First 4-Minute Mile Was in 1770

Most people familiar with the sport of running remember that the first ever recorded sub-four-minute mile was accomplished by Roger Bannister on May 6, 1954. But somebody started looking things up and discovered that back in the 18th Century a few runners were reported to have got there first.

It was on May 9, 1770 when James Parrott, a street fruit & vegetable seller in London, was bet the grand total of 15 guineas (about $200 today) to run a mile in under four and a half minutes. He took the bet since he probably only earned about 50 guineas a year at the time selling fruits and vegetables.

With money on the line, it's likely that umpires on both sides carefully checked the watches, locked them in a box to prevent tampering, and placed them in a horse-drawn carriage that would make sure they reached the finish line ahead of the runner.

After the signal was given, Parrott was away, turning briefly up the narrow confines of Rotten Row before emerging onto the flat, wide open space of Old Street. Legs pumping, heart pounding, he ran its length almost all the way to the finish, a mile away at the gates of Shoreditch Church. The result was reported in the Sporting Magazine of 1794: "1770 May 9th, James Parrott, a coster-monger, ran the length of Old St, viz. from the Charterhouse- wall in Goswell Street, to Shoreditch Church gates, (which is a measured mile) in four minutes." That is the first known report of anyone running a four-minute mile.

Some 244 years later, Peter Radford of the BBC retraced Parrott's steps and reported that estate agents and kebab shops now line the route and a massive roundabout has been added, but St Leonard's Shoreditch still looks much as it would have back then. Radford says, "All of the new buildings are clustered around the road which is exactly the same as it was then, with the same bends and twists and turns and width."

Radford is a retired professor of sports science, and also bronze medalist in the 100m and 4 x100m sprints at the 1960 Rome Olympics. He has a passion for runners from the past, and it's largely thanks to him that we know of the achievements of James Parrott and others like him. He's collected more than 600 records of running races from the 18th and 19th Centuries, revealing a rich culture of running and athletic achievement. "Women did it, men did it, young men did it, old men did it, fat men did it," Radford says. "Sometimes for a wager someone would say, 'I can run two miles in XYZ time while eating a chicken'."

A sub-four-minute mile was also recorded by Sporting Magazine in 1796. The article reads, "A young man called Weller, one of three brothers, undertook for a wager of three guineas to run one mile on the Banbury road in four minutes, which he performed two seconds within the time." In other words, a mile in three minutes, fifty eight seconds.

From a modern perspective, it's natural to assume that the further back in time we look, the slower people were running. But Radford argues that at the time of Parrott's run, agricultural chains would have been able to measure the distance to within a few inches. And, by the late 18th Century, the best watches were extremely accurate. Even a watch that lost five seconds a day could still time a mile to within a second. But crucially, the culture of wagers gave everyone a strong financial incentive to get it right.