We've all heard the advice: 'You need to walk!' 'You must start running!' '10,000 steps a day!' How many times have we been told to buy a treadmill? A glance through any gym door is enough to see that the treadmill looks more like punishment than help, and if we study its history, we find exactly that: a device designed to reform prisoners.
The Treadmill as a Punishment Machine
The following video, which includes Spanish subtitles, offers further insight into this dark history.
Yes, the treadmill is torture. Personally, I think the stair climber is worse, but regardless of the device, we have the fundamental advantage of being able to stop when the session becomes unbearable. Now imagine a treadmill you can't get off. Someone might say there's a Black Mirror episode playing with that idea, but we find a better example in the past. Let's travel back to the early 19th century in the United Kingdom. The Victorian era had not yet begun, but we can say with certainty that the penal system was a catastrophe.
In 1818, British engineer Sir William Cubitt introduced the concept of the penal treadmill. Until then, available treadmills were 'operated' by one or two prisoners to lift water buckets and grind grain, but Cubitt's design aimed at a much larger scale, sometimes with dozens of prisoners at once. Initially, the idea was to 'occupy' convicts with repetitive, meaningless punishment, or in Cubitt's own words, 'reform criminals by teaching 'the habits of industry'.'
Over time, more than forty prisons in England adopted treadmills as a way to obtain energy, process grain, and 'revive industry' after the effects of the Napoleonic Wars. The treadmills, basically infinite staircases with a roller 1.8 meters in diameter, had wooden dividers so prisoners wouldn't touch each other. Each prisoner spent between six and ten hours daily on the stair climber, divided into fifteen-minute sessions and five-minute breaks.
Finally, the Prison's Act of 1898 recognized the excessive cruelty of treadmills and abolished them for penal use. However, the device found a second life in the commercial world. The first US patent for a training machine was registered in 1913. Engineer William Staub created the first version intended for home use in the late 1960s... and the rest is history. Treadmills represent the best-selling exercise equipment category worldwide, with hundreds of manufacturers.
