There are similar examples from other countries as well. TV was seen as a means for making live broadcasts, so back-ups weren’t made and tapes got recorded over. Source: a course on TV history I took.
I'm not for capital punishment (because there is always a chance justice failed), but if you are going to do it, might as will do it in a way that is quick, accurate, reliable, will cost little, and have few complexities. Lethal injection is a mess. Electrocution is ridiculous. Hanging is not super reliable. Gunshot it not quick. Maybe we need guillotine 2.0. Like, if we were to create a modern version of it, what would it look like? What would be the improvements to the design? Hell, there is probably a simulator on Steam for this question already. lol
Well, I suppose you first need to consider what's doing the work on a guillotine; as far as I can tell it's only using gravity to drop the blade. So we'd want to reduce any friction caused by the rails, it'd be easiest to upgrade to aluminum and get some sort of ball bearings or something to keep it as low as possible. Obviously we want a sharp a blade as possible - considering our lack of sustained killings it might be best to move to a one use blade mechanism to keep it pointy since we probably don't have to worry about durability with sustained beheadings.
Hmm, after that we should probably try to introduce more energy into the system since we're still just using gravity. Adding more weight would probably help but wouldn't ever make it go faster than terminal velocity. Maybe the cheapest option would be spring-loading the top of the guillotine so after the lever is pulled it shoots down. Or if you want more future-y could try to make some sort of magnet railgun to propel the blade down at increasingly fast speeds.
For the bottom it seems pretty good, though you'll want to make sure you have the executioner line up the blade to be in-between the vertebrae (gotta try and make it as swift as possible). Then maybe add a pillow, because it doesn't look super comfy there.
I was watching the Monty Python documentary and they mentioned this. I think one of the Terry’s bought the episodes, which were scheduled to be erased. Otherwise, no Monty Python for America. What was remarkable was many shows that the Pythons had written for, and the ones that had influenced them, At Last the 1948 Show or the Goon Show were gone. So in an alternate timeline, we might be huge Spike Milligan fans.
In the lost media community there is a distinction between things that are known to be lost forever (baring some miracle) and things that may still exist but either no known copies have been found or the owner refuses to release a digital copy (usually due to copyright reasons). For example most of the early seasons of Doctor Who were lost due to the BBCs policy but over the years copies of the film and even some rudimentary at home recordings have been found, allowing for them to be archived and preserved
They are still finding new ones though! We may never see all of them, unfortunately, but we can see a large chunk of them. That’s something to be grateful for considering the circumstances.
A lot of the 2nd Doctor is missing, some of the 1st. Some episodes have been animated, but some are only audio and still frames. It's a bit rough to get through.
It was way better than some drunk guy in a hood with a dull axe. I think I remember reading about some teen who suicided themselves with a homemade guillotine in the woods. I don’t know why I’m mentioning that.
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