Dan Snow's History Hit - The Treadmill

Episode Date: May 25, 2022

Before they found their way into gyms, treadmills had a much darker history. In the 19th Century, they could most commonly be found in prisons.In contrast to their modern track record of improving health, the Victorians saw treadmills as a way to explicitly inflict pain and punishment. A tool for ‘grinding men good’ through gruelling hours of physical activity.What were the moral rationalisations of this corporal punishment? Who was the inventor responsible for these machines? And what cautionary tales can we learn from this punishing chapter of penal history?We answer all these questions and more in this episode of Patented with the help of Rosaline Crone, a Senior Lecturer in History at the Open University who specialised in nineteenth-century criminal justice history.If you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download the History Hit app please go to the Android or Apple store.

This is History's Heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas, and the courage to stand alone. Including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War. You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you. Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts. Hi there, History Hit listeners. I'm really happy that Dallas Campbell has joined Team History Hit.

He's one of the best broadcasters out there. He makes science shows. People watch them. They're great. He has a knack of enthusing about things that you never remember to get excited by. And that's what he does on patented history of inventions. He talks about the things that have transformed our world. You know, our story is really one of inventions. It's about these apes with these opposable thumbs working stuff out. So from bronze to iron to putting a drone on Mars,

we're just on one mad helter-skelter journey. Who knows where it's going to end? But if you want to have a few guesses, you might want to see where we've come from. Check out Patented, a history of inventions with Dallas Campbell, wherever you get your pods. Men over 16 were meant to tread on a treadmill for six hours a day,

and they were meant to climb just over 8,100 feet. That's the equivalent of going up the Shard about eight times. Hello, I'm Dallas Campbell and welcome to Patented, a podcast about the history of inventions from History Hit. Today on the show, I'm going to be talking about the tortuous history of treadmills. Some may argue that treadmills as we know them today are a punishing device, and I think they have a point. Running on the spot inside for hours on end isn't exactly my idea of fun, but I will admit the intention behind them is a noble one. The use of treadmills for fitness actually originates in efforts to treat, diagnose and eventually curb death by heart disease, which had become a huge killer in the first half of the 20th century.

In the 1960s, we began to see studies that used treadmills to test cardiovascular health. This then drove research into how running can be used to prevent these conditions in the first place. All this helped fuel the rise of running as a wellness trend. And where were these keen joggers supposed to run in the winter months? Why, on a treadmill, of course. And thus, the treadmill as we know it, was born. However, before they found their way into hospitals, homes and gyms, treadmills had a much darker history. In the 19th century, treadmills could most commonly be found in prisons. In contrast to their modern track record of improving health and reducing deaths,

the Victorians sought treadmills as a way to explicitly inflict pain and punishment, a way of grinding men good through grueling hours of physical activity. What were the moral rationalizations of this corporal punishment? Who was the inventor responsible for these terrible machines? And what cautionary tales can we learn from this punishing chapter of penal history? We answer all these questions and more on the show today with the help of Rosalind Crone, Senior Lecturer in History at The Open University, who specialised in 19th century criminal justice history. Let's get our running shoes on and get into it. welcome to the show rosalind crone thank you it's great to be on the show thank you very

much for the invitation. Who do we have to thank for blooming treadmills then? Now that's a really good question because the history of the treadmill or the treadwheel goes back a very long way, hundreds and hundreds of years. There's evidence to suggest that the Romans were using them in the first century AD. Really? Yeah, treadwheels were really popular in medieval Europe as well, but their function at this time was to lift heavy loads. So they were employed at construction sites

to build cathedrals, that kind of thing, quarries, shipping ports. And these structures also known as kind of tread wheel cranes. And there are some lovely examples of these in Britain and Europe, which have been either preserved or reconstructed for the public to go and see. Well, just explain to our listeners what a treadwheel would look like. I'm imagining like a sort of paddle wheel or a water wheel looking type thing. Is that right? That's exactly right. Yeah. So these early treadwheels were just like that. And if you imagine a hamster wheel, that gives you a sense of how it operated. They would put either an animal like a donkey or a person inside the wheel, and they would walk around and this

thing would spin. And it was that power that then would drive something. So it would drive the crane or drive the mill. Pully or something. Yeah. So what kind of people in the Roman times or whenever, who would be in the hamster wheel? So we know from Roman reliefs that they sometimes use slaves in these wheels. So not always free people, but sometimes free people, labourers were put into them. It's quite interesting. In the late 16th century, there was an inventor called John Payne. That's nominative determinism, John Payne. The story gets better. So he came up with a treadwheel, which was kind of an inclined wheel

that you walked on in a kind of a base that was up a little bit that would drive a mill. And it was either John Payne or the Lord Mayor of London who suggested was up a little bit that would drive a mill. And it was either John Payne or the Lord Mayor of London who suggested that maybe a version of this treadmill could be placed in the new London Bridewell in the late 16th century. Now, the Bridewell was kind of like a new prison that had been invented at the time for the incarceration of petty offenders, vagrants, idle apprentices, basically those who would not work. And they loved Payne's Mill because they thought you could either use it with your feet or use it with your hands. So if you think about vagrants who had lost an arm or a hand or a leg or a foot could still use this mill. So they couldn't get out of performing work when they were at the

Bridewell. Oh, I see. So it became sort of a part of prison reform. Yeah, we don't actually know if that treadmill ended up in the Bridewell. But we do know that there were thoughts about this. And those thoughts about the treadmill continued into the 18th century. So by the time of the Penitentiary Act, the famous Penitentiary Act of 1779, legislators put a provision in there for prisoners to be put to hard labour on something like a treadmill. So there were all these thoughts that were going around. And this all laid the groundwork for basically the invention of what we recognise as a penal treadmill in the very early 19th century. So what was the point of it when you say the famous prison reform? What was

the sort of change? Basically, the penal treadmill itself was a product of the penal reform movement in Britain during the late 18th and early 19th century. So just to back up a bit, before the late 18th century, imprisonment was not often used as a punishment for those who were convicted of crime. So first of all, you had jails. This was one type of prison in the period and they were just used to hold those who were accused of crime and were awaiting jail as well as debtors etc you also had bride wells that i just mentioned before also known as houses of correction and so they were for petty offenders vagrants the idle and disorderly and they were given very short sentences but it was hoped that they would be given some kind of work to do in the House of Correction as a means of correcting them or reforming them. As for the convicted criminals,

there were just a range of bodily punishments that existed for them, whipping, branding, transportation death. Now, all this began to change in the second half of the 18th century, and this was partly in response to the war with America that was happening in the 1770s, because suddenly they could no longer transport their convicted criminals. But it was also in response to a kind of growing number of criminals, because capture and prosecution were becoming more successful, and also an idea of humanitarian punishment. So people started thinking that perhaps it was not such a good thing to inflict bodily punishments on people, especially when they're ever-growing numbers. Yeah, that's fair. Yeah. So we have on the one hand, this kind of

transformation in the use of the prison as a punishment. At the same time, there's also a transformation of the prison as an institution. Again, prisons in the 18th century, especially jails, they were really, really unpleasant places. And the extent of the misery and the dirt and the dangers, they were kind of recorded and captured by that famous prison reformer, John Howard, in the 1770s. And substantial efforts were made to make prisons into kind of healthier environments through better sanitation, regular whitewashing, and transferring the cost of imprisonment, which used to be on the prisoner, onto the authorities. But it was also about what do you do with these prisoners? So you've got this ever-growing number of criminals in the jail, in the bridewell, but they're all idle. They're all sitting around

with nothing to do. And this is a control problem because idle prisoners are dangerous. They kind of get together and they come up with plans. You don't want them to do that. But it's also a question of reform or rehabilitation. You want to teach them to work. So they go out and they become productive members of society and they don't commit crime anymore. And the way to achieve this, nearly all reformers agreed, was through the performance of some kind of labour in prisons. And this idea of hard labour, but also industrial employment. There are various examples of industrial employment around the turn of the 19th century in prisons. But industrial occupations started to fall out of favour. And there were several reasons for this. First of all, the problem of short sentences. There were so many prisoners who were unskilled and they were only serving sentences of weeks or perhaps a couple of months. And there was no time to train them in these new trades for industrial occupations. Second problem was about less eligibility. So industrial occupations are

hardly punishing things. They're kind of nice things, especially when the prisoners were allowed to earn a bit of money while they were doing them. So people on the outside were getting a bit cross, especially when crime rates were going up. There was also an economic depression, which came about at the end of the Napoleonic War. And so there was increasing unemployment, and there was fear of competition from prison labour. And finally, industrialisation. So the economy in Britain was becoming less labour intensive, and more capital intensive. So there wasn't so much of a need for all of these people to perform labour. And it was in this context that gave rise to the invention of the penal treadmill.

In other words, enter William Cubitt. So we have a name we can blame for the treadmill. So William Cubitt. It sounds very familiar, William Cubitt. I'm trying to think where I know the name William Cubitt from. Yeah, the Cubitts were very famous engineers. So there's the family that William Cubit came from, who were kind of one branch, and then there were another set of Cubits as well.

Oh, okay. So in history, they're quite a famous engineering name. Maybe I just know, isn't a measurement a cubit? Isn't that a sort of standard measurement of something like an inch? Yeah. So William Cubit, engineer, comes along, and you've got all these prison reforms, all this change that's going on that you've beautifully described. What does he come up with? Yeah. So William Cubitt at the time was working in Suffolk and he was chief engineer at a firm

called Ransoms and they specialised in agricultural equipment. And he had a kind of a side thing of designing interesting machines. Now there were kind of different accounts of how he came up with the idea of a treadmill. But apparently, this is a story he told to a governor of the jail in London called Colbath Fields, and the governor wrote it down in a book that he wrote. Basically, it goes like this. William Cubitt was friends with one of the magistrates in Suffolk. And one day, Cubitt and the magistrate happened to be together in the town of Bury St Edmunds on some kind of business. And they saw the prisoners in the county jail. And these prisoners were just kind of lounging about doing nothing apart from kind of contaminating

each other, making each other worse. They're bad influences. And apparently, the magistrate turned to Cubitt and said, I wish to God, Mr. Cubitt, you could suggest to us some mode of employing these fellows. Could nothing like a wheel become available? And apparently this kind of instantaneous idea flashed through the mind of Mr. Cubitt and he whispered to himself, ah, the wheel elongated. But he just said to his companion, aha, something has struck me, which may prove worthy of further consideration. And perhaps you may hear from me upon this subject.

And he left. And apparently it was that very exchange that gave birth to the penal treadmill. It's like a proper eureka moment. Yeah. Eureka! Yeah. Though we always wonder if eureka moments are imagined afterwards, rather than being actually true. But Cubitt presumably would have known, as you mentioned, these sort of wheels that the Romans would have used. And actually, when you said agricultural

things, did similar things exist in an agricultural context? Yes. Some people used tread wheels for raising water from wells and also as part of mill kind of equipment. If you think of big water wheels, instead of using the water, you use human power to power a mill for grinding flour. Yeah. So tread mill, does it come from milling things? Yes, that's exactly right. I just realised, yeah. So that's why you get, it can either be called a treadwheel because you're treading on a wheel or a treadmill because you're treading powers the mill. This is History's Heroes.

People with purpose, brave ideas, and the courage to stand alone. Including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War. You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you. Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, so tell us the sort of process from that eureka moment to, okay, now we're going to install these things in prisons in order to keep prisoners not happy, but productive. Yeah. Okay. So what Kubit did was he took that tread wheel of old, that hamster wheel that I told you about, that was powered by human and animals. And what he did is

he turned it inside out and he elongated it. So instead of walking on the inside of the wheel to turn it, he made it so you walked on the outside of the wheel. And then by elongating the wheel, because you could do that now if prisoners are walking on the outside, he could get lots of people walking on it at once. So he put steps on, wooden steps on the outside of the wheel. Like kind of cogs. I'm sort of imagining when they're in the water, those logs and people sort of run on them. Yeah. So imagine these kind of cantilevered steps kind of sticking out and that's what the prisoners would walk on. And the prisoners would climb on these steps and they would hold onto a bar to steady themselves. The steps were clever because

they were kind of positioned right at the wheel's axle and their covering was placed on the top step. So you couldn't go up the wheel. You could just walk in the same position. So the effect is kind of like going up an escalator the wrong way at a steady pace. That was my favourite thing to do when I was a kid. Yeah, and it was actually a punishment in the 19th century, right? I still kind of do. When I see an escalator, I'm still tempted. Okay, so I can sort of picture what it looks like, this kind of elongating. How many prisoners do you have in one of those? Well, his prototype that he then installed at Bury St Edmund's Jail to solve the problem of

those idle prisoners that he had watched sitting around and doing bad things, you could get 28 men on that at once. Jeepers. So presumably they all have got to be exactly in time with each other, otherwise it's going to be chaos. Presumably people are going to fall off and get mangled. Ooh, yeah. We can definitely talk about accidents, unless you want to know first about the Berry Mill, which is quite interesting. Yeah. Tell us about that. So it costs between about £500 and £600 to install it. And you could put 28 men on, but the best thing to do was to arrange your prisoners in relays. So the wheel would never stop. So you had men waiting to go on,

and then men coming off the other side. And how long would a session on the wheel be? So you could do about 10 or 15 minutes on and then five minute rest, 10 to 15 minutes on and then five minute rest. That's kind of like what you do in the gym, like a proper gym routine. Yes. And then this thing really took off. So the leading kind of penal reform organisation at the time, the Society for the Improvement of Prison Discipline, they were sent all the designs by Cubitt and they had a look at it and they observed the mill at Bury and they thought this is a fantastic idea. So they recommended it. But just in terms of the psychology for the prisoners, what would it do to the prisoners? So you want them to have something to do so they're not conspiring and misbehaving. Anyone who's been on a gym treadmill knows how mind-numbing they are. Was that the sort of idea?

Just, you know, that we talk about the treadmill of life as being just utter monotony and literal mind-numbing. It became that later. But at the start, that wasn't necessarily an intention. The start was a kind of a punishment that could be equalized across all. So every man and woman would perform the same labor, no more and no less. Right. So it's that idea of being able to equalize the punishment. Oh, it's sort of standardisation. That's right. But also these treadmills originally

were meant to be productive. So William Cubitt himself even had ideas that you could get outside contractors renting the mill and the prisoners to grind grain or to spin cotton or something. He thought his mill was great because it could be applied to basically any region of England to do any kind of work that was local. Presumably, the productivity of it is going to be relatively small given there's not that many prisons. This is where you're wrong. The productivity could be huge. In England alone at this time, there were around 300 prisons and many, many, many prisoners. So the possibilities were great. And places like Australia, for example, because the idea spread around the world, the treadmills in Sydney at Carter's Barracks

were producing about a thousand kilograms of ground corn per day in 1825. Wow, that's a lot. Yeah. These wheels are incredibly efficient at doing productive work. The problem is, in England, they very quickly become unproductive. Why is that? Again, it goes back to the economic context that I was talking about before, of the need for prisoners to do this kind of labour. There just wasn't the need, and so they just quickly fell out of use. They were only then employed to do certain tasks within the prison, for example, pumping the water to all the cells. You mentioned accidents accidents as well. Something like that stuff is going to go wrong, isn't it?

People falling off and getting wedged in between steps and terrible things. Yeah, this is interesting. So the very earliest reports on the treadmills from the early 1820s, they really thought it was a great success. And in 1823, the Home Secretary, for example, sent a circular around the local prisons and he said tell me your stories how how good is this thing you know how how is it working and the responses they got some of the claims which is absolutely extraordinary okay so apparently at ipswich county prison the prisons loved it so much they would queue up to get on they were just so keen to take a turn apparently why well apparently? Well, apparently it was the health benefits.

Oh, okay. Yeah. The women at North Allerton County House of Correction, they loved it too, because they said it was much easier to walk on the wheel than to do the prison laundry. And I have some sympathy for that argument, actually. I think they might have been right. And there was even an account of one woman who was able to knit as she was treading on the mill.

Then other people, yeah, were talking about all the exercise benefits. And so you get all these great reports early on of these wonderful treadmills, but very soon evidence to the contrary comes out. And it's evidence about all the damage to health that is being caused by these treadmills as well. Like physical damage, like people breaking things. Yep. So pulmonary complaints complaints rheumatic complaints uh apparently inflammations of the groin that was a common complaint as well hernias there were scandals about women on the treadmill and the particularly dangerous effects for them and some pregnant women had miscarriages from turning the wheel so a lot of prisons removed their women are from the

treadmill as well yeah and you know there are all sorts of problems. And also prison reformers began to say, well, at a time when we're trying to reform prisoners and we're trying to send them out as better people, what these treadmills are doing is they're just irritating the prisoners and hardening them up and making them very unpleasant people. So perhaps we're doing the wrong thing. So what we then saw in the 1830s and 40s was a big backlash against the treadmill. And whereas it had spread internationally, you saw this great big retreat and people pulling in and saying that actually, in a lot of places, we don't need these things. We can use prison labour for other purposes. And so you see it disappearing from places like America and Australia quite quickly. In Britain, though,

you get a retreat, and then you suddenly get, bam, a revival in the late 19th century of the treadmill. In prisons? Yeah. So you get this retreat in the 1840s, and then suddenly in the 1860s, this great big revival. But basically, the penal treadmill is abolished by the early 20th century. It becomes a great scandal in the late 19th century, and it becomes an instrument of torture in prisons because of new ideas about punishment. Well, how do we go from treadmills in prison to treadmills becoming a fitness craze or fitness thing that people use?

That's a good question. The link is a little bit tenuous, if you ask me, because if you look at the prison treadmill, that's a wheel that's turning around. Our treadmills today, they're not wheels. They're something that we walk on the spot. And we're not climbing either. So it's more the language of the treadmill, I think. We think about treading, the treadmill of poverty, the treadmill of pain. So

it's more about the monotonous activity that gives the exercise equipment its name rather than the invention itself. I think a closer kind of relative to the penal treadmill is probably those stepping machines that you see in gyms. And it's that act of stepping, it's much more painful than the act of walking. Yeah, there is something slightly dehumanising about being on a treadmill, I always find. Time sort of elongates. It does. Now, if you imagine in the late 19th century, the new kind of rules that came in meant that men over 16 were meant to tread on a treadmill for six hours a day, you know, with their little rest intervals, six hours a day. And they were meant to climb just over 8,100 feet. That's a lot.

That's a lot. That's the equivalent of going up the Shard about eight times. Am I right in thinking Oscar Wilde was on the treadmill? He was not. Is that a myth? Yeah, that is a nonsense. He was excused. He was not physically fit. And this was the other problem, again, of the treadmill in the late 19th century, that it was just so punishing. They did a calculation as to how much men should walk on the treadmill. And they basically said, how much can you do without dying? And so they calibrated it all on a kind of average man. Oscar Wilde was not an average man. He was not fit and

he was not healthy. And so many people, like Oscar Wilde, had to be excused from the treadmill. So this punishment that everyone was meant to do, a lot of people didn't. So for example, in the early 1880s, about 75% of men were cleared for going on the treadmill or some other kind of hard labor. This dropped to about just over 50% by the mid 1890s. And that's when Oscar Wilde was sentenced to imprisonment. So he was excused. He watched it and wrote about it, but he never experienced it for himself. Okay. Is there a cautionary tale we should be taking away from us when we think about treadmills, from your point of view as a historian of the

penal system? Yeah, I think there are two things to learn from this. I mean, the first one is about prison labour. What do we get prisoners to do, especially prisoners who are in short sentences with low skills? There's not enough time to train them. There are continuous objections from the economy outside in terms of establishing competitive markets within prisons. How do we connect them into the economy outside? That's a perennial problem. We haven't solved that one yet. And we see the treadmill that starts off as something that should be productive, becomes unproductive. It's hard for modern audiences, I think, to kind of capture in their imagination what the treadmill would have been like in the late 19th century.

As a man sentenced to a couple months in prison, you would have gone on having very little sleep on a plank bed, being given very little food. You're on virtually a starvation diet that was deliberately made nauseating and horrible to give you stomach complaints. And then if you think about the noise, the motion of the wheel going around and around, the sweat, the smell, I mean, this was truly an instrument of torture. And this is what happens when we kind of divide prisoners off, you know, we erect walls between prison populations and the general population, and we dehumanise

the prisoner. We have a rhetoric of needing to punish prisoners, and we end up with torture. What are prisons there for? What are they meant to do? And is a kind of focus on punishment, on hard labour, really the right thing to be focusing on? I mean, surely we need to reform people, and we need to be more humanitarian in our approach. That is a good place to pause, I think. And you've got a book. When's that coming out and what is it? And tell us a little bit about it. Yeah, so that's coming out in May and it's the first ever study of the history of prison education. Fantastic. And you've also got a book, Violent Victorians as well, haven't you? I do. Everyone loves that title. That's all about

entertainments in London in the 19th century and how gruesome and bloody they were. Just give us a little flavour. What's the most gruesome Victorian bit of entertainment? Oh, well, definitely going to a hanging is a pretty good entertainment in the 19th century, but also penny bloods, penny dreadfuls. What's a penny dreadful? Kind of little chapters of books that are sold in penny numbers, you know, with lurid illustrations showing tremendous amounts of bloodshed sold in penny numbers, you know, with lurid illustrations showing tremendous amounts of bloodshed. And of course, don't forget Punch and Judy.

Love Punch and Judy. Didn't that come from Italy, Punch and Judy? Yes, Pulcinello. Commedia dell'arte. Yeah, there you go. There you go. Hey, we could talk all day about fun, Victorian, terrible things. But we shall leave it there. Rosalind, thank you very much indeed for being on the show. Thanks for having me. Thanks very much for listening to today's episode. Hope you enjoyed it. If you're enjoying the show, please make sure you take a second to rate it and review the episode. It really, really helps us out.

So thank you very much if you could do that. Remember also to subscribe to the show as I'm back every Wednesday and Sunday with brand new episodes. And coming up next, we've got an episode with the fabulous and brilliant Tamandra Harkness on the invention of zero. I hope to see you then. Today's episode features music from Epidemic Sound. sound. This is History's Heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas, and the courage to stand alone. Including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War. You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you.

Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts.