For most of history, innovation was driven by individuals, whether it was the village blacksmith or somebody like Archimedes or Leonardo da Vinci.
I believe it was Thomas Edison who developed the first research organization in 1876, in which dozens of people would all be simultaneously working on different parts of the same project.
A very early kinda-sorta example.
That suggests that there were some people or guilds who specialized in making weapons that a general or king could phone and place an order.
I get that is glib but I hope you see the point. It would seem there would need to be some system to concentrate knowledge of weapon building that militaries would have easy access to.
Anything DARPA like would depend on the nature of the economy and the prevailing power structure. According to Nossorov, “Ancient and Medieval Siege Weapons” , the Romans purchased high tech weapons from the Greeks. The Romans wanted a high power ballista that was portable. The Greeks changed from bow power to arms fitted to torsion springs. That met the need but the torsion of animal sinew springs varies with moisture. So, the Greeks encased them in metal cylinders and used metal frames for greater stability.
Nossorov indicates that cheiroballistra weapons were being produced in volume to uniform specifications. And they were being steadily improved using feed back from the customer base. Such an effort would require a large manufacturing facility with a skilled work force and a network of suppliers. Sounds like your standard issue military industrial complex. Perhaps (from Google Translate):
Provectus Investigationis Propellente Defensionis
Also remember that the craftsmen of the time tended to guard their secrets (something the military likes to do today) So much stuff was invented and forgotten when the need or materials to duplicate it was no longer there, especially things done in private, like metallurgy or mixing Greek fire. So a lot of the “spread” before printing was observation and manuscripts, followed by trial and error in the new location. Obviously when it came to weapons like huge catapult machines, it was hard to hide the general idea - “oh look, if you don’t have skeins of horsehair a foot thick, then using gravity and a big rock to throw things works well…”
The other thing to remember is that anything was expensive, when the main impetus was simply enough food to eat. So a lot of effort to produce interesting weapons was dependent on need. If you weren’t typically the aggressor, your motivation was better city walls, not an array of war machines that may get old and creaky before they were needed.
The weapon designers would often access a geopolitical situation and market their innovations to a court’s needs. If the court took a pass, they would take them to that court’s rival. Their non-alliance to any particular patron gave the inventors tremendous leverage. When Christian courts took a pass on (the Christin Hungarian) Orban’s giant cannons, he took his designs to the Ottomans who used them to knock down the 1000 year old walls protecting Constantinople.
Weapon makers from before the rise of the nation state were a horse looking for a cart and stoked geopolitical insecurity in ways that even the most evil modern military industrial schemer could only dream of.
Worth also looking at the Venice Arsenal - which was responsible for large-scale weaponry manufacturing - from pointy sticks to warships - for the state. Wikipedia says it was the largest pre-Industrial Rev manufacturing undertaking [with usual caveats of not knowing what China and India were up to].
The Wikipedia article picks up on some of the matters discussed upthread about innovation and expertise, using uniformity and consistency to build performance, experimentation vs sticking with proven gear and so on.
Its not an advanced or experimental weapons development entity, but would have created innovation and improvements [some being big jumps in thinking] as part of its normal work.
Trebuchets, specifically, are the end-product of incremental design from slings → staff-slings → mangonels → counterweight trebuchets. There was no one design breakthrough, and development took place over centuries, like Horatious said. It wasn’t a conscious design effort overall, although individual improvements were done by particular designers.
Staff-slings are fun. I’ve made a few, they were great for SCA water balloon fights on a hot day.
I’m reading “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind” and read something about this in chapter 14 just last night. In short, the people in charge were not thinking of improving their technology in order to gain an advantage over other nations. The author says this really started during WWI. At the beginning of that war, battles were still fought with rifles and bayonets. The idea was to outsmart the opponent and using more manpower. Tanks were used starting in the middle of that war and planes near the end. It’s not until WWII that these new technologies and ideas were used and new departments dedicated to coming up with new technologies such as the Manhattan Project and the German’s V2 rocket that they thought would help them win up until the end.
If that were so, then no new weapons would ever have been developed, because why else would a weapon be developed, than to give its wielders an advantage?
And we know that’s true - he left lots of drawings.
I listened to an interesting podcast on this subject. Stuff You Should Know, maybe? Fascinating stuff.
That’s a glib reading. I think what the original author of ‘Sapiens’ was getting at was that innovation was itself an innovation. Gradual improvement or change through trial and error has always happened, but creating mechanisms or organisations whose purpose is to come up with new ideas and develop them to effectiveness is a rare phenomenon. Creating a DARPA means expecting to pour billions down the toilet in failed ventures and wrong turns. Finding a government that wants to do that is rare, unless they have deep pockets and the stakes are high enough [Cold War geopolitical extinction focussed the mind wonderfully].
Nalanda University in India operated from 427 until 1197 CE. It had thousands of scholars attend and research together from India, China, Tibet, Japan, Indonesia …
It was destroyed by invading muslims and the resident scholars had their heads shaved and were then slain. The library is supposed to have burned for 3 months. Nalanda mahavihara - Wikipedia
Nalanda is just one example of the widescale destruction of scholarship that went around India.
A lot of Hindus believe that there was ancient research into defensive arms, architecture … and even sex evidenced by the kamasutra.
There is the legendary Wootz Steel that came from India, that made the legendary swords of Europe but the actual research interests or records are all burnt away.