Go Read This: The Verge’s favorite reads from all over the web
See all Stories
V
Pedometers tracked philandering spouses and sleepy employees back in the 1800s.
If you thought step counting and activity tracking was a new-ish thing, apparently not! This excerpt from Numbered Lives: Life and Death in Quantum Media goes into how wealthy people in the 1800s used pedometers as a form of surveillance — tracking naughty spouses, and checking to see if soldiers were properly patrolling... or just taking a nap during the night shift.
Surveillance and the Secret History of 19th-Century Wearable Tech
[The MIT Press Reader]
Follow topics and authors from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates.
Loading comments
Getting the conversation ready...
Most Popular
Most Popular
- Midjourney goes from generating cat images to full-body ultrasound scans
- Apple’s weird anti-nausea dots cured my car sickness
- Amazon employees say they’re facing termination for backing data center limits
- This Ghost in the Shell keyboard makes me want to activate the hundred spidery robot fingers inside my regular fingers
- Tim Cook says RAM expenses are ‘unsustainable’ and Apple is going to raise prices
