 Running on treadmill is hard work, perhaps even torturous, but the first forms of treadmills date back to a form of punishment and even further back as a form of power. In this video I attempt to build this ancient technology and see if I can harness it to power my own tools. In my last couple of videos I explored the water wheel, a way of harnessing falling water to power things like a sawmill. Unfortunately water flows are very seasonal, with mills often only running during the spring when there is a high flow of water. And completely shutting down if you get below freezing. And that is on top of the limitations of only being able to operate one in specific locations with proper streams. When we were struggling to get our water wheel to spin we resorted to manually moving it ourselves, which quickly gets exhausting. It doesn't take long before you try to optimize your labor and turn your water wheel into a treadwheel. Perhaps surprising is that some of the earliest forms of the treadwheel were basically used as reverse water wheels, rather than being powered by falling water. Human power was used to raise water, in this case to pump water out of deep mines. The need to pump water from mines is a very important thread to follow when it comes to technology and history, as it's going to eventually become the impetus for the invention of the steam engine. But before I took on building this giant human sized treadwheel, I actually built some smaller versions that I was hoping to do for a video to come out before that where I actually harness the power from some dogs. Unfortunately training dogs is actually proving to be a little bit more difficult than I had hoped. I'm still working on trying to finish this video, but the language barrier with the dogs has definitely proven to be a challenge. 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If you're not speaking confident within three days, they'll refund you no questions asked. Choose a subscription that fits your lifestyle. They have options for everyone. Ready to embark on a language adventure, join Babbel today and make language learning an unforgettable experience. Click the link in the description box to get 60% off during Babbel's Black Friday sale. To build our treadwheel, we're basically going to need to build a pair of rings and then connect them to form our walking platform. We're going to need four concentric rings in the shape of a dodecagon, otherwise a 12 sided circle. Each joint is going to be 30 degrees, so each cut on the wood will be a 15 degree cut. And hopefully, if our math is correct, that will form our dodecagon. So we'll see how it goes. The rings outside and completed, we added the crossbeams on them that will connect to the central axle. Then notched out sections to attach some crossbeams to connect the two rings. Have we established that it's very big yet today? We debated rounding off the rings to actual circles, but that felt like it reduced the structural strength. And keeping on the corners didn't seem to cause any issues with this design. Then it's just a matter of nailing in all the boards to form the walking surface. Next, we need the axle, which was designed to fit snugly between the cross braces. The ends would need to be rounded off so we could spin it inside the supports. Lastly, you just need to construct the supports. They'll hold it on either side. So I think we got pretty much everything together now to put it on the actual axles and get it spinning. So it's kind of scary. I think this is probably the first project that's really felt like if we lose control, it could run over and kill somebody. And it's the size I planned on, but in real life, it's a lot bigger than expected. Hopefully three of us can lift it up and put it into the side holders here. We're going to lift it up on some car jacks here to get it up. These are rated for, I think, 13,000 pounds. So if it breaks that, we'll know this is at least 26,000 pounds. On the side supports here, we have this kind of block here is so that you aren't splitting the wood here. Also is kind of a point where it's going to wear the most. So as it wears out, we can swap it out with a new block. And I have to rebuild the entire thing. So hopefully that works well. We'll have to grease it. It's also kind of triangularly shaped, which is kind of intended to hold it in place with a minimum amount of points of contact. Hopefully we can get it to work. All right, moment of truth. Time to get in. Be the guinea pig. I want to be on this side. It moves pretty easily. All right, I can see how this gets you dizzy. That is, oh wow. He didn't go all the way around. The use of the tread wheel as a source of power would diminish as the industrial revolution would have eventually provided cheaper and more versatile power sources. However, the technology took a slightly different turn in 1818 when the treadmill was introduced as a form of punishment in prisons. It would still be used as a power source to sometimes mild grain, but other times it would even be utilized and was just a form of punishment where prisoners would be forced to walk the mill for up to 10 hours a day. And it was eventually banned by the end of that century. In the 1900s, the treadmill was once again reintroduced with yet another purpose, exercise, and eventually evolved into the modern treadmill you find today at the gym. But this time around, it uses power instead of producing it. Takes a little bit to get used to. It's a little bit challenging to focus where you need to go and focus away otherwise you get a little disorientated and a little bit nauseous. But I have to say the center beam is kind of right in the way. It's almost kind of swap backwards a little bit from the post. Today, most people will compare the tread wheel to the hamster wheel, but really the human-sized tread wheel design dates back to early antiquity. Hamsters, on the other hand, were really only domesticated as pets starting in the 1700s, not really becoming popular until the 1930s. The first report use of the phrase hamster wheel wasn't until 1949. So if anything, this is a human wheel. So we're able to get the tread wheel built and actually came together pretty well. A lot of concerns. It's just massive. Running it is a little bit nauseating, I have to say. Your eyes kind of sticking to the wheel, which is spinning, and the world that isn't gets you a little bit nauseous if you do it too much. And it really helps just kind of look off to the side and focus on something. Then you can run pretty well. And the center bar is kind of a little bit in the way, but actually works pretty good and it's pretty easy to just walk in it and provide power. It's a lot easier than just trying to manually spin a water wheel or something else. So you can definitely see the value of these and how they kind of came into use. So these wheels were used to power a variety of different things from pumping water to grinding corn. One of the main things that it was used for is to power a crane since Roman and medieval times, where it could be used to lift pretty substantial amount of weight. So we're actually going to be doing that pretty soon here to convert the tread wheel into an actual Roman crane and see how much we can actually lift with that. Other things the wheel has been used for are things like the trebuchet was used to wind it up and store the energy that you're going to use to fire it, which is a large project hoping to get to at some point and build their own trebuchet. But for this video, I thought we'd go back a little bit to an earlier project, the Da Vinci Cam Hammer and see if we can connect that to the tread wheel and power that basically have a humid powered power hammer. And this is a very useful tool that can be used in a variety of upcoming projects. And I'm really excited to see what we can make with it next. Thank you to all of my supporters on Patreon without you will be able to keep doing this. Thanks for watching. If you enjoyed this video, be sure to subscribe and check out other content we have covering a wide variety of topics. Also, if you've enjoyed these series, consider supporting us on Patreon. We are largely a fan-funded channel and depend on the support of our viewers in order to keep our series going. Thanks for watching.