Alexander the Great's Mad Scientist

In 332 BC, on the coast of modern-day Lebanon, Alexander the Great faced an impossible problem. The island city of Tyre, a kilometer offshore and ringed by towering walls, refused to open its gates. The Tyrians killed Alexander's envoys and threw their bodies into the sea. Alexander had no fleet, no way to reach the walls, and no precedent for taking a fortress like this by force. So he turned to a man history has mostly forgotten: Diades of Pella, his chief military engineer—a figure one modern scholar calls the first mad scientist.

The Engineer Who Changed Geography

Diades grew up in the greatest school of military engineering the ancient world had ever known. Under Alexander's father, Philip II of Macedon, engineers like Polyidus of Thessaly had been developing new siege weapons, most importantly the torsion catapult. Earlier catapults could scatter infantry but rarely threatened fortifications. The torsion catapult changed that by storing and releasing far more power, making it possible to damage well-built walls for the first time.