Pedometers and fitness trackers have been popular for many years, and they're likely to feature on many gift wishlists this holiday season. These days, it’s common for people to glance at their smartwatch or Fitbit throughout the day to see how many steps they’ve taken (along with other health and fitness data such as heart rate and sleep quality). Perhaps you’re someone who can’t relax at the end of the day without your daily step count reaching 10,000.
Yet although step counting has become an integral part of modern wearable technology, it’s certainly not a new phenomenon. In fact, pedometers were already being made in Germany as early as 1590. Thomas Jefferson is widely credited with introducing a French-made mechanical pedometer to the United States.
Today’s obsession with getting your 10,000 steps was predated by a 19th-century craze for pedometers. Newspaper articles from the mid-1800s sometimes featured amusing anecdotes about wives who had attached pedometers to their husbands in an attempt to keep track of their evening perambulations and check that they were telling the truth about their whereabouts.
Similarly, pedometers were used by some employers to determine whether their subordinates were doing their jobs, such as naval officers assigned to night watch duties. Yet even back then, people had already come up with ways to trick their pedometers, whether by simply shaking them for long periods of time or designing contraptions to mechanically move the step-counting devices and mimic walking.
By the turn of the 20th century, doctors and athletic organizations had latched onto the value of pedometers for encouraging people to walk more frequently. There are also stories of people being told by their doctors to get more exercise who then came up with ways to make their pedometers show that they were far more active than they really were—a scenario that undoubtedly still occurs with users of today’s fitness trackers and apps.
Pedometers were used by women as well as men, perhaps most famously in the late 19th century when they became a fashionable accessory. At elegant balls, young debutantes tracked their dancing activity on their pedometers, sometimes to the disapproval of onlookers.
Just keep walking:
- Before pedometers even existed, the Italian polymath Leonardo da Vinci imagined a mechanical step-counting device that he believed could be useful for the military.
- The success of Bertha Von Hillern, a popular pedestrian athlete who walked 89 miles in 26 hours in 1878, led to more women taking up the pastime of walking for their health, often sporting pedometers as part of their walking attire.
- The daily goal of walking 10,000 steps was popularized in Japan following the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. The “Manpo-kei” (ten thousand steps-meter) was released in 1965, leading to an explosion of walking clubs around Japan devoted to the goal of 10,000 daily steps.
