Grinding the Wind
In 1818 an engineer named William Cubitt — later Sir William, a builder of railways and canals and in time president of the Institution of Civil Engineers — was visiting the gaol at Bury St Edmunds and observed a yard full of prisoners lying about doing nothing. This offended him, in the specific way that idleness offended the nineteenth-century English mind, and he designed a solution. The treadwheel was a long paddle wheel, like a mill wheel with the water taken out and men put in. Prisoners stood on the paddles in a line, holding a bar, and climbed. The wheel turned. They climbed again. A man might do the equivalent of eight or ten thousand vertical feet in a day, which is Everest and a half, in a shed, in Suffolk.
It spread across Britain within a decade and was regarded as a triumph of humane reform, because it replaced flogging.
Sometimes the wheel did something. It ground corn or pumped water, and where it did, the prison could sell the flour and offset the cost of its own inmates, which was considered highly satisfactory. But in a great many prisons it was connected to nothing at all except a brake — a set of vanes that beat the air to provide resistance, adjustable by the governor. The prisoners had a phrase for this, and it is one of the best phrases the English language has produced under duress: they were grinding the wind.
Sit with that. A machine, in a public institution, funded by the state, whose function was to convert human exertion into precisely nothing, with an adjustable dial so that the nothing could be made harder to produce. And the reason it was thought valuable — the reason reformers approved of it — was that it was understood to be morally improving. The labour did not need a product. The labour was the product. Its purpose was to occupy, exhaust, and discipline, and the absence of any output was not a design flaw; in some accounts it was preferable, because work that produced goods might be mistaken for a trade, and a trade would be a skill, and a skill might be useful to the man afterwards, which was not the idea.
Its companion device was the crank: a handle in a cell, attached to a counter, which a prisoner turned ten or fifteen thousand times a day before he was fed. The resistance could be increased by tightening a screw on the mechanism, which is where — depending on which etymologist you trust, and I have never found one who sounds entirely certain — the slang term for a prison officer is supposed to come from. The screw was the man with the screw.
Oscar Wilde did the wheel at Pentonville and then at Reading, and it is generally reckoned to have contributed to killing him. Parliament abolished both devices in 1898.
