Warren Lincoln Travis

5 February 1876 – 22 July 1941 · Brooklyn, New York

Warren Lincoln Travis — the "Iron King" — was the most prominent American back-lift and harness-lift specialist of the pre-First World War era. He was a pupil of Professor Attila and the senior American figure in the heavy supported-lifting tradition between Cyr's retirement and the rise of York Barbell.

Origins

Travis was born in Brooklyn in February 1876. He took up dumbbell training in his teens and came under Attila's instruction at the New York studio in the late 1890s. He turned professional shortly after the turn of the century, making his name in Coney Island, the Bowery variety theatres, and on the small-town American touring circuit.

The work

Travis specialised in the heavy supported lifts of the period: back-lifts on a platform, harness lifts with chains, partial lifts of automobiles and other large objects. He toured the United States through the 1900s and 1910s, gave exhibitions for the U.S. military during the First World War, and continued to perform sporadically into the 1930s. He held what was billed for several years as the world record in the back-lift, exceeding the platform weights Cyr had claimed in Montréal.

Notable feats

• Back-lift figures variously reported in the 4,000–4,500 lb range across his career.
• Harness lift of a small automobile carrying passengers, performed as a stage piece on the Coney Island circuit.
• Lifting and supporting a platform on which a band performed.
• One-finger lifts in the 600–700 lb range.

Method

Travis trained primarily on the implements he would actually use in performance: the platform, the harness, the thick-handled dumbbell. He left no training book and his programme is recoverable mainly from interview material in Strength and the Coulter correspondence.

Legacy

Travis's significance is as the principal American successor to Cyr in the heavy-supported-lift tradition, and as evidence that the back-lift remained a competitive American category well into the 1920s. The category was effectively retired with the consolidation of the modern Olympic lifting programme. Travis's training equipment passed to a small succession of New York lifters and some of it survives in the Stark Center collection.

Disputed and unresolved

Travis's back-lift figures, like Cyr's, depend critically on the rigging of the platform and on whether the platform fully cleared its supports. His best-documented lifts are well-witnessed; the highest figures (in the 4,500 lb range) are less firm than the lower.