Doctor Joseph Ignace Guillotin (1738 - 1814) belonged to a small
reform movement that sought to banish the death penalty completely.
At that time, executions in France were public events held in town
squares. The entire town would gather to watch a quartering, where
the prisoner's limbs were tied to four oxen and the animals were
driven in four different directions. Upper-class criminals bought
their way into a less painful death. Guillotin argued for a
painless and private capital punishment method equal for all the
classes, as an interim step towards completely banning the death
penalty.
Guillotine like killing devices had already been used in Germany,
Italy, Scotland and Persia for aristocratic criminals. However,
never had such a device been adopted on a large institutional
scale, for that reason the guillotine was named after Doctor
Guillotin. The 'e' at the end of the word was added by English
poets to make the word easier to rhythm.
Doctor Guillotin worked together with German engineer and
harpsichord maker, Tobias Schmidt, to build a prototype guillotine
machine. Schmidt suggested placing the blade at an oblique
45-degree angle and changing it from the round blade. Additional
improvements to the guillotine machine were made in 1870 by Leon
Berger, an assistant executioner and carpenter. Berger added a
spring system, which stopped the mouton at the bottom of the
groves, a lock/blocking device at the lunette and a new release
mechanism for the blade. All guillotines built after 1870 are made
according to Berger's construction.
The French Revolution began in 1789, the year of the famous
storming of the Bastille, the notorious French prison. On July 14
of the same year, Louis XVI was driven from the throne and sent
into exile. The new civilian assembly rewrote the penal code to
say, "Every person condemned to the death penalty shall have his
head severed." All classes of people were now executed equally. The
first guillotining took place on April 25, 1792, when Nicolas
Jacques Pelletie was guillotined at Place de Grève on the Right
Bank. Ironically, Louis XVI had his own head chopped off on January
21, 1793. Thousands of people were guillotined during the French
Revolution and executions became more of a public celebration. The
last execution by guillotine took place in Marseilles, France on
September 10, 1977, when the murderer Hamida Djandoubi was
beheaded.
Total weight of a Guillotine is about 1278 lb
The guillotine blade with weight is over 88.2 lb
The heights of the guillotine posts average about 14 feet
The guillotine blade drop is about 88 inches
The falling blades rate of speed is about 21 feet/second
The actual beheading takes 2/100 of a second
The time for the guillotine blade to fall down where it stops takes
70th of a second
The power when the guillotine blade stops at the bottom is 888,5
lb
