Treadwheel
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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A treadwheel is a form of animal engine typically powered by humans. It may resemble a water wheel in appearance, and can be worked either by a human treading paddles set into its circumference (treadmill), or by a human or animal standing inside it (treadwheel).
Uses of treadwheels included raising water, to power cranes, or grind grain. They were used extensively in the Greek and Roman world, such as in the reverse overshot water-wheel used for dewatering purposes.
They were used in prisons as penal labor in the early Victorian period in Britain as a form of punishment. According to The Times in 1827, and reprinted in William Hone's Table-Book in 1838, the amount prisoners walked per day on average varied, from 6,600 feet at Lewes to 17,000 feet in just ten hours during the summertime at Warwick gaol.
A treadwheel was also used in a submarine in 1851 to pump air to change buoyancy and thus make the vessel dive or rise.
United States
- New Salem, Illinois - an ox-powered treadmill operating a double carding machine (full scale replica).
