Inventor of the Treadmill
William Staub, Engineer Who Built an Affordable Treadmill, Dies at 96
By WILLIAM YARDLEY
Published: NY Times July 28, 2012
Before personal trainers and paddleboard yoga, before “Just Do It,” Bill Staub read a book that changed his life. It was called “Aerobics,” published in 1968, and it declared that a better life was rooted in better cardiovascular health.
“It said if you can run a mile in eight minutes, you’ll always be in the upper echelon of fitness,” Mr. Staub’s son Thomas recalled.
So Mr. Staub started running — and soon made his way to the workshop at Besco, the manufacturing company he owned in Clifton, N.J. While employees on one side of the building made fuel nozzles for airplane engines and wing weights for helicopters, he was on the other side, building early versions of a device that the book argued had the potential to get many more Americans exercising — and on their way to that eight-minute mile.
The device was a treadmill, and the author of the book, Dr. Kenneth H. Cooper, presumed it would never be affordable for home use.
Mr. Staub proved otherwise. His earliest models, built under the brand name PaceMaster, had wooden rollers and a simple on-off switch near the floor. They were more rudimentary than the ones doctors had started using in the 1950s for stress tests, but they were also much cheaper, as little as $399 in the 1970s.
“He was the pioneer for the use of the treadmill in the home,” Dr. Cooper said of Mr. Staub. “He took away a lot of the excuses people had not to exercise. They don’t have to worry about the weather, safety or whatever may be. I don’t know how long he exercised for himself, but I know he didn’t die early.”
Mr. Staub died on July 19 at his home in Clifton. He was 96. His sons say he was walking on one of his treadmills as recently as two months ago.
By the mid-1980s the company he formed to manufacture them, Aerobics Inc., was selling 2,000 treadmills a year to a nation increasingly eager to work up a sweat in the rec room. By the mid-90s, sales reached 35,000 a year. Innovation became essential as competition increased. Newer machines could be customized for different speeds, for warm-ups and cool-downs, and to replicate hilly or flat conditions.
Early on, Mr. Staub’s son Gerald designed an on-off switch that could be mounted on the handlebars. His father was perplexed.
“My father said, ‘Well, why would you want to do that?’ ” Thomas Staub said. “My brother said, ‘To make it easier for people.’ And my dad said, ‘But it’s an exercise device.’ ”
The brothers bought Aerobics from their father in the late 1990s, then sold it to a private equity firm, which moved production overseas. The private equity firm filed for bankruptcy in 2010. With the help of an investor, the brothers tried to restart Aerobics, but it closed for good last fall.
Dr. Cooper, who is 81 and was among the doctors who monitored President George W. Bush’s health, said treadmills in general had a promising future. He pointed to a recent study suggesting that elderly people who maintain a faster gait live longer. “The next step is to use it to increase longevity,” Dr. Cooper said of treadmills. He runs Cooper Aerobics, which has two fitness centers in Texas.
William Edward Staub was born in Philadelphia on Nov. 3, 1915. (The initials in the company name Besco stood for Bill Edward Staub Corporation.) In addition to his sons Thomas and Gerald, his survivors include two other sons, William and Norman; two daughters, Dorothy Kentis and Dolores Colucci-Healey; a sister, Helene Walsh; 21 grandchildren; and 14 great-grandchildren. His wife, Dorothy, died in 2007. His daughter Patricia died in 1977.
Mr. Staub was a man of routine. He counted calories and did not invite disruptions to his daily diet, which started with tea and toast in the morning.
“If he felt he was gaining any weight at all, he would cut back immediately,” Thomas Staub said. “He controlled his life, and it gave him the results he was looking for.”
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