Complex Numbers

Crank

Damn, people in the past sure had barbaric ideas about things like medicine... and punishment.

    Victorian Crank Machine: a soul-crushing gadget designed to break prison inmates  

I'm hereby calling dibs on Victorian Crank Machine for my steampunk band.

In the grim confines of 19th century British prisons, wardens sought ever more sadistic ways to punish inmates through forced labor.

Gosh, this never happens today.

One diabolical device they landed on was the crank machine.

Another was the treadmill,   which you've probably used voluntarily at least once in your life.

The crank was a hand-powered rotary mechanism that served no purpose other than to torment prisoners. Locked in isolated cells, inmates had to turn a crank handle connected to paddles that churned sand inside a box. The only output was soul-crushing tedium.

If this happened in the US, I'd blame someone taking seriously the specious claim that "idle hands do the Devil's work." I don't know; maybe enough religious nutbars stayed in the UK for it to be true there, too.

Also... let's pretend for a moment that it did serve some purpose, like, I don't know, turning wheat into flour or running a coal conveyor or the urchin grinder, or whatever else the Victorians needed done. Would that have made it somehow better?

To earn basic sustenance like food and water, prisoners were expected to complete a 10,000-14,000 revolutions per day on the crank, often working late into the night by candlelight if they fell behind quota.

I guess this was before the lightbulb was invented, or they could have used the power to keep the bulb lit. Maybe; I didn't do the math. But regardless, why would someone need light to do this task?

Mercifully, the crank machine faded from use by the early 20th century as more humane concepts of rehabilitation took hold.

I suspect the phrase "more humane" is relative. One wonders what punishments of today will be looked back on in a century with great disgust.