polybolos
Sign in to savethumb|Arsenal of ancient mechanical artillery in the Saalburg, Germany; left: polybolos reconstruction by the German engineer Erwin Schramm (1856–1935) thumb|A modern reconstruction of the repeating "polybolos" catapult of Dionysius of Alexandria, in Museum of Ancient Greek Technology|Kotsanas Museum of Ancient Greek Technology, [[Athens, Greece.]] The polybolos (the name means "multi-thrower" in Greek) was an ancient Greek repeating ballista, reputedly invented by Dionysius of Alexandria (a 3rd-century BC Greek engineer at the Rhodes arsenal,) and used in antiquity. The polybolos was not a cr
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thumb|Arsenal of ancient mechanical artillery in the Saalburg, Germany; left: polybolos reconstruction by the German engineer Erwin Schramm (1856–1935) thumb|A modern reconstruction of the repeating "polybolos" catapult of Dionysius of Alexandria, in Museum of Ancient Greek Technology|Kotsanas Museum of Ancient Greek Technology, [[Athens, Greece.]] The polybolos (the name means "multi-thrower" in Greek) was an ancient Greek repeating ballista, reputedly invented by Dionysius of Alexandria (a 3rd-century BC Greek engineer at the Rhodes arsenal,) and used in antiquity. The polybolos was not a crossbow since it used a torsion mechanism, drawing its power from twisted sinew-bundles. However the earlier and similar oxybeles employed a tension crossbow mechanism, before it was abandoned in favor of torsion.
Philo of Byzantium ( 280 BC – 220 BC) encountered and described a weapon similar to the polybolos, a catapult that could fire again and again without a need for manual reloading. Philo left a detailed description of the gears that powered its chain drive (the oldest known application of such a mechanism) and that placed bolt after bolt into its firing slot.