May 15, 2020 • 51 mins
It cuts heads off, but who invented it? Robert and Joe explore.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:08):
Hey, welcome to Invention. I'm Robert Lamb and 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
(00:30):
of the stuff that comes out of our imaginations and
becomes the technology we use every day 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,
(00:52):
do you say it like a French guy's name, or
like what a fish breathes with? 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.
(01:15):
I don't think there's a firm 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
question certain death. Now, one thing I was thinking about
(01:37):
to illustrate this is what would you even say 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
(01:58):
something about circulation, like this sation of the heartbeat. Um.
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 oxygen, which means the brain can't work. Yeah,
(02:19):
and it's something that's just cemented in our mythology as well, right,
I mean, you want to kill a vampire, you wanna
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
(02:41):
when you find beheaded humans from ages past, there appears
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 human sacrifice.
Maybe there's some kind of symbolic form of justice being done,
(03:05):
if it's the corps of a criminal 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 spirits 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, there's
(03:28):
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. In it we find
a human skull draped and amputated, hands palm side down,
(03:50):
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 that, yeah,
there were all kinds of forms of of apparently posthumous
mutilation going on in the way these bones are arranged.
(04:12):
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
(04:32):
ancient world was that 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
(04:55):
some evidence that the ancient Greeks and Romans viewed beheading
is 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
(05:17):
often reserved for the aristocracy, while common criminals might more
often be killed in what was considered a less dignified
way like hanging. Yeah, I mean, obviously, beheadings 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 could knock
(05:39):
or cut a 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, 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
(06:01):
with them, you know, you 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 trustworthy
executioner that you know is going to cut your head
off right right, Like i' you really gotta put yourself
in the in the shoes of the condemned here right. Uh.
You know, obviously you don't want to be stoned to death.
You know, you don't want to be thrown into that
burlap sack with two wild animals and thrown into the river.
(06:22):
You 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
(06:44):
that's either really good or really bad, depending on how
you look at it. Like the idea of a trained
specialist doing the deed, 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
(07:06):
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 me 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,
(07:29):
like oh yes, this could go very wrong. But George rr.
Martin did not make up this concept obviously, of of
being weak at swinging the executioner sword or the axe.
History is replete with stories of botch to be headings,
and they are horrific and unfortunately sometimes kind of funny.
I want to tell you a couple. Uh, this one's
not so funny. And this concerns Mary, the Queen of Scots.
(07:53):
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 e Verragon had
been annulled, and obviously lots of people at the time,
especially some Catholics, had opinions about that right. And Elizabeth's
(08:18):
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 was eventually implicated in an assassination plot against
Elizabeth in fifteen eighty six, at least she was allegedly
(08:38):
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 all black, raises up his axe to kill her,
but instead of cutting through her neck, he misses and
(08:59):
he hits her on the head head and then some
report that she murmurs Sweet Jesus in shock before the
executioner raises his acts a second time and then strikes
again and still fails to cut her head off completely.
And finally he quote just sawed through what remained of
her neck. That's that's that's rough for Mary. Yeah, and
(09:20):
this is you know, this is presumed main event beheading here.
So right, this is before a royal audience, right, so
this would have to be either an act of just
just just an utterly inept executioner or one that is
intentionally 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
(09:42):
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 apparently so. It's described sometimes that the executioner appeared
horrified at what was going on, but the head's my
After he got her head off, he took hold of
(10:02):
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, 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
(10:24):
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 was a seventeenth century English executioner named Jack
Catch Catch spelled like catch up, catch yeah, or like
(10:45):
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,
all right. It's like Jack Ketch him right, the hard writer.
That's what comes to my mind. I don't well anyway,
this is Jack Ketch K E T C H so
(11:05):
Jack Ketch birthday unknown died in sixteen eighty six, who
was notorious for being a complete screw up at his
job and bungling executions. A couple of examples. In sixteen
eighty three, Ketch 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
(11:26):
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 by complaining that Russell wouldn't hold still, And
then you got the second one. Later, James, Duke of Monmouth,
(11:49):
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 guinea for you. Pray, do your business well.
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
(12:11):
was standing nearby, and told his servant to pay Catch
only if Ketch did the beheading correctly, and then Catch
said I hope I shall. Then Monmouth asked to feel
the axe blade, and he did, and he complained that
this is too dull, and Ketch said, no, it's sharp enough,
it'll be heavy enough. So Monmouth got down in place
(12:31):
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 Ketch angrily. Then he got
back down so Ketch could hit him again, and Catch
hit him several more times, failing each time to be
(12:52):
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 out yelled at
him and told him to go back and finish it.
So finally he went back. After some more blows uh
and the use of a knife, he finally managed to
get the duke's head off. Well that's awful, Like, this
guy is a true hack. I wonder if that's where
(13:13):
the word hack comes from. 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. But he this is obviously
not going the way it's supposed to. And if we're
(13:34):
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 expert practitioner. This is just
a clumsy exercise and horror. But what if mechanical controls
(13:59):
could be said at 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, It can't hesitate or engage in
unfair punishment. It's not gonna judge you based on your
(14:21):
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 the guillotine itself. All right, we're back.
(14:45):
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 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.
(15:06):
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 and they worked along
the same principles. They maybe they weren't quite as refined,
but essentially the idea was there that we should say that.
It was only in the aftermath of the French Revolution
(15:26):
that people began referring to decapitation machines as guillotines. That's
where the name comes from. Yes, they had equally less
refined names. They had more grizzly names. One fines. 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, and in fact, we don't even know
(15:47):
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, It doesn't really relate to
the individual or individuals that created it, right. I mean,
(16:08):
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. But
um So, there are a couple of known mechanical beheading
devices from England that predated the French guillotine, and one
is known as the Halifax Gibbet. So the how Halifax
(16:31):
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 Gibbet they would go. It was described in
(16:51):
an eighteen thirty seven history by an author named William
White in the following way quote. The executions always took
place on the Great Mark at 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 on Gibbet Hill. The execution was
(17:13):
performed by means of an engine, which was raised upon
a platform 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
(17:33):
square block of wood four feet 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,
(17:53):
being fixed to 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 became the executioner.
(18:18):
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
(18:40):
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
are referenced it alongside the notoriously tough police of Kingston
(19:05):
upon 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
(19:26):
one 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 good. Well. I like how it's sort
(19:48):
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 again in a sizing 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 to greater rewards or suffering,
(20:12):
depending on how one supernatural revenge fantasy is playing 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
(20:33):
um embody them too much in the act of execution itself. Yeah. Now,
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 pent crimes and not and no matter
(20:53):
what you think, really probably deserving of death. But there's
some strange stories about how people reacted to what happened
with at the Halifax gibbet. 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
(21:14):
his neck through with such force that the head jumped
into one of her hampers, or as others say, seized
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
(21:35):
that comes with beheading executions. But there's an interesting observation
from the Halifax historian John Crabtree, who has a sort
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
(21:59):
hardened by such exhibitions, and the fact develops the inadequacy
of such awful administrations of justice to produce that proper
moral and salutary effect which might have been anticipated. Such scenes,
often repeated, appear to harden rather than soften, to stupefy,
rather than awaken, the sensibilities of man's nature. And I
(22:20):
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
a copy essentially of the Halifax Gibbitt 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
(22:42):
to have introduced the decapitation machine to his country of Scots,
inspired by the Halifax Gibbet. Allegedly he at some point
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 can be transported around the
country to perform beheadings wherever. But it was often accepting
(23:04):
the condemned at Edinburgh, and according to the National Museums
of Scotland, crimes that could get you sent to the
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
(23:24):
sixth and Morton opposed the Catholic faction of Mary, Queen
of Scott's who we discussed earlier, Mary Stewart, and he
was 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,
(23:44):
there's your poetic justice. Uh. And legends of that kind
will appear again and again in this episode actually, well
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
(24:04):
in the movies it's 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
out of people who could have known my shark ape
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
(24:27):
came around. But the individual who is often credited as
the inventor of the guillotine, uh is a French surgeon
and physiologist Antoine Louis who lives seventy three through seventeen
nine two. Yeah, he is often credited as the inventor,
though based on what I was reading, it appears to
me was maybe designed by some sort of committee of
(24:48):
which Louis was the leader. Right, And this is actually
all the more fitting when We really get to the
heart 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,
(25:10):
it's bureaucratic violence. Yes, it very much embodies the idea
of retributive 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
(25:31):
amazing this the similarities involved here, this this these sometimes
these struggles over what exactly is happening when a machine
does the bidding of a human. If a machine is vending, say,
blasphemous literature, as we discussed in 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
(25:53):
bureaucracy has condemned you to death, the machine is actually
doing the execution. Uh, we're just merely you know, pushing
the button, pulling the string, etcetera. 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,
(26:14):
it was often early on it was called names. Not
the Guillotine yet, but names like the Louisette or the
louis Zone, which doesn't have as much of a ring
to it. Oh, 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
(26:36):
lived seventy through eighteen fourteen. He was a physician, uh,
he was a National Assembly member, and he played a
major role in passing the 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
(26:58):
do have to point out that bite some urban legends
out there, Guillotine himself was not killed by 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
(27:19):
that he could accomplish that directly. Right, this seemed the
best reasonable next step, Right, It's like, 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, Guilloton was
born when his pregnant mother was out walking one day
(27:39):
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, where
a person would be stretched out on a wheel in
a kind of starfish poson. They'd have their limbs broken
with an iron rod or with a club. Just insane brutality.
So he is very much opposed to that sort of thing,
(28:01):
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 bystanders might just walk
through town and witness such uh, such horror. So he
was thinking, maybe if less children end up watching this,
the better, Yes, and make it. Yeah, it's more systematic,
(28:23):
it's more you know that the act itself is less flashy.
And then we're just gonna make it less for performance.
So Guillot Tom was not out there 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
(28:46):
the work of friends mesmer of mesmerism, you know, the
the form of hypnotism that we had back in the
day u 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
(29:07):
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
time in history was that it supposedly extended the democratic
and egalitarian principles of the French Revolution to common criminals. Essentially,
(29:27):
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, 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 Guillotin had, thinking that this would
(29:47):
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 play things of all people's from prehistoric times to
the nineteenth century by Carl Grober, published in nineteen and
(30:08):
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 taste. The toy shops put
on the market little guillotines with which little patriots could
be head figures of aristocrats. They're still survives some specimens
of this pretty and diverting machine, one of which bears
(30:30):
the date seventeen ninety 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 Kang von Gota.
(30:51):
So Gruber tells the story that in December seventeen nine,
Girta wrote a letter to his mother and Frankfort, asking
if you 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
(31:11):
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
(31:33):
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
(31:55):
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. What
is 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 was
(32:16):
like shaped like a skull, and then it would dump
slime on top of the head of the poor hero.
And it was I think that 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
(32:38):
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
(33:01):
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
(33:24):
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
(33:45):
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, so we can
see how that might have influenced confused the telling. Right.
But then there are a couple of other examples. So
(34:05):
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
(34:28):
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, 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
(34:48):
of like creator and then killed by his creation irony there,
since he apparently or at least allegedly offered refinements to
the design. All right, well, and 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 we're
(35:11):
at the machine itself, the French guillotine of the seventeen
eighties and onward. 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 Assembly in sev the
(35:34):
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 taker was a taker from Germany,
(35:55):
and so the guillotine was constructed by a German harpsichord maker,
aimed Tobias Schmidt. Apparently he also supplied a leather sack
that would catch heads. And now you can 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. You know it pays well,
it's gonna really help us out next month. Oh who
(36:17):
are you putting a hots harpsichorde of chord for? Oh,
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 Clement
Sans Song in eighteen seventy six, saints On came from
(36:39):
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 feel like he's probably on the
(37:00):
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 rope which fixes and retains a ram.
(37:21):
This is perpendicularly armed with a sharp and broad blade,
which gradually becomes broader on all its surface, so then
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 to slide down. It is enclosed in
(37:42):
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 way plank. Strong straps are fastened
(38:03):
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. The
executioner's assistance lower another rounded crossbar. The head being thus
grooved in a perfect circle, which prevents it from moving
(38:24):
in any way. This precaution is indispensable in regard to
the terrible inconveniences of fear. The executioner then touches the spring.
The whole affair is 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.
The head falls into a basket full of brand and
(38:45):
the body is pushed into another wicker basket lined with
very thick leather. That's a heck of a rating, Robert. Yeah,
that is 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 is a precision in his in his description of
(39:06):
the 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 could
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
(39:27):
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
(39:50):
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 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
(40:11):
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
(40:35):
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 what we can talk talk about
in a minute over whether it's ever humane to just
execute somebody? Was it actually true that the guillotine was
(41:00):
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 Samuel Thomas summer Ing,
(41:23):
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 nine. So he he
was something of a poly math. In addition to naming
the twelve pairs of cranial nerves, he also invented a
telegraphic system and made discoveries in paleontology, specifically with the
(41:46):
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 an expert argument that like, I'm not sure
that this is great what we're doing. Maybe it's a
little it's almost a little too precise. Yeah, The core
(42:07):
takeaway of his essay on the inhumanity of the guy
tain 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 know, there were a lot
of tales of this happening, right of people running to
check out the heads of the of the decapitated, in
various doctors checking in and seeing what was going on
(42:28):
with the eyes. And there was a lot of interest
in this in determining what, you know, what happens to
consciousness to add death like this was a perfect clinical
exercise for for weighing in on it. Yeah, the classic
tales about this, they get repeated the most often are
like seeing someone's cheeks flush with anger when they behold someone,
or who's someone who mocks them or something like that,
(42:51):
or or who slaps them in the face, or thinking
that that a severed head would be like looking at
people as if it recognize is to them, something like that. Yeah,
and obviously there's a lot of inbellishment with these stories,
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
(43:11):
seen 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 gonna occur within two
to three seconds of decapitation due to interruption of blood
flow to the brain. So just the massive sudden drop
in blood pressure, Yeah, that's gonna do it. So any
(43:34):
tales of like, you know, confronting the head having any
kind of like moment of human uh contact, even if
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 what is
the legacy of this machine, this this machine of bureaucratic violence.
(43:55):
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 guillotan envisioned a more humane way
of doing business when the state was just you know,
couldn't be convinced not to kill people. Or did it
(44:17):
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. It was
actually used in France up until nineteen seventy seven, that's
when the last execution occurred via guillotine, before the outlying
(44:40):
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, 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,
(45:04):
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, which killed 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
(45:24):
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 means of
an execution, and you'll typically see an expression of of
power involved, say it's a physical strength, or you know,
(45:45):
vengeful spirit or increasingly a culture's greatest technological achievements. Isn't
it weird? To think about how these methods climbed the
tree of developing technology. So starting with varying levels of
tool proficiency, you know, axes and swords, weapons, weapon crafting,
then we go into gunpowder, uh, you know, firing squads, electricity,
(46:08):
and the electric chair. It is weird to trace through
history execution methods just sort of like tracking with whatever
is the most interesting new technology we have available. Yeah, chemicals, pharmaceuticals.
I mean, why an electric chair. That is just such
a strange idea to even come up with. H French
philosopher Michelle Fuco he weighed in on this, and he
(46:32):
pointed out that penal technology is of course an expression
of power, but we also have to dwell on the
fact that it does this through everyday technology, ubiquitous technology.
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,
(46:56):
the tool of of justice. So like our everyday use
of energy and the consumer economy, a constant reminder of
the methods of death that the state can inflict upon
people if they if they don't stay in line exactly. Now,
a one small area of the legacy of the guillotine
comes down to its use in medical terminology. So there
(47:16):
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
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
(47:39):
about cutting out infected tissue and making sure drainage of
proper drainage occurs, and then secondary surgery is performed to
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
(48:03):
and in the medical science, and uh, and it stems
from 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
(48:24):
us in exactly the wrong direction, if he was actually
against 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
(48:44):
mean just think about how this applies to modern methods
of state sanctioned killing, everything from lethal injection to drone strikes.
Does the sanitizing and distancing and depersonalization opportunity provided by
lethal technology in encourage us to make ourselves able to
kill more while feeling less about it? Yeah? I mean, ultimately,
(49:08):
is the the botched at execution that we've discussed already,
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
(49:31):
with a sword or an axe. But yeah, at least
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
(49:52):
almost funny. You know. It's interesting. You know, in this
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
(50:14):
it do? And what are the ultimate ramifications of this advancement. Well,
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. All right,
(50:38):
So that's it for this week's episode of Invention. If
you want to learn more about the show and check
out other episodes, head on over to our website invention
pod dot com. Big thanks to Scott Benjamin for research
assistance with this episode, thanks to our audio producer Tari Harrison.
If you would like to get in touch with us
directly with feedback on this episode or any other, to
(50:59):
suggest the top for the future, or just to say hi,
let us know how you found out about the show
where you listen from all that kind of stuff, you
can email us at contact at invention pod dot com.
Hey, welcome to Invention. I'm Robert Lamb and 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
(00:30):
of the stuff that comes out of our imaginations and
becomes the technology we use every day 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,
(00:52):
do you say it like a French guy's name, or
like what a fish breathes with? 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.
(01:15):
I don't think there's a firm 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
question certain death. Now, one thing I was thinking about
(01:37):
to illustrate this is what would you even say 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
(01:58):
something about circulation, like this sation of the heartbeat. Um.
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 oxygen, which means the brain can't work. Yeah,
(02:19):
and it's something that's just cemented in our mythology as well, right,
I mean, you want to kill a vampire, you wanna
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
(02:41):
when you find beheaded humans from ages past, there appears
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 human sacrifice.
Maybe there's some kind of symbolic form of justice being done,
(03:05):
if it's the corps of a criminal 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 spirits 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, there's
(03:28):
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. In it we find
a human skull draped and amputated, hands palm side down,
(03:50):
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 that, yeah,
there were all kinds of forms of of apparently posthumous
mutilation going on in the way these bones are arranged.
(04:12):
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
(04:32):
ancient world was that 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
(04:55):
some evidence that the ancient Greeks and Romans viewed beheading
is 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
(05:17):
often reserved for the aristocracy, while common criminals might more
often be killed in what was considered a less dignified
way like hanging. Yeah, I mean, obviously, beheadings 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 could knock
(05:39):
or cut a 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, 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
(06:01):
with them, you know, you 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 trustworthy
executioner that you know is going to cut your head
off right right, Like i' you really gotta put yourself
in the in the shoes of the condemned here right. Uh.
You know, obviously you don't want to be stoned to death.
You know, you don't want to be thrown into that
burlap sack with two wild animals and thrown into the river.
(06:22):
You 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
(06:44):
that's either really good or really bad, depending on how
you look at it. Like the idea of a trained
specialist doing the deed, 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
(07:06):
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 me 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,
(07:29):
like oh yes, this could go very wrong. But George rr.
Martin did not make up this concept obviously, of of
being weak at swinging the executioner sword or the axe.
History is replete with stories of botch to be headings,
and they are horrific and unfortunately sometimes kind of funny.
I want to tell you a couple. Uh, this one's
not so funny. And this concerns Mary, the Queen of Scots.
(07:53):
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 e Verragon had
been annulled, and obviously lots of people at the time,
especially some Catholics, had opinions about that right. And Elizabeth's
(08:18):
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 was eventually implicated in an assassination plot against
Elizabeth in fifteen eighty six, at least she was allegedly
(08:38):
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 all black, raises up his axe to kill her,
but instead of cutting through her neck, he misses and
(08:59):
he hits her on the head head and then some
report that she murmurs Sweet Jesus in shock before the
executioner raises his acts a second time and then strikes
again and still fails to cut her head off completely.
And finally he quote just sawed through what remained of
her neck. That's that's that's rough for Mary. Yeah, and
(09:20):
this is you know, this is presumed main event beheading here.
So right, this is before a royal audience, right, so
this would have to be either an act of just
just just an utterly inept executioner or one that is
intentionally 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
(09:42):
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 apparently so. It's described sometimes that the executioner appeared
horrified at what was going on, but the head's my
After he got her head off, he took hold of
(10:02):
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, 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
(10:24):
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 was a seventeenth century English executioner named Jack
Catch Catch spelled like catch up, catch yeah, or like
(10:45):
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,
all right. It's like Jack Ketch him right, the hard writer.
That's what comes to my mind. I don't well anyway,
this is Jack Ketch K E T C H so
(11:05):
Jack Ketch birthday unknown died in sixteen eighty six, who
was notorious for being a complete screw up at his
job and bungling executions. A couple of examples. In sixteen
eighty three, Ketch 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
(11:26):
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 by complaining that Russell wouldn't hold still, And
then you got the second one. Later, James, Duke of Monmouth,
(11:49):
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 guinea for you. Pray, do your business well.
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
(12:11):
was standing nearby, and told his servant to pay Catch
only if Ketch did the beheading correctly, and then Catch
said I hope I shall. Then Monmouth asked to feel
the axe blade, and he did, and he complained that
this is too dull, and Ketch said, no, it's sharp enough,
it'll be heavy enough. So Monmouth got down in place
(12:31):
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 Ketch angrily. Then he got
back down so Ketch could hit him again, and Catch
hit him several more times, failing each time to be
(12:52):
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 out yelled at
him and told him to go back and finish it.
So finally he went back. After some more blows uh
and the use of a knife, he finally managed to
get the duke's head off. Well that's awful, Like, this
guy is a true hack. I wonder if that's where
(13:13):
the word hack comes from. 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. But he this is obviously
not going the way it's supposed to. And if we're
(13:34):
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 expert practitioner. This is just
a clumsy exercise and horror. But what if mechanical controls
(13:59):
could be said at 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, It can't hesitate or engage in
unfair punishment. It's not gonna judge you based on your
(14:21):
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 the guillotine itself. All right, we're back.
(14:45):
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 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.
(15:06):
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 and they worked along
the same principles. They maybe they weren't quite as refined,
but essentially the idea was there that we should say that.
It was only in the aftermath of the French Revolution
(15:26):
that people began referring to decapitation machines as guillotines. That's
where the name comes from. Yes, they had equally less
refined names. They had more grizzly names. One fines. 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, and in fact, we don't even know
(15:47):
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, It doesn't really relate to
the individual or individuals that created it, right. I mean,
(16:08):
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. But
um So, there are a couple of known mechanical beheading
devices from England that predated the French guillotine, and one
is known as the Halifax Gibbet. So the how Halifax
(16:31):
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 Gibbet they would go. It was described in
(16:51):
an eighteen thirty seven history by an author named William
White in the following way quote. The executions always took
place on the Great Mark at 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 on Gibbet Hill. The execution was
(17:13):
performed by means of an engine, which was raised upon
a platform 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
(17:33):
square block of wood four feet 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,
(17:53):
being fixed to 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 became the executioner.
(18:18):
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
(18:40):
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
are referenced it alongside the notoriously tough police of Kingston
(19:05):
upon 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
(19:26):
one 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 good. Well. I like how it's sort
(19:48):
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 again in a sizing 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 to greater rewards or suffering,
(20:12):
depending on how one supernatural revenge fantasy is playing 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
(20:33):
um embody them too much in the act of execution itself. Yeah. Now,
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 pent crimes and not and no matter
(20:53):
what you think, really probably deserving of death. But there's
some strange stories about how people reacted to what happened
with at the Halifax gibbet. 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
(21:14):
his neck through with such force that the head jumped
into one of her hampers, or as others say, seized
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
(21:35):
that comes with beheading executions. But there's an interesting observation
from the Halifax historian John Crabtree, who has a sort
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
(21:59):
hardened by such exhibitions, and the fact develops the inadequacy
of such awful administrations of justice to produce that proper
moral and salutary effect which might have been anticipated. Such scenes,
often repeated, appear to harden rather than soften, to stupefy,
rather than awaken, the sensibilities of man's nature. And I
(22:20):
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
a copy essentially of the Halifax Gibbitt 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
(22:42):
to have introduced the decapitation machine to his country of Scots,
inspired by the Halifax Gibbet. Allegedly he at some point
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 can be transported around the
country to perform beheadings wherever. But it was often accepting
(23:04):
the condemned at Edinburgh, and according to the National Museums
of Scotland, crimes that could get you sent to the
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
(23:24):
sixth and Morton opposed the Catholic faction of Mary, Queen
of Scott's who we discussed earlier, Mary Stewart, and he
was 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,
(23:44):
there's your poetic justice. Uh. And legends of that kind
will appear again and again in this episode actually, well
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
(24:04):
in the movies it's 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
out of people who could have known my shark ape
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
(24:27):
came around. But the individual who is often credited as
the inventor of the guillotine, uh is a French surgeon
and physiologist Antoine Louis who lives seventy three through seventeen
nine two. Yeah, he is often credited as the inventor,
though based on what I was reading, it appears to
me was maybe designed by some sort of committee of
(24:48):
which Louis was the leader. Right, And this is actually
all the more fitting when We really get to the
heart 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,
(25:10):
it's bureaucratic violence. Yes, it very much embodies the idea
of retributive 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
(25:31):
amazing this the similarities involved here, this this these sometimes
these struggles over what exactly is happening when a machine
does the bidding of a human. If a machine is vending, say,
blasphemous literature, as we discussed in 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
(25:53):
bureaucracy has condemned you to death, the machine is actually
doing the execution. Uh, we're just merely you know, pushing
the button, pulling the string, etcetera. 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,
(26:14):
it was often early on it was called names. Not
the Guillotine yet, but names like the Louisette or the
louis Zone, which doesn't have as much of a ring
to it. Oh, 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
(26:36):
lived seventy through eighteen fourteen. He was a physician, uh,
he was a National Assembly member, and he played a
major role in passing the 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
(26:58):
do have to point out that bite some urban legends
out there, Guillotine himself was not killed by 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
(27:19):
that he could accomplish that directly. Right, this seemed the
best reasonable next step, Right, It's like, 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, Guilloton was
born when his pregnant mother was out walking one day
(27:39):
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, where
a person would be stretched out on a wheel in
a kind of starfish poson. They'd have their limbs broken
with an iron rod or with a club. Just insane brutality.
So he is very much opposed to that sort of thing,
(28:01):
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 bystanders might just walk
through town and witness such uh, such horror. So he
was thinking, maybe if less children end up watching this,
the better, Yes, and make it. Yeah, it's more systematic,
(28:23):
it's more you know that the act itself is less flashy.
And then we're just gonna make it less for performance.
So Guillot Tom was not out there 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
(28:46):
the work of friends mesmer of mesmerism, you know, the
the form of hypnotism that we had back in the
day u 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
(29:07):
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
time in history was that it supposedly extended the democratic
and egalitarian principles of the French Revolution to common criminals. Essentially,
(29:27):
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, 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 Guillotin had, thinking that this would
(29:47):
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 play things of all people's from prehistoric times to
the nineteenth century by Carl Grober, published in nineteen and
(30:08):
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 taste. The toy shops put
on the market little guillotines with which little patriots could
be head figures of aristocrats. They're still survives some specimens
of this pretty and diverting machine, one of which bears
(30:30):
the date seventeen ninety 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 Kang von Gota.
(30:51):
So Gruber tells the story that in December seventeen nine,
Girta wrote a letter to his mother and Frankfort, asking
if you 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
(31:11):
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
(31:33):
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
(31:55):
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. What
is 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 was
(32:16):
like shaped like a skull, and then it would dump
slime on top of the head of the poor hero.
And it was I think that 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
(32:38):
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
(33:01):
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
(33:24):
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
(33:45):
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, so we can
see how that might have influenced confused the telling. Right.
But then there are a couple of other examples. So
(34:05):
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
(34:28):
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, 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
(34:48):
of like creator and then killed by his creation irony there,
since he apparently or at least allegedly offered refinements to
the design. All right, well, and 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 we're
(35:11):
at the machine itself, the French guillotine of the seventeen
eighties and onward. 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 Assembly in sev the
(35:34):
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 taker was a taker from Germany,
(35:55):
and so the guillotine was constructed by a German harpsichord maker,
aimed Tobias Schmidt. Apparently he also supplied a leather sack
that would catch heads. And now you can 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. You know it pays well,
it's gonna really help us out next month. Oh who
(36:17):
are you putting a hots harpsichorde of chord for? Oh,
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 Clement
Sans Song in eighteen seventy six, saints On came from
(36:39):
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 feel like he's probably on the
(37:00):
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 rope which fixes and retains a ram.
(37:21):
This is perpendicularly armed with a sharp and broad blade,
which gradually becomes broader on all its surface, so then
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 to slide down. It is enclosed in
(37:42):
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 way plank. Strong straps are fastened
(38:03):
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. The
executioner's assistance lower another rounded crossbar. The head being thus
grooved in a perfect circle, which prevents it from moving
(38:24):
in any way. This precaution is indispensable in regard to
the terrible inconveniences of fear. The executioner then touches the spring.
The whole affair is 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.
The head falls into a basket full of brand and
(38:45):
the body is pushed into another wicker basket lined with
very thick leather. That's a heck of a rating, Robert. Yeah,
that is 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 is a precision in his in his description of
(39:06):
the 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 could
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
(39:27):
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
(39:50):
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 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
(40:11):
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
(40:35):
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 what we can talk talk about
in a minute over whether it's ever humane to just
execute somebody? Was it actually true that the guillotine was
(41:00):
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 Samuel Thomas summer Ing,
(41:23):
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 nine. So he he
was something of a poly math. In addition to naming
the twelve pairs of cranial nerves, he also invented a
telegraphic system and made discoveries in paleontology, specifically with the
(41:46):
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 an expert argument that like, I'm not sure
that this is great what we're doing. Maybe it's a
little it's almost a little too precise. Yeah, The core
(42:07):
takeaway of his essay on the inhumanity of the guy
tain 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 know, there were a lot
of tales of this happening, right of people running to
check out the heads of the of the decapitated, in
various doctors checking in and seeing what was going on
(42:28):
with the eyes. And there was a lot of interest
in this in determining what, you know, what happens to
consciousness to add death like this was a perfect clinical
exercise for for weighing in on it. Yeah, the classic
tales about this, they get repeated the most often are
like seeing someone's cheeks flush with anger when they behold someone,
or who's someone who mocks them or something like that,
(42:51):
or or who slaps them in the face, or thinking
that that a severed head would be like looking at
people as if it recognize is to them, something like that. Yeah,
and obviously there's a lot of inbellishment with these stories,
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
(43:11):
seen 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 gonna occur within two
to three seconds of decapitation due to interruption of blood
flow to the brain. So just the massive sudden drop
in blood pressure, Yeah, that's gonna do it. So any
(43:34):
tales of like, you know, confronting the head having any
kind of like moment of human uh contact, even if
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 what is
the legacy of this machine, this this machine of bureaucratic violence.
(43:55):
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 guillotan envisioned a more humane way
of doing business when the state was just you know,
couldn't be convinced not to kill people. Or did it
(44:17):
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. It was
actually used in France up until nineteen seventy seven, that's
when the last execution occurred via guillotine, before the outlying
(44:40):
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, 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,
(45:04):
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, which killed 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
(45:24):
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 means of
an execution, and you'll typically see an expression of of
power involved, say it's a physical strength, or you know,
(45:45):
vengeful spirit or increasingly a culture's greatest technological achievements. Isn't
it weird? To think about how these methods climbed the
tree of developing technology. So starting with varying levels of
tool proficiency, you know, axes and swords, weapons, weapon crafting,
then we go into gunpowder, uh, you know, firing squads, electricity,
(46:08):
and the electric chair. It is weird to trace through
history execution methods just sort of like tracking with whatever
is the most interesting new technology we have available. Yeah, chemicals, pharmaceuticals.
I mean, why an electric chair. That is just such
a strange idea to even come up with. H French
philosopher Michelle Fuco he weighed in on this, and he
(46:32):
pointed out that penal technology is of course an expression
of power, but we also have to dwell on the
fact that it does this through everyday technology, ubiquitous technology.
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,
(46:56):
the tool of of justice. So like our everyday use
of energy and the consumer economy, a constant reminder of
the methods of death that the state can inflict upon
people if they if they don't stay in line exactly. Now,
a one small area of the legacy of the guillotine
comes down to its use in medical terminology. So there
(47:16):
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
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
(47:39):
about cutting out infected tissue and making sure drainage of
proper drainage occurs, and then secondary surgery is performed to
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
(48:03):
and in the medical science, and uh, and it stems
from 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
(48:24):
us in exactly the wrong direction, if he was actually
against 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
(48:44):
mean just think about how this applies to modern methods
of state sanctioned killing, everything from lethal injection to drone strikes.
Does the sanitizing and distancing and depersonalization opportunity provided by
lethal technology in encourage us to make ourselves able to
kill more while feeling less about it? Yeah? I mean, ultimately,
(49:08):
is the the botched at execution that we've discussed already,
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
(49:31):
with a sword or an axe. But yeah, at least
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
(49:52):
almost funny. You know. It's interesting. You know, in this
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
(50:14):
it do? And what are the ultimate ramifications of this advancement. Well,
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. All right,
(50:38):
So that's it for this week's episode of Invention. If
you want to learn more about the show and check
out other episodes, head on over to our website invention
pod dot com. Big thanks to Scott Benjamin for research
assistance with this episode, thanks to our audio producer Tari Harrison.
If you would like to get in touch with us
directly with feedback on this episode or any other, to
(50:59):
suggest the top for the future, or just to say hi,
let us know how you found out about the show
where you listen from all that kind of stuff, you
can email us at contact at invention pod dot com.
Stuff To Blow Your Mind News
Hosts And Creators
Robert Lamb
Joe McCormick
Popular Podcasts
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang
Ding dong! Join your culture consultants, Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang, on an unforgettable journey into the beating heart of CULTURE. Alongside sizzling special guests, they GET INTO the hottest pop-culture moments of the day and the formative cultural experiences that turned them into Culturistas. Produced by the Big Money Players Network and iHeartRadio.
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.