Charles Atlas

30 October 1892 – 24 December 1972 · Acri, Calabria → Brooklyn → Long Beach, New York

Charles Atlas — born Angelo Siciliano in Calabria — built the most durable American mail-order physical-culture business of the twentieth century. His Dynamic Tension course, sold by mail from 1922 and by Charles Atlas Ltd. from 1929, is still marketed, and the "97-pound weakling" advertisement that ran in comic books for decades is one of the best-known campaigns in American advertising.

Origins

Siciliano was born in Acri, in the province of Cosenza, on 30 October 1892, and moved to Brooklyn in 1904, later working in a leather-goods business. He tried weights, pulley exercisers and calisthenics, watched the strongmen at Coney Island, and read Bernarr Macfadden's Physical Culture magazine, eventually putting together his own system of exercises. He took the name Charles Atlas — reportedly after a friend said he resembled a statue of Atlas on a Coney Island hotel — and made the change legal in 1922.

The work

Macfadden's Physical Culture named him "America's Most Handsome Man" in 1921 and "America's Most Perfectly Developed Man" after a contest at Madison Square Garden in 1922. He worked for a time as a strongman in a Coney Island sideshow and posed for sculptors. In November 1922 he began selling a mail-order course written with the health writer Frederick Tilney, whom he had met through Macfadden. In 1929 Tilney sold his half of the business to the advertising man Charles P. Roman, and Charles Atlas Ltd. was formed. Roman coined the phrase "Dynamic Tension" and ran the advertising.

The advertisements, drawn in cartoon form from the 1930s and a fixture of comic books from the 1940s, told the story of a skinny young man humiliated by a bully on the beach who sends for the Atlas course and returns to settle accounts — the best-known version being "The Insult that Made a Man out of Mac". Slogans copyrighted in 1932–33 included "Let Me Give You a Body that Men Respect and Women Admire" and the "97-pound weakling" line. The campaign continued in much the same form long after Atlas's death.

Notable feats

• Titled "America's Most Perfectly Developed Man" by Physical Culture, 1922.
• Model for several public sculptures, including Alexander Stirling Calder's Washington at Peace (1917–18) on the Washington Square Arch in Manhattan, Pietro Montana's Dawn of Glory (1924) in Highland Park, Brooklyn, and James Earle Fraser's Alexander Hamilton (1923) at the Treasury Building in Washington, D.C.
• Founder, with Charles Roman, of Charles Atlas Ltd. (1929), which still sells the course.

Atlas was a physique star and showman rather than a competitive lifter, and no contest lifting record attaches to him.

Method

Dynamic Tension is a course of twelve lessons, plus a final continuing lesson, of self-resistance and free-hand exercises that need no equipment, each illustrated with photographs of Atlas. Its training value is real but limited; its success was promotional rather than methodological. Similar exercises appeared in the courses of Macfadden and Earle Liederman. Atlas's own account was that weights and pulleys had not built his body; how far that is true is impossible to establish.

Legacy

The Atlas course is still sold by Charles Atlas Ltd., and the brand has outlived almost all of its competitors. As a cultural artefact — the comic-book advertisement — Atlas is one of the most widely recognised figures in twentieth-century American advertising.

In his last years Atlas suffered chest pains after exercising and was admitted to hospital in December 1972. He died of a heart attack on 24 December 1972 in Long Beach, New York, aged eighty, and is buried at St. John's Cemetery in Queens.

Disputed and unresolved

Atlas's story that he was once a 97-pound weakling who had sand kicked in his face, and that he devised Dynamic Tension after watching a lion at the zoo pit one muscle against another, is the kind of promotional autobiography on which mail-order strength culture depended, and should be read as such; none of the exercises resembles anything a lion does. His titles were awarded by Macfadden's magazine rather than won in open competition, and he never won a title as "the world's most perfectly developed man", though his advertising used the phrase.