Dr Guillotin

 When I was a boy my dad told me that Dr Guillotin invented the guillotine and he was the first person executed by it. He was executed for inventing such an inhumane machine. I thought that was really funny, but of course, it isn’t true. Mechanical beheading devices were used long before the French Revolution. (One was recorded in Dublin in 1307). But in 1790 Joseph-Ignace Guillotin argued that such a device should be used as a humane method of executing people. (And it was humane compared to most methods!) His idea was adopted and the device was named after him. Dr Guillotin died of natural causes in 1838.