biography
| name: |
Atlas, Charles
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originally Angelo Siciliano
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| sex:
| male
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| lived:
| (1893–1972)
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| biography:
| Body-builder and trainer, born in Acri, S Italy. He went to the USA in 1904, was anaemic and weak as a youth, and took up exercise at a Brooklyn Young Men's Christian Association gym. There he developed his own system of pitting muscle against muscle - what he later (1921) called ‘dynamic tension’. He built up his body, and was soon attracting attention as a strong man at Coney Island. He had meanwhile adopted the name of a statue of the ancient Atlas. Invited to model by sculptors, he posed for several public sculptures (including, it is alleged, George Washington in Washington Square, New York City). In 1922 he won a contest for ‘the World's Most Perfectly Developed Man’ and to capitalize on his reputation he opened a gymnasium to teach his system. Together with businessman Charles P Roman, he successfully launched a mail-order course in body-building, advertising it with his eventually legendary image of the ‘97-pound weakling’ who loses his girl to a bully at the beach. (It is probably apocryphal that Atlas himself experienced this exact event.) The mail-order course became so popular that he soon gave up his gymnasium to concentrate on marketing it worldwide, and it was translated into several languages. A precursor of the modern body-building movement, he maintained his own body so well that in 1938, weighing only 178 pounds, he pulled a 145 000-pound train 122 feet. |
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