Today, heads will roll. The University of Houston's
College of Engineering presents this series about
the machines that make our civilization run, and
the people whose ingenuity created them.
We've praised technology
enough in this series. The time has come to speak
of darker things. So let's look at the guillotine.
The story of beheading is all mixed up in class
distinctions. In ancient Greece, Xenophon singled
it out as a noble punishment. The Romans,
who did horrible things to common criminals, also
saved decapitation for nobler folk. They called it
capitis amputatio.
William the Conqueror brought beheading to England,
where it was, again, set aside for nobility -- for
people like Lady Jane Grey and Anne Boleyn. When
the English beheaded the lower classes, it was only
to finish off a victim who'd first been tormented
in ways too nasty to talk about here.
The reason for mechanizing such a seldom-used
punishment was that axemen could be horribly
inaccurate. Victims, after all, paid executioners a
gold coin so they'd cut cleanly. Inventors were
devising beheading machines at least as early as
1300. Sixteenth-century Scots used a device they
coyly named the Maiden, and England's old
Halifax Gibbet greatly resembled the French
guillotine.
But it took the egalitarian French Revolution to
bring beheading to commoners. Joseph Guillotin was
a physician and a member of the Constituent
Assembly in the early days of the French
Revolution. In 1789 he got a law passed requiring
that beheading machines be made so that, and I
quote,
the privilege of decapitation would no
longer be confined to nobles, and the process of
execution would be as painless as possible.
The story has it that, in 1738, shortly before his
birth, Guillotin's mother witnessed a poor wretch
being publicly tortured to death on the wheel. She
was so stricken by the horror of it that she went
into immediate labor. Guillotin's mother may've
been an early influence on his later advocacy of
the beheading machine. In any case, one was built,
tested on dead bodies, and turned loose on common
criminals in 1792.
Of course, once this was done, it became all too
easy to dispose of counter-revolutionaries, and the
slaughter called the Reign of Terror
followed. Since Guillotin himself was an
aristocrat, he narrowly escaped perishing on a
guillotine.
The American adventurer and inventor Count Rumford
gave a macabre footnote to Guillotin's work.
Rumford married the widow of the famous chemist
Antoine Lavoisier, who'd been among the thousands
who died on guilliotines. But a few years before
his marriage, Rumford wrote,
I made the acquaintance of Monsieur Guillotin,
the contriver of the two famous Guillotines. He
is a physician, and a very mild, polite humane
man.
This may all seem quite ghoulish, but the point is
clear enough. We technologists need to think twice
when we're given the chance to sanitize death. Any
machine that makes it easy to end life will go
wrong. Our work is about sustaining and improving
life. It is not about bringing it to a close.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
(Theme music)
