October 28, 2019 • 52 mins
Once more, for Halloween! The 18th century Guillotine represents the absolute pinnacle of mechanical decapitation. In this episode of Invention, Robert Lamb and Joe McCormick explore its origins and legacy.
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Speaker 1 (00:07):
Hey, Welcome to Invention. My name is Robert Lamb and
I'm Joe McCormick, and we're bringing you a classic episode
of Invention. Is the show old enough to have classics? Now?
If so, this is a classic? Yes, I think it?
Yet why not? I think this might have been the
first episode of the show we recorded. Was yeah, I
was looking back. This is the first episode we put out.
We went in there grizzly, and now it's Halloween, so
(00:28):
we figured let's replay this grizzly classic of Invention. Right,
it's seasonally appropriate, but it also turned out to be
I thought, a very nuanced and interesting subject. So this
is our early episode of Invention on the guillotine. We
hope you enjoy. Welcome to Invention, a production of I
Heart Radio. Hey, welcome to Invention. I'm Robert Lamb and
(00:55):
I'm Joe McCormick. And you might know Robert and I
from our other show Stuff to Blow your Mind, our
other show in the house Stuff Works Network. But today
you apparently have somehow wandered into our brand new Curiosity
Store of Inventions, where we explore human ingenuity, for good,
for ill, all of the stuff that comes out of
our imaginations and becomes the technology we use every day
(01:18):
or maybe just read about in history books. Yes, the
hallowed halls of technological, systematic, and cultural invention, the very
human machines, customs, and systems that altered the course of history.
And today we're talking about one of the most useful
inventions of all time. It's got to be the and Robert,
before I say it, do you say it like a
French guy's name, or like what a fish breathes with?
(01:40):
I go with guillotine because it sounds a little more
like an open face sandwich that way, and also it
has the the G has more of a sound to it. Yeah,
I like how it sounds kind of like the minotar
the guillotine. But but apparently guillotine in English is also
somewhat acceptable pronunciation. I don't think there's a firm uh
(02:00):
ruling one way or another from the lords of English pronunciation. Now,
one thing is for certain as we we venture into
this world of the guillotine. Beheadings themselves are just a
time honored way for one human being to kill another.
It's a wound that still can't be repaired, and it is,
without questions certain death. Now one thing I was thinking
about to illustrate this is what would you even say
(02:22):
is the quote cause of death in a beheading? So well,
blood loss, loss of oxygen to the brain. Basically, it
just cuts off. It cuts off your all your plumbing
systems from all of your your your your thinking systems. Yeah,
it makes it makes you think about how often when
you hear phrases like clinically dead, that can refer to
something about circulation, like the cessation of the heartbeat. Um.
(02:44):
But yeah, so when you separate the head from the body,
I guess you've got to be really rigorous about what
you mean by dead. Though I guess it also happens
pretty quickly so you don't have to worry about it
too much. But yeah, all the blood comes out of
the head, immediate loss of blood pressure, which means the
brain can't get oxyd gin, which means the brain can't work. Yeah.
I it's something that's just cemented in our mythology as well, right.
(03:05):
I mean, you want to kill a vampire, you want
to kill a medusa, you want to kill a highlander,
what do you do? You cut their head off? There
is something just supernaturally potent about this form of death. Well,
I think that's absolutely true, and you see that in
a lot of archaeological finds of beheadings from human history. Like,
here's a kind of strange fact. A lot of times
when you find beheaded humans from ages past, there appears
(03:28):
to be evidence that the people were beheaded posthumously. Why
did that happen? There are a lot of ways you
could explain it. I mean that you would take a
dead person and cut off their head. Maybe there's some
sort of ritual function going on here, might be a
human sacrifice. Maybe there's some kind of symbolic form of
justice being done, if it's the corps of a criminal
(03:50):
or an enemy or something. But a lot of times
it appears like it might be a form of apotropaic magic,
the kind of magic you would use to ward off
evil or bad spirit. It's in the same way that
you might find a skeleton from hundreds of years ago
with an iron rod driven through its hard or with
a brick in its mouth, and say the tombs underneath Venice. Yeah,
(04:10):
there's like a dismantling of the the individual that that
seems evident in these acts um you know, and we
see acts of ritual decapitation dating back thousands of years.
For instance, there's evidence in Brazil that dates back to
at least nine thousand BC, and it's UH and in
it we find a human skull draped and amputated, hands
(04:32):
palm side down, covering the face as if as if
in grief. That's from place called Lapa Dosanto in UH
in South America and Brazil, and a lot of bones
have been discovered there. And it's not always easy to
determine how to read the intention behind what you see
in these people. But the yeah, there were all kinds
of forms of of apparently posthumous mutilation going on in
(04:54):
the way these bones are arranged. For example, sometimes you'll
find skulls they're full of finger bones inside the skulls.
What was going on? What made the people want to
do that? It seems like it may well have formed
some kind of magical intention, but what was it? Indeed,
we can only guess now. Another kind of significance that
beheading has often had in the ancient world was that
(05:17):
it was one of the many forms of execution practiced
of course in ancient Greece and Rome, UH and in
fact our terms decapitation and capital punishment both come from
the Latin from capit meaning head, so like capital punishment
is punishment of the head, or that you you pay,
you pay for a crime with your head by separating
it from the other stuff. Uh. And there's some evidence
(05:39):
that the ancient Greeks and Romans viewed beheading as not
a particularly harsh punishment, but more as a particularly noble
and honorable form of execution. And you see strains of
this thinking carried into much more recent times, like when
beheading was deployed as an execution method throughout the history
of England. Not always, but it was most often reserved
(06:01):
for the aristocracy, while common criminals might more often be
killed and what was considered a less dignified way like hanging. Yeah,
I mean, obviously be headings in general have probably been
occurring as long as we've had weapons fine enough to
inflict the blow. Uh, you know, as long as we
had you know, something that couldn't knock or cut a
(06:23):
head off. And then when you start looking at these, uh,
the the use of the of of a sword or
an axe and execution, you know, a lot of it
comes down to the craftsmanship of that weapon, but also
the skill of the individual using it. Yeah, that's that's
a real kicker, isn't it. I Mean, when you contract
somebody to do a job for you, a lot of times,
if you don't have a previous relationship with you, you
(06:45):
don't know what kind of work they're gonna do. You
want to find those people you can trust, but it's
hard to find a trust or the execution er that
you know is going to cut your head off right right,
Like if you really got to put yourself in the
in the shoes of the condemned here right. Uh. You know,
obviously you don't want to be stone to death. You know,
you don't want to be thrown into that burlap sack
with two wild animals and thrown into the river. You
(07:05):
would probably prefer a nice, clean beheading, but nobody wants
a less than perfect beheading. If the local warlord is
doing it, you know, that's one thing. Uh, you know, unless, however,
you're worried about the war lord inflicting an intentionally less
than perfect stroke, you know, out of personal malice. If
if it's a professional executioner that's doing the honors, well
(07:27):
that's either really good or really bad, depending on how
you look at it. Like the idea of a trained
specialist doing the ded That sounds good. But on the
other hand, at death via the sort of person who
either seeks this line of work out or is not
suited for any other form of labor, that's a little
uh frightening, I would say. Plus, do you really want
to be toward the bottom of an executioner's list for
(07:50):
the day after they're tired from swinging that big old axe,
like it's your turn on Friday afternoon? Yeah? Like you
kind of I want to be up there. I would
want to be up there first, let to get that
that first blow in on me. I must admit I
don't think I had ever much considered the horrors of
a weak strike from the executioner until Game of Thrones
came around, and then that I suddenly began to think, like, oh, yes,
(08:13):
this could go very wrong. But George R. Martin did
not make up this concept, obviously, of of being weak
at swinging the executioner sword or the acts. History is
replete with stories of botched beheadings, and they are horrific
and unfortunately sometimes kind of funny. I want to tell
you a couple uh, this one is not so funny.
(08:33):
And this concerns Mary, the Queen of Scots. So during
the reign of Protestant Queen Elizabeth the First of England
in the sixteenth century, there was obviously a lot of
anxiety about succession because Elizabeth had been born to King
Henry the Eighth and his second wife Anne Boleyn, after
Henry's first marriage to Catherine of Aragon had been annulled,
(08:54):
and obviously lots of people at the time, especially some Catholics,
had opinions about that right. And Elizabeth's cousin, Mary Stewart,
was born to James the Fifth of Scotland, who was
descended from a legitimate royal line, and so many Catholic
supporters thought, well, maybe Mary actually has a more legitimate
claim to the throne than Elizabeth does. And so Mary
(09:15):
was eventually implicated in an assassination plot against Elizabeth in
fifteen eighty six, at least she was allegedly involved in it,
and she was sentenced to execution in fifty seven. So
you've got Mary Stewart, Mary Queen of Scott's, going to
her execution, and the story goes that she's blindfolded and
she gets helped to the block and the executioner wearing
(09:35):
all black, raises up his axe to kill her, but
instead of cutting through her neck, he misses, and he
hits her on the head, and then some report that
she murmurs Sweet Jesus in shock before the executioner raises
his axe a second time and then strikes again and
still fails to cut her head off completely. And finally
(09:55):
he quote just sawed through what remained of her neck.
That's that's that's rough for Mary. Yeah, and this is
you know, this is presumed a main event be heading here.
So right, this is before a royal audience, right, so
this would have to be either an active just just
just an utterly inepped executioner, or one that is intentionally
(10:16):
doing a bad job out of mouth. It's like there
seems to be very little room in between. It's hard
to understand what happened here because you know, we only
have accounts from the time, which may not even be
fully reliable. We're relying on what people told us they
saw there, right, And there could be some objective in
crafting a version of the tale that sounds more inapt
than it actually was. But it actually gets worse because
(10:37):
apparently so it's described sometimes that the executioner appeared horrified
at what was going on. But the headsman, after he
got her head off, he took hold of the severed
head and he held it up in front of the
crowd so he could hold up the severed head and
say God save Queen Elizabeth. But he grasped Mary's head
by the hair, and it turned out the hair was
a wig, so the head fell down and rolled away,
(10:58):
leaving him holding only a hacked up, bloody wig while
proclaiming his true queen. And then another part of the story,
maybe maybe not to be believed, is that after Mary's
head rolled away, her lips kept moving as if she
was talking or praying. Okay, some of that sounds like
it might have been embellished, but it also sounds like
this guy was a real hack, no pun intended. Well,
I got an even worse hack for you, because there
(11:20):
was a seventeenth century English executioner named jack Ketch. Catch
spelled as like catch up, catch yeah, or like what's
the kid in the Pokemon's I have no idea. Our
very knowledgeable producer Paul just tells me it is ash
catch him. Okay, I guess he's got to catch him.
(11:41):
All right, it's like jack Ketch him right, the harr rider.
That's what comes to my mind. I don't well anyway,
this is jack Ketch K E T C H so
Jack Ketch birthday unknown died in six six who was
notorious for being a complete screw up at his job
and bungling executions. A couple of examples. In sixteen eighty three,
(12:01):
Catch performed the beheading of William Lord Russell, who was
convicted for treason in his role of in his role
in the Rye House plot, which was against King Charles
the Second of England, and Catches beheading of Russell was
reportedly just this clumsy horror, with Catch whacking Russell again
and again with the axe, but repeatedly failing to get
his head off. And apparently after this, Catch defended himself
(12:24):
by complaining that Russell wouldn't hold still. And then you
got the second one later, James, Duke of Monmouth, he
went to the block for the Monmouth Rebellion of sixteen
eighty five, and he tried to pay Catch not to
screw up his execution. He's recorded as saying, quote, here
are six guineas for you, pray do your business well
(12:45):
do not serve me as you did, my Lord Russell.
I have heard you struck him three or four times.
Then Monmouth gave three more guineas to his servant who
was standing nearby, and told his servant to pay Catch
only if Catch did the beheading correct to Lee. And
then Catch said, I hope I shall. Then Monmouth asked
to feel the axe blade, and he did, and he
(13:07):
complained that this is too dull, and Catch said, no,
it's sharp enough, it'll be heavy enough. So Monmouth got
down in place to accept his fate, and Catch brought
the axe down on Monmouth, and at this point it
is reported that after he got hit, Monmouth lifted his
head up and turned around and glared at Catch angrily.
(13:29):
Then he got back down so Ketch could hit him again,
and Catch hit him several more times, failing each time
to be head him. Then Catch got frustrated and tried
to walk away and quit in the middle of the execution,
while Monmouth was still alive. But the crowd yelled at
him and told him to go back and finish it,
so finally he went back. After some more blows and
the use of a knife, he finally managed to get
(13:51):
the Duke's head off. Well, that's awful. This guy is
a true hack. I wonder if that's where the word
hat comes perhaps. Uh yeah, But so you had people
whose job it was to administer what I guess was
supposed to be the more humane form of execution at
the time. I mean, this is different than being you know, uh,
tortured and hanged and drawn and quartered and all that.
(14:13):
But he this is obviously not going the way it's
supposed to. And if we're going inspired by the Greek
and Roman model, something is obviously wrong here, Like not
only is it unnecessarily painful, this does not really seem
like an honorable death. This seems humiliating. Yeah, there's nothing
noble about this, you know, it's this is not a
finely craft instrument wielded by a by and by an
(14:35):
expert practitioner. This is just a clumsy exercise and horror.
But what if mechanical controls could be set in place
the same level of perfection, regardless of whoever you know
happens to be wearing the hood, how tired they are,
what sort of weapon they're using, or what sort of
six stuff they're into. A machine that cannot get tired,
(14:58):
it can't hesitate or engage in unfair punishment. It's not
gonna judge you based on your your royal or commoner status.
A good blade, some gravity, and a simple frame with
a necklock, well that would be the guillotine. All right,
We're gonna take a quick break, and when we come
back we will discuss some precursors to the guillotine and
(15:21):
the guillotine itself. All right, we're back. So the guillotine
of late eighteenth century France, which I'm sure you've heard
about before, that was involved in the French Revolution, the
Reign of Terror, the first French Republic. That guillotine was
not the first human head removal machine, not by a
(15:43):
long shot. And we're not saying it was. You know
that it was predated by people swinging in axe or
a sword with their hands, of course it was. But
there were organized machines for doing this job more efficiently
and in a more consistent way before the guillotine was
instituted in France, right, and they worked along the same principles.
They maybe they weren't quite as refined, but essentially the
(16:05):
idea is there that we should say that it was
only in the aftermath of the French Revolution that people
began referring to decapitation machines as guillotine. That's where the
name comes from. Yes, they had equally less refined names.
They had more grizzly names. One finds we'll meet a
couple in a moment. So as for who invented the
first general decapitation machine, this is totally unknown, lost to history,
(16:29):
and in fact, we don't even know for sure how
many societies used a device like this. There there are
a lot of tales, but many of these tales might
not even be true. We don't know for sure, right,
And then how often is the individual uh celebrated for
creating such a thing? As we'll discover the naming of
the guillotine, and it doesn't really relate to the individual
(16:50):
or individuals that created it, right. I mean a lot
of people who create execution devices don't want to be
associated with And when you find the people who do
want to be associated with them or don't mind, you've
got to kind of wonder about those people. Um. So,
there are a couple of known mechanical beheading devices from
England that predated the French guillotine, and one is known
(17:11):
as the Halifax Gibbet, so the how. Halifax is a
town in West Yorkshire in England, and it had this
infamous beheading machine known as the Halifax Gibbet, which was
allegedly used mostly to punish petty theft. So people would
steal some small sum of money or something worth not
very much, some cloth or something, and into the Halifax
(17:31):
Gibbet they would go. It was described in an eighteen
thirty seven history by an author named William White in
the following way quote. The executions always took place on
the Great market day in order to strike the more
terror into the neighborhood. When the criminal was brought to
the gibbet, which stood a little way out of the town,
where part of the stone platform may still be seen
(17:54):
on Gibbet Hill. The execution was performed by means of
an engine, which was raised upon a plat form four
ft high and thirteen feet square, faced on every side
with stone, and ascended by a flight of steps. In
the middle of this platform was placed two upright pieces
of timber fifteen feet high, joined at the top by
a transverse beam. Within these was a square block of
(18:17):
wood four ft and a half long, which moved up
and down by means of grooves made for that purpose.
To the lower part of the sliding block was fastened
in iron axe of the weight of seven pounds and
twelve ounces. The axe, thus fixed, was drawn up to
the top by a cord and pulley. At the end
of the cord was a pin, which, being fixed to
(18:38):
the block, kept it suspended till the moment of execution.
When the culprit, having placed his head on the block,
the pin was withdrawn and his head was instantly severed
from his body. If the offender was condemned for stealing
an ox, a sheep or a horse, the end of
the rope was fastened to the beast, which, being driven,
pulled out the pin and thus be came the executioner.
(19:02):
In other cases, the bailiff for his servant cut the
rope and allowed the axe to descend. It's a little
unnecessary complexity involving fim animals, but otherwise the basic principles
of the guillotine as we've come to know it. Yeah,
it's more or less there there. There might be some
design refinements we come on later, but this is the idea.
It's it's a reliable consistent machine that's not going to
(19:24):
mess up, right. And of course it doesn't sound like
it was necessarily a custom blade, or maybe it was,
but it's very much based on the design of an
axe blade. Yeah, and when you see illustrations it looks
like just a large axe head on the bottom of
a huge wooden block. Uh So, this beheading machine of
Halifax was famous enough that the English poet John Taylor
referenced it alongside the notoriously tough police of Kingston upon
(19:49):
Hull in a poem uh that that I thought was
pretty good. He writes, there is a proverb and a
prayer withal that we may not to Three strange places
fall from Hull, from Halifax, from Hell. 'tis thus from
all these three good Lord deliver us at Halifax. The
law so sharp doth deal that whoso more than one
(20:10):
threepence doth steal. They have a lynn that wondrous, quick
and well. Since thieves all headless unto Heaven or Hell.
From Hell, each man says, Lord, deliver me, because from
Hell can no redemption be men may escape from Hull
and Halifax, but sure in Hell there is a heavier tax.
It sounds pretty grim, well, I like how it's sort
(20:32):
of captures two themes there. One is that how the
Halifax jibbit is deadly and something to be feared, but
it also contrasts it with the supposed tortures of Hell.
I guess you can emphasizing that, well, it's not as
torturous as many of the other methods that are being used. Yeah,
he's almost describing it like it's a like it's a
plane ticket to too greater rewards are suffering depending on
(20:57):
how one supernatural revenge fantasy is hang out here. But
on the other hand, I like that it is to
a certain extent farm animals, uh you know. Notwithstanding, it
is to a certain extent saving the horrors of an
afterlife for those imagined afterlife and not trying to um
embody them too much in the act of execution itself. Yeah. Now,
(21:21):
whether that's actually a good thing or not, we can
discuss later, but it does seem to be there's at
least there's at least a superficial kind of humaneness to write,
even though it seems to be being lumped on people
who commit extremely pack crimes and not and no matter
what you think, really probably deserving of death. But there's
(21:41):
some strange stories about how people reacted to what happened
with at the Halifax Gibbitt. The story in Thomas Wright
tells a legend quote of a countrywoman who was writing
by the gibbet on her hampers to the market just
at the execution of a criminal when the acts chopped
his neck through with such four that the head jumped
into one of her hampers, or as others say, seized
(22:04):
her apron with the teeth and they're stuck for some time.
I don't believe that's true, or at least the teeth.
I don't believe. Again, we're coming back to the sort
of inherent comedy. I mean, it's true gallows humor, uh
that comes with beheading executions. But there's an interesting observation
from the Halifax historian John Crabtree, who has a sort
(22:28):
of attitude about what stories like this mean. He writes, quote,
it is useless employing words about this fair, but the
circumstance may serve to show with what apathy the country
people regarded this mode of punishment. Their minds were evidently
hardened by such exhibitions, and the fact develops the inadequacy
of such awful administrations of justice to produce that proper
(22:50):
moral and salutary effect which might have been anticipated. Such scenes,
often repeated, appear to harden, rather than soften, to stoop
fi rather than awakened, the sensibilities of man's nature. And
I think we should come back to that thought later on. Indeed,
all right, so what else do we have in terms
of proto guillotine machines. Well, a quicker story is just
(23:12):
a copy essentially of the Halifax Gibbet, known as the
Scottish Maiden. So James Douglas, the fourth Earl of Morton,
who was the ruler of Scotland from fifteen seventy two
to fifteen seventy eight, he was alleged at some point
to have introduced the decapitation machine to his country of Scots,
inspired by the Halifax Gibbett. Allegedly, he at some point
(23:33):
traveled through Halifax and he was so inspired by the
gibbet that he thought, well, I should share this same
technology with my countrymen. So a similar machine was built
out of oak, and it could be transported around the
country to perform beheadings wherever, but it was often accepting
the condemned at Edinburgh, and according to the National Museums
of Scotland, crimes that could get you sent to the
(23:53):
Scottish Maiden included murder, incest, stealing, treason, adultery, forgery and robbery.
But there's an ironic twist, so James Douglas, the Earl,
fourth Earl of Morton was a supporter of James the sixth,
and Morton opposed the Catholic faction of Mary, Queen of
Scott's who he discussed earlier, Mary Stewart, and he was
(24:15):
eventually implicated in a plot to murder Mary's second husband,
Lord Darnley, and was put to death in June, decapitated
by the Scottish Maiden that he brought to Scotland. Ah,
there's your poetic justice, and legends of that kind will
appear again and again in this episode. Actually, well, yes,
(24:35):
and even beyond this episode, because this isn't that a
common theme? The man destroyed by his own invention, by
his own machine. It happens enough in the movies that
you should think it happens more often in reality. Though
in the movies is especially common when that invention is
some kind of hybrid animal, like I created a shark ape,
and you know, it swings from the trees, taking bites
(24:57):
out of people who could have known my arcape would
turn on me, and yet it always happens. Alright. So,
as we've been discussing, there were similar devices already used
in Europe and had been for centuries before the guillotine
came around. But the individual who is often credited as
the inventor of the guillotine, uh is a French surgeon
(25:17):
and physiologist Antoine Louis, who lives seventeen through seventeen two. Yeah,
he is often credited as the inventor, though based on
what I was reading, it appears to me it was
maybe designed by some sort of committee of which Louis
was the leader. Right. And this is actually all the
more fitting U when we really get to the heart
(25:38):
of the guillotine here, because it is this this thing
that is it is this utilization of technology and this
there's a there's an air of civility to it. Uh.
This this taking something that is kind of that is
rather barbaric and making it a little less so. Well,
it's bureaucratic violence. Yes, it very much embodies the idea
(25:59):
of retrie bet of violence by the state. Taken out
of the emotional hands of the single executioner and placed
into the hands of a disembodied machine that is created
by a committee through drafts. Yes, you know, we have
another episode that we're recording this week on vending machines.
And it's amazing this the similarities involved here, this this
these sometimes these struggles over what exactly is happening when
(26:23):
a machine does the bidding of a human. If a
machine is vending, say, blasphemous literature, as we're discussing this
other episode, then who is it fault foresaid literature sale
and uh, And there's a sense of that here too.
It's like the bureaucracy has condemned you to death. The
machine is actually doing the execution. We're just merely you know,
(26:44):
pushing the button, pulling the string, et cetera, to carry
out this judgment. Right, But we do at least have
Antoine Louis to associate with the creation of the machine,
even if it wasn't just him alone, but because of
his association with it, it was often early on it
was hold names, not the guillotine yet, but names like
the Louisette or the louis Zone, which doesn't have as
(27:06):
much of a ring to it. I kind of like it.
I could see executions by the Louisette. Yeah, I guess
it would have grown on us. But at any rate,
later it definitely came to be named after Joseph Ignace
Guillotan who lived seventeen thirty eight through eighteen fourteen. He
was a physician. Uh, he was a National Assembly member,
(27:27):
and he played a major role in passing legislation that
made death by machine the law. The loose idea here
is that it would this kind of legislation would provide
the best possible version of beheading to all classes of society.
And we do have to point out that, despite some
urban legends out there, Guillotine himself was not killed by
(27:49):
his own machine, and he wasn't actually a huge fan
of execution either. It's not like he was a huge
execution enthusiasts. Well, no, exactly the opposite. Guilloton opposed the
death penalty. He wanted the abolition of the death penalty,
but he didn't think that he could accomplish that directly. Right,
this seemed the best reasonable next step. Right, It's like,
(28:09):
if I can't we can't eradicate it, We're going to
have it, we might as well make it clean and
uh and fair to all involved. According to a popular legend,
Guillotan was born when his pregnant mother was out walking
one day and she overheard the screams of a condemned
criminal being broken on the wheel. And breaking on the
wheel was you know, a classic death by torture type method,
(28:32):
where a person would be stretched out on a wheel
in a kind of starfish post and they have their
limbs broken with an iron rod or with a club.
Just insane brutality. So he was very much opposed to
that sort of thing, not only just the bar the
barbaric nature of the execution, but the public nature of it,
the idea that that women and children, uh, just innocent
(28:54):
bystanders might just walk through town and witness such such
are So he was thinking, maybe if less children end
up watching this, the better, Yes, and make it. Yeah,
it's more systematic, it's more you know that the act
itself is less flashy, and then we're just gonna make
it less for performance. So Guillotam was not out there
(29:15):
lobbying to get this machine named after his family, No, No,
it just it ended up sticking. Now a cool little
fact here that sounds like something right out of an
Alan Moore comic book. But along with Benjamin Franklin, Uh,
Guillotine investigated the work of Franz Mesmer of Mesmerism, you know,
the the the form of hypnotism that we had back
(29:37):
in the day. Uh, And they investigated him on behalf
of King Louis the League of Extraordinary Gentleman exactly. So
another way of thinking, you alluded to this a minute ago, Robert,
like the idea that it would be the best method
for all the classes. So another way of thinking about
the motivation for the institution of the guillotine at this
(30:00):
time in history was that it supposedly extended the democratic
and egalitarian principles of the French Revolution to common criminals,
essentially extending them the courtesy of the honorable beheading that
was more often reserved for nobles and aristocrats instead of
more shameful and common and painful deaths like hanging, burning,
(30:23):
or breaking on the wheel, which you were more likely
to get if you were just some lower class petty criminal. Now,
as for the idea Guillotan had, thinking that this would
shield children from the gruesome practice of execution, Unfortunately this
did not work out. I was reading a section from
a book called Children's Toys of Bygone Days, A History
of playthings of all people's from prehistoric times to the
(30:46):
nineteenth century by Carl Grober, published in nineteen twenty eight,
and the author writes, quote, the worst monstrosity of the
kind was the outcome of the French Revolution, which indeed
was over rich in aberrations of east. The toy shops
put on the market little guillotines with which little patriots
could be head figures of aristocrats. There still survives some
(31:10):
specimens of this pretty and diverting machine, one of which
bears the date seventeen four, and he's got an illustration.
These were not models, but pure toys. And in proof
of this we have the king's evidence from one whom
we should never suspect of wishing to give so bloodthirsty
a toy to his little son. And here the author
is speaking of the romantic poet Johann wolf Kan von Gurta.
(31:34):
So Gruber tells the story and that in December seventeen
Girta wrote a letter to his mother and Frankfort, asking
if she would buy a toy guillotine for his little son.
And she replied, dear son, anything I can do to
please you is gladly done and gives me joy. But
to buy such an infamous implement of murder that I
(31:55):
will not do at any price. If I had authority,
the maker should be put in the stocks, and I
would have the machine publicly burnt by the common executioner.
And I guess this is sort of the seventeen nineties
equivalent of like asking your grandmother to buy you a
copy of Doom for Christmas in the nineteen nineties. Yeah, well,
I'm glad that you brought up Doom here. And just
because it's it's easy for us to look back on
(32:17):
this account and think, oh, these children of a more
barbarous age. But go to any toy store and look
at the machine gun based toys that are on display. There,
all the various guns like true true murder weapons. Um,
not even methods of bureaucratic execution, but weapons of just
(32:38):
wanton violence. Uh, these are all represented in toys even today. Uh. Likewise,
I can't help but think back on how much I
wanted the slime pit when I was a kid. Do
you know that this was a master's of the universe.
Place set the device and basically you would lock he
man or some other figure into the machine and it
(32:59):
was like shape like a skull, and then it would
dump slime on top of the head of the poor hero.
And it was I think maybe the actual lore of
it was like I would make them mutate or something,
but it was very much Uh, it was very much
like a guillotine, except instead of a blade, it was slime.
It was like clearly an instrument of execution, of of
ritualized death for your toys. So you're arranging an execution
(33:22):
for he man exactly. So you know, the the idea
of a toy guillotine. It makes perfect sense. Uh, we can't.
We can only distance ourselves from such an idea so much.
Though I also have to wonder I somehow detect between
the lines. This could have been one of those situations
where and Robert, I bet you're familiar with this, where
a dad buys or requests a toy for his child
(33:45):
because secretly he wants to play. Uh. In fact, Gerta
wrote in Faust quote ages no second childhood age makes
plain children. We were true children. We remain again much
like it is today now we mentioned that Guillaton was
responsible for introducing legislation that would eventually lead the French
(34:08):
National Assembly to say, Okay, we're only going to be
killing people by beheading machine. Now that that's that's going
to be the new method of execution. That's what's humane,
that's what the state should be up to. And so
I think in just a minute we should turn to
the machine itself. But I just wanted quickly before we
do that, to discuss where it is that this rumor
(34:28):
came from. The Guillotan was killed by the machine that
he recommended putting in place for executions in France, and
I think I know maybe a few threads of where
the story came from. Obviously, we had that ironic story
of the Earl of Morton earlier, right, right, so we
can see how that might have influenced confused the telling, right.
But then there are a couple of other examples. So
(34:49):
Dr Antoine Louis, the secretary of the Academy of Medicine
and physician to King Louis the one who we talked
about earlier, chairing that committee that designed the device. He
was actually temporarily condemned to die in the machine that
he designed or helped design, though he escaped this fate
basically during a change of power. So he narrowly escaped
(35:11):
going to the guillotine himself. And then King Louis the sixteenth,
who was interested in mechanical engineering, is said to have
made refinements to the design of the guillotine, of like
recommending an angled blade while he was still in power,
before the device was eventually turned on the king himself
and on his wife Marie Antoinette. And so there's another
kind of like creator and then killed by his creation.
(35:35):
Irony there since he apparently or at least allegedly offered
refinements to the design. All right, Well, on that note,
we're gonna take one more break, and when we come back,
we'll discuss the machine itself in more detail, and we'll
also discuss its legacy. All right, we're back. So now
(35:55):
we're at the machine itself, the French guillotine of the
seventeen eighties and on word. And the question is was
it actually built? Well, of course it was. This one
was definitely built. Some of the inventions were discussing on
this show, you know, maybe didn't get out of the
blueprint phase. This definitely saw action. So after the legal
standard of execution by machine was approved by the National
(36:17):
Assembly in sev the construction of the machine was delegated
to a politician named Pierre Louis red Areo, who I'm
always going to struggle with that name, so I'll just
call him Pierre here. Uh. He apparently had trouble finding
a contractor who could build the machine since no one
wanted their name associated with it, and eventually found a
(36:37):
taker was a taker from Germany, and so the guillotine
was constructed by a German harpsichord maker named Tobias Schmidt.
Apparently he also supplied a leather sack that would catch heads.
Now you could you just gotta wonder about Tobias. I
can just imagine the scenario. It's like, so, honey, what
are you working on today? I get this new contracted
(36:58):
you know it pays well, it's gonna really help us
out next month. Oh, who are you putting a hot
harpsichord of chord for? Well, it's not quite a harpsichord. Well,
I'm just imagining you in his shop while he's working
on the guillotine, that harpsichord music is constantly playing. Dan
Dan Dan Dan Dan Dy. Anyway, according to the memoirs
of the French executioner Enrie Clements sans Song in eighteen
(37:22):
seventy six, saints On came from a line of a
long line of executioners, and he so he has these
memoirs about his family's exploits cutting off heads and performing
executions in France, and his memoirs are considered probably only
partially reliable. But his up close description of the workings
of the guillotine is fairly straightforward. So I see, I
(37:43):
feel like he's probably on the right track here. All right,
I'm gonna read part of this and I'm gonna I'm
gonna go for an executioner's voice. Here do it. On
a scaffold from seven to eight feet high, two parallel
bars are made fast in one end. Their top part
is united by a strong crossbar. To this crossbar is
added a thick iron ring, and which is past a
(38:03):
rope which fixes and retains a ram. This is perpendicularly
armed with a sharp and broad blade, which gradually becomes
broader on all its surface, so that instead of striking perpendicularly,
it strikes sideways, so that there is not an inch
of the blade that does not serve the ram ways
from pounds, and its weight is doubled when it begins
(38:24):
to slide down. It is enclosed in the groove of
the bars. A spring makes it fast to the left bar.
A band of iron descends along the outside of the
same bar, and the handle is locked to a ring
with a padlock, so that no accident is possible and
the weight only falls from the executioner interferes to a
(38:45):
way plank. Strong straps are fastened by which the criminal
is attached under the armpits and over the legs, so
that the body cannot move as soon as the way
plank goes down. The head, being between the bars is
supported by a rounded crossbar, are the executioner's assistants lower
another rounded crossbar. The head, being thus grooved in a
(39:06):
perfect circle, would prevents it from moving in any way.
This precaution is indispensable in regard to the terrible inconvenience
as of fear. The executioner then touches the spring. The
whole affair has done so quickly that only the thump
of the blade when it slides down and forms the
spectators that the culprit is no longer of the living.
(39:27):
The head falls into a basket full of brand and
the body is pushed into another wicker basket line with
very thick leather. That's a heck of a rating, Robert. Yeah,
that was going to do a number on my throat.
But I'm sorry. Maybe I should have taken part of it,
but I was just enjoying listening to your Henri Clement. Well,
there's a precision in his in his description of the
(39:51):
act that I felt like I had had to capture
now obviously, so he's described how the device works now,
but they had to test it out before they can
make sure to try it on a human, right, So
you know you always wonder like, how do you test
a guillotine? You put a watermelon in there? Do you
gallagher it? Well, I suppose you could, but it's kind
of a waste of a good melon, And ultimately you
(40:12):
want to test it on the real thing, right, So
they use dead bodies. Oh yeah, also farm animals like
sheep and calves. Yeah, because you just I mean, it
makes sense. You want to make sure you're cutting through
actual vertebrate tissue there and most notably the neck and
then on a officials installed and use the guillotine for
the first time. Right, So, the first victim of the
(40:34):
French guillotine was Nicholas Jacques Beltier, who was a highwayman,
and he was executed where the machine was erected, at
the Plasta Grev And they're so a large crowd came out,
obviously to witness the first execution by the new machine.
But it was reported that the crowd was somewhat unimpressed
and they found the efficiency of the killing less entertaining
(40:56):
than the forms of execution they were used to, even
the more classic beheadings. Nevertheless, over time, the executions that
the guillotine became a very popular spectator event during the
reign of Terror, and you know, in generally afterwards when
the guillotine was used, people would show up to watch.
So we see a little success here. Like it was
clearly less dramatic, uh, you know, there was less theater
(41:19):
in the act. And yet at the same time, a
few things are more dramatic in life than the ending
of a life like this is the people. You can
understand why people would still turn out even if you
had made things a little more precise. Now, putting aside
the question, I guess we can talk talk about in
a minute, O or whether it's ever humane to just
execute somebody? Was it actually true that the the guillotine
(41:44):
was a more refined, more humane version of execution than
what came before? Was it? Was it an improvement if
you were somebody who was interested in reducing the suffering
of humankind. Yeah, I mean you could again, you could
say the concept is inherently controversial, but still others took
issue with just how humane it was. So Prussian doctor
(42:04):
Samuel Thomas summer Ing, who lives seventeen fifty five through
eighteen thirty, he studied the cadavers of guillotine victims, and
he argued that severed heads were still capable feeling and since,
and he wrote an essay on this in seventeen So
he he was something of a poly math. In addition
to naming the twelve pairs of cranial nerves, he also
(42:26):
invented a telegraphic system and made discoveries in paleontology, specifically
with the pterodactyl fossils. They're not dinosaurs, folks, that's a
different thing. So this was you know, this was not
just it wasn't just some crazy guy coming up in Santa,
the heads are still alive, you know, he was he
was making an expert argument that, like, I'm not sure
(42:47):
that this is great what we're doing. Maybe it's a
little it's almost a little too precise. Yeah, the core
takeaway of his essay on the humanity of the guillotine
was that we can't rule out that it's possible that
a severed head could still be having experience, could experience
being severed now we knew. And there were a lot
of tales of this happening right of people running to
(43:07):
check out the heads of the of the decapitated, in
various doctors checking in and seeing what was going on
with the eyes. And there was a lot of interest
in this in determining what, you know, what happens to
consciousness at death, Like this was a perfect clinical exercise
for for weighing in on it. Yeah. The classic tales
about this thin get repeated the most often are like
(43:28):
seeing someone's cheeks flush with anger when they behold someone
or who's someone who mocks them or something like that,
or or who slaps them in the face, or thinking
that that I severed head would be like looking at
people as if it recognized them, something like that. Yeah,
and obviously there's a lot of indeliphment with these stories,
(43:49):
but we don't know how much to trust them. Yeah,
we really don't know how much to trust them. But
we do know today that that any kind of activity
scene in the heads after death, most of this is
going to be reflective twitching of muscles. So, um, basically
coma and brain death are probably going to occur within
two to three seconds of decapitation due to interruption of
(44:12):
blood flow to the brain. So just the massive sudden
drop in blood pressure, Yeah, that's going to do it. Yeah.
So any tales of like, you know, confronting the head
having any kind of like moment of human uh contact,
even it it's just in the eyes. Uh, it's pretty
clear that that is all just embellishment of stories or
just wishful thinking on the part of the observer. So
(44:35):
what is the legacy of this machine, this this machine
of bureaucratic violence. And if we try to look at
it from with our perspective, from today, with our hindsight,
and you know, with with the kind of value judgments
we would make, was the guillotine a step forward or
a step backward? Was it as uh, Giatan envisioned a
more humane way of doing business when the state was
(44:57):
just you know, couldn't be convinced not to kill people.
Or did it perhaps enable a worse state of affairs
where more people could be sent to their deaths with
impunity than would have been the case otherwise. Yeah, I
think you could probably go either way on it. I mean,
one thing is for certain. It it changed the way
executions were performed in France for nearly two hundred years.
(45:17):
It was actually used in France up until nineteen seventy seven,
that's when the last execution occurred via guillotine, before the
outlying of capital punishment in one It also took on
symbolic way. It's just this this symbol of the reign
of terror and perhaps to a larger extent, a symbol
of systematically violent rebellion. Yeah. I read one author point out,
(45:38):
certainly not in defending the guillotine or the use of
the guillotine, but it just pointing out a kind of
strange irony that the guillotine now to us symbolizes this
this horror, this horror period of bureaucratic violence, which it
certainly was. But we look at that and we think
of that period as a reign of terror, but don't
think the same way. Say about the Napoleonic Wars killed
(46:00):
far more people than the guillotine ever, did not that
that makes the killings of the guillotine any less horrific.
That's true, now, you know one the one thing about
the weirdness of this whole situation that stands out. I mean,
aside from just the inherently weird nature of of a
beheading machine machine that cuts off heads, there is still
something highly symbolic going on here. I think to the
(46:21):
means of an execution, and you'll typically see an expression
of of power involved, say it's a physical strength or
you know, vengeful spirit, or increasingly a culture's greatest technological achievements.
Isn't it weird to think about how these methods climb
the tree of developing technology. So starting with varying levels
(46:43):
of tool proficiency, you know, axes and swords, weapons, weapon crafting,
then we go into gunpowder, uh, you know, firing squads,
electricity and the electric chair. It is weird to trace
through history execution methods just sort of like tracking with
whatever's the most interesting new technology we have available. Yeah,
chemicals pharmaceuticals. Mean, why an electric chair that is just
(47:07):
such a strange idea to even come up with. Ye.
French philosopher Michelle Fuco he weighed in on this, and
he pointed out that penal technology is of course an
expression of power, but we also have to dwell in
the fact that it does this through everyday technology, ubiquitous technology.
(47:28):
So if it's something like electricity or even you know
or even you know, pharmaceuticals, chemicals, Uh, it's it's taking
aspects of everyday life and turning them into the the system,
the tool of of justice. So like our everyday use
of energy and the consumer economy, a constant reminder of
(47:48):
the methods of death that the state can inflict upon
people if they if they don't stay in line exactly. Now,
one small area of the legacy of the guillotine comes
down to its use in medical terminal alogy. So there
are two primary means of amputation. Um in terms of
like amputating a limb or what have you, you have
flap amputations in which flaps of flesh are left so
(48:10):
that you can fold them and close the stump of
the wound. And then there are guillotine amputations which which
are more of a straight down affair with no immediate
concerns for flap tissue. So in guillotine amputation, it's more
about cutting out infected tissue and making sure drainage of
proper drainage occurs, and then secondary surgery is performed to
(48:31):
create the flap tissue to close everything off into a stump.
But obviously that's like a secondary appellation, like you wouldn't
you wouldn't have called that guillotine cutting in the surgical
since before the guillotine, right, But it is certainly an
example where if you're you, you encounter this terminology now
in in medical science and uh, and it stems from
(48:51):
the use of this execution device. That being said, there's
a lot of medical terminology that stems from various weapons
and so forth. Of course, so I want to come
back to this question that we've been teasing throughout where
you can't help, but wonder if Joseph Eskaton pushed us
in exactly the wrong direction, if he was actually against
(49:13):
the death penalty and trying to institute more humane treatment
of criminals. You know, it's hard not to notice that
by sanitizing a horrible act, it often seems like you
make the act easier to carry out. And I mean,
just think about how this applies to modern methods of
state sanctioned killing, everything from lethal injection to drone strikes.
(49:36):
Does the sanitizing and distancing and depersonalization opportunity provided by
lethal technology encourage us to make ourselves able to kill
more while feeling less about it? Yeah? I mean, ultimately,
is the the botched at execution that we've discussed already,
(49:56):
Are those not maybe a more honest depiction of what's
going on? This this this fallible um barbaric human effort,
not this uh precision of the holy blameless machine. Well,
I mean, obviously we're not going to sit here and
advocate brutal, botched executions with jack ketch hacking at us
with a sword or an axe. But yeah, at least
(50:19):
with that, I'm not saying that's preferable, But I do
see what you're saying that it's at least there, you're
acknowledging that something brutal and weird is going on, and
you can't just you know, clean it up in your
mind and ignore it because you're hearing the screams and
it's splattering on you, and it's so brutal that it's
almost funny. You know, it's interesting. You know, in this
(50:39):
show we talk about innovation and inventions and how how
they change the world, and and so often you see
that that people have to look back and try to
figure out what changed and how it changed us. Uh,
And here we are, hundreds of years later, looking back
and saying, well, what did the guillotine mean? What did
it do? And what are the ultimate ramifications of this advancement. Well,
(51:04):
I posit that maybe one takeaway from it is that
the truth is it has showed us that there is
no good or clean or sanitary way to kill a person,
and any belief that there is, in fact turns out
to be a kind of brutalizing and dehumanizing illusion. Alright, Well,
on that note, we're gonna close out the episode here.
(51:26):
But hey, we want to remind everybody that we are
open to your suggestions and your ideas and your feedback
and thoughts on the inventions and innovations that we discuss
on this podcast. Since our real website probably won't be
up yet, you should check out stuff to Blow your
Mind dot com, where you can see our other podcasts
that has all kinds of great content. If you're interested
(51:47):
in in depth discussions like this, but more focused on
intersections of science and philosophy, religion, mythology, history, uh and
and less specifically focused on technological innovation, check out Stuff
to blow your mind. That's our great mother crab from beyond.
And if you want to get in touch with this directly,
just email us at our email address, which might not
(52:08):
be active at the time we launch. Who Knows Invention
is production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts for
my heart Radio because the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, Welcome to Invention. My name is Robert Lamb and
I'm Joe McCormick, and we're bringing you a classic episode
of Invention. Is the show old enough to have classics? Now?
If so, this is a classic? Yes, I think it?
Yet why not? I think this might have been the
first episode of the show we recorded. Was yeah, I
was looking back. This is the first episode we put out.
We went in there grizzly, and now it's Halloween, so
(00:28):
we figured let's replay this grizzly classic of Invention. Right,
it's seasonally appropriate, but it also turned out to be
I thought, a very nuanced and interesting subject. So this
is our early episode of Invention on the guillotine. We
hope you enjoy. Welcome to Invention, a production of I
Heart Radio. Hey, welcome to Invention. I'm Robert Lamb and
(00:55):
I'm Joe McCormick. And you might know Robert and I
from our other show Stuff to Blow your Mind, our
other show in the house Stuff Works Network. But today
you apparently have somehow wandered into our brand new Curiosity
Store of Inventions, where we explore human ingenuity, for good,
for ill, all of the stuff that comes out of
our imaginations and becomes the technology we use every day
(01:18):
or maybe just read about in history books. Yes, the
hallowed halls of technological, systematic, and cultural invention, the very
human machines, customs, and systems that altered the course of history.
And today we're talking about one of the most useful
inventions of all time. It's got to be the and Robert,
before I say it, do you say it like a
French guy's name, or like what a fish breathes with?
(01:40):
I go with guillotine because it sounds a little more
like an open face sandwich that way, and also it
has the the G has more of a sound to it. Yeah,
I like how it sounds kind of like the minotar
the guillotine. But but apparently guillotine in English is also
somewhat acceptable pronunciation. I don't think there's a firm uh
(02:00):
ruling one way or another from the lords of English pronunciation. Now,
one thing is for certain as we we venture into
this world of the guillotine. Beheadings themselves are just a
time honored way for one human being to kill another.
It's a wound that still can't be repaired, and it is,
without questions certain death. Now one thing I was thinking
about to illustrate this is what would you even say
(02:22):
is the quote cause of death in a beheading? So well,
blood loss, loss of oxygen to the brain. Basically, it
just cuts off. It cuts off your all your plumbing
systems from all of your your your your thinking systems. Yeah,
it makes it makes you think about how often when
you hear phrases like clinically dead, that can refer to
something about circulation, like the cessation of the heartbeat. Um.
(02:44):
But yeah, so when you separate the head from the body,
I guess you've got to be really rigorous about what
you mean by dead. Though I guess it also happens
pretty quickly so you don't have to worry about it
too much. But yeah, all the blood comes out of
the head, immediate loss of blood pressure, which means the
brain can't get oxyd gin, which means the brain can't work. Yeah.
I it's something that's just cemented in our mythology as well, right.
(03:05):
I mean, you want to kill a vampire, you want
to kill a medusa, you want to kill a highlander,
what do you do? You cut their head off? There
is something just supernaturally potent about this form of death. Well,
I think that's absolutely true, and you see that in
a lot of archaeological finds of beheadings from human history. Like,
here's a kind of strange fact. A lot of times
when you find beheaded humans from ages past, there appears
(03:28):
to be evidence that the people were beheaded posthumously. Why
did that happen? There are a lot of ways you
could explain it. I mean that you would take a
dead person and cut off their head. Maybe there's some
sort of ritual function going on here, might be a
human sacrifice. Maybe there's some kind of symbolic form of
justice being done, if it's the corps of a criminal
(03:50):
or an enemy or something. But a lot of times
it appears like it might be a form of apotropaic magic,
the kind of magic you would use to ward off
evil or bad spirit. It's in the same way that
you might find a skeleton from hundreds of years ago
with an iron rod driven through its hard or with
a brick in its mouth, and say the tombs underneath Venice. Yeah,
(04:10):
there's like a dismantling of the the individual that that
seems evident in these acts um you know, and we
see acts of ritual decapitation dating back thousands of years.
For instance, there's evidence in Brazil that dates back to
at least nine thousand BC, and it's UH and in
it we find a human skull draped and amputated, hands
(04:32):
palm side down, covering the face as if as if
in grief. That's from place called Lapa Dosanto in UH
in South America and Brazil, and a lot of bones
have been discovered there. And it's not always easy to
determine how to read the intention behind what you see
in these people. But the yeah, there were all kinds
of forms of of apparently posthumous mutilation going on in
(04:54):
the way these bones are arranged. For example, sometimes you'll
find skulls they're full of finger bones inside the skulls.
What was going on? What made the people want to
do that? It seems like it may well have formed
some kind of magical intention, but what was it? Indeed,
we can only guess now. Another kind of significance that
beheading has often had in the ancient world was that
(05:17):
it was one of the many forms of execution practiced
of course in ancient Greece and Rome, UH and in
fact our terms decapitation and capital punishment both come from
the Latin from capit meaning head, so like capital punishment
is punishment of the head, or that you you pay,
you pay for a crime with your head by separating
it from the other stuff. Uh. And there's some evidence
(05:39):
that the ancient Greeks and Romans viewed beheading as not
a particularly harsh punishment, but more as a particularly noble
and honorable form of execution. And you see strains of
this thinking carried into much more recent times, like when
beheading was deployed as an execution method throughout the history
of England. Not always, but it was most often reserved
(06:01):
for the aristocracy, while common criminals might more often be
killed and what was considered a less dignified way like hanging. Yeah,
I mean, obviously be headings in general have probably been
occurring as long as we've had weapons fine enough to
inflict the blow. Uh, you know, as long as we
had you know, something that couldn't knock or cut a
(06:23):
head off. And then when you start looking at these, uh,
the the use of the of of a sword or
an axe and execution, you know, a lot of it
comes down to the craftsmanship of that weapon, but also
the skill of the individual using it. Yeah, that's that's
a real kicker, isn't it. I Mean, when you contract
somebody to do a job for you, a lot of times,
if you don't have a previous relationship with you, you
(06:45):
don't know what kind of work they're gonna do. You
want to find those people you can trust, but it's
hard to find a trust or the execution er that
you know is going to cut your head off right right,
Like if you really got to put yourself in the
in the shoes of the condemned here right. Uh. You know,
obviously you don't want to be stone to death. You know,
you don't want to be thrown into that burlap sack
with two wild animals and thrown into the river. You
(07:05):
would probably prefer a nice, clean beheading, but nobody wants
a less than perfect beheading. If the local warlord is
doing it, you know, that's one thing. Uh, you know, unless, however,
you're worried about the war lord inflicting an intentionally less
than perfect stroke, you know, out of personal malice. If
if it's a professional executioner that's doing the honors, well
(07:27):
that's either really good or really bad, depending on how
you look at it. Like the idea of a trained
specialist doing the ded That sounds good. But on the
other hand, at death via the sort of person who
either seeks this line of work out or is not
suited for any other form of labor, that's a little
uh frightening, I would say. Plus, do you really want
to be toward the bottom of an executioner's list for
(07:50):
the day after they're tired from swinging that big old axe,
like it's your turn on Friday afternoon? Yeah? Like you
kind of I want to be up there. I would
want to be up there first, let to get that
that first blow in on me. I must admit I
don't think I had ever much considered the horrors of
a weak strike from the executioner until Game of Thrones
came around, and then that I suddenly began to think, like, oh, yes,
(08:13):
this could go very wrong. But George R. Martin did
not make up this concept, obviously, of of being weak
at swinging the executioner sword or the acts. History is
replete with stories of botched beheadings, and they are horrific
and unfortunately sometimes kind of funny. I want to tell
you a couple uh, this one is not so funny.
(08:33):
And this concerns Mary, the Queen of Scots. So during
the reign of Protestant Queen Elizabeth the First of England
in the sixteenth century, there was obviously a lot of
anxiety about succession because Elizabeth had been born to King
Henry the Eighth and his second wife Anne Boleyn, after
Henry's first marriage to Catherine of Aragon had been annulled,
(08:54):
and obviously lots of people at the time, especially some Catholics,
had opinions about that right. And Elizabeth's cousin, Mary Stewart,
was born to James the Fifth of Scotland, who was
descended from a legitimate royal line, and so many Catholic
supporters thought, well, maybe Mary actually has a more legitimate
claim to the throne than Elizabeth does. And so Mary
(09:15):
was eventually implicated in an assassination plot against Elizabeth in
fifteen eighty six, at least she was allegedly involved in it,
and she was sentenced to execution in fifty seven. So
you've got Mary Stewart, Mary Queen of Scott's, going to
her execution, and the story goes that she's blindfolded and
she gets helped to the block and the executioner wearing
(09:35):
all black, raises up his axe to kill her, but
instead of cutting through her neck, he misses, and he
hits her on the head, and then some report that
she murmurs Sweet Jesus in shock before the executioner raises
his axe a second time and then strikes again and
still fails to cut her head off completely. And finally
(09:55):
he quote just sawed through what remained of her neck.
That's that's that's rough for Mary. Yeah, and this is
you know, this is presumed a main event be heading here.
So right, this is before a royal audience, right, so
this would have to be either an active just just
just an utterly inepped executioner, or one that is intentionally
(10:16):
doing a bad job out of mouth. It's like there
seems to be very little room in between. It's hard
to understand what happened here because you know, we only
have accounts from the time, which may not even be
fully reliable. We're relying on what people told us they
saw there, right, And there could be some objective in
crafting a version of the tale that sounds more inapt
than it actually was. But it actually gets worse because
(10:37):
apparently so it's described sometimes that the executioner appeared horrified
at what was going on. But the headsman, after he
got her head off, he took hold of the severed
head and he held it up in front of the
crowd so he could hold up the severed head and
say God save Queen Elizabeth. But he grasped Mary's head
by the hair, and it turned out the hair was
a wig, so the head fell down and rolled away,
(10:58):
leaving him holding only a hacked up, bloody wig while
proclaiming his true queen. And then another part of the story,
maybe maybe not to be believed, is that after Mary's
head rolled away, her lips kept moving as if she
was talking or praying. Okay, some of that sounds like
it might have been embellished, but it also sounds like
this guy was a real hack, no pun intended. Well,
I got an even worse hack for you, because there
(11:20):
was a seventeenth century English executioner named jack Ketch. Catch
spelled as like catch up, catch yeah, or like what's
the kid in the Pokemon's I have no idea. Our
very knowledgeable producer Paul just tells me it is ash
catch him. Okay, I guess he's got to catch him.
(11:41):
All right, it's like jack Ketch him right, the harr rider.
That's what comes to my mind. I don't well anyway,
this is jack Ketch K E T C H so
Jack Ketch birthday unknown died in six six who was
notorious for being a complete screw up at his job
and bungling executions. A couple of examples. In sixteen eighty three,
(12:01):
Catch performed the beheading of William Lord Russell, who was
convicted for treason in his role of in his role
in the Rye House plot, which was against King Charles
the Second of England, and Catches beheading of Russell was
reportedly just this clumsy horror, with Catch whacking Russell again
and again with the axe, but repeatedly failing to get
his head off. And apparently after this, Catch defended himself
(12:24):
by complaining that Russell wouldn't hold still. And then you
got the second one later, James, Duke of Monmouth, he
went to the block for the Monmouth Rebellion of sixteen
eighty five, and he tried to pay Catch not to
screw up his execution. He's recorded as saying, quote, here
are six guineas for you, pray do your business well
(12:45):
do not serve me as you did, my Lord Russell.
I have heard you struck him three or four times.
Then Monmouth gave three more guineas to his servant who
was standing nearby, and told his servant to pay Catch
only if Catch did the beheading correct to Lee. And
then Catch said, I hope I shall. Then Monmouth asked
to feel the axe blade, and he did, and he
(13:07):
complained that this is too dull, and Catch said, no,
it's sharp enough, it'll be heavy enough. So Monmouth got
down in place to accept his fate, and Catch brought
the axe down on Monmouth, and at this point it
is reported that after he got hit, Monmouth lifted his
head up and turned around and glared at Catch angrily.
(13:29):
Then he got back down so Ketch could hit him again,
and Catch hit him several more times, failing each time
to be head him. Then Catch got frustrated and tried
to walk away and quit in the middle of the execution,
while Monmouth was still alive. But the crowd yelled at
him and told him to go back and finish it,
so finally he went back. After some more blows and
the use of a knife, he finally managed to get
(13:51):
the Duke's head off. Well, that's awful. This guy is
a true hack. I wonder if that's where the word
hat comes perhaps. Uh yeah, But so you had people
whose job it was to administer what I guess was
supposed to be the more humane form of execution at
the time. I mean, this is different than being you know, uh,
tortured and hanged and drawn and quartered and all that.
(14:13):
But he this is obviously not going the way it's
supposed to. And if we're going inspired by the Greek
and Roman model, something is obviously wrong here, Like not
only is it unnecessarily painful, this does not really seem
like an honorable death. This seems humiliating. Yeah, there's nothing
noble about this, you know, it's this is not a
finely craft instrument wielded by a by and by an
(14:35):
expert practitioner. This is just a clumsy exercise and horror.
But what if mechanical controls could be set in place
the same level of perfection, regardless of whoever you know
happens to be wearing the hood, how tired they are,
what sort of weapon they're using, or what sort of
six stuff they're into. A machine that cannot get tired,
(14:58):
it can't hesitate or engage in unfair punishment. It's not
gonna judge you based on your your royal or commoner status.
A good blade, some gravity, and a simple frame with
a necklock, well that would be the guillotine. All right,
We're gonna take a quick break, and when we come
back we will discuss some precursors to the guillotine and
(15:21):
the guillotine itself. All right, we're back. So the guillotine
of late eighteenth century France, which I'm sure you've heard
about before, that was involved in the French Revolution, the
Reign of Terror, the first French Republic. That guillotine was
not the first human head removal machine, not by a
(15:43):
long shot. And we're not saying it was. You know
that it was predated by people swinging in axe or
a sword with their hands, of course it was. But
there were organized machines for doing this job more efficiently
and in a more consistent way before the guillotine was
instituted in France, right, and they worked along the same principles.
They maybe they weren't quite as refined, but essentially the
(16:05):
idea is there that we should say that it was
only in the aftermath of the French Revolution that people
began referring to decapitation machines as guillotine. That's where the
name comes from. Yes, they had equally less refined names.
They had more grizzly names. One finds we'll meet a
couple in a moment. So as for who invented the
first general decapitation machine, this is totally unknown, lost to history,
(16:29):
and in fact, we don't even know for sure how
many societies used a device like this. There there are
a lot of tales, but many of these tales might
not even be true. We don't know for sure, right,
And then how often is the individual uh celebrated for
creating such a thing? As we'll discover the naming of
the guillotine, and it doesn't really relate to the individual
(16:50):
or individuals that created it, right. I mean a lot
of people who create execution devices don't want to be
associated with And when you find the people who do
want to be associated with them or don't mind, you've
got to kind of wonder about those people. Um. So,
there are a couple of known mechanical beheading devices from
England that predated the French guillotine, and one is known
(17:11):
as the Halifax Gibbet, so the how. Halifax is a
town in West Yorkshire in England, and it had this
infamous beheading machine known as the Halifax Gibbet, which was
allegedly used mostly to punish petty theft. So people would
steal some small sum of money or something worth not
very much, some cloth or something, and into the Halifax
(17:31):
Gibbet they would go. It was described in an eighteen
thirty seven history by an author named William White in
the following way quote. The executions always took place on
the Great market day in order to strike the more
terror into the neighborhood. When the criminal was brought to
the gibbet, which stood a little way out of the town,
where part of the stone platform may still be seen
(17:54):
on Gibbet Hill. The execution was performed by means of
an engine, which was raised upon a plat form four
ft high and thirteen feet square, faced on every side
with stone, and ascended by a flight of steps. In
the middle of this platform was placed two upright pieces
of timber fifteen feet high, joined at the top by
a transverse beam. Within these was a square block of
(18:17):
wood four ft and a half long, which moved up
and down by means of grooves made for that purpose.
To the lower part of the sliding block was fastened
in iron axe of the weight of seven pounds and
twelve ounces. The axe, thus fixed, was drawn up to
the top by a cord and pulley. At the end
of the cord was a pin, which, being fixed to
(18:38):
the block, kept it suspended till the moment of execution.
When the culprit, having placed his head on the block,
the pin was withdrawn and his head was instantly severed
from his body. If the offender was condemned for stealing
an ox, a sheep or a horse, the end of
the rope was fastened to the beast, which, being driven,
pulled out the pin and thus be came the executioner.
(19:02):
In other cases, the bailiff for his servant cut the
rope and allowed the axe to descend. It's a little
unnecessary complexity involving fim animals, but otherwise the basic principles
of the guillotine as we've come to know it. Yeah,
it's more or less there there. There might be some
design refinements we come on later, but this is the idea.
It's it's a reliable consistent machine that's not going to
(19:24):
mess up, right. And of course it doesn't sound like
it was necessarily a custom blade, or maybe it was,
but it's very much based on the design of an
axe blade. Yeah, and when you see illustrations it looks
like just a large axe head on the bottom of
a huge wooden block. Uh So, this beheading machine of
Halifax was famous enough that the English poet John Taylor
referenced it alongside the notoriously tough police of Kingston upon
(19:49):
Hull in a poem uh that that I thought was
pretty good. He writes, there is a proverb and a
prayer withal that we may not to Three strange places
fall from Hull, from Halifax, from Hell. 'tis thus from
all these three good Lord deliver us at Halifax. The
law so sharp doth deal that whoso more than one
(20:10):
threepence doth steal. They have a lynn that wondrous, quick
and well. Since thieves all headless unto Heaven or Hell.
From Hell, each man says, Lord, deliver me, because from
Hell can no redemption be men may escape from Hull
and Halifax, but sure in Hell there is a heavier tax.
It sounds pretty grim, well, I like how it's sort
(20:32):
of captures two themes there. One is that how the
Halifax jibbit is deadly and something to be feared, but
it also contrasts it with the supposed tortures of Hell.
I guess you can emphasizing that, well, it's not as
torturous as many of the other methods that are being used. Yeah,
he's almost describing it like it's a like it's a
plane ticket to too greater rewards are suffering depending on
(20:57):
how one supernatural revenge fantasy is hang out here. But
on the other hand, I like that it is to
a certain extent farm animals, uh you know. Notwithstanding, it
is to a certain extent saving the horrors of an
afterlife for those imagined afterlife and not trying to um
embody them too much in the act of execution itself. Yeah. Now,
(21:21):
whether that's actually a good thing or not, we can
discuss later, but it does seem to be there's at
least there's at least a superficial kind of humaneness to write,
even though it seems to be being lumped on people
who commit extremely pack crimes and not and no matter
what you think, really probably deserving of death. But there's
(21:41):
some strange stories about how people reacted to what happened
with at the Halifax Gibbitt. The story in Thomas Wright
tells a legend quote of a countrywoman who was writing
by the gibbet on her hampers to the market just
at the execution of a criminal when the acts chopped
his neck through with such four that the head jumped
into one of her hampers, or as others say, seized
(22:04):
her apron with the teeth and they're stuck for some time.
I don't believe that's true, or at least the teeth.
I don't believe. Again, we're coming back to the sort
of inherent comedy. I mean, it's true gallows humor, uh
that comes with beheading executions. But there's an interesting observation
from the Halifax historian John Crabtree, who has a sort
(22:28):
of attitude about what stories like this mean. He writes, quote,
it is useless employing words about this fair, but the
circumstance may serve to show with what apathy the country
people regarded this mode of punishment. Their minds were evidently
hardened by such exhibitions, and the fact develops the inadequacy
of such awful administrations of justice to produce that proper
(22:50):
moral and salutary effect which might have been anticipated. Such scenes,
often repeated, appear to harden, rather than soften, to stoop
fi rather than awakened, the sensibilities of man's nature. And
I think we should come back to that thought later on. Indeed,
all right, so what else do we have in terms
of proto guillotine machines. Well, a quicker story is just
(23:12):
a copy essentially of the Halifax Gibbet, known as the
Scottish Maiden. So James Douglas, the fourth Earl of Morton,
who was the ruler of Scotland from fifteen seventy two
to fifteen seventy eight, he was alleged at some point
to have introduced the decapitation machine to his country of Scots,
inspired by the Halifax Gibbett. Allegedly, he at some point
(23:33):
traveled through Halifax and he was so inspired by the
gibbet that he thought, well, I should share this same
technology with my countrymen. So a similar machine was built
out of oak, and it could be transported around the
country to perform beheadings wherever, but it was often accepting
the condemned at Edinburgh, and according to the National Museums
of Scotland, crimes that could get you sent to the
(23:53):
Scottish Maiden included murder, incest, stealing, treason, adultery, forgery and robbery.
But there's an ironic twist, so James Douglas, the Earl,
fourth Earl of Morton was a supporter of James the sixth,
and Morton opposed the Catholic faction of Mary, Queen of
Scott's who he discussed earlier, Mary Stewart, and he was
(24:15):
eventually implicated in a plot to murder Mary's second husband,
Lord Darnley, and was put to death in June, decapitated
by the Scottish Maiden that he brought to Scotland. Ah,
there's your poetic justice, and legends of that kind will
appear again and again in this episode. Actually, well, yes,
(24:35):
and even beyond this episode, because this isn't that a
common theme? The man destroyed by his own invention, by
his own machine. It happens enough in the movies that
you should think it happens more often in reality. Though
in the movies is especially common when that invention is
some kind of hybrid animal, like I created a shark ape,
and you know, it swings from the trees, taking bites
(24:57):
out of people who could have known my arcape would
turn on me, and yet it always happens. Alright. So,
as we've been discussing, there were similar devices already used
in Europe and had been for centuries before the guillotine
came around. But the individual who is often credited as
the inventor of the guillotine, uh is a French surgeon
(25:17):
and physiologist Antoine Louis, who lives seventeen through seventeen two. Yeah,
he is often credited as the inventor, though based on
what I was reading, it appears to me it was
maybe designed by some sort of committee of which Louis
was the leader. Right. And this is actually all the
more fitting U when we really get to the heart
(25:38):
of the guillotine here, because it is this this thing
that is it is this utilization of technology and this
there's a there's an air of civility to it. Uh.
This this taking something that is kind of that is
rather barbaric and making it a little less so. Well,
it's bureaucratic violence. Yes, it very much embodies the idea
(25:59):
of retrie bet of violence by the state. Taken out
of the emotional hands of the single executioner and placed
into the hands of a disembodied machine that is created
by a committee through drafts. Yes, you know, we have
another episode that we're recording this week on vending machines.
And it's amazing this the similarities involved here, this this
these sometimes these struggles over what exactly is happening when
(26:23):
a machine does the bidding of a human. If a
machine is vending, say, blasphemous literature, as we're discussing this
other episode, then who is it fault foresaid literature sale
and uh, And there's a sense of that here too.
It's like the bureaucracy has condemned you to death. The
machine is actually doing the execution. We're just merely you know,
(26:44):
pushing the button, pulling the string, et cetera, to carry
out this judgment. Right, But we do at least have
Antoine Louis to associate with the creation of the machine,
even if it wasn't just him alone, but because of
his association with it, it was often early on it
was hold names, not the guillotine yet, but names like
the Louisette or the louis Zone, which doesn't have as
(27:06):
much of a ring to it. I kind of like it.
I could see executions by the Louisette. Yeah, I guess
it would have grown on us. But at any rate,
later it definitely came to be named after Joseph Ignace
Guillotan who lived seventeen thirty eight through eighteen fourteen. He
was a physician. Uh, he was a National Assembly member,
(27:27):
and he played a major role in passing legislation that
made death by machine the law. The loose idea here
is that it would this kind of legislation would provide
the best possible version of beheading to all classes of society.
And we do have to point out that, despite some
urban legends out there, Guillotine himself was not killed by
(27:49):
his own machine, and he wasn't actually a huge fan
of execution either. It's not like he was a huge
execution enthusiasts. Well, no, exactly the opposite. Guilloton opposed the
death penalty. He wanted the abolition of the death penalty,
but he didn't think that he could accomplish that directly. Right,
this seemed the best reasonable next step. Right, It's like,
(28:09):
if I can't we can't eradicate it, We're going to
have it, we might as well make it clean and
uh and fair to all involved. According to a popular legend,
Guillotan was born when his pregnant mother was out walking
one day and she overheard the screams of a condemned
criminal being broken on the wheel. And breaking on the
wheel was you know, a classic death by torture type method,
(28:32):
where a person would be stretched out on a wheel
in a kind of starfish post and they have their
limbs broken with an iron rod or with a club.
Just insane brutality. So he was very much opposed to
that sort of thing, not only just the bar the
barbaric nature of the execution, but the public nature of it,
the idea that that women and children, uh, just innocent
(28:54):
bystanders might just walk through town and witness such such
are So he was thinking, maybe if less children end
up watching this, the better, Yes, and make it. Yeah,
it's more systematic, it's more you know that the act
itself is less flashy, and then we're just gonna make
it less for performance. So Guillotam was not out there
(29:15):
lobbying to get this machine named after his family, No, No,
it just it ended up sticking. Now a cool little
fact here that sounds like something right out of an
Alan Moore comic book. But along with Benjamin Franklin, Uh,
Guillotine investigated the work of Franz Mesmer of Mesmerism, you know,
the the the form of hypnotism that we had back
(29:37):
in the day. Uh, And they investigated him on behalf
of King Louis the League of Extraordinary Gentleman exactly. So
another way of thinking, you alluded to this a minute ago, Robert,
like the idea that it would be the best method
for all the classes. So another way of thinking about
the motivation for the institution of the guillotine at this
(30:00):
time in history was that it supposedly extended the democratic
and egalitarian principles of the French Revolution to common criminals,
essentially extending them the courtesy of the honorable beheading that
was more often reserved for nobles and aristocrats instead of
more shameful and common and painful deaths like hanging, burning,
(30:23):
or breaking on the wheel, which you were more likely
to get if you were just some lower class petty criminal. Now,
as for the idea Guillotan had, thinking that this would
shield children from the gruesome practice of execution, Unfortunately this
did not work out. I was reading a section from
a book called Children's Toys of Bygone Days, A History
of playthings of all people's from prehistoric times to the
(30:46):
nineteenth century by Carl Grober, published in nineteen twenty eight,
and the author writes, quote, the worst monstrosity of the
kind was the outcome of the French Revolution, which indeed
was over rich in aberrations of east. The toy shops
put on the market little guillotines with which little patriots
could be head figures of aristocrats. There still survives some
(31:10):
specimens of this pretty and diverting machine, one of which
bears the date seventeen four, and he's got an illustration.
These were not models, but pure toys. And in proof
of this we have the king's evidence from one whom
we should never suspect of wishing to give so bloodthirsty
a toy to his little son. And here the author
is speaking of the romantic poet Johann wolf Kan von Gurta.
(31:34):
So Gruber tells the story and that in December seventeen
Girta wrote a letter to his mother and Frankfort, asking
if she would buy a toy guillotine for his little son.
And she replied, dear son, anything I can do to
please you is gladly done and gives me joy. But
to buy such an infamous implement of murder that I
(31:55):
will not do at any price. If I had authority,
the maker should be put in the stocks, and I
would have the machine publicly burnt by the common executioner.
And I guess this is sort of the seventeen nineties
equivalent of like asking your grandmother to buy you a
copy of Doom for Christmas in the nineteen nineties. Yeah, well,
I'm glad that you brought up Doom here. And just
because it's it's easy for us to look back on
(32:17):
this account and think, oh, these children of a more
barbarous age. But go to any toy store and look
at the machine gun based toys that are on display. There,
all the various guns like true true murder weapons. Um,
not even methods of bureaucratic execution, but weapons of just
(32:38):
wanton violence. Uh, these are all represented in toys even today. Uh. Likewise,
I can't help but think back on how much I
wanted the slime pit when I was a kid. Do
you know that this was a master's of the universe.
Place set the device and basically you would lock he
man or some other figure into the machine and it
(32:59):
was like shape like a skull, and then it would
dump slime on top of the head of the poor hero.
And it was I think maybe the actual lore of
it was like I would make them mutate or something,
but it was very much Uh, it was very much
like a guillotine, except instead of a blade, it was slime.
It was like clearly an instrument of execution, of of
ritualized death for your toys. So you're arranging an execution
(33:22):
for he man exactly. So you know, the the idea
of a toy guillotine. It makes perfect sense. Uh, we can't.
We can only distance ourselves from such an idea so much.
Though I also have to wonder I somehow detect between
the lines. This could have been one of those situations
where and Robert, I bet you're familiar with this, where
a dad buys or requests a toy for his child
(33:45):
because secretly he wants to play. Uh. In fact, Gerta
wrote in Faust quote ages no second childhood age makes
plain children. We were true children. We remain again much
like it is today now we mentioned that Guillaton was
responsible for introducing legislation that would eventually lead the French
(34:08):
National Assembly to say, Okay, we're only going to be
killing people by beheading machine. Now that that's that's going
to be the new method of execution. That's what's humane,
that's what the state should be up to. And so
I think in just a minute we should turn to
the machine itself. But I just wanted quickly before we
do that, to discuss where it is that this rumor
(34:28):
came from. The Guillotan was killed by the machine that
he recommended putting in place for executions in France, and
I think I know maybe a few threads of where
the story came from. Obviously, we had that ironic story
of the Earl of Morton earlier, right, right, so we
can see how that might have influenced confused the telling, right.
But then there are a couple of other examples. So
(34:49):
Dr Antoine Louis, the secretary of the Academy of Medicine
and physician to King Louis the one who we talked
about earlier, chairing that committee that designed the device. He
was actually temporarily condemned to die in the machine that
he designed or helped design, though he escaped this fate
basically during a change of power. So he narrowly escaped
(35:11):
going to the guillotine himself. And then King Louis the sixteenth,
who was interested in mechanical engineering, is said to have
made refinements to the design of the guillotine, of like
recommending an angled blade while he was still in power,
before the device was eventually turned on the king himself
and on his wife Marie Antoinette. And so there's another
kind of like creator and then killed by his creation.
(35:35):
Irony there since he apparently or at least allegedly offered
refinements to the design. All right, Well, on that note,
we're gonna take one more break, and when we come back,
we'll discuss the machine itself in more detail, and we'll
also discuss its legacy. All right, we're back. So now
(35:55):
we're at the machine itself, the French guillotine of the
seventeen eighties and on word. And the question is was
it actually built? Well, of course it was. This one
was definitely built. Some of the inventions were discussing on
this show, you know, maybe didn't get out of the
blueprint phase. This definitely saw action. So after the legal
standard of execution by machine was approved by the National
(36:17):
Assembly in sev the construction of the machine was delegated
to a politician named Pierre Louis red Areo, who I'm
always going to struggle with that name, so I'll just
call him Pierre here. Uh. He apparently had trouble finding
a contractor who could build the machine since no one
wanted their name associated with it, and eventually found a
(36:37):
taker was a taker from Germany, and so the guillotine
was constructed by a German harpsichord maker named Tobias Schmidt.
Apparently he also supplied a leather sack that would catch heads.
Now you could you just gotta wonder about Tobias. I
can just imagine the scenario. It's like, so, honey, what
are you working on today? I get this new contracted
(36:58):
you know it pays well, it's gonna really help us
out next month. Oh, who are you putting a hot
harpsichord of chord for? Well, it's not quite a harpsichord. Well,
I'm just imagining you in his shop while he's working
on the guillotine, that harpsichord music is constantly playing. Dan
Dan Dan Dan Dan Dy. Anyway, according to the memoirs
of the French executioner Enrie Clements sans Song in eighteen
(37:22):
seventy six, saints On came from a line of a
long line of executioners, and he so he has these
memoirs about his family's exploits cutting off heads and performing
executions in France, and his memoirs are considered probably only
partially reliable. But his up close description of the workings
of the guillotine is fairly straightforward. So I see, I
(37:43):
feel like he's probably on the right track here. All right,
I'm gonna read part of this and I'm gonna I'm
gonna go for an executioner's voice. Here do it. On
a scaffold from seven to eight feet high, two parallel
bars are made fast in one end. Their top part
is united by a strong crossbar. To this crossbar is
added a thick iron ring, and which is past a
(38:03):
rope which fixes and retains a ram. This is perpendicularly
armed with a sharp and broad blade, which gradually becomes
broader on all its surface, so that instead of striking perpendicularly,
it strikes sideways, so that there is not an inch
of the blade that does not serve the ram ways
from pounds, and its weight is doubled when it begins
(38:24):
to slide down. It is enclosed in the groove of
the bars. A spring makes it fast to the left bar.
A band of iron descends along the outside of the
same bar, and the handle is locked to a ring
with a padlock, so that no accident is possible and
the weight only falls from the executioner interferes to a
(38:45):
way plank. Strong straps are fastened by which the criminal
is attached under the armpits and over the legs, so
that the body cannot move as soon as the way
plank goes down. The head, being between the bars is
supported by a rounded crossbar, are the executioner's assistants lower
another rounded crossbar. The head, being thus grooved in a
(39:06):
perfect circle, would prevents it from moving in any way.
This precaution is indispensable in regard to the terrible inconvenience
as of fear. The executioner then touches the spring. The
whole affair has done so quickly that only the thump
of the blade when it slides down and forms the
spectators that the culprit is no longer of the living.
(39:27):
The head falls into a basket full of brand and
the body is pushed into another wicker basket line with
very thick leather. That's a heck of a rating, Robert. Yeah,
that was going to do a number on my throat.
But I'm sorry. Maybe I should have taken part of it,
but I was just enjoying listening to your Henri Clement. Well,
there's a precision in his in his description of the
(39:51):
act that I felt like I had had to capture
now obviously, so he's described how the device works now,
but they had to test it out before they can
make sure to try it on a human, right, So
you know you always wonder like, how do you test
a guillotine? You put a watermelon in there? Do you
gallagher it? Well, I suppose you could, but it's kind
of a waste of a good melon, And ultimately you
(40:12):
want to test it on the real thing, right, So
they use dead bodies. Oh yeah, also farm animals like
sheep and calves. Yeah, because you just I mean, it
makes sense. You want to make sure you're cutting through
actual vertebrate tissue there and most notably the neck and
then on a officials installed and use the guillotine for
the first time. Right, So, the first victim of the
(40:34):
French guillotine was Nicholas Jacques Beltier, who was a highwayman,
and he was executed where the machine was erected, at
the Plasta Grev And they're so a large crowd came out,
obviously to witness the first execution by the new machine.
But it was reported that the crowd was somewhat unimpressed
and they found the efficiency of the killing less entertaining
(40:56):
than the forms of execution they were used to, even
the more classic beheadings. Nevertheless, over time, the executions that
the guillotine became a very popular spectator event during the
reign of Terror, and you know, in generally afterwards when
the guillotine was used, people would show up to watch.
So we see a little success here. Like it was
clearly less dramatic, uh, you know, there was less theater
(41:19):
in the act. And yet at the same time, a
few things are more dramatic in life than the ending
of a life like this is the people. You can
understand why people would still turn out even if you
had made things a little more precise. Now, putting aside
the question, I guess we can talk talk about in
a minute, O or whether it's ever humane to just
execute somebody? Was it actually true that the the guillotine
(41:44):
was a more refined, more humane version of execution than
what came before? Was it? Was it an improvement if
you were somebody who was interested in reducing the suffering
of humankind. Yeah, I mean you could again, you could
say the concept is inherently controversial, but still others took
issue with just how humane it was. So Prussian doctor
(42:04):
Samuel Thomas summer Ing, who lives seventeen fifty five through
eighteen thirty, he studied the cadavers of guillotine victims, and
he argued that severed heads were still capable feeling and since,
and he wrote an essay on this in seventeen So
he he was something of a poly math. In addition
to naming the twelve pairs of cranial nerves, he also
(42:26):
invented a telegraphic system and made discoveries in paleontology, specifically
with the pterodactyl fossils. They're not dinosaurs, folks, that's a
different thing. So this was you know, this was not
just it wasn't just some crazy guy coming up in Santa,
the heads are still alive, you know, he was he
was making an expert argument that, like, I'm not sure
(42:47):
that this is great what we're doing. Maybe it's a
little it's almost a little too precise. Yeah, the core
takeaway of his essay on the humanity of the guillotine
was that we can't rule out that it's possible that
a severed head could still be having experience, could experience
being severed now we knew. And there were a lot
of tales of this happening right of people running to
(43:07):
check out the heads of the of the decapitated, in
various doctors checking in and seeing what was going on
with the eyes. And there was a lot of interest
in this in determining what, you know, what happens to
consciousness at death, Like this was a perfect clinical exercise
for for weighing in on it. Yeah. The classic tales
about this thin get repeated the most often are like
(43:28):
seeing someone's cheeks flush with anger when they behold someone
or who's someone who mocks them or something like that,
or or who slaps them in the face, or thinking
that that I severed head would be like looking at
people as if it recognized them, something like that. Yeah,
and obviously there's a lot of indeliphment with these stories,
(43:49):
but we don't know how much to trust them. Yeah,
we really don't know how much to trust them. But
we do know today that that any kind of activity
scene in the heads after death, most of this is
going to be reflective twitching of muscles. So, um, basically
coma and brain death are probably going to occur within
two to three seconds of decapitation due to interruption of
(44:12):
blood flow to the brain. So just the massive sudden
drop in blood pressure, Yeah, that's going to do it. Yeah.
So any tales of like, you know, confronting the head
having any kind of like moment of human uh contact,
even it it's just in the eyes. Uh, it's pretty
clear that that is all just embellishment of stories or
just wishful thinking on the part of the observer. So
(44:35):
what is the legacy of this machine, this this machine
of bureaucratic violence. And if we try to look at
it from with our perspective, from today, with our hindsight,
and you know, with with the kind of value judgments
we would make, was the guillotine a step forward or
a step backward? Was it as uh, Giatan envisioned a
more humane way of doing business when the state was
(44:57):
just you know, couldn't be convinced not to kill people.
Or did it perhaps enable a worse state of affairs
where more people could be sent to their deaths with
impunity than would have been the case otherwise. Yeah, I
think you could probably go either way on it. I mean,
one thing is for certain. It it changed the way
executions were performed in France for nearly two hundred years.
(45:17):
It was actually used in France up until nineteen seventy seven,
that's when the last execution occurred via guillotine, before the
outlying of capital punishment in one It also took on
symbolic way. It's just this this symbol of the reign
of terror and perhaps to a larger extent, a symbol
of systematically violent rebellion. Yeah. I read one author point out,
(45:38):
certainly not in defending the guillotine or the use of
the guillotine, but it just pointing out a kind of
strange irony that the guillotine now to us symbolizes this
this horror, this horror period of bureaucratic violence, which it
certainly was. But we look at that and we think
of that period as a reign of terror, but don't
think the same way. Say about the Napoleonic Wars killed
(46:00):
far more people than the guillotine ever, did not that
that makes the killings of the guillotine any less horrific.
That's true, now, you know one the one thing about
the weirdness of this whole situation that stands out. I mean,
aside from just the inherently weird nature of of a
beheading machine machine that cuts off heads, there is still
something highly symbolic going on here. I think to the
(46:21):
means of an execution, and you'll typically see an expression
of of power involved, say it's a physical strength or
you know, vengeful spirit, or increasingly a culture's greatest technological achievements.
Isn't it weird to think about how these methods climb
the tree of developing technology. So starting with varying levels
(46:43):
of tool proficiency, you know, axes and swords, weapons, weapon crafting,
then we go into gunpowder, uh, you know, firing squads,
electricity and the electric chair. It is weird to trace
through history execution methods just sort of like tracking with
whatever's the most interesting new technology we have available. Yeah,
chemicals pharmaceuticals. Mean, why an electric chair that is just
(47:07):
such a strange idea to even come up with. Ye.
French philosopher Michelle Fuco he weighed in on this, and
he pointed out that penal technology is of course an
expression of power, but we also have to dwell in
the fact that it does this through everyday technology, ubiquitous technology.
(47:28):
So if it's something like electricity or even you know
or even you know, pharmaceuticals, chemicals, Uh, it's it's taking
aspects of everyday life and turning them into the the system,
the tool of of justice. So like our everyday use
of energy and the consumer economy, a constant reminder of
(47:48):
the methods of death that the state can inflict upon
people if they if they don't stay in line exactly. Now,
one small area of the legacy of the guillotine comes
down to its use in medical terminal alogy. So there
are two primary means of amputation. Um in terms of
like amputating a limb or what have you, you have
flap amputations in which flaps of flesh are left so
(48:10):
that you can fold them and close the stump of
the wound. And then there are guillotine amputations which which
are more of a straight down affair with no immediate
concerns for flap tissue. So in guillotine amputation, it's more
about cutting out infected tissue and making sure drainage of
proper drainage occurs, and then secondary surgery is performed to
(48:31):
create the flap tissue to close everything off into a stump.
But obviously that's like a secondary appellation, like you wouldn't
you wouldn't have called that guillotine cutting in the surgical
since before the guillotine, right, But it is certainly an
example where if you're you, you encounter this terminology now
in in medical science and uh, and it stems from
(48:51):
the use of this execution device. That being said, there's
a lot of medical terminology that stems from various weapons
and so forth. Of course, so I want to come
back to this question that we've been teasing throughout where
you can't help, but wonder if Joseph Eskaton pushed us
in exactly the wrong direction, if he was actually against
(49:13):
the death penalty and trying to institute more humane treatment
of criminals. You know, it's hard not to notice that
by sanitizing a horrible act, it often seems like you
make the act easier to carry out. And I mean,
just think about how this applies to modern methods of
state sanctioned killing, everything from lethal injection to drone strikes.
(49:36):
Does the sanitizing and distancing and depersonalization opportunity provided by
lethal technology encourage us to make ourselves able to kill
more while feeling less about it? Yeah? I mean, ultimately,
is the the botched at execution that we've discussed already,
(49:56):
Are those not maybe a more honest depiction of what's
going on? This this this fallible um barbaric human effort,
not this uh precision of the holy blameless machine. Well,
I mean, obviously we're not going to sit here and
advocate brutal, botched executions with jack ketch hacking at us
with a sword or an axe. But yeah, at least
(50:19):
with that, I'm not saying that's preferable, But I do
see what you're saying that it's at least there, you're
acknowledging that something brutal and weird is going on, and
you can't just you know, clean it up in your
mind and ignore it because you're hearing the screams and
it's splattering on you, and it's so brutal that it's
almost funny. You know, it's interesting. You know, in this
(50:39):
show we talk about innovation and inventions and how how
they change the world, and and so often you see
that that people have to look back and try to
figure out what changed and how it changed us. Uh,
And here we are, hundreds of years later, looking back
and saying, well, what did the guillotine mean? What did
it do? And what are the ultimate ramifications of this advancement. Well,
(51:04):
I posit that maybe one takeaway from it is that
the truth is it has showed us that there is
no good or clean or sanitary way to kill a person,
and any belief that there is, in fact turns out
to be a kind of brutalizing and dehumanizing illusion. Alright, Well,
on that note, we're gonna close out the episode here.
(51:26):
But hey, we want to remind everybody that we are
open to your suggestions and your ideas and your feedback
and thoughts on the inventions and innovations that we discuss
on this podcast. Since our real website probably won't be
up yet, you should check out stuff to Blow your
Mind dot com, where you can see our other podcasts
that has all kinds of great content. If you're interested
(51:47):
in in depth discussions like this, but more focused on
intersections of science and philosophy, religion, mythology, history, uh and
and less specifically focused on technological innovation, check out Stuff
to blow your mind. That's our great mother crab from beyond.
And if you want to get in touch with this directly,
just email us at our email address, which might not
(52:08):
be active at the time we launch. Who Knows Invention
is production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts for
my heart Radio because the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
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