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.
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!
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.
I choose to believe OP is Luigi planning his next move
Rusty cage built a massive one a couple years ago
Listen, this thing was effective right from the start. Do you really think it is so “technically challenging” if people from the XVIII century made it work from the first go? Any non-imbecile engineer would make needed calculations in no time.
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 ☝️
Also, they had plenty of people to test it on as they refined the design
