There's a good chance you've never noticed it before, but your local fitness gym is hiding a
horrifying secret. No, not those maniacs who dry their entire bodies with the hair dryers - I'm
referring to a popular piece of gym equipment with an incredibly sinister past... the treadmill.
OK, so treadmills might not sound all that terrifying on the face of it.
But bear with me. Because the world's most popular piece of gym equipment has
a surprising - and disturbing - history that, for some reason, the world has chosen to forget.
As for what that history is... the clue's in the name. Treadmill. Treadmill. The tread part makes
perfect sense obviously - but why mill? Well, it turns out that, not so long ago,
that part made perfect sense, too... allow me to explain.
At the turn of the 19th century right here in England, there were well over 200 criminal
offences that were punishable by death. Among them were such heinous crimes as 'being in the company
of gypsies for one month,' 'writing a threatening letter,' and - brace yourself - 'stealing from
a rabbit warren.' (I always knew those cuddly bastards were hiding something).
Put simply, back then if you broke the law in almost any way,
you were basically fucked. This absurdly strict criminal justice system would eventually come
to be known as the 'Bloody Code,' but it was its very harshness that catalysed a
dramatic shift in public sentiment towards how criminals were treated.
I mean, was it *really* OK to have someone murdered for writing a strongly worded letter?
Assuming they didn’t continually use the wrong spelling of ‘their,’ probably
not. But of course, such reckless hate still needed to be punished *somehow.*
It was this need for an alternative to capital punishment that saw the number of state prisons
being set up in England rise dramatically in the early part of the the 19th century.
By and large, incarceration was seen as a positive alternative to death, but while prisons were
clearly a good place to house any spare criminals you weren’t planning on hanging, not everyone was
entirely convinced they were the best way to encourage those criminals to change their ways.
You're probably familiar with the phrase 'there's no rest for the wicked,' which is usually used
lightheartedly to mean that work doesn't stop, no matter how tired or busy you might be. But
the phrase originally comes from a passage in the book of Isaiah in the Old Testament of the Bible
that explains how sinners who end up in the fiery pits of hell
will experience eternal torment and therefore never know peace - or rest - again.
And that whole concept raised an interesting question - if never-ending torture was God's way
of punishing evildoers down in hell, was prison really the best solution for dealing with them
up here on earth? Because in prison - which was basically just a giant building full of
tiny rooms where nobody ever did anything - there was *plenty* of rest for the wicked.
In the early 19th century, this little discrepancy between the will of God and the approach taken in
England's prisons came to the attention of a young British engineer by the name of William Cubitt.
He'd recently visited Bury St. Edmond's Gaol and been outraged to witness widespread idleness among
the inmates there. So outraged, in fact, that he decided he was going to do something about it.
Coming from a family of millers, Cubitt reasoned that the best way to get these lazy criminals
was to give a taste of what genuine hard work looked like. But that was easier said
than done. After all, there wasn't exactly an abundance of useful jobs to choose from,
nor was there the space for much in the way of physical activity. Cubitt needed to come up with
a way of putting large numbers of inmates to work without taking up too much precious real estate.
His solution, as I'm sure you've guessed by now, was the treadmill.
Admittedly, Cubitt's original design was fairly different to the treadmills that
can be found in homes and gyms all over the world today - it was basically just a giant
rotating wheel complete with large flat spokes
that a prisoner could climb, a bit like an endless staircase, as the wheel rotated.
And here's where the 'mill' part of the name will finally start to make sense. You see,
the largest treadmills could accommodate as many as 40 prisoners at once, and Cubitt realised he
could harness the energy they generated to do useful things. Some prisons used this energy to
pump water or circulate air, while others used their treadmills like giant human-powered mills
to grind corn. In some cases, all the energy was harnessed to do… absolutely nothing at all,
with prisoners working those treadmills jokingly claiming to be 'grinding the wind'.
At this point you might be wondering what all the fuss is about. Can a spot of exercise on
one of Cubitt's treadmills really have been that bad? After all, these days people pay
good money to 'grind the wind' on the running machines and steppers at their local gyms.
But we aren't talking about a leisurely 5k followed by a protein shake and half an hour
in the sauna here. Prisoners over the age of 16 in England who were sentenced to hard labour
were forced to work the treadmill 7 days a week for between 6 and 10 hours a day with minimal
breaks. During that time, inmates would climb somewhere north of 4000 vertical metres - the
equivalent of scaling Mount Elbert, the tallest mountain in the Rockies, *every single day.*
That in itself is pretty insane, but the reality was actually even worse.
If for some reason you *did* climb Mount Elbert every day, you would at least be
rewarded with lungfuls of crisp mountain air, incredible views, and that exquisite feeling
of superiority over all your friends every time you posted a summit picture on Instagram.
But prisoners who were forced to walk the treadmill had no such return on their physical
investment. The machines were carefully designed to make the whole experience as mind-numbing as
possible. Most were built inside enclosed stalls, meaning that, far from having a lovely view,
prisoners had no choice but to stare at a blank, featureless wall hour after hour as they climbed,
and many prisons added partitions to prevent inmates from talking, or even seeing each other.
To top it all off, prison rations were woefully inadequate for such a relentless
schedule of physical exertion, meaning prisoners would slowly grow weak and sickly
as their sentences dragged on, which only served to make each day harder than the last.
This combination of brutal physical hardship and mind-numbing boredom brought about by almost
total sensory deprivation made the treadmill not just an incredibly gruelling form of punishment,
but a genuinely cruel one too. Hardened criminals frequently collapsed midway through a shift,
particularly in the summer months, and there are reports of formerly sanguine
individuals becoming more or less unhinged by week after week of monotonous stair-climbing.
In a few cases, the ordeal is even thought to have proven fatal.
Probably the most famous person ever to have been made to walk the treadmill
is none other than legendary author and playwright
Oscar Wilde, who, in 1895, was imprisoned for the 'heinous crime' of being a homosexual.
As part of his sentence, Wilde was forced to suffer on the treadmill at Pentonville Prison
in London for a period of about 3 months, and he was left so exhausted and weak by the
experience that he collapsed one day in the prison chapel. It was a nasty fall and Wilde came away
from it with a ruptured eardrum - an injury that some doctors believe contributed to his death,
which came just 2 years after he was released from prison at the age of 46.
Despite its incredible cruelty, for a long time the treadmill was seen as a great success,
largely thanks to a deluge of glowing 5 star reviews from prison wardens
who invariably reported less trouble among inmates after a treadmill was installed. Not
that that's exactly a big surprise - in order to make trouble you have to actually move, something
that prisoners who used the treadmill for 8 hours a day were understandably disinclined to do.
By the end of the 20th century there were almost 40 treadmills in use in prisons around Britain,
with several institutions in the US and beyond also adopting the technology.
But over the years, it seems the powers that be
slowly came to the shocking realisation that prisoners are actually human beings too,
and that both physically and mentally torturing them, was, all things considered,
probably a bit unnecessary. The treadmill was finally banned in England in 1902.
And that should probably have been that, but some 60 years later, an enterprising American chap by
the name of William Staub saw a new use for this outlawed torturer of prisoners - home fitness.
Treadmill-like devices were already being used by doctors to test patient heart rates at the time,
but it was Staub who first saw a gap in the market for a running machine that could be used at home.
And what a colossal gap it turned out to be - as of today,
the treadmill is the world's most popular piece of gym equipment
by quite a distance, with global sales topping $3 billion dollars in 2020.
Of course, it's hard to miss the irony here - these days, not only do people willingly jump
on these literal torture devices, they usually pay large sums of money for the privilege.
But then, as is often the case,
context is everything. In the hands of a surgeon in an operating theatre,
a scalpel is a life-saving tool. Wielded by a thug in a street fight, it's a lethal weapon.
The same can be said of the treadmill - in a prison setting where people were forced to use it
for up to 10 hours a day, it was a brutal torture device. But when you can push the big red stop
button whenever you feel like it, it's one of the perks of a hundred pound a month gym membership.
And thanks for watching.