File200 wrote:Your splitting maul is definitely not going to cut a head off in one or two strokes, or even three or four.
I agree with you there, due to the bluntness and the narrowness of the cutting edge, and the angle of the wedge which would result in pushing tissue aside unnecessarily. I believe a hard blow could penetrate all the way through the neck, though it wouldn't completely sever. I'm thinking here of a chicken or turkey; I believe the maul could easily smash a raw chicken or turkey to pieces in one hit, and penetrate through to the chopping block beneath. That's based on my physical intuition about the various things I've whacked with a maul (not just splitting wood but also e.g. smashing up chairs, a fiberglass boat, etc) and my knowledge of the consistency of a raw chicken.
However, a moderately sharp axe of the same weight, with a blade as wide as a neck, would be massive overkill and very easily sever the head. To my knowledge, executioner's axes weren't nearly as heavy as my 18lb maul, but they probably would have been larger and heavier than a war axe (which would typically only weigh 2-3 lb). In the picture I linked earlier, the axe used in the Tower of London appears quite large and heavy, possibly approaching in weight to my maul.
First of all, vertebrae aren't just harder than wood--they're A LOT harder than wood. Second, you can't just push the vertebrae out of the way, because the execution isn't over until the head is removed.
You could just push the vertebrae out of the way, and fully remove the head, in one stroke. They would get pushed out of the way through the softer tissues of the neck as the axe passes through.
Unless you're trying to argue that the first strike would probably kill, in which case I agree. But that's not really the same as finishing an execution cleanly. In fact, it kind of goes back to my point about how pointless it was to sharpen war axes.
The first strike would probably kill, like I mentioned earlier, but yes I've gotten kind of focused on whether it would fully sever the head.
And on that topic, I'm going to talk about flesh for a little bit, because I've done plenty of dissections for EBIO classes and I carve my own birds. There's a big difference between splitting wood and cutting flesh. Wood is brittle, but flesh, even after rigor mortis, is compressible and elastic. When you try to chop it, a lot of the force is absorbed, and the problem gets worse if you're hitting a large surface area. This is why the guillotine blade is angled. Living, healthy wood is also closer to flesh than it is to dry, dead logs. Especially aspen trees, which I'm certain were devised by Satan's underpaid botanical consultant.
Are you telling me you found it required less force to cut wood with an unpowered hand tool than to perform a dissection with a scalpel?
I can fairly easily cut through meat that I'm eating with a knife. If I tried to do the same cut with the same knife and the same force on a piece of wood, I'd dent the surface and that's about it.
Sure, wood is brittle (depending on the direction you hit it), and that's why it splits. But it's still a lot stronger than flesh.
I will concede that a dull 2-3 lb war axe is unlikely to sever the head in one strike, but I don't think that's the typical case, both because war axes wouldn't have been dull, and because the axes used in executions were larger and heavier than war axes.
Also - one's intuition about how elastic flesh is goes wrong when the projectile speed is high enough. Have you ever seen a slow motion video of a bird being chopped up by a jet engine? The body of the bird seems more like water or cake, with no cohesion at all.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZV3siHf910 Although of course the speed here is much greater than an axe blow would be, the same principle applies to a lesser extent with a fast axe blow.
Posted: Sunday, 19th July 2015, 00:31