The Treadmill: Grinding Air

What happens when the punishment for going to prison is being forced to walk up an endless staircase for hours every single day?

In this episode of Torture: A Dark History, Kevin Young and Dan Hourigan explore the bizarre and brutal history of the treadmill, a machine that turned prisoners into human engines and became one of the most notorious forms of hard labor in 19th century Britain.

We’ll follow the story from engineer Sir William Cubitt’s original design at Brixton Prison to the machines that eventually spread throughout Britain, the colonies, and the United States. Prisoners were forced to spend hours climbing the endless steps, often under brutal conditions, with the work eventually becoming less about productivity and more about punishment.

We’ll look at the prisoners who endured it, the injuries and deaths associated with the machines, Oscar Wilde’s experience with prison labor, the strange variations of the treadmill, and why some prisons eventually decided that making inmates grind away for hours wasn’t quite the brilliant idea everyone had hoped.

And because this is Torture: A Dark History, Kevin and Dan bring their own dark sense of humor to an invention that somehow managed to turn “going nowhere” into an actual prison sentence.

If you’re interested in prison history, Victorian punishment, the history of treadmills, hard labor, British prisons, Oscar Wilde, corporal punishment, torture, dark history, and the wonderfully terrible ways humans have invented to make exercise miserable, this episode is going to be a long walk.

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