Science Art: Reducing Apparatus, in “Phoney Patent Offizz,” The Electrical Experimenter, April 1917.

Scientific illustration in the form of a 1900s comic strip parodying early electrical experiments. Cartoon shows a man on a treadmill being encouraged to lose weight while unknowingly powering up the inventor's bank of batteries.
Scientific illustration in the form of a 1900s comic strip parodying early electrical experiments. Cartoon shows a man on a treadmill being encouraged to lose weight while unknowingly powering up the inventor's bank of batteries.

This is nerd humor from the dawn of the electric age. The “Phoney Patent Offizz” was apparently a regular column in Hugo Gernsback’s The Electrical Experimenter, a pop-science magazine. They offered readers THREE DOLLARS for the best patent.

In this case, an unscrupulous personal trainer is using his fat-burning exercise machine to supply an early battery-bank with electricity. “It is well known to phsychologists [sic] and alienists that there is nothing so effective to reduce superfluous ombumpoint of stoutish individuals than strenuous exercise, especially marathoning,” the patent explains. “The victim to be reduced is made to hoof it rapidly on endless rubber belt 3, revolving on its axis supported by bismuth casting 5.” And so on.

You can read the magazine (and a whole bunch of early 20th century nerdery) at archive.org.