Angelo Siciliano was born in Acri, Italy, and emigrated to the US at
age 11 with his family, which settled in Brooklyn, NY. He had always
been a frail and sickly child, often picked on by neighborhood kids.
One night when he was 15 he was on his way home when he was jumped and
severely beaten by a neighborhood bully. Angered and depressed over the
incident and feeling powerless because of his weak condition, he
brooded over it until one day he caught a look at a statue of the Greek
hero Hercules, which he had never seen before. Impressed with the
statue's physique, he started attending a local gym to exercise and
lift weights in order to make his body stronger. However, he discovered
that the more weights he lifted, the more tired he became and the more
his muscles and body hurt. While visiting the local zoo one day, he
became fascinated with a lion lying in his cage. He wondered how the
animal maintained such a powerful, muscular physique while cooped up
with virtually no exercise. Then he saw the animal get up and stretch
its body. Watching it pit one muscle against the other gave Angelo the
idea for a process that was to change the world of bodybuilding
forever: "Dynamic Tension".
Employing and refining the principles he observed in the lion--nowadays
called "isometrics"--he developed a finely sculpted body, and in 1922
won a national contest to find "The World's Most Perfectly Developed
Man" run by publisher and fitness enthusiast
Bernarr Macfadden. Someone told Angelo
that he looked a lot like the statue of Atlas outside a local bank. It
was then that he decided to change his name from Angelo Siciliano to
Charles Atlas.
Through a friend he got a job as a "life" model, where artists would
pay to draw his body while he posed. He was earning the princely (for
the time) sum of $100 a week, and he got the idea that if people would
pay money to see him, they would probably pay even more money if he
would show them how they could look like him. He began a correspondence
course in bodybuilding using his techniques. The business was mildly
successful until a friend who worked in an advertising firm gave him
some ideas on how to promote his business. Atlas began performing such
stunts as pulling six cars chained together for a half-mile, and he
once towed a 72-ton railroad engine more than 100 feet along the tracks
with a rope. Those kinds of things got him a lot of press coverage,
which in turn caused his business to grow exponentially. However, his
most famous tactic was the ads that he would run in comic books (whose
readership was almost exclusively young teenage males, a prime market
for his course) showing a puny man at a beach having his girlfriend
taken away by a stronger bully who proceeds to kick sand in his face.
Angered and humiliated, the young man sends away for the Charles Atlas
course, and in the next panel he's musclebound, buff and goes back to
the bully, kicks sand in HIS face and gets his girl back. The ad worked
beyond his wildest dreams, and brought him millions of customers from
all over the world.
In addition to his bodybuilding course, Atlas also started a string of
successful gyms. He practiced what he preached, and even into his 60s
was working out in a gym every day, his body sculpted and toned to a
degree that put to shame many men half his age.
Charles Atlas died in 1972 at age 79.
