The Inventor of the Treadmill Passed Away, So You Can Stop Pretending to Work Out

To all you goofball exercisers who drive your giant honkin’ SUVs to the gym to fart around on a piece of cardio equipment indoors on a sunny day, here’s one near and dear to your heart: the inventor of the home treadmill passed away last week. William Staub, a mechanical engineer, was 96 when he passed at his home in Clifton, New Jersey, and was apparently seen using his own invention as recently as a couple months ago.

Staub built his first treadmill — the self-contained type with all the rollers and motors built-in — sometime in the late 1960s. According to an AP obituary, he wasn’t a fitness buff until he read Dr. Kenneth Cooper’s 1968 book “Aerobics,” which suggested that mixing in some cardio work with your cigarettes and heart attack breakfast would be good for your health.

“Dr. Cooper said if you ran a mile in 8 minutes and did it four to five times a week, you would always be in a good fitness category,” Staub’s son Gerald said. “[Staub] said even I — no excuses — I can afford 8 minutes. That’s what excited him about it.”

It was Cooper himself that said a relative-inexpensive home treadmill would sell like hotcakes. At the time, treadmills were mostly large, doctor-only affairs, which meant that a home version could offer millions of self-conscious individuals the ability to work out even when the weather was bad.

“The treadmills we were using were very expensive, but there wasn’t one on the market for the masses. And that’s why he said, `We need this,’” Cooper told the AP. “I encouraged it. I said, `If you can develop a treadmill that could be used in a home or an apartment it would be a slam dunk.’ And it was.”

Check out the AP’s story for more on Staub’s background, but it’s safe to say that he had a massive hand in popularizing of home fitness. And despite that market being flooded with scads of ridiculous gizmos and workout tapes since, he also deserves credit for being able to first develop something that’s technologically challenging and useful, and then market it successfully — unlike 99% of said gizmos.

Of course, it’s also rather hilarious that Staub’s invention preyed — completely unwittingly, of course — on people’s natural insecurities about their image and health. Staub was just trying to make fitness easier for the masses, but he’s also the reason countless people spent untold piles of money on a shiny promise to themselves: that having a treadmill in the house would somehow make them work out when simply running around the block couldn’t work.

The treadmill — especially in its dusty, stashed-in-the-garage form — is the perfect symbol of people fetishizing technology to support their own delusion. Someone buys a treadmill because they envision themselves becoming just as fit and attractive as the person on the box, just as Apple has brilliantly convinced the public that its products are synonymous with being hip. Neither is inherently true — I mean, they’re assumptions based off marketing — but in any case I don’t get the feeling that Staub would be particularly sympathetic to all of the unused treadmills out there. It only takes eight minutes a day, after all.

Follow Derek Mead on Twitter: @derektmead.

• Vibrators Cured Hysteria But We Are Still Hysterical
• Science Has Good News for Chubby Gamer Kids
• Some Ways the Internet Can Actually Help Productivity