Claw of Archimedes

The Claw of Archimedes was an ancient weapon devised by the mathematician Archimedes to defend the seaport of Syracuse during the Second Punic War, around 214 BCE. Ancient accounts describe it as a kind of crane fitted with a grappling hook able to seize an attacking ship, a quinquereme, by the bow, lift it, and then let it drop back into the water or onto rocks so violently that it could capsize and throw the crew into the sea. The weapon was mounted on the city walls to defend against Roman assaults from the sea, and when the Roman general Marcus Claudius Marcellus attacked with sixty ships between 214 and 212 BCE, the ancient historian Livy credited the Claws and Archimedes' other war machines with sinking a number of vessels and disrupting the assault. Television documentaries from the BBC in 1999 and the Discovery Channel in 2005 built scale models to test the concept, and engineers who built a working prototype found it could indeed tip over a model Roman ship, showing the device was technically feasible even though this does not prove it was actually used as described.