The Brixton Tread Mill or Everlasting Staircase 1822 - A Restored Print - Crime - Punishment Meets The Horrors Of The Industrial Revolution

Treasures from the Early Science & Technology Collection at The Willing Mind. By exclusive arrangement with The Grand Review.

Print size 24 x 20, and consciously formatted to work with a 24 x 20 size frame, or custom framed as you see fit. For further easy, inexpensive framing options, please feel free to contact us.

The Brixton Tread Mill, 1822. Illustration from an 1822 edition of The Gentleman's Magazine.

What makes America 'the good guy'? When I hear terms like The Price Of Freedom is Eternal Vigilance, I'm plenty good with that, IF 'eternal vigilance' includes regular self examination of who and what we are as a people.

Is there virtue in this or that path? Simple truth? Love?

Of course my myriad friends of color can guffaw at my cornball dreamy eyed WASPy visions, having battled through and continuing to struggle with the yellow brick road often paved with jagged glass, but I continue to hold onto the belief that only through regularly challenging ourselves can we raise the bar for all and always have something good and worthy to strive for.

Truth, Justice & The American Way. It's in the Superman script. The announcer says it. I believe it. That's the end of it.

In the Federal Period, one of the things we clearly did correctly right up front while tail dragging our virtues in other ways was was to choose to not use a new technology to punish prisoners. The Industrial Revolution gave us blessings and nightmares, but one of the latter was The Tread Mill, a British invention that forced convicts to walk up steps that never stopped. Eventually, of course, the man power, like horse power, was harnessed to drive machinery. Also known as the treadwheel and the everlasting staircase, this diabolical iron and wooden monster was meant to serve as a deterrent, but ultimately served the pocketbooks of those who benefited from the system.

In this one case, we were very clearly better than our former mother country. We declared them barbaric for allowing such an inhuman and certainly non Christian practice. What has happened in the latter part of the 20th century and the beginnings of the 21st century in America? We have filled our prisons with those who've had none of the advantages of the basic human needs we are capable of providing inexpensively for all, benefiting the privatized new prisons with endless tax dollars and even providing just a few pennies more than slave wages for prison production lines for goods that benefit the same sorts of people. Then we turn the prisoners back out with no training and entirely unprepared for reintroduction into common culture, and hold the door wide as they tumble back in.

Our revolving door has become our tread mill.

NOW... ALL THAT SAID, when I take this out to shows I listen to those who stop and spend time with it. Like with all my work, I want to know what they're seeing. Of all The Plethora of Pow!!! on display, what stoppeth you-eth here-eth? That sort of thing...

I get people who love exercise and who hate exercise, but some variation of a tread mill plays a role in that love hate relationship. They are BY FAR the biggest buyers of this print. I also get the science history types, and there are a LOT of them folks. I get mechanics and woodworkers and iron smashers, and sure enough I get people who've been in prison and those who are part of what is a colossal prison industry. Judges and politicians look, fascinated, but they never buy this particular print. Those that simply feel they're on a tread mill in some aspect of their work or life usually don't declare it right there.

• Handmade item
• Materials: Art stock enhanced matte paper, archival ink
• Made to order
• Only ships within United States.

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A NOTE ON OUR PROCESS, OUR CHOICES AND THE QUALITY OF THE GRAPHIC CRAFTSMANSHIP THAT GOES INTO OUR PRINTS.

Every print we deem exciting enough to present to the public via our Etsy store or available here at our studio has gone through a number of steps. The first of those is always discovering and falling in love with an obscure image, always an original that we can hold in our hands. That image is speaking to us, sometime screaming “Don’t leave me here. See what I am, what I was, what I can be, what I SHOULD be!”

There is a real sense of excitement involved, and a great many smiles and knowing grins when we make that deal and bring that ancient print, that battered photo, that scrap of ephemera that contains some scrap of genius from an unknown commercial artist home with us, knowing already how we mean to approach its restoration.

There is the heady promise of a further hunt just as real as what drags a weekend fisherman out of bed at 3AM to work a favorite brook as we start our research, looking for that great backstory, and both ready and willing to tumble down as many rabbit holes as are revealed to us to get that story.

Then there is a meticulous digital restoration that is as often as much fun as riding a vintage Moto Guzzi on a winding coastal road. I don’t care if that sounds crazy, it really is like jumping in the saddle! So many choices, so many chances to take to subtly or spectacularly give new life to otherwise permanently obscure images.

This dedication and the ongoing rush of joy in the accomplishment of it, and the opportunity to share the results in our studio and here on Etsy, is the fire of passion that keeps these engines roaring. We make every effort to ensure our customers are not just satisfied but thrilled, and we happily stand 100% behind our work.