This year marks the 80th that Charles Atlas‘s mail-order company has been in business:
Atlas himself is long gone — he died in 1972 — and Charles Atlas Ltd. now operates out of a combined shrine, archive and office over a nail salon in the northern New Jersey town of Harrington Park. But the Internet has given Dynamic-Tension a new life. From all over the world, letters and e-mails continue to pour in, testament to one of the most successful fitness programs ever devised. And to its mythic founder.The man who made history marketing his muscles was an unlikely hero. Born in Acri, a tiny town in southern Italy, he arrived with his parents at Ellis Island in 1903 at age 10. His name was Angelo Siciliano, and he spoke not a word of English.
He didn’t look like much, either. Skinny and slope-shouldered, feeble and often ill, he was picked on by bullies in the Brooklyn neighborhood where his family had settled, and his own uncle beat him for getting into fights. He found little refuge at Coney Island Beach, where a hunky lifeguard kicked sand in his face and a girlfriend sighed when the 97-pound Atlas swore revenge.
On a visit to the Brooklyn Museum, he saw statuary depicting Hercules, Apollo and Zeus. That, and Coney Island’s side show, got him thinking. Body building was then a fringe pursuit, its practitioners consigned to the freak tents beside the fat lady and the sword swallower. Alone at the top was Eugen Sandow, a Prussian strongman discovered by showman Florenz Ziegfeld. Sandow toured vaude ville theaters, lifting ponies and popping chains with his chest. Atlas pasted a photo of Sandow on his dresser mirror and, hoping to transform his own body, spent months sweating away at home with a series of makeshift weights, ropes and elastic grips. The results were disappointing, but on a visit to the Bronx Zoo one day he had an epiphany, or so he would recall in his biography Yours in Perfect Manhood, by Charles Gaines and George Butler. Watching a lion stretch, he thought to himself, “Does this old gentleman have any barbells, any exercisers?…And it came over me….He’s been pitting one muscle against another!”
Some of us might draw another conclusion: he’s a lion. Anyway, this supposedly drove Atlas to create his method of dynamic tension:
Atlas threw out his equipment. He began flexing his muscles, using isometric opposition and adding range of motion to stress them further. He tensed his hands behind his back. He laced his fingers under his thighs and pushed his hands against his legs. He did biceps curls with one arm and squeezed his fist down with the other. Experimenting with varied techniques, and likely aided by exceptional genes, Atlas emerged from many months at home with a physique that stunned school chums when he first revealed himself on the beach. One of the boys exclaimed, “You look like that statue of Atlas on top of the Atlas Hotel!”
Fans of the old pulp hero, Doc Savage, may recognize dynamic tension in his series of special exercises pitting one muscle against another to build tremendous strength and endurance.
Anyway, Charles Atlas got his big break when an artist spotted him on the beach in 1916:
A boom in public sculpture was coming, and busy carvers were desperate for models with well-built bodies. Among the most prominent was socialite sculptor Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, who, watching Atlas disrobe, exclaimed, “He’s a knockout!” Further impressed by his ability to hold a pose for 30 minutes, she soon had him running from studio to studio. By the time he was 25, Atlas was everywhere, posing as George Washington in Washington Square Park, as Civic Virtue in Queens Borough Hall, as Alexander Hamilton in the nation’s capital. He was Dawn of Glory in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park and Patriotism for the Elks’ national headquarters in Chicago.
He went on to win a “World’s Most Beautiful Man” photo contest sponsored by Physical Culture magazine. 
When he brought on a savvy marketer, Charles Roman, who coined the dynamic-tension name, the money started rolling in. It didn’t last forever — but it has come back:
It turned out the World Wide Web was the perfect marketing tool: cheaper even than the back pages of comics, international in scope, the ideal vehicle for mail-order sales. Seemingly immune from inflation — the course now sells for $49.95, only $20 more than in the early 1930s — Atlas’ promise to “Make You a New Man!” was only a click away in banner ads on youth-oriented sites. The company says it now does 80 percent of its business online. “We are literally overwhelmed by the Web site activity,” says Hogue, who declines to provide figures on revenue or growth. And such high-profile brands as the Gap, Mercedes and IBM have licensed the Atlas image or “Hey, Skinny!” comic strips for retro advertisements.
Frankly, I’m shocked that his mail-order course could sell for anywhere near $29.95 in the 1930s. That’s the equivalent of hundreds of dollars today. The ads themselves offer a free 32-page illustrated book. I guess you don’t have to convert too many of those to make a decent living. It’s sure easier than selling and shipping iron weights.
I took the Atlas course as a skinny 17-year-old in 1975. I put 5 inches on my chest and two inches on each bicep — in three months! You can the course for free at the following link: Charles Atlas Bodybuilding Course.