What angle must the blade be? Is it good to have a high attack angle, or one that’s nearly flat?
How heavy should the apparatus holding the blade be? How far should it travel? Is keen sharpening important, or does the weight do most of the work? What kind of latch/release do you use?
Lastly, morbid extra credit, did they ever execute someone with their face up, so they could see the blade coming?
EDIT FOR CLARITY: Way more complex than an axe or a noose.
Just because it was a long time ago, don’t assume they were stupid. Their engineers that built castles and structures have that work still standing today–while USA has infrastructure collapsing
A little bit of survivorship bias there, but you are correct that engineers throughout history have been just as smart as engineers today.
As an engineer of today, I find it insulting that you would lower engineers throughout history to my level.
Lolz
Yes agreed. It was simplest relation to come to mind. Guys figuring out gravity and universe math had as much skill (or more) than today, without the advantage of mass computation and world wide collaboration.
Anyone can build a bridge which stands. It takes a engineer to build a bridge which just stands, while not costing an insane amount of money.
That said, engineers throughout history were incredibly smart and shouldn’t be discounted.
I never said that
but you were certainly thinking it loudly. or how else was one to interpret ‘people from the 18th century wouldn’t be able to do something if it was technically challenging’?
You can interpret it as “It was easy in the XVIII century, so it is totally trivial nowadays”