Warren Lincoln Travis

21 February 1876 – 12 July 1941 · Brooklyn → Coney Island, New York

Warren Lincoln Travis was an American professional strongman, billed as "the World's Strongest Man", who specialised in the heavy supported lifts — the back lift, the harness lift and finger lifts — and performed for decades at Coney Island.

Origins

Travis was born in Brooklyn on 21 February 1876 as Roland Morgan, and was adopted. He turned professional at about twenty-one. In his prime he weighed only around 200 lb.

The work

Travis made his name with the heavy lifts rather than the overhead lifts: back and harness lifts of loaded platforms, finger lifts, and endurance feats of repeated lifting. In 1906 a popular strength publication named him the "World's Greatest Weightlifter" and awarded him a jewel-studded belt. He was also a successful businessman and became wealthy.

On 13 February 1923, at the city hall in Augusta, Maine, Travis met the strongman John B. Gagnon in a contest for the unofficial title of World's Strongest Man. Gagnon answered each of Travis's lifts with a heavier one and finished by lifting a platform of 23 men, some 4,040 lb; Travis withdrew. A proposed return match in New York never took place.

Notable feats

• Harness lift of 3,985 lb, before witnesses.
• Back lift of 4,140 lb, before witnesses.
• One-finger lift of 667 lb, 1907.
• Endurance back lifting, 1927: reported as 5,500 repetitions with 1,000 lb — 5.5 million lb in total — in 3 hours 9 minutes, a figure not exceeded until Howard Prechtel's 6,066,060 lb in 1982.

"Challenge to the World"

Travis left in his will an open challenge, with his jewelled belt as the prize, to anyone who could match a list of his feats — among them a 350 lb teeth lift, a 560 lb one-finger lift, a 3,660 lb back lift and a 3,580 lb harness lift, all within thirty minutes. No one is recorded as having claimed it.

Death

Travis went on lifting until the end of his life. He died at Coney Island on 12 July 1941, aged sixty-five; some accounts say he collapsed during a performance at Luna Park.

Disputed and unresolved

As with all platform lifts, Travis's back- and harness-lift figures depend on how the load was weighed and rigged, and they were exhibition lifts rather than contest lifts under agreed rules. The account of his death during a performance is widely repeated but thinly sourced.