The Invention

MrBallen strings together three remastered stories about familiar inventions with strange histories. The first, 'The Spectacle', opens just after midnight on June 17, 1939, outside a prison in Versailles, where a crowd watches uniformed men assemble a wooden structure by muscle memory. At 4:50 a.m. — after sunrise, which officials had wanted to avoid — convicted serial killer Eugene Weidmann is brought out and guillotined in front of a shrieking, souvenir-hunting crowd, with the press filming everything. The headlines about the bloodthirsty scene embarrassed France so badly that public executions were abolished; the guillotine kept operating for decades, but only behind closed doors.

The second story, 'A New Technology', is set in the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh in 1785, where a woman in obstructed labor — the baby stuck in the birth canal, a C-section then close to a death sentence — is saved by Dr. John Aitken and a new instrument he built to make the symphysiotomy, a procedure that severs the pubic joint, faster and more targeted. The tool worked, became standard for the procedure, faded from hospitals once C-sections got safer around 1900, and was then rediscovered by an entirely different trade: lumberjacks. Aitken's obstetric device was the chainsaw.

The final story, 'Healing Hands', follows surgeon William Halstead at Johns Hopkins in 1889, a germ-theory zealot whose hand-washing regime included acid and a five-minute mercury bichloride soak. Watching the blistered hands of his head nurse Caroline Hampton — whom he was secretly in love with — he spent a year on a workaround he couldn't openly justify, then handed her a prototype from a package on his desk: the first rubber surgical gloves. Her hands healed within a week, he finally confessed his feelings, and they married. MrBallen closes by noting the stories are based on true events with some details fictionalized for dramatic purposes.