I heard a joke that started:
I just got hired at the guillotine factory…
I’ll beheading there soon.
Yeah, silly premise… or is it? How many guillotines were ever produced? Were they all one-offs, or was there a factory that made them?
ETA: I found this.
Upshot is, no, the United States did not buy guillotines from France, but many other countries did. So someone was building a lot of them, apparently.
There was only one execution by guillotine in North America.
Saint Pierre and Miquelon is a self-governing French territory located in the northwestern Atlantic Ocean near the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador. It is the only part of New France that remains under French control, with an area of 242 square kilometres (93sqmi) and a population of 6,080 at the January 2011 census.
The only time the guillotine was used in North America was in Saint-Pierre in the late 19th century. Joseph Néel was convicted of killing Mr Coupard on Île aux Chiens on December 30, 1888, and was sentenced to be executed by guillotine, the official method of execution in France. The only problem was, Saint-Pierre did not own a guillotine. They finally located one 5000 miles away, on the Caribbean island of Martinique. When it arrived from Martinique, the guillotine was not in working order, and had to be repaired.
Finally, on August 24, 1889, Neel was led to the guillotine, which had been set up in a public square, which was now filled by a crowd of eager onlookers. St. Pierre had to recruit a local petty criminal to serve as executioner. They hadn’t thought through the execution procedure to determine who would give the order to drop the blade, so after an uncomfortable pause, Neel himself shouted at the executioner to just do it. By the time it hit bottom, human flesh was left grotesquely clinging to the dull imported blade. The poor executioner was so ostracized that he left for France afterwards.
The prosecutor vowed never to seek another death sentence.
Never used again, this infamous device remains in St. Pierre to this day. It can be seen there behind the stairs at the Musée de l’Arche.
Does suicide count? Because… James Moon.
If you look upo “Guillotine Manufacturers” you encounter a wealth of hits – because “guillotines” are what they call the devices that cut paper, tubing, cigars, etc. in the same fashion that the same-named devices once gave aristocrats an uncomfortably close shave.
Nevertheless, considering their former use, it’s daunting read their ad copy:
Looking through the history of capital punishment guillotines, I get the im pression that most were custom jobs, not the work of any factory that took pride in their sales, or had signs up that read “____days since last acidental decapitation”
The sites to answer most of your guillotine questions:
Very few customer complaints?
I used to run one of those machines in a bookbinding factory. It kept me on my toes.
“A mechanical device lay across the floor. A man’s head had been severed from his body and an axe was embedded in the floorboards.”
Did they charge his estate for damages? 
You can bet they kept the security deposit.
It would’ve kept me on my fingers.
At one factory I worked in during my long-ago youth, there was a plunger that came down to squeeze liquid out of the stuff we were working on. It was a cylindrical device that fit neatly into a cylindrical bore below, like an engine’s piston in its engine block. The guys operating the thing had to keep their wits about them to be sure they had the same quota of fingers and thumbs at the end of the shift that they did at the start.
Yeah, there were safety screens and the like, but people routinely defeat interlocks in the interest of time and ease.
And it’s amazing how often management fails to notice those defeats. Except when the OSHA inspector is standing there. Assuming there is an OSHA.
I have a working guillotine, it’s currently disassembled in my basement. Iccy (aka Ichabod Crane the 6th), a headless, teenaged mannequin likes to use it, on the front lawn, in late October.
Why does this not surprise me, coming from you?
I’ve seen the commercial hydraulic-powered guillotines for paper in print shops. They were designed so that you had to use two hands to operate them.
“Guillotine” is also the term used in Commonwealth countries for closure, to cut off debate. We don’t have indefinite fillibusters.
I’ll bet Alice Cooper’s was a custom job.
