Cruel works of many wheels: Prison treadmills and nineteenth-century sciences of productive labor

Treadmills were introduced into British jails in the early decades of the nineteenth century to meet legislative demands that prisoners be subject to systems of hard labor. Mechanisms were designed so that treadmill work would continue, even if entirely unproductive, and systems applied that allegedly permitted precise scrutiny of labor performed and of prisoners’ bodily conditions. In the plentiful publicity and fierce controversy that raged around the workings and applications of this scheme, especially about the relation between labor and production, the hosts of numerical accounts compiled in prisons and presented to commissioners and surveyors, became important evidence in contemporary projects on the physiology and physics of the laboring body, and, more generally, of the proper means of labor measurement. Some experimenters themselves walked the treadmills in London jails, conducting trials on their own conduct and their own bodily state so as to gather what was claimed was decisive information about the ways in which work was performed and its chemical and physiological basis best analyzed. Penal machinery played a significant and, in some clear respects, decisive role in the formation of sciences of energy and of labor power in the mid-nineteenth century conjuncture of mechanical discipline and the extraction of value from the human body.