What angle must the blade be? Is it good to have a high attack angle, or one that’s nearly flat?
How heavy should the apparatus holding the blade be? How far should it travel? Is keen sharpening important, or does the weight do most of the work? What kind of latch/release do you use?
Lastly, morbid extra credit, did they ever execute someone with their face up, so they could see the blade coming?
EDIT FOR CLARITY: Way more complex than an axe or a noose.
a noose or an axe both put much more need on the skill of the executioner, while the guillotine puts more need on the skill of the engineer. both the axe and the noose are materially simpler, but still very fuckupable without special skills or training, while the guillotine, once built, is much more simply operated by one with less expertise. the guillotine is a tool of mass execution, and its apparent mechanical complexity is there to facilitate that, via ease of operation and resetability.
Absolutely. The National Assembly voted the guillotine, “the most gentle of lethal methods.”
This thread led me down a bit of a rabbit hole, so I suppose I’ll post some of my meager findings.
Of course, the Wikipedia Article On The Guillotine includes a brief history documenting the evolution of it’s invention, but is sparse on the technical specifications, which online searches also turned up a bit sparse.
I did eventually land on this technical schematic PDF of the Guillotine from archive.org.
Somewhat amusing to find, you can also pay for the blueprints to creating a historically accurate replica guillotine here.
As a morbid aside, the Wikipedia article details under the Controversy Section the dispute as to whether a decapitated head remained alive shortly after the beheading and the eye witness account of someone witnessing the staring of a decapitated man’s eyes after calling out his name multiple times. The description is deliciously macabre.
Don’t think this really answered your question OP, but nevertheless, this was intriguing for me to look into, so thanks for sparking my curiosity with your post!
EDIT: Fixing various small typos.
A couple of observations from the schematics:
- Wheels on the side of the blade mechanism! I thought it just slid!
- Springs? There are springs?
Well we have plenty of executives to practice on.
Pretty sure they gave them a choice to face up or face down. Some chose to look at the sky one last time before the blade fell…might have been a better view than a basket with dried…and not so dried blood on it.
I choose…sideways. I’ll make faces at some kid in the crowd. And when the blade comes down, my face will be stuck that way!
His mom will be proved right! Don’t make faces or your face will get stuck that way!
If you’re guillotineed.
I choose to believe OP is Luigi planning his next move
They were pretty well optimised, frequently sharpened and they had an angled blade with a decent amount of weight behind it. This means that there’s reduced surface area at the point of contact so higher penetration. Guillotines don’t miss as they’ve got a guide, unlike axes which were known for occasionally gouging the victim’s back, because executioners did miss!
Rusty cage built a massive one a couple years ago
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Calm down, calm down. I didn’t say it was ineffective. Quite the opposite actually.
As to “technically challenging,” you had to build the damn thing; as opposed to throwing rocks at someone, or tossing them off a building.
I don’t think the 18th century was the idiot-land you think it was.
It takes an engineer making calculations? Thanks for helping make my point ☝️
Just because it was a long time ago, don’t assume they were stupid. Their engineers that built castles and structures have that work still standing today–while USA has infrastructure collapsing
A little bit of survivorship bias there, but you are correct that engineers throughout history have been just as smart as engineers today.
As an engineer of today, I find it insulting that you would lower engineers throughout history to my level.
Lolz
Yes agreed. It was simplest relation to come to mind. Guys figuring out gravity and universe math had as much skill (or more) than today, without the advantage of mass computation and world wide collaboration.
Anyone can build a bridge which stands. It takes a engineer to build a bridge which just stands, while not costing an insane amount of money.
That said, engineers throughout history were incredibly smart and shouldn’t be discounted.
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but you were certainly thinking it loudly. or how else was one to interpret ‘people from the 18th century wouldn’t be able to do something if it was technically challenging’?
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Also, they had plenty of people to test it on as they refined the design
