Two centuries ago, the county prison in Gloucester, England installed a treadmill.

It wasn't for exercise though.

In an era when many of the inmates there had been sentenced to hard labor, authorities

had been finding it very difficult to deliver on that promise.

That is until January of 1823.

That was the year a man named William Cubitt got involved.

He came from a long line of millers, people who understood better than most how to build

machines that ran continuously on the power of water or wind.

In Gloucester though, he was tasked with tapping into a different source of energy.

The prisoners.

When it opened, the Gloucester prison treadmill had enough room for 36 men at a time.

They would step onto the wooden slats and do a sort of walk mixed with climbing.

The power they generated wasn't wasted either.

In Gloucester, it was harnessed to grind corn, but in other prisons who adopted the same

form of punishment, it sometimes pumped water.

Many though did nothing at all, so they called it grinding the wind.

Or as odd as that punishment sounds, it was actually pretty mild compared to a lot of

methods used over the centuries.

In medieval times, they used the picket, where a criminal would be hung by their thumb

or wrist, with a sharp spike beneath their foot.

Deciding between standing on the painful spike or hanging from just their thumb, created

a painful dilemma for those subjected to the picket.

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