Guillotine

read about in history books. Yes, the hallowed halls of technological, systematic, and cultural invention, the very human machines, customs, and systems that altered the course of history. And today we're talking about one of the most useful inventions of all time. It's got to be the And Robert, before I say it, do you say it like a French guy's name, or

like what a fish breathes with? I go with guillotine because it sounds a little more like an open face sandwich that way, and also it has the the G has more of a sound to it. Yeah, I like how it sounds kind of like the minotar the guillotine. But but apparently guillotine in English is also somewhat acceptable pronunciation. I don't think there's a firm 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 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 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, 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 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, 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 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, 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. For example, sometimes you'll find skulls they're full of finger bones inside the skulls. What was going on? What made the people want to do that? It seems like it may well have formed some kind of magical intention, but

what was it? Indeed, we can only guess now. Another kind of significance that beheading has often had in the ancient world was that it was one of the many forms of execution practiced, of course in ancient Greece and Rome. Uh. And in fact, our terms decapitation and capital punishment both come from the Latin from capit meaning head, so like capital punishment is punishment of the head, or that you you pay, you pay for a crime with your head

by separating it from the other stuff. Uh. And there's some evidence 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 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

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 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. 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 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 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, 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.

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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

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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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

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. 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. 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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, 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. 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

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 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 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 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, 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

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 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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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,

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 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

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

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,

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 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 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, 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 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 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

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 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, 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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.

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 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 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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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.

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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

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, 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 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 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. 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 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 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, 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 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, 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, 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 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,

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 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 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 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 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 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, 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

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

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

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, 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 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.