Now when it comes to fitness, we usually think of running, and the treadmill is actually the most common thing in the gym. But as a kind of fitness equipment, it gradually came into being after the rise of modern fitness in China. Running was not advocated in ancient Greece. They danced and wrestled, and the invention of the treadmill was only a hundred years ago. At the beginning of its birth, it was actually a torture device in prison.
If you lived more than 100 years ago, don't be too happy when you were asked to walk on the treadmill because of a crime. You will soon find that this is a very painful thing. The early evolution of treadmills is said to have evolved from "stepping on wheels". This traditional agricultural equipment helps people to grind rice and lift heavy objects, which plays a very important role in people's lives, but it has not reached 65438+.
He found that prisoners in prisons often did nothing at that time. Although they were put in prison for committing crimes, it is obvious that they didn't get the lessons they deserved in prison. On the contrary, businessmen at that time often hired these prisoners to do labor, so he also hired some prisoners to pedal the wheels for his factory. However, as a famous inventor, he is more enthusiastic. Through the boring work of pedaling wheels, he developed a tool specially used in prisons to punish criminals.
He installed a large cylindrical roller on an iron bracket, and then installed a wooden pole on it. After the prisoner climbs up, because the roller is cylindrical and rotates, the prisoner can only hold it firmly on the wooden pole, and at the same time, in order to maintain the balance of his body, he has to constantly adjust it, which seems to be similar to the effect of a treadmill.
Since having this kind of torture device, prisoners have been arrested every day in their spare time, trying to keep their balance while repeating boring trampling. They have no rest time every day, for more than ten hours, and are hung high on the roller until they are exhausted. More importantly, because the drum is very long, more than a dozen people can sit on it, and everyone must be separated by carriages to repeat this monotonous work.
This method was later adopted by various prisons. Some prisons even install fans to increase resistance, and even stipulate how many turns the prisoners in the prison must make every day, otherwise they can't rest. It was gradually institutionalized. Only in the 1960s of 1902, when a strong criminal was sentenced to run and fainted and died, people began to consider whether this punishment was too cruel. It was not until 1902 that the criminal pedaled.