![]() Apparently, this chair was so uncomfortable-painful, even-that no one wanted to use it. Thanks to the marvelous development of harnessed electricity, he engineered a wooden vibrating chair (above) around 1900, which he claimed could clear out the intestines, dissolve backaches and headaches, and improve muscle tone. Outside of crunchy cereal goodness, perhaps Kelloggs’ mostly lasting legacy is the concept of vibrating your way to fitness. Like Zander, he advocated massage machines as exercise, like this rolling device (above), which was used well into the 1970s, as a page from a 1977 JCPenney catalog shows. On the other, he advocated complete celibacy, female genital mutilation, electroshock therapy, eugenics, racial segregation, and even immersion in freezing radium-laced water as a therapy. Kellogg introduced several revolutionary ideas that are widely accepted in medicine today: that diet and exercise are vital to good health that intestinal health, supported by consuming fiber and probiotic yogurt, is essential to well-being that sex can pass nasty diseases that smoking can cause lung cancer and that coffee can do serious damage. John Harvey Kellogg was the chief physician at the famous Battle Creek Sanitarium in Michigan, a high-end health resort that inspired the 1994 movie, “The Road to Wellville.” Kellogg, who invented corn flakes and bran flakes with his brother, Will Keith Kellogg, the founder of the Kellogg’s cereal company, had some unorthodox ideas about health. Others, like this ab-rolling machine (above) or horse-riding simulator (below), had little more physical benefit than a good massage. Some of these were the forebears to StairMasters and modern weight machines. Swedish physician Gustav Zander is the man to blame for “the gym.” His Zander Institute, established in the late 1800s, featured 27 machines he designed himself to help his wealthy clientele improve fitness. Here’s a look at effort-free exercise gizmos through the ages. In fact, most of them have modern counterparts that are sold on TV informercials today. Despite what you might think, such pointless exercise contraptions are not just things of the past. While some of their inventions evolved into modern gym equipment, many were as physically useless as they were absurd-looking. “Kellogg had some unorthodox ideas about health.”Įxercising is an energy-draining and time-consuming process, so the minute we started making machines to do our labor, we also made machines to do our workouts for us. In fact, if it weren’t for Victorian ingenuity, such terrible places as the sweat-drenched neon-lit 24-hour gyms would not exist. Of course, as soon as we figured out how to avoid those laborious chores, we did. Not long after, we had to come up with new ways of staying in shape hence, exercise. When we had to kill, gather, grow, or herd our own food, working out happened naturally. ![]() ![]() Time was, humans didn’t have to worry much about getting exercise. ![]()
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