Well an hour has 3,600 seconds. And US federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour or 725 pennies an hour. So that crank would get you about 1 penny every…5 seconds of cranking. Holy shit that’s bad. Imagine if cranking that was your actual job. Just on a treadmill of sadness.
You want to know something crazier. Sometimes the treadmills weren’t even hooked up to anything. Prisoners were “lazy” for being locked up so make them work. Don’t have work for them to do just make them walk on the treadmill even when it does nothing. It was literally Sisyphean.
Later, when prison philosophy changed, using the energy to power pumps and corn mills became acceptable. 44 prisons in England adopted this form of hard labour to grind grain. Others remained “grinding the wind”
There is also the minimum wage penny machine
Well an hour has 3,600 seconds. And US federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour or 725 pennies an hour. So that crank would get you about 1 penny every…5 seconds of cranking. Holy shit that’s bad. Imagine if cranking that was your actual job. Just on a treadmill of sadness.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penal_treadmill
There’s a photo from 1895! Holy shit.
You want to know something crazier. Sometimes the treadmills weren’t even hooked up to anything. Prisoners were “lazy” for being locked up so make them work. Don’t have work for them to do just make them walk on the treadmill even when it does nothing. It was literally Sisyphean.
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yeah and when you compare the calories it’s not even close. hash brown gets you a measly 140, while the gasoline gives you 31,000.
You should look up the Lumière brothers’ work. There is film from 1895, and some amazing upscaled/enhanced versions.
Well, it was just proof-of-work