{"id":154808,"date":"2025-02-16T10:14:29","date_gmt":"2025-02-16T09:14:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/imperiumromanum.pl\/?post_type=ciekawostki&#038;p=154808"},"modified":"2025-02-16T10:14:29","modified_gmt":"2025-02-16T09:14:29","slug":"polybolos-ancient-greek-machine-gun","status":"publish","type":"ciekawostki","link":"https:\/\/imperiumromanum.pl\/en\/curiosities\/polybolos-ancient-greek-machine-gun\/","title":{"rendered":"Polybolos &#8211; ancient Greek machine gun?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In the world of ancient military, the Greeks and Romans perfected siege art, constructing machines that were awakened by the battlefields. One of the most fascinating inventions of those times was <em>polybolos <\/em>&#8211; a weapon, which can be called the prototype of modern machine guns.<!--more--><\/p>\n<p><em>Polybolos <\/em> was an improved version of the ballista, which he mentions in his work <i> Sytaxis <\/i> (preserved only in fragments) Filon from Byzantium, a Greek engineer living in the 3rd century BCE. This weapon was to be able to automatically shoot a series of bolts (stored in a wooden magazine), thanks to a mechanism that he himself reloaded and tightened the chord.<\/p>\n<p>Thanks to the use of gear and chain, <em> polybolos <\/em> could repetitively shoot the shots, without having to stretch the chord manually. The mechanism worked based on a carousel feeder that moved the bullfall to the shot position.<\/p>\n<p>After shooting, the gear system moved another bolt to the position ready to be fired, and the chord was stretched automatically.<\/p>\n<p>We have no more sources and information whether the machine was widely used on the battlefields.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":154805,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"kategorie_ciekawostek":[80],"class_list":["post-154808","ciekawostki","type-ciekawostki","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","kategorie_ciekawostek-army"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/imperiumromanum.pl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/ciekawostki\/154808","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/imperiumromanum.pl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/ciekawostki"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/imperiumromanum.pl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/ciekawostki"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/imperiumromanum.pl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/ciekawostki\/154808\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/imperiumromanum.pl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/154805"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/imperiumromanum.pl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=154808"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"kategorie_ciekawostek","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/imperiumromanum.pl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/kategorie_ciekawostek?post=154808"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}