An Irish doctor and geologist developed the hangman's drop as a more humane way by which to carry out the unpalatable task of executing people, writes Mary Mulvihill.
Convicts who were sentenced to hang in the years after 1866, might lose their life, but at least they could be sure of a speedy dispatch. In that year a Carlow-born scientist, Rev Samuel Haughton (1821-97), invented the humane hangman's drop. No longer would anyone have to suffocate slowly at the end of a short rope, now they faced the long drop, which ensured their neck broke quickly and cleanly.
The problem was that hanging had not been designed to kill, but as a prelude to "drawing and quartering". After those more barbaric practices were abandoned, convicts were instead sentenced "to hang by the neck until dead". But a man might take 15 minutes to suffocate, and a lighter person even longer, their suffering adding to the general spectacle. Samuel Haughton argued for a more humane approach.
Haughton came from a well-known Carlow Quaker family and was later ordained into the Church of Ireland. He was already Professor of Geology at Trinity College Dublin when he decided to study medicine.
By 1866, with his new knowledge of anatomy, he calculated that a person weighing 160 pounds had to be dropped 14-feet to break his or her neck. Haughton published his calculations for various convict weights and corresponding drops, in what today we might call "a manual of best practice" for executioners.
Samuel Haughton was a forthright man with deep religious convictions. Believing the world to have been created, and everything in it perfectly formed, he saw no need for Charles Darwin's theory of evolution. He also dismissed Lister's use of antiseptics and Pasteur's germ theory of disease as mumbo-jumbo.
Yet Haughton provided us with several useful geological insights. By studying how muscles and bones are attached in fossils, he revealed how extinct animals moved. He also showed that geological processes had distorted many animal fossils. From this he measured the distortion in the rocks, a significant breakthrough at the time.
He also produced the first reasonable estimate of blood pressure, based on how far blood spurted from a severed artery (the experiment was performed on a dog).
A prolific author, he published numerous books on science, geology and mathematics that went to many editions. Tides and currents were another speciality and on occasion the police used his help to investigate the causes of shipwrecks. In 1862 he wrote a manual on tides and currents in the Irish Sea, hoping to reduce the number of shipwrecks in the channel.
Samuel Haughton, who gave us the humane hangman's drop, is buried in the family plot at Killeshin, Co Carlow.
Mary Mulvihill's book, Ingenious Ireland: a county by county exploration of Irish mysteries and marvels, was published by TownHouse in November