Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of I Heart Radio. Hi, my name is Robert Lamb and this is the Artifact, a short form series from Stuff to Blow Your Mind, focusing in on particular objects, ideas, and moments in time. Weary, scornfully bad Billy one time that he didn't even know what a blood gutter was. Billy guessed it was the drain in the bottom of the iron maiden, but that was wrong. A blood gutter, Billy learned, was the shallow groove in the side of
the blade of a sword or bayonet. That's an excerpt from Kurt Vonnegut's classic ninety nine novel slaughter House Five, in which the character Billy Pilgrim endures a lesson in weapon design from the sadistic Ronald Weary. If you're like me, a high school read of this classic novel may have introduced you to the concept of a blood gutter, often said to either allow a wound to bleed more or
to allow easier extraction from the victim. In my own case, I think that my memory tends to combine two different sections of the novel, Wearies ramblings about blood gutters and a later ramble about triangular blades, but the long groove you find in many blades has nothing to do with blood or the physics of stabbing someone. The fuller, as
it is more properly called, is purely structural. As Nick Evangelista points out in the Encyclopedia of the Sword, the groove or grooves cut into the face of a blade simply serve to make it lighter. You use less metal, as much as thirty five percent less to make a
blade that's just as durable and well stappable. And yet the Ronald wearies of the world continue to mislabel fullers as blood grooves or blood gutters, terms which are not only incorrect in terms of function, but also, according to Pope and Steven's in Arms and Armor of Knights and Landsnecks in the Netherlands Army Museum quote betrays a rather
too romantic and bloodthirsty view. How fitting then that Vonnegutt mentions it in the same breath as the Iron Maiden, a torture instrument of mostly fantasy that most historians believe was never actually used. Tune into additional editions of the artifact each week. As always, you can email us at contact at Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow your Mind is production of I heart Radio.
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