Short answers, pulled from the story.
King Uzziah of Judah is among the earliest documented users of catapult-like machines, equipping the walls of Jerusalem with devices that shot great stones, recorded around 750 BC. Greek catapults are attested by the historian Diodorus Siculus as part of a Greek army's equipment in 399 BC, with the weapon used at the siege of Motya in 397 BC.
The word catapult comes from the Latin catapulta, which derives from the Greek katapeltēs. That Greek word is built from kata, meaning "downwards", and pallō, meaning "to toss, to hurl".
Warwolf was a giant trebuchet built by the army of Edward I for the siege of Stirling Castle in 1304. Contemporary records describe it leveling a section of castle wall and concluding the siege.
In World War I, catapults were used during trench warfare to throw hand grenades across no man's land into enemy trenches, before being replaced by small mortars. In World War II, Britain fitted catapults to merchant vessels, called CAM ships, to launch Hawker Hurricane fighters against German Focke Wulf Condor aircraft; the Hurricanes could not be recovered after launch and pilots had to ditch in the ocean or reach land.
British experiments from 1917 to 1919 first tested catapult-assisted takeoffs using Fairey Campania and Short 310 floatplanes. By the 1930s, aircraft catapults were standard equipment on major warships of most leading naval powers, including battleships, cruisers, and aircraft carriers.
During 2001 and 2002, a trebuchet at Middlemoor Water Park in Somerset, England, launched paying customers 100 ft through the air. A fatality occurred when a participant failed to land on the safety net, ending the practice. The operators were tried for manslaughter but found not guilty, though the jury noted the fatality might have been avoided with stricter safety measures.