The Guillotine – The Most Efficient And Fast Capital Punishment In History
“Capital punishment is a fundamentally wrong as a cure for crime as charity is a wrong cure for poverty”. Henry Ford. According to the history, there have been several types of capital punishment, all of them with the function of killing people by the state as a punishment for committing a crime. Now talking about which capital punishment is considered the most efficient and fast is “The Guillotine”.
During the 1700s, executions in France were public events where all the citizens could saw, they were very bloody and painful. On December 10, 1789 a man named Dr. Joseph Guillotin appeared before the Legislative Assembly, France´s new government. He gives important ideas and suggests that France could adopt a “special machine” as a form of capital punishment. He said to the government that his machine would be fast, painless, and humane. The Legislative Assembly accepted all his ideas except the one about punishment. But in 1791, Guillotin´s ideas were accepted including the guillotine.
The guillotine was a common execution method for a poor criminal, it consists of two large vertical posts, about 14 feet high, with a crossbar connecting them at the top. As every method of execution, it has the main part that catches the attention of everyone and it’s its weighted blade which was pulled up to the top using ropes and pulleys. The weight blade was then released from the top of the vertical poles and would behead the victim kneeling at the bottom of the machine. In addition, some facts that we can take in consideration to understand more the mechanism of the guillotine are: the total weight of a guillotine is about 1278 lbs., the metal blade weighs about 88.2 lbs., the falling blade has a rate of speed about 21 feet/ second, the actual beheading takes 2/100 of a second, the time for the guillotine blade to fall down to where it stops takes 70th of a second.
In a scientific effort to determine if any consciousness remained by the guillotine, three French doctors attended the execution of Monseieur Prunier in1879, having obtained his prior consent to be the subject of their experimentation. Once after the blade fell on the condemned man, the trio retrieved his head and attempted to elicit some of intelligent response by “shouting in his face, sticking in pins, applying ammonia under his nose, silver nitrate, and candle flames to his eyeballs”. In response, they could record only that Prunier´s face “bore a look of astonishment”. Finally, we can say that capital punishment is used in every historical occasion, from the guillotine in the French revolution to nowadays with other ways of capital punishment. It depends in how you saw the use of “execution”.
