Catapults
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40 free Catapults trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
A catapult is one of the oldest ways people found to throw something farther than an arm can manage. For more than two thousand years, engineers kept inventing new ways to store up energy and let it go in a single snap, and the results knocked down walls, decided sieges and frightened whole armies. These fun facts about catapults cover the main machines (the ballista, the onager, the mangonel and the trebuchet), the people who built and faced them, and the simple science behind every shot. The quiz also follows the idea into modern life, where the same trick still launches aircraft and turns up in films, sports and games. The questions are written for curious kids, parents, teachers and anyone who has ever built a launcher out of craft sticks and a spoon. Each answer comes with a short explanation, so you pick up the story as you play.
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Q 01Which conquistador's men built a trebuchet at the siege of Tenochtitlan, only for its first stone to hit the machine?
Hernán Cortés
Hernán Cortés tried the old-fashioned weapon in 1521 because his gunpowder was running low, and the attempt reportedly wrecked it at once.
Q 02The Roman onager, a one-armed stone-throwing catapult, was named after which animal for the way it kicked?
Wild ass
Wild ass is what onager means: the machine bucked so hard on release that it could not be mounted on stone walls without shaking them loose.
Q 03At an American contest held each autumn, teams build catapults and air cannons to hurl what as far as possible?
Pumpkins
Pumpkins must stay whole until they land for a throw to count, and one that bursts in mid-air is jokingly scored as pie.
Q 04Vincent Connare, who named a 1996 typeface after the trebuchet, also designed which font included in Windows 95?
Comic Sans
Comic Sans came first, in 1994; he named Trebuchet MS after a workplace puzzle about flinging a person a mile across the Microsoft campus.
Q 05Which Renaissance artist designed a catapult driven by a large wooden leaf spring, wound up on a drum?
Leonardo da Vinci
Leonardo da Vinci left no sign that the machine was built in his lifetime, but modern enthusiasts have since reconstructed it.
Q 06By one famous account, the army besieging Caffa in the 1340s catapulted corpses carrying which disease over its walls?
Plague
Plague was the disease in the tale told by the Italian notary Gabriel de Mussis, who blamed the tactic for the Black Death's spread.
Q 07In Britain, the word catapult is also the everyday name for which handheld toy?
Slingshot
Slingshot is the usual American name, though the same toy is a gulel in India, a kettie in South Africa and a shanghai in Australia.
Q 08In Monty Python and the Holy Grail, what do taunting French soldiers hurl from their castle at King Arthur's knights?
Barnyard animals
Barnyard animals rain down on the knights, and a later home release came boxed as a castle with a catapult and rubber animals to launch.
Q 09Which medieval traveller's book claims his family helped build the giant catapults that ended the siege of Xiangyang?
Marco Polo
Marco Polo's boast cannot be true as told, because the siege ended in 1273, before he had reached Kublai Khan's court.
Q 10A circus human cannonball is really launched by a hidden catapult mechanism, using a spring or a jet of what?
Compressed air
Compressed air has done the job since Ildebrando Zacchini's 1922 design, and any bang and smoke are added purely for show.
Q 11The Roman ballista, which shot large iron-tipped darts along a flat path, resembled a giant version of which weapon?
Crossbow
Crossbow-like in shape, the ballista was accurate but hit less hard than the big stone-throwers, and was usually built on site for each siege.
Q 12A medieval counterweight trebuchet got its throwing power from which force, acting on a heavy box of stones or sand?
Gravity
Gravity did the work once the crew had slowly raised the loaded box, and letting it drop whipped the long end of the beam upward.
Q 13Greek and Roman torsion catapults stored energy in rope bundles twisted from hair or which other animal material?
Sinew
Sinew from the feet of deer and the necks of oxen was preferred, and the ropes were rubbed with olive oil and animal fat to keep them springy.
Q 21The Greek gastraphetes, a hand weapon that came before the catapult, was cocked by pressing which body part against it?
Belly
Belly is the first half of its name, belly-releaser, and leaning on it let the user store more energy than an ordinary hand-drawn bow.
Q 22Which TV show built a working replica of the polybolos, an ancient Greek repeating catapult, and judged it plausible?
MythBusters
MythBusters found in 2010 that the weapon could have existed, though their replica kept breaking down and needed repeated repairs.
Q 23The ancient Greek polybolos, a bolt-thrower that reloaded itself, holds the oldest known use of which bicycle mechanism?
Chain drive
Q 14The catapults that fling jets off the deck of a nuclear-powered Nimitz-class aircraft carrier are driven by what?
Steam
Steam catapults were a Royal Navy idea, devised after the Second World War because its smaller carriers had shorter launch runs for heavy new jets.
Q 15The US Navy's Ford-class aircraft carriers were the first ships to launch jets with catapults powered by what?
Magnetic fields
Magnetic fields from a linear motor pull a carriage along a track, speeding planes up more smoothly and putting less strain on their airframes.
Q 16In the early trench fighting of the First World War, armies used catapults to throw what across no man's land?
Hand grenades
Hand grenades were lobbed by machines such as Britain's Leach catapult, made by a London department store, until small mortars took over.
Q 17Which Greek mathematician's catapults, cranes and ship-lifting claw held off a Roman siege of his home city?
Archimedes
Archimedes was killed by a Roman soldier when the city finally fell, although the Roman commander had ordered that he be spared.
Q 18Which conqueror's catapults drove Saka horse archers from the far bank of the river Jaxartes so his army could cross?
Alexander the Great
Alexander the Great's crossing is the first on record to be covered this way, because the machines could shoot farther than the enemy's bows.
Q 19The mangonel, a catapult swung by a team of people hauling on ropes, was first recorded in which ancient land?
China
China's Mohist writings, compiled in the 4th century BC, describe the machine hurling hollowed-out logs filled with burning charcoal.
Q 20The Roman army named a light bolt-shooting catapult after which venomous creature?
Scorpion
Scorpion bolt-throwers were often massed in batteries on high ground, where the legion's main body could shield their flanks.
Chain drive links turned by a windlass slid the firing block back and forth, dropping a fresh bolt from a hopper on every cycle.
Q 24Rows of ancient impact marks, blamed on a rapid-fire catapult used by Sulla's troops, scar which Italian city's walls?
Pompeii
Pompeii's scars look so much like modern machine-gun marks that they have been linked to a self-loading Greek bolt-thrower.
Q 25Greek arrow-shooting catapults first saw action in 397 BC at Motya, a Sicilian island stronghold of which rival power?
Carthage
Carthage was the first to face the new weapon, which caught on so widely that a later inscription sets rules for young Greeks' catapult-shooting contests.
Q 26The Bible credits King Uzziah of Judah with fitting which city with machines to shoot arrows and hurl large stones?
Jerusalem
Jerusalem's machines, set on towers and corner defences, would be among the earliest catapults on record if the passage is taken at its word.
Q 27The giant trebuchet built in 1304 to batter Stirling Castle, said to fill 30 wagons in pieces, had which name?
Warwolf
Warwolf was built on the orders of England's Edward I, who by some accounts kept the surrendering Scots inside until he had tested it.
Q 28Which aviation pioneers launched their aeroplanes with a catapult worked by iron weights falling from a tower?
Wright brothers
The Wright brothers had relied on strong coastal winds for their first flights, but the breezes back home in Ohio were seldom strong enough.
Q 29Which German weapon of 1944, nicknamed the doodlebug, was flung up a launch ramp by the Walter catapult?
V-1 flying bomb
V-1 flying bomb launches left the ramp at about 320 km/h, well above the speed the pilotless craft needed to keep flying.
Q 30During the Third Crusade, a stone-thrower nicknamed God's Own Catapult battered the walls of which port city?
Acre
Acre faced a machine paid for from the crusaders' common fund, and a chronicler says a priest preached beside it to collect money for its repairs.