Guillotine
2 of the 6 encyclopedias on this shelf carry an entry for Guillotine. Both are reproduced below, so you can see where they agree and where they differ.
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
gil'lo-ten, a contrivance for beheading condemned criminals. In 1792 the French Assembly decided, on motion of Dr. Guillotin, to adopt a beheading machine described by him. Dr. Guillotin deprecated the use of the sword or ax as open to accident and as brutal. He proposed to revive a machine formerly used in Scotland and Germany. A young German mechanic by the name of Schmidt was authorized to construct eighty-three of these new instruments, one for each department of France, for the sum of $100 each. The new machine was called a guillotine, after the name of the physician who recommended it. The guillotine consists of a heavy base, two upright posts, with a crosspiece at the top, and a heavy, weighted knife with an oblique edge. The knife slides in grooves of the upright posts. The knife is raised to the top of the grooves; the victim is strapped to a plank, face downward, so that his neck is directly beneath the knife; a spring is touched; the heavy, keen-edged knife descends, and the criminal's head is severed as easily as a sharp razor cuts a hair. No one at the time had any idea that the guillotine would play so great a part in the horrors of the Revolution. Dr. Guillotin himself came very near being a victim of the instrument which bears his name. He was thrown into prison during the reign of terror but was released on Robespierre's death and resumed the practice of medicine in Paris. He died in 1814. See French Revolution
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
an apparatus for beheading persons at one stroke, adopted by the National Assembly of France during the first revolution, on the proposal of a Dr. Guillotin, after whom it is named. It was made by a , German mechanic, named Schmidt under the direction of Dr. Antoine Louis, secretary of the Academy of Surgery, and was at first called Louison, or Louisette. It was used the first time April 25, 1792, for the execution of a highwayman named Pelletier.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Both entries describe the guillotine as a working instrument of justice, and in 1910 and 1921 it was exactly that. Public executions in France ended in 1939, after crowds at the beheading of Eugen Weidmann at Versailles behaved so badly that the government moved the machine behind prison walls; the last use of all was on Hamida Djandoubi at Marseille on 10 September 1977. France abolished capital punishment in 1981, so Aiton's careful description of the sliding oblique blade now records a retired object rather than a current procedure. Aiton's claim that Guillotin himself designed the machine has been trimmed by later scholarship in the direction Collier's already indicates: the physician proposed a mechanical method, but the apparatus was worked out by the surgeon Antoine Louis and built by the German harpsichord maker Tobias Schmidt.
Written for this edition, 2026.