had ever known, which just happens to be the army of Philip II of Macedon.
It seems like a straightforward invention, but it's incredibly significant and it's incredibly sort of important part of why Diades is able to do what he's able to do for Alexander.
So, yeah, it's a great one to focus on.
Before this, before like torsion catapults, so catapults which are able to store a huge amount of power and then kind of release it all at once with whatever they happen to be throwing across a battlefield.
Catapults...
are very good at kind of scattering groups of infantry or just being kind of awkward things which kind of fill the air with flying rocks, but they're not able to really get up enough power to pose a serious threat to fortification.
So you could line up a whole bunch of sort of early Greek siege weaponry, first century Greek siege weaponry, and you could
dang away at a wall pretty much for a long time.
And the chances of that wall coming down, if it was well-built, if people were able to kind of conduct repairs, was extremely low.
Like the fortification, if it was a well-built fortification, was not really going to be under threat.
The torsion catapult changes that.
The early designs are kind of experimental.
They go wrong quite frequently.
They often do not drop rocks where they're meant to be dropping rocks, but they throw things with a level of power that simply had not been seen before.
And they do so in a way that suddenly changes the equation between missile and fortification.
Suddenly, Greek siege weaponry is actually able to pose an actual threat to fortifications.
And that really changes the game for warfare.
Let's absolutely start there.
That innocuous sounding date is a moment when the world changes.
It's the date of the Battle of Issus, which is the first great clash between Alexander and Darius III, the great king of Persia.
Showing 81–100 of 621 · page 5 of 32
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