🎧 The Treadmill
🎧 Patented: History of Inventions • 24m
Today on the show we discuss the torturous history of treadmills.
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 on the show today 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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🎧 The Ear Trumpet
Ear Trumpets are seen as old fashioned and clumsy, mostly deployed in pop culture for comic effect as a snarky shorthand for how old and out-of-touch a person is.
But during the Enlightenment there was a wider embrace of this new technology as a means of increased participation.
This episode we...
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🎧 Monks: Medieval Masters of Invention
In medieval times it was monks who were the masters of invention. They were the most educated members of society who saw scientific and philosophical investigation as a way to get closer to god. However, any experimentation had to be carefully balanced with religion, the threat of being labelled ...
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🎧 Spacesuits
It required borrowing skills from some surprising places to pull it off...namely, women's underwear.
With the help of Ryan Nagata, artist and replica spacesuit maker, we chart the evolution of the spacesuit from the Wiley Posts, to the iconic Apollo suits and beyond.
