The guillotine was a device that was made so that execution could be fair and equal among all classes of people, introduced in France in 1792. Before the guillotine was invented there were two similar devices, one called the Scottish maiden was already a copy of the other, the halifax gibbet. The guillotine had a 14 ft tall grooved wooden frame with an oblique blade that would slide along the groove and be dropped from a height in order to decapitate a person cleanly, and with no pain. Antoine Louis designed the device, and Joseph Guillotin made the law that required all executions to be made with the guillotine. The guillotine was used to kill thousands of people in the reign of terror that took over france, two of those decapitated where frances king and queen, Louis XVI and Marie Antoinett. Guillotine executions were very popular events that many people would watch, and the guillotine operators were national celebrities. In the 1870’s notable improvements to the device were made by executioner and carpenter Leon Burger. He added a spring system so that the blade would stop at the bottom of the grooves, he added a locking device for the lunette (the thing that holds your head down), and he made a new release mechanism for the guillotine. After Leon Burger made the improvements all guillotines were made to his blueprints. Some fun facts about include the fact that the guillotine was used by nazi germany for executions, after the beheading scientists would conduct a variety of gruesome experiment on the head and body of the person, the blade fell at around 21 ft/sec which took only one 70th of a second to reach the bottom and took only 2/100ths of a second to actually cut the head. france outlawed the death penalty in 1981 but the number of deaths by guillotine slowly went down during the sixties and seventies. Only 8 executions occurred between 1965 and 1977. The last execution by guillotine to date took place in 1977. While the last person was executed in 1977 the first person was executed in 1792 which means that the guillotine was in use for a whopping 185 years. So while the guillotine was made to revolutionize the death penalty it was used to execute thousands, if not tens or hundreds of thousands of people in its 185 year usage.

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