Original subtitles

Tonight, the most notorious methods of execution...

Bones breaking, skin ripping, blood flowing...

and the diabolical devices used to carry them out.

It's gonna slice through whatever's in its path.

From a seemingly ordinary wheel...

The execution would weave them around the spokes of the wheel.

To an infamous chair...

Blood vessels are bursting in his face.

It looks like he's sweating blood.

We'll reveal the surprising origins

of these lethal objects.

The darkest marvel of all is the human mind.

People get an idea of a way to be cruel to one another

and then they build it.

Not all inventions are made with good intentions.

Unlock the twisted history

behind the world's darkest marvels.

Throughout history, the death sentence,

that most final of punishments,

takes many forms.

And one of the most infamous

begins with an accident.

Buffalo, New York, 1881.

A drunken worker named Lemuel Smith

touches a live circuit in an electrical plant.

He got a very heavy jolt

of electricity all the way through him,

and he fell over dead.

In the 1880s, the electrical industry

is very much in its infancy.

Ordinary people saw electricity as something magical,

maybe even divine.

You've got Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein",

where the monster of Frankenstein

is brought to life by a spark.

At the time, there were experiments that doctors would do

where they would administer electric current to corpses,

causing the corpse to twitch.

So there was this incorrect assumption

that electricity had something to do with powering life.

So news of Smith's death travels very quickly.

This creates a sense of apprehension.

People start to realize

that electricity is a really lethal

and potentially life-ending force.

And that sparks a thought

for local dentist Alfred Southwick.

Alfred Southwick is living in Buffalo at the time

Lemuel Smith dies.

Seeing the news of Smith's death,

which by all accounts was instantaneous,

was probably painless,

gives Southwick some ideas.

Maybe electricity can be used

to put people to death humanely in the United States.

At the time, the dominant mode of execution

in the United States was hanging.

There were a lot of people who were concerned about hanging.

Bungled hangings had been turning people off

of capital punishment as a practice.

Part of the problems with hanging

were a lot of the time the neck did not break,

and as a result, the person asphyxiates to death.

Sometimes people are left dangling for 20, 30 minutes.

Hangings took too long,

and they caused incalculable distress

to the people that were hanged,

but also to the people that had to do the hanging

and the people that had to watch the hanging.

Among the most publicized

of these botched executions

was the hanging of a woman in New York.

In 1887, Roxalana Druse

was put to death for the crime

of murdering her abusive husband.

And because of her petite size,

Roxalana doesn't die quickly.

And this is one of the many cases of this period

that galvanizes public sentiment against hanging.

The state creates a commission

to look for alternatives.

On that commission is one Alfred Southwick,

who suggests electrocution.

They just need the right device.

There were a bunch of different options that they were considering.

One of them was to put the condemned

in a telephone booth type structure.

Another option was to put the condemned on a table

and strap them down to the table

and electrocute them in a prone position.

Now remember, Southwick is a dentist,

so Southwick proposes the dental chair.

Now in many people's minds,

the dental chair is an instrument of pain,

but in Southwick's mind

the chair would give just enough dignity

so that it didn't look like the person was a specimen being operated on.

But it also wouldn't create the collapse of the body

and the dramatic sort of evidence

of the violence of the state

that a standing execution would create.

But the chairman of the commission isn't convinced.

Elbridge Gerry had been an advocate of using a poison,

probably morphine, as a means of capital punishment.

One of the objections to executing somebody with a dose of morphine

was that it would be too easy,

that it would be too peaceful,

that it wouldn't be scary enough.

There was still the idea that executions should serve a deterrent effect.

You didn't just want to just put somebody to sleep.

You wanted to make it fearsome.

No one kills other people with electricity.

The state would be the only entity

that was using electricity to inflict on death on folks,

and its violence would have that kind of godlike, awe-inspiring authority.

But Gerry isn't persuaded by these kinds of arguments,

so Southwick decides he's gonna contact Thomas Edison.

Now Edison was against the death penalty.

He saw it as a barbaric activity

that humans shouldn't do.

Southwick wrote to Thomas Edison and said,

"Your personal opinions about the death penalty don't really pertain.

While it is the law of the land, don't we have a responsibility

to make it as humane as possible?"

And that sways Edison. Edison writes back and says,

"I would be pleased to speak with your commission about electricity."

Now Edison genuinely cared

about reducing pain and suffering in the world,

but he also had his own financial interests.

Edison had started to really feel the squeeze of competition

from a man named George Westinghouse.

George Westinghouse is a Pennsylvania engineer

who in the mid-1880s

is promoting a different form of electricity

than Edison's direct current.

It's called alternating current,

and Westinghouse's success

makes the two men bitter rivals.

Alternating current is superior

to Edison's direct current in a number of ways,

so to Edison, alternating current is nothing short of an existential threat.

His whole company is invested in direct current.

Edison is convinced that direct current is safer than alternating current

because the voltage is so much lower.

Sure, it can hurt you,

but he says it's not gonna kill you.

Spotting the perfect opportunity to undermine his enemy,

Edison agrees to help create the electric chair on one condition.

He said the best tool for the job

would be alternating current generators,

and he even specified,

manufactured by George Westinghouse of Pittsburgh.

What better way to demonstrate

how unsafe alternating current is

than to have that be the current that's used by the state

in its execution of condemned criminals.

In June 1888,

the state of New York approves execution

by electric chair as the primary form

of capital punishment.

But the state of New York has still not settled on

what the current for the electric chair will be.

Edison released an illustration

of the first design he proposed,

and on that generator he made a point

of putting the Westinghouse label on it.

Edison starts a rather gruesome series of tests.

He convenes a who's who

in the world of electricity at these demonstrations,

and what happens is by all accounts

a really horrifying scene.

There were many dogs, several horses,

a bunch of calves, all with the goal of establishing AC

as the preferred current of death

and establishing the correct amount of current required.

Well, nobody thinks this is a good experiment.

The people are looking on in horror.

They're watching these animals be tortured in front of them.

Despite the negative reactions,

Edison hopes he's made his point.

And the Edison Company, they're talking about with delight

the idea maybe people would start referring to executions

by electricity as being "Westinghoused."

But as the first live human to experience it

is about to find out, the early electric chair

is far from perfect.

In early 1889, after a gruesome

demonstration electrocuting animals,

Edison's campaign to make alternating current

power the electric chair pays off.

The experiments at the Edison laboratory

convince New York State that alternating current

is what should be used in killing condemned prisoners.

So Governor David Hill signs into law a bill

that funds the construction of three electric chairs

for the state's three prisons...

Clinton, Sing Sing, and Auburn.

The first electric chair has a sturdy oak frame,

leather straps to bind the person

at the chest, arms, waist, and legs,

and two metal electrodes placed at the head and back.

When the switch is flipped, a thousand volts of current

will surge through the victim,

supposedly killing them instantly.

William Kemmler is the unfortunate first person to be sentenced to death

under the state's Electrical Execution Act.

William Kemmler has been convicted of murdering his common law wife.

One day, after a long bender,

Kemmler came home and accused his wife Tillie

of stealing from him and cheating on him.

They begin to fight,

and in the heat of the moment,

he suddenly just stops fighting

and calmly leaves...

finds a hatchet...

comes back...

and murders her.

On August 6th, 1890,

Kemmler is escorted to the electric chair

at New York's Auburn Prison.

He is strapped in. A mask covers everything but his mouth.

He is, by some accounts,

the calmest person in the room.

Everything's secured and attached to his body

to send these volts jolting through him.

He's been assured that this is going to be a rather humane experience.

The doctors standing next to the chair,

they have a plan to put 1,000 volts into Kemmler.

The appointed time happens. The knock happens.

The dynamo runs.

Among his final words are,

"Take it easy, and do it properly.

I'm in no hurry."

They turned the current on.

It flowed for 17 seconds.

Multiple different things occur

when the body is electrocuted.

You can have sparks flying out of somebody.

Your eyes could actually pop out.

You're gonna have a significant amount

of muscle contraction,

and if they're fighting against it,

the amount of muscle contraction

could also cause bones to break.

But at the end of the day, if you have enough energy

and it gets to your heart, it's gonna stop,

and you're gonna die.

Everyone immediately starts to celebrate

because it looks like Kemmler is dead.

Men approach what they think is Kemmler's corpse...

Initially they think, "All right, that's done."

One person reaches out to touch it.

Then he starts gasping for breath.

Kemmler is not dead,

and they realize that they have not completed their task.

Everyone in the room is appalled.

You have a lot of witnesses.

They recharge the chair

for another attempt,

this time doubling the voltage.

They amp up the voltage to 2,000 volts

and this creates a gruesome spectacle.

He's convulsing, foam is coming out of his mouth,

bits of Kemmler's jacket began to smolder and catch on fire.

It looks like he's sweating blood as blood vessels are bursting in his face.

Smoke was rising from his head by some accounts.

An ungodly smell was filling the execution chamber.

You have grown men fleeing from the room

feeling that they're about to vomit.

By the time they flip it off,

he looks absolutely grotesque.

This has been anything but a humane execution.

What happened in Auburn that day was a nightmare.

Reformers had wanted this quick and painless execution.

What they got was this eight minutes of hell.

The main problem with Kemmler's botched execution

was the placement of the electrodes.

Instead of at the head and the middle the back,

it should've been placed at his head and his feet.

That path would've ensured that most of the current

would've passed near or through his heart,

which would've killed him much quicker

than what the botched execution actually did.

They cooked him rather than electrocuted him.

So in the aftermath of Kemmler's horrific execution,

Westinghouse goes on the record by saying simply,

"They would've done better by using an axe."

The botched execution

prompts engineers to redesign the chair.

Later incarnations of the electric chair

improved upon that first design

by changing the electrodes from metal to brass,

a copper mesh was introduced to the top of the scalp,

and it ensured that the current path

would actually pass through the heart,

killing the person quickly.

These upgrades eventually reduce

the chair's failure rate to less than 2%.

As of 2023, the electric chair

is an approved method of execution in eight states.

There are 4,374 people

who have died by the electric chair in the United States.

And when you think about this,

this device that probably wouldn't have existed

if Thomas Edison hadn't wanted to damage

the business interests of one of his rivals,

that that device could end up killing so many Americans,

it's astonishing and it's horrendous.

Ironically, Edison suffers his own loss

when his direct current loses out to his rival.

In the end, alternating current won the war of currents

because the electricity that we use every day

is in the form of alternating current.

Alternating current offered such an advantage

in terms of carrying electricity cheaply to more people

that it just left direct current in the dust.

The electric chair is a stark reminder

that modern technology can be twisted to serve unintended ends.

The wheel is often called

the most important invention in human history,

but for centuries this seemingly simple object

delivered more than transport.

It also delivered excruciating death.

The darkest marvel of all is the human mind.

And what we see over time

is that people get an idea of a way

to be cruel to one another,

and then they build it, and then they implement it.

So if we start with a wheel,

all right, a wheel is a wonderful thing.

And then somebody had this bright idea,

oh, how to make this wheel more lethal.

The wheel, of course, was never intended

for men to be splayed on it, have all their bones broken.

But for 2,000 years,

it was used as a means of punishment and death.

Known as the breaking wheel,

the exact origin of this execution device is unclear,

though some historians trace it back

to a notoriously cruel Roman ruler.

Commodus is a second century Roman emperor

who's known to have a particular bloodlust.

Commodus famously killed

80 lions all by himself with 80 spears

just to show off how powerful and masculine he was.

So if indeed the wheel was invented by him

for uses of punishment,

it would be fitting

for what we know of him.

Commodus uses the wheel

because he likes the entertainment,

if you will, out of the death.

He was a up guy.

In early versions,

the wheel is outfitted with iron spikes

that roll across the victim's body.

Later, a gruesome variation emerges

that makes very clear why it's called the breaking wheel.

After tying a victim to the wheel,

executioners use a hammer to break their bones.

There were essentially two ways

of going about killing somebody

on the breaking wheel like this.

One was to do it from the bottom up,

which is to say to start at the extremities

at the bottom of the body and start breaking the bones going upwards.

That's not the way you wanted this to happen if you were the victim.

You wanted to go from the top down,

which means that the initial blows were done to the head,

to the top part of the body, which is going to kill you faster

so you suffer less.

So it was usually an act of mercy

for somebody to get it top down.

At that point, the executioner would simply take the limbs

and weave them around the spokes of the wheel.

If you've ever broken a single bone,

you know how painful that can be.

This would be having all four of your limbs

shattered so completely

that they could then be manipulated

and tied around a spoke of wood.

That is extraordinary pain.

For the truly unfortunate,

the wheel does not kill quickly.

The point of the breaking wheel, especially in public,

was to have the largest amount of visible suffering,

and the bones breaking, the skin ripping,

the blood flowing,

and the screams from the individual,

who would not die.

That is what the executioner wanted.

In one case, we have a report

that somebody lives for four days

woven onto the wheel in horrific agony,

but they're kept alive for that long

in what must've been to the executioner and those involved

a real horrible high-five moment,

but absolutely incredible, awful pain

for the person involved.

Ultimately what's going to kill you on the breaking wheel

is not the pain and the agony of the injuries,

it's the decreased amount of blood in your body,

and it doesn't sustain life

because you don't have any oxygen to your tissue.

Once the victims do succumb,

their mangled corpses are left on display.

This kind of execution is public.

You're wanting people to see this, to hear it,

to be horrified by it,

because people are often fascinated about death.

There's also an element of social control

whereby displaying a broken body on the wheel,

everyone who's looking on is reminded

that you, the powers that be,

have the power to do that to them, too.

Twisted tales of the breaking wheel

reverberate throughout history.

But the most famous story

may be the legend of Saint Catherine,

a Christian tortured by Roman Emperor Maxentius

in the fourth century AD.

Emperor Maxentius was persecuting Christians

because he wants to unify

the whole Roman empire in his worship.

Catherine was a young woman, only 14 years old,

and she had already heard about Christianity

and persuaded many others to follow Christ.

And so the emperor had her arrested.

And first they tortured her down in the dungeons.

The beat her and starved her.

Then he finally decided to bring out the worst torture of all,

the breaking wheel.

She was raised on the wheel.

They were ready to break her bones,

and the wheel fell down.

When she touched the wheel and it broke to pieces,

finally they gave up in despair and cut off her head.

Real or not,

because of this story, the breaking wheel

has been associated with Catherine so fully

it's called Catherine's Wheel across time.

It remains one of the more popular forms

of public execution in Europe for centuries,

until the late 1700s when the citizens of France

start to question the barbaric practice.

In 1788, seven years after Marquis de Lafayette

plays a pivotal role in the American revolution,

his countrymen are still being broken on the wheel.

The last person to be sentenced to death in France by a breaking wheel

was a convicted murder Jean Louschart.

People were so angry that a whole mob rushed forward

and basically rescued Louschart from this device.

He is pulled off and taken away by the crowd to freedom.

King Louis XVI actually ended up

banning the use of the breaking wheel in 1791.

And so a new form of execution is needed,

one that's more humane.

And among the next death machine inventors,

a French doctor whose name is forever tied to the Reign of Terror.

France, 1789.

Fueled by immense gaps between the rich and the poor,

a social revolution is starting to boil.

Since the time of King Louis XIV,

we are seeing a lot of excessive spending coming from the crown,

such as the building of the Palace of Versailles,

which practically bankrupted France in the early 1700s.

We are also seeing a long time period of famine due to weather crises.

Harvests aren't going very well,

and France goes into a lot of debt

because of various wars against England.

So we're seeing a lot of people who are hungry,

they're exhausted, they're angry,

and this is going to kick off

what becomes known as the French Revolution.

One of the other causes of the French Revolution

was the American Revolution.

The American Revolution spread the mystique of revolution.

It showed an example of a successful revolution,

and that served as a powerful role model for the French.

The French Revolution

officially begins in late spring of 1789

with the formation of the National Assembly,

a governing body of the people

meant to represent all classes.

With revolutionaries now in control in France,

they start looking at things that would change society,

and one of them even was how to put people to death.

The major problems of inequality in France

even extended into death.

The different classes got different treatments

in terms of execution.

If a member of the upper class

was going to be executed,

they would get the most humane way... being beheaded.

Those of the lower classes though

were given really harsh punishments.

These included things like hanging.

These included things like drowning,

burning at the stake,

or being put onto the breaking wheel.

On October 10th, 1789,

a prominent French physician steps forward

with an innovative idea...

Using an efficient sharp blade

to kill everyone sentenced to death,

regardless of class.

That doctor's name, Joseph Guillotin.

Guillotin hated public executions of any kind.

But he knew there was no chance in eliminating the death penalty,

so what he advocated was at least making the execution

more humane if possible.

The practice of beheading was far from perfect

because it didn't guarantee

a quick or painless or clean death.

Sometimes the axe might be dull,

and it would require multiple attempts

to actually sever the head from the neck.

The executioners would often show up drunk and miss their mark,

or they wouldn't swing hard enough and it would be very messy.

So what Guillotin was proposing

is we have to create some sort of mechanical device

that will make it so any sort of beheading

will automatically be very clean and painless and immediate.

The National Assembly agrees and commissions a prototype.

The project is overseen by the king's physician Antoine Louis,

who looks at other beheading machines around Europe for inspiration.

The Halifax Gibbet is essentially a frame of about 14 feet high,

and there's an axe blade that's attached to a wooden piece

that then drops with a rope and a pulley.

The Scottish Maiden is more sophisticated.

It works on an arm lever, and you have the blade drop.

It's a sharper blade.

It is more effective,

and because it's in use until 1710,

it is an immediate inspiration for the guillotine.

Though it was initially called the Louisette

after Anton Louis,

the death device is soon renamed

after the man whose idea triggered it.

The first guillotine is a tall wooden frame

with a heavy blade suspended at the top by a rope.

When the rope is released, the blade falls

severing the head in one swift, fluid motion.

Legend has it, King Louis XVI also gave an idea

of how to make the guillotine even more effective...

Make the blade slanted

so it could go in with a sharper and even cleaner cut.

You have essentially an 88-pound weight

that's hoisted 14 feet above the ground.

And released from rest,

it's gonna accelerate very quickly.

And at the end, it's moving 15 miles an hour.

It's gonna slice through whatever's in its path.

In this case, it's the human neck.

In 1792, they start testing it out.

So first they release it down onto bales of hay

to see how it would slice through.

Once they perfected this,

they went through and they began beheading animals.

Once they realized it worked for that,

they began testing it on corpses

to make sure it would also work on human beings.

And they tested it very quickly,

and they ironed out the kinks very fast.

Within just one week, the guillotine was ready

for use on live humans.

It's April 25th, 1792,

and a notorious instrument of death

is about to make its bloody debut.

The first person to face the guillotine

is convicted robber and murderer

Nicolas Jacques Pelletier.

The guillotine was set up publically

in the square in front of the town hall.

This was a big gravel pit

where all kinds of executions,

even some market activity were happening.

So people are kind of always coming through this area.

It was really central in Paris.

This was such an event

that thousands upon thousands of people

showed up because they had heard about this guillotine.

They'd heard about this new method,

and they wanted to see it put into action.

The crowd watches intently

as Pelletier is escorted to the guillotine.

He is secured into the stocks.

The blade is released,

and he is instantly decapitated.

It just happened so fast, many people didn't even see it happen.

And the crowd is not satisfied

because they're used to the spectacle of torture.

They start getting upset. It hasn't taken long.

They wanted a more lengthy execution.

They started to say, "Bring back the gallows.

Bring back the gallows," so that they can see men writhing in pain

for a little bit before they finally go to their maker.

The whole point of this invention

was to level the playing field

and create a painless and humane way of death

for all classes.

And instead of people being happy,

people were actually furious

because they felt they were missing out

on a grand public piece of entertainment.

But as more citizens are sent to the guillotine,

the public's attitude starts to shift.

What people came to realize was that the guillotine itself

offered a different type of spectacle.

People could now watch many executions in a row

because it made the process so fast.

The crowds go for an afternoon.

10, 12 people would be executed.

Some say it had a carnival-esque quality to it.

There would be hawkers or vendors in the crowd

selling food and drink and souvenirs,

maybe even little models of the guillotine itself.

People gawking at the murder of a fellow human being.

We're seeing so many executions

that the process kind of restores that raucous

and social tradition of public execution.

As public executions continue to draw crowds,

those in the front row begin to notice something peculiar.

Because the guillotine was so sharp,

there are reports of a severed head

being so quickly severed

that the eyes and mouth of the head

would open and close.

And the implication is that

because it was so swift, so clean,

the neural impulses, the electrical impulses

were still going to the brain.

Soon the efficient new killing machine

becomes a symbol of the French Revolution,

an era that's so deadly

it's referred to as the Reign of Terror.

So many people in Paris got executed a day

that by halfway through the day

the blade would've gotten dull.

And what happened is that people had to

start releasing the blade multiple times

just to behead somebody,

and so this humane method of execution

became an absolute horror.

Initially the guillotine's victims

were nobles, they were the bourgeoisie.

Pretty soon though it's pretty much anybody who doesn't agree

with those in power will be sent to the guillotine.

We get musicians, we get painters, we get teachers.

Anybody who might be viewed as an enemy of the revolution

could be guillotined.

Nobody was safe during the Reign of Terror. Nobody.

Eventually, even King Louis XIV

is convicted of treason and conspiracy

and condemned to die.

The ruler who outlawed the breaking wheel

will meet his end at the guillotine on January 20th, 1793

before a crowd of thousands.

He's there on the scaffolding

looking out at all of these people

who are kind of lusting for his death,

and he finds out that, of course,

the person that will be setting the machine in motion

is his former employee the royal executioner.

Ironically, King Louis XVI

dies by the very blade he helped design.

By the end of the French Revolution,

the list of guillotine victims

includes Queen Marie Antoinette

and revolutionary leader Maximilien Robespierre.

As nearly as we can tell, some 17,000 people

were killed by the guillotine.

Maybe 15% were from the nobility,

leaving another 85% from all the other walks of life.

In 1774, the Reign of Terror draws to a close,

but the guillotine remains in service

for another two centuries.

Despite the horror that the guillotine

came to represent during the Reign of Terror

in the French Revolution, it remained France's

only method of public execution, because no matter what,

it was still seen as more humane than any other method.

France's last beheading by guillotine

occurs on September 10th, 1977

with the execution of convicted murderer Hamida Djandoubi.

And the death penalty in France

would be abolished ultimately in 1981.

So basically during the 20th century,

we were putting people into space

while we also still chopping off people's heads.

But the guillotine is much more civilized

than one of the most excruciating

and elaborate execution methods ever conceived.

The electric chair...

the breaking wheel, and the guillotine

remain among humankind's darkest objects of execution.

But they pale in comparison

to one medieval method

that begins with a rope.

One of the oldest forms of execution is death by hanging.

That is tying a noose around somebody's neck and pulling them up,

stringing them up until they strangle to death.

There are records of hangings that go back centuries.

The first physical evidence of hanging

dates from 500 BC...

A person they now call Tollund Man,

who actually has the rope still attached around his neck.

There are other examples in the Bible

and "The Odyssey," all sorts of literature,

but we actually have a body.

Because hanging could be achieved almost anywhere,

over a tree limb, over a beam,

hanging is very easy and very common.

But towards the 13th, 14th, and then 15th centuries

in England in continental Europe, hanging becomes a spectacle.

It is a public performance of state sponsored execution.

As a consequence, some of those sights of execution

become permanent structures.

By the Middle Ages, gallows were being built,

and these were outside of castles,

they were outside of fortifications,

often at crossroads.

And this is where people could observe

the hanged body for many, many days afterwards

until basically the birds ate it

or something along those lines.

To give onlookers a better view,

gallows are often constructed atop high platforms.

When the lever is pulled, a trap door opens

allowing the victim to fall straight down,

being strangled by the noose and their own body weight.

The laws that you needed to break in order to be executed

were few and far between.

Murder, theft, counterfeiting,

those warranted capital punishment, mostly by hanging.

But the most brutal form of punishment

is reserved for the highest crime... treason.

It involves three excruciating forms of torture

that ultimately end in death.

Hanging, drawing, and quartering,

this is something unique.

This doesn't happen nearly as often,

and it's extremely gruesome.

The process of being hanged,

drawn, and quartered

really begins at the prison.

The person is often stripped naked, their hands are bound,

and then they are dragged

to the place of actual execution.

The point of this is humiliation.

It is to give people the opportunity

to throw things, to cause violence to the victim,

and then you start with the hanging.

Unlike most hangings,

the goal at this stage isn't death.

The idea here instead

is to put the noose around and tighten it

and lift the body so that they are choking.

You want to bring them right to the point of death

and then bring them down so that they're still alive.

And now you begin the next stage.

Now the drawing part of this punishment

basically had two methods.

One is you are literally being drawn

across the cobblestones by being attached to a horse,

or it's going to mean that you're going to be disemboweled alive,

meaning that your organs are going to get drawn out of you.

Basically, your body is cut open,

and your intestines are going to be removed.

And then, finally, came the quartering

in which either a man with an axe

chopped off your arms and legs,

or horses were gathered on four sides of you

and a rope was attached to your various limbs and to the horse.

And someone said, "Giddy-up," and there went your limbs.

And at that point, you probably should've suffered death,

but just in case, they also then follow that up with a beheading.

And then usually the parts of your body are put on display,

all to say, "Don't do what this person did

or the same fate will await you."

One of the best known examples of this barbaric practice

is the execution of Scottish knight William Wallace.

In 1305, William Wallace helps to lead

a Scottish force that defeats a far larger English force

in the Battle of Stirling Bridge.

This definitely puts a target on his back.

William Wallace is brought just outside of London to Smithfield,

he's brought in display of everybody, and he's hanged.

He's cut down before he can die.

He is then laid out

and they begin to pull various pieces off of him.

He is disemboweled.

His entrails are burned in front of him,

but he is also castrated.

This is meant to wipe out the lineage of your enemy

and drive home the point

that Scotland has no future of its own.

After he is castrated, he is beheaded,

and his corpse is cut into four different pieces.

Those four quarters are sent to the four corners of England,

and they're put on display on city walls.

His head is placed on a pike on London Bridge.

William Wallace may have been a famous victim of this,

but he's by no means the only one.

The very last person to actually be hanged,

drawn, and quartered, this occurred in the 1700s.

But the actual law for hanging, drawing, and quartering

wouldn't get outlawed until 1870.

Of all the executions out there in history,

hanging, drawing, and quartering

was one of the most painful and humiliating ways

one could ever be executed in the world.

If the history of execution

has proven anything,

it's that there's often a dark side to innovation...

and where there's a will, there's a way

to transform even the most mundane objects

into instruments of death.