The Eathen

The treadmill was invented in 1818 to punish prisoners, and Britain eventually took it out of its jails for being too cruel. Its designer, the engineer William Cubitt, looked at convicts lying idle and decided they needed the habit of industry. His machine was a long wooden wheel with steps set into it, wide enough for a row of men. They climbed, the wheel turned under them, and they climbed again. The regulation day was six hours: fifteen minutes on, five off, in silence. At the standard speed that came to 8,640 feet of climbing a day, nearly twice the height of Ben Nevis. In some prisons the wheel ground corn. In others it was connected to nothing at all, and the men called it grinding the wind. Dozens of English prisons installed one. Oscar Wilde was put on one at Pentonville. The Prison Act of 1898 ended them, and by 1902 the last had stopped turning. In the late 1960s an American engineer started selling one for the home, and the modern gym is now built around rows of them facing a wall, with a television to stop you noticing. The punishment was never the climbing. It was the hours: the same movement at the same pace, going nowhere, until the will gave out before the legs did. Building anyone up was never part of the sentence. Anyone over 60 who walks into a gym today gets pointed straight at the machine Britain retired from its prisons, and steered away from the barbell, the one thing in the building that would keep them off the floor.

Canadian police spent the 1950s and 60s shooting the sled dogs of the Inuit, and a people who had fed themselves off the sea ice for a thousand years ended up queuing at a government store. An Inuit family's dog team was its truck, its tractor and its larder. The dogs pulled the sled out to the seal holes and the caribou grounds and brought the meat home. They could smell a seal's breathing hole under the snow before the hunter could see it. A family without dogs could not reach the animals that fed it. The government wanted the Inuit in settlements, where they could be counted, schooled and housed. Parents were told the family allowance would stop if the children were not in school. And across the Arctic, Mounties and other officials shot the dogs, often in front of their owners. Between 1950 and 1975 the number of Inuit sled dogs fell from more than 10,000 to fewer than 1,000. In 2006 the RCMP investigated itself and concluded it had only been protecting public safety. A judge's inquiry in Quebec found the dogs had been killed to force the Inuit into the settlements. In November 2024 the Canadian government apologised to the Inuit of northern Quebec, conceded that the killings had left families hungry and cut off from the land, and paid C$45 million. The settlements had a store, and the store sold flour, sugar, lard and tea. Nunavut now has the highest rate of household food insecurity in Canada. Nobody ever passed a law telling an Inuk he could not hunt. They shot his dogs, put his children in a school and opened a shop, and let the rest follow. It is never the hunting they ban. It is whatever the hunting depends on.

How butter is made. Take cream from a cow. Shake it. Pour off the buttermilk. Salt it. Three steps, and a child can do all of them. How seed oil is made. Take seeds. Cook them at 88°C to split the cell walls and kill the proteins. Crush them under tonnes of pressure. Soak the paste in hexane, a petroleum solvent used to strip grease off engine parts. Boil most of the hexane back off. Some stays in. The regulators have had a think and decided they are relaxed about it. Wash the brown, stinking sludge in caustic soda, because the oil has gone rancid before it has left the factory. Bleach it through clay, so you never find out what colour it really is. Steam it at 240°C under vacuum for an hour to take the smell off, because without this step no human being would let it near a frying pan. Pour the clear, odourless, flavourless result into a plastic bottle and put a heart on the label. Nine steps, a chemical plant and a fire certificate. But yes. Healthier than the one the child made.

The year is 1956. Your mother is expecting you, and her doctor smokes through the appointment. More doctors smoke Camels than any other brand, the adverts say, and he tells her a few a day will settle her nerves and keep the baby small for an easy birth. The year is 1960. Your first proper shoes come from a shop with an X-ray machine in the corner. You slide your feet into the slot and watch your own toe bones wriggle, green and glowing, while the assistant checks the fit. You go back every time your feet grow. The year is 1961. Your mother is expecting your sister and the sickness is bad. The chemist has a new tablet, advertised as completely safe in pregnancy. Your sister arrives the next year alongside 10,000 other babies whose mothers took it, and some of them arrive without arms. The year is 1964. Three sore throats, so the tonsils come out, as they do for over a million children a year on both sides of the Atlantic. Twenty beds, and the promise of ice cream. Nobody asks what the tonsils were for. They were the immune system, and the operation never did much for the throats. The year is 1972. You are sixteen and every car on earth runs on leaded petrol. The lead comes out of the exhaust and settles on the playground, the vegetable patch and the blood of every child walking to school. The men who put it in the petrol knew what it did to a brain in the 1920s. The ban arrives in your forties. The year is 1981. Your mother's hands have gone stiff. The doctor has a new arthritis tablet with the biggest launch the drug industry has ever mounted. Two years later it is pulled on both sides of the Atlantic, with dozens of pensioners dead whose kidneys could not clear it. She gets off lightly: the sun burns her on it, and she spends a summer behind the curtains. The year is 1991. Your father is diabetic, and the dietitian hands him a sheet. More than half his calories are to come from carbohydrate: bread, potatoes, pasta, cereal. His sugar goes up on it, so his insulin goes up with it, and his waist follows. He does as he is told for twenty years. The year is 1998. Your back has gone. The doctor has a new opioid, and the rep carries a letter from a medical journal saying addiction on it is under 1%. The letter is five sentences long. The company pleads guilty twice, and by the second time more than half a million Americans are dead. The year is 2002. Your knees hurt, and the doctor has a new pill that is kinder on the stomach. You take it for two years, the same two years the maker is sitting on its own heart data. It is withdrawn with as many as 140,000 heart attacks laid at its door. Your heart was fine. The man next door's was not. The year is 2008. Your wife has a prolapse after three children, and the surgeon fits a strip of plastic mesh. Once the tissue grows through it, it cannot come out. Australia apologises to its women in 2018, America bans it in 2019, Britain apologises in 2020. Your wife gets hers by press release. The year is 2026. You are seventy, and the new doctor has a screen and a number for everything. The meat on your plate is a hazard. The oil in the bottle is good for your heart. The injection is for life. He is the age the first doctor was when he lit a Camel in front of your mother, and every bit as sure. Not one of them was a rogue. Every one was the standard of care, taught to the next doctor, printed on the leaflet, and handed to a family with no way to check it. You have spent seventy years as the experiment. The results come out after you are gone, under somebody else's name, and the chair you are sitting in is where they recruit for the next one.