JF Ptak Science Books Post 1507
"Ring around the rosy, a pocketful of posies, Ashes, ashes, we all fall down"
In the history of killing in the United States, the segment that is most documented and recorded is the killing done by the Colonial governments and by the representatives of the United States federal and state institutions. Since 1608 when the first person (brought to North America from Europe) was executed there have been some 20,000 executions. The earliest part of this procedure was accomplished by crushing, breaking on the wheel, firing squad, and bludgeoning, and then occasionally by burning at the stake (the last of these unfortunates perishing in 1825 in this manner). In the modern era, most executions were accomplished by hanging, and then the electric chair, though now almost all executions are done by lethal injection. People are executed now mainly for committing crimes of aggravated murder and, occasionally, for felony murder. Earlier on, people were done in for far less: arson, burglary, criminal assault, conspiracy to commit murder, counterfeiting, desertion, espionage, robbery, theft, train robbing and witchcraft all had their day, though most of these offenses ceased being capital punishment cases long ago.
Hanging hung on, so to speak, for a long time, and became part of our culture, to one degree or another--so much so that it became a part of a toy and game for children: the game "Hangman". In this game a player would be given x-chances to determine a hidden word; each miss of a letter would result in adding a feature to an already-drawn gallows; after adding the head, torso, arms, legs, feet, hat or whatever without resolution of the hidden word, the player would be hanged, dead. A weird game, and something that I've played many times, without really thinking about the consequences.
Its a little similar to the old nursery rhyme (above), which may or may not come from the plague years in England (1664/5), the words referring to the marks around the red spots appearing on the bodies of the infected; the posies being a sweet smelling bit that was supposed to ward off the disease which was believed to be brought on by breathing bad smells; and the ashes, of course, are our own at death.
Somehow these things enter our heads without any real connection to the real thing, and we pass it down to our kids. Its a small bit, I think, but I don't think we'll be using a gallows to play our next hidden-word game.
This is what started this post: a 1977 Patent Office report on a 3-D gallows to be used with the word guessing game. Drawing the figure out is bad enough; having the gallows, complete with an articulated victim, is, well, another matter entirely.
"A hangman game comprising: a miniature three dimensional gallows having a platform including an operable trap door and a noose pendently suspended over the trap door; component means for constructing a representation of a human figure to be suspended from said noose, said component means including separate head, torso, arm and leg components; said components carrying mutually engageable magnetic buttons for removably engaging said components to each other to construct said representation in steps starting with said head component; said head component being proportioned to be carried in said noose."
Here's another, and more recent, example, though this one is digitally displayed:
This last example from 1976 does away with the gallows but keeps the articulated condemned, while adding a rather complex electrical board for the guessing part.
Then there's the real thing.
The next patent drawing offers a novel idea--turning the gallows into a strangulation machine. This patent specifically attempts to prevent the neck of the convicted from being broken, the machine instead raising the person slowly, so that they suffocate under their own weight. The thing about the old-time executioners was to do their jobs cleanly, efficiently, and without any unnecessary struggles to the condemned. That said, it was the aim of most of them--at least for the public executions in England, the only parts of this gory history that I've read about--to kill the condemned by snapping the neck without ripping off the head or tearing open the neck, so that the person is basically dead as soon as he or she makes the drop. The only thing left there in the body would be a beating heart, or so that is what the executioners aimed for.
Here's another gallows changed into a strangulation contrivance of great complexity:
This one was designed so that there would be no stairs to climb, the condemned being strangled to death by raising the roof to which the neck was attached. Also in this way no one touches the condemned, making it a hands-off approach to an excruciating act of vengeance and punishment.
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