🤫 The treadmill was invented in 1818 to punish prisoners. Britain eventually removed it from its jails for being too cruel. Its designer, the engineer William Cubitt, saw convicts lying idle and decided they needed to learn the habit of hard work. His machine was a long wooden wheel with steps set into it, wide enough for a row of men. They climbed, the wheel turned beneath them, and they climbed again. The regulation day was six hours: fifteen minutes on, five off, in silence. At the standard pace, that meant climbing 8,640 feet a day, nearly twice the height of Ben Nevis. In some prisons the wheel ground grain. In others it was connected to nothing at all. The men called it “grinding the wind.” Dozens of English prisons installed treadmills. Oscar Wilde was put on one at Pentonville. The Prison Act of 1898 put an end to their use, and by 1902 the last wheel had stopped turning. In the late 1960s, an American engineer began selling a treadmill for home use. Today, gyms have rows of them facing a wall, with a television to keep you from noticing. The punishment was never the climbing. It was the hours: the same movement at the same pace, going nowhere, until the will gave out before the legs did. Building anyone up was never part of the sentence. Anyone over 60 who walks into a gym today gets pointed straight toward the machine Britain retired from its prisons and steered away from the barbell, the one thing in the building that would keep them off the floor. #info #meta #nationalism
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