The treadmill in your gym has a far grimmer origin than the humming machine you run on. It began as a punishment.
Victorian engineer Sir William Cubitt invented it in 1818, when it was known as the everlasting staircase. His design was a large rotating wheel with steps, and it let several prisoners climb at the same time. The wheel turned, the prisoners climbed, and nobody went anywhere.
Prisoners were often made to walk on these machines for an average of six hours a day. They got an average of 12 minutes’ rest for each hour walked. To see what that looked like, Zack D. Films has made a simulation that shows exactly what prisoners were subjected to. It is a useful reminder of how much worse a bad spin class could be.
Looking at the design, I’d say it resembles a step machine more than the treadmill we use today. Either way, spending several hours a day on one sounds miserable.
Academic Vybarr Cregan-Reid calls the Victorian treadmill the “perfect punishment” of its time. Some of the devices existed for one purpose: to wear prisoners out, rather than to grind corn or pump water. Speaking to BBC Radio 4, he explained where the idea came from.
“They were invented to solve a problem,” he said. “It came out of the Enlightenment… this idea that punishment should be fair and appropriate, and it should teach the criminal to behave in a certain way.”
He also described what the work was like. “The idea was, they would walk, and they would do nothing and just go round and round and round… What they were doing was literally pointless.”
The treadmill was usually handed down to people sentenced to hard labour. Cregan-Reid notes that the author Oscar Wilde was forced to walk on one after being sentenced to two years of hard labour in 1895. Those two years on the treadmill would cause irreparable damage to his health, and he died a couple of years after leaving prison.
The penal treadmill was finally abolished in 1902.
It is a sobering story, and the news has been heavy enough lately that a little comic relief is welcome. Next time your gym treadmill feels like an instrument of torture, you can take some comfort in knowing that at least it is not the Victorian version. Yours at least takes you somewhere, even if it is only to the end of the workout.