Charles Atlas

30 October 1892 – 24 December 1972 · Acri, Calabria → Brooklyn

Charles Atlas — born Angelo Siciliano in Calabria — ran the most successful long-running American mail-order physical-culture business of the twentieth century. The Dynamic Tension course, sold by mail from 1929 onwards, became the surviving giant of the field after the 1929 crash took out his principal competitor Earle Liederman. The "97-pound weakling" advertisement on the back of comic books for forty years is his.

Origins

Siciliano was born in Acri, Calabria, in October 1892, and emigrated with his mother to Brooklyn in 1903. He took up Sandow-style dumbbell drill in his teens, won a series of small physique contests in the 1910s, and was named in 1922 by Bernarr Macfadden's Physical Culture magazine "the world's most beautiful man" — a piece of marketing that he then converted into a career. He took the stage name Charles Atlas in the late 1910s.

The work

Atlas's first significant business venture was a partnership with the advertising copywriter Charles P. Roman, who joined him in 1929 and ran the marketing for the rest of Atlas's career. The Atlas course — "Dynamic Tension," a system of self-resistance exercises requiring no equipment — was advertised in comics, pulp magazines, and on matchbook covers using the famous "Mac" advertisement (a beach bully kicks sand on a thin young man, who orders the Atlas course and returns to settle accounts). The campaign ran in essentially the same form from 1929 until well after Atlas's death.

The business survived where Liederman's did not, partly because of Roman's marketing skill, partly because Dynamic Tension required no equipment and could therefore be sold at any income level, and partly because Atlas's own image — the courteous, well-spoken Italian-American strongman — fitted the post-Depression American imagination.

Notable feats

• Lifelong operation, with Roman, of the Charles Atlas Ltd. mail-order course, from 1929 onwards.
• Selected as the model for Roosevelt's George Washington statue in Washington Square (1939) and for several other public sculptures.
• Performed standard strongman feats — bending iron bars, ripping telephone directories, supporting weights — throughout his career, though he was never a competitive contest lifter.

Method

Dynamic Tension is a system of isometric and self-resistance exercises, performed with no equipment, in graduated lessons. The training value is real but limited; the course's success was promotional rather than methodological. Whether Atlas himself developed his physique through Dynamic Tension or through more conventional dumbbell training is contested; what is firm is that he was, from his late teens onwards, an unusually well-developed man.

Legacy

The Atlas course is still sold, in essentially its original form, by Charles Atlas Ltd. The brand has outlived most of the field. As cultural artefact — the comic-book advertisement — Atlas is one of the most widely recognised figures in twentieth-century American advertising; as a strength athlete he was modest and honest about being so. He died in December 1972 in Long Beach, New York.

Disputed and unresolved

Atlas's claim to have developed his physique by watching a tiger flex in the Brooklyn Zoo, and to have invented Dynamic Tension by inference from that observation, is the kind of promotional autobiography on which mail-order strength culture depended. It is repeated in Charles Atlas Ltd. publicity to the present and should be read as such. The 1922 "world's most beautiful man" contest is documented but was a Macfadden promotional event rather than an open athletic competition.