The Treadmill

Dan Snow's History Hit

History Hit

History

4.7 • 12.9K Ratings

🗓️ 25 May 2022

⏱️ 26 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

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.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This episode is sponsored by Audible, where you can now stream the new series of that brilliant Stephen Fry's
0:06.7	Secrets of podcast. It peaks behind the curtain of the 1920s this time. The life and times of the flappers,
0:14.1	police women, radio, the movies, jazz, the British sense of humour,
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0:38.7	Hi there, history at listeners. I'm really happy that Dallas Campbell has joined Team History. He's my best broadcasters out there.
0:44.3	He makes science shows. People watch them. They're great.
0:47.0	He has a neck of infusing about things that you never remember to get excited by. That's what he does. On patented history of inventions.
0:55.2	He talks about the things that have transformed our world. You know, our story is really one of inventions.
1:01.0	It's about these apes with these opposable thumbs working stuff out. So from bronze to iron to putting a drone on Mars,
1:10.3	we're just on one mad health-as-counter journey. Who knows what's going to end? If you want to have a few guesses,
1:15.2	you want to see where we've come from. Check out patented history of inventions with Dallas Campbell wherever you get your pods.
1:21.4	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.
1:29.4	That's the equivalent of going up the shard about eight times.
1:39.4	Hello, I'm Dallas Campbell and welcome to patented a podcast about the history of inventions from history hit.
1:47.0	Today on the show, I'm going to be talking about the torturous history of treadmills.
1:53.9	Some may argue that treadmills, as we know them today, are a punishing device and I think they have a point.
2:00.1	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.
2:10.0	The use of treadmills for fitness actually originates in efforts to treat, diagnose and eventually curb death by heart disease,
2:18.0	which had become a huge killer in the first half of the 20th century.
2:22.0	In the 1960s, we began to see studies that used treadmills to test cardiovascular health.
	...

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