#23: Off With His Head

This next one is a fact I’ve certainly never heard before. Like a lot of people, I associate the guillotine—a contraption that efficiently chops people’s heads off—with the French Revolution, so I assumed that it had fallen out of use in the more than 200 years since then.

In actuality, though, it stayed France’s primary means of execution of criminals until the country abolished capital punishment in 1981. The last execution by guillotine happened in 1977—recent enough to have overlapped with early video game consoles.