HISTORIES AND PRECEDENTS

Harnessing human powered energy is associated for some with harnessing the animal in us--our inner horse (plows, old mills, water pumps), or inner dog (sleds...), or with other humiliations. Certainly dogs, horses, and sheep have been put to work on early muscle-powered machines, including early versions of the treadmill, to grind corn, saw wood, thresh grain, drive piles, lift stone, fan fires, and turn roasting spits, possibly as early as 4000 years ago (Steven Vogel, "A short history of muscle-powered machines," Natural History, March 2002). But humans have also tread the mill to generate power since at least Roman times. Typically, though, it has been certain types of humans--slaves, epileptics, women, prisoners, children, or laborers in the mines.

miners and slaves
Georgius Agricola's De Re Metallica, 1556, includes descriptions of mining machines fueled by foot-treading as well as by arm-cranking. (The latter, involving body parts closer to the head, suggests more intentional, directed, and refined labor than the brutishness of using the lower body, which is associated with sex and base instinct and, again, our animal natures). It is unclear from Agricola's elegant illustrations what conditions these workers treaded under. In Roman mines around 100 CE, it was slaves who tread the mill both to pump water and to raise ore.

epileptics
The hospital of Bicêtre, France boasts a prodigiously deep well underneath, dating from 1735. The horizontal wheel that pumped the water was turned initially by twelve horses, then, starting in 1781, by 72 men, taking shifts on a 24 hr day. These workers were eventually replaced by epileptic patients and "madmen" in residence at the hospital.

women
A description of women working a treadmill in China, written at the beginning of the 20th century by an American company that made educational image sets for children, uses the barbaric implications of the treadmill to "other" the Chinese:

prisoners
But human-powered treadmills were used in America as well. The prison treadmill was invented in England in 1817 by Sir William Cubit, who observed prisoners lying around in idleness and put himself to the task of "reforming offenders by teaching them habits of industry." (Oliver P. Hubbard, The Treadmill in America, 1887, pamphlet) Forty-four prisons in England adopted it as a form of hard labor that could also grind grain.

The punitive treadmill was then implemented in America for two long years, between 1822 and 1824, at Bellevue penitentiary outside New York. Prisoners stepped on the mill for 10 hours a day (with 20 minute breaks per hour), grinding grain, often with a large audience of jeering onlookers housed in a specially built viewing house.

A small book (James Hardie, The History of the Treadmill, 1824), written by a self-avowed former drunk who found god, quit ardent spirits and took a job as gatekeeper in the prison adjacent to the almshouse where the ardent spirits had led him, outlines the many advantages of the treadmill at Bellevue: no skill is required to work it (women are as useful as men because it is only the weight of the prisoner that pushes the wheel); prisoners can't neglect their task because all must work equally and synchronize their steps (8 or 10 on the wheel at one time); the power it generates can grind grain to offset the cost of providing food for the prisoners; it is constant and sufficiently severe - but, "its monotonous steadiness, not its severity, breaks down the obstinate criminal spirit."   Hardie also points out that the architecture of this mill is such that if the supply of grain were to run out, the prisoners wouldn't know it, so they could still be employed in hard labor even if nothing was produced. Hardie's emphasis on this important detail underscores the fact that the prison treadmill was not simply an economic but also an ideological machine - intended, as he states repeatedly, to reform moral character.

children
Jeremy Bentham's famous Panopticon (1787) envisioned an economically self-sufficient prison on the model of a slave labor camp that supported itself through internal factories worked by the inmates. Those inmates included children; the factories would be powered by mechanisms attached to the children's seesaws, swings, and merry-go-rounds, translating play into work. A recent invention in 2003 by Raj Pandian, engineer at Tulane University, transforms the energy from children's seesaws, swings, and merry-go-rounds into electricity. Pandian's project is intended to contribute a partial solution to affordable and sustainable energy in places that have none. Clearly his humanitarian invention comes at a different time, for a different purpose, and from a different mindset altogether than Bentham's utilitarian one, though both designs attempt to translate play into work.

pleasure
The present initiative, which translates voluntarily expended exercise energy (a kind of adult "play") into power, shares a similar structure. But it's not quite the same, as working out for some adults is truly hard work, and not especially fun. But we still sign up and pay the monthly membership. One might think that we had internalized punishment, and transformed it into a form of pleasure. The monotonous repetition that was considered worse than pain but useful for squashing the spirit of resistance is now enjoyed, or at least tolerated for the sake of other priorities, like health, beauty, energy, vanity, or offsetting boredom. "Notions of Expenditure" acknowledges a cultural moment when individual interests are elevated above the collective, but why not parasitize those individual energies to build a collective vision of the future?

health and space The first private health club in the U.S. was started by Professor Louis Attila in 1894. Cardio workout machines entered the clubs much later and were developed initially for the hospital. The first medical treadmill designed to diagnose heart and lung disease was invented by Dr. Robert Bruce and Wayne Quinton at the University of Washington in 1952. Dr. Kenneth Cooper's research on the benefits of aerobic exercise, published in 1968 ( Aerobics ), provided a medical argument to support the commercial development of the home treadmill and exercise bike. Tunturi, Schwinn, and LifeCycle produced stationary bikes in the mid and late 60s; Aerobics, Inc produced a home treadmill in 1968. (The Jetsons' treadmill (1962) was designed for Astro the dog, and pre-figured home treadmills for humans by about 6 years.) Meanwhile Nasa was developing stationary exercise systems for long space missions because, in Zero-G, astronauts' muscles atrophy quickly. Early versions included a velcro mat and wooly socks; in 1973, Skylab went into orbit with a stationary bike and treadmill made of slippery teflon plate to which the astronaut was attached by bungee cords.

calories and watts
In his essay on the history of the treadmill, biologist Steven Vogel estimates an average healthy male body can sustain production of about 100 watts over an eight hour day of treadmill labor. He also estimates that a body would need 350 calories per hour to produce this much electricity, given that a body also uses food energy for basic metabolic processes and that we are only partly efficient at digestion. Shorter bursts of activity can of course generate higher numbers.

The Matrix might seem an unfortunate precedent for a collective harvest of body energy to run machines.   Another unfortunate precedent is Les Triplettes de Belleville, in which the energy of the captured bikeriders powers the projected movie that holds them in thrall. (Many up to date exercise machines have similar built in entertainment systems). But both of these invented precedents, as well as most of the historic ones, used bodies without their consent, and gyms supply more-than-eager volunteers.

war
Soldiers, however, constitute one category of potential participant that is arguably indentured, given that, for many U.S. soldiers, military service often seems to be the best if not the only option for employment.   Research attempting to harvest a soldier's autonomic body energy to support military operations in the field has become increasingly realistic, paired with research into the use of drugs and genetic engineering to design and insure a soldier's peak performance. (https://safe.sysplan.com/scihelpamerica/SOTO.pdf) While squeeze-powered flashlights and power generators built into the heel of a boot may seem benign, or quaint, or just a good idea, the overall military project is to design an increasingly invulnerable and task-oriented body, professionally fit to kill, and not to think twice about it. Since access to limited resources has traditionally been a major cause for war, next to the need to avenge a family member (still occasionally a cause), wouldn't it be better not to be so dependent on those resources to begin with?   We could all give just a small amount of our life energy, energy that would otherwise coagulate as fat, or be wasted in unharnessed exercise like grain left to rot in the field.

now The upstairs cardio gallery at the University gym pulses with the inaudible vibrations of competing headset tunes and the frenetic energies of 40 bodies pumping up and down on machines. We are working, in a way that used to signify labor, but generating nothing for all that work. Each of us may be healthier, but collectively our work contributes nothing beyond increasing isolation (one person, one machine) and narcissism (better butts). In the meantime, the Bush administration is waging a war to control the fossil fuel resources of Iraq, lowering emission standards of US power companies to allow more pollutants to enter our air and water, continuing to generate nuclear waste without safe storage, neglecting to develop renewable power sources on any convincingly committed scale, planning to drill, by hook or by crook, in the Alaska wilderness, and otherwise committing egregious acts of violence and injustice in order to profit from perceived scarcities of energy. This project is not intended to contribute to or condone the new anti-obesity measures being directed toward poor children, especially in the south-making them feel individually responsible for living in a culture that provides neither nutritious foods nor adequate education nor living wage jobs, resulting in diets that are cheap and compensatory. But it is intended to stimulate thinking about every day activities in relation to larger systems and public policies, as well as to generate collective solutions.