Before Arnold Schwarzenegger and even before Charles Atlas, there was Eugene Sandow. Rising from obscurity in Prussia, Sandow became an international celebrity during the golden age of the strongman in the late 19th century for his amazing feats of strength and his well-sculpted physique. While Sandow wowed crowds in the United Kingdom and the United States, he also preached a new gospel of physical fitness and well-being.
00:01:33.780Of course. It'll be a great pleasure. A hundred years ago, Eugene Sandow would have been one
00:01:38.960of the most famous people on the planet. He was famous in North America. He was famous
00:01:43.160in Great Britain. He was famous in Europe. He was famous the length and breadth of the
00:01:48.100British Empire. And he was famous for having the most extraordinary male body, obviously
00:01:53.200male body. He was known in his day as the perfect man. And he celebrated for the perfection
00:02:01.380of his body, but also for being one of the strongest people on the planet as well. He never
00:02:08.460actually said that he was the strongest man in the world, but other people made that claim
00:02:12.820for him. So that's really who he was in terms of celebrity in his heyday. He was born in
00:02:18.7201867 in East Prussia, in a place that is now part of Russia, Königsberg, and no longer
00:02:25.720exists actually. It's called Kaliningrad now. And that was in 1867. And he came to prominence
00:02:32.360in 1889 when he jumped onto a music hall stage in London and entered into a challenge. And
00:02:40.080he won this challenge and thereafter became almost overnight a celebrity on the music hall
00:02:46.620stage. In 1893, he came to North America, spent a number of years over in your part of
00:02:52.720the world and became very celebrated on the vaudeville circuit. Then he went back to London
00:02:57.940in 1897. A very rich man, he had accumulated about $250,000 of earnings by that time. And
00:03:06.000with that, he set up his own fitness establishment and a mail order business in which he sold the
00:03:14.220secrets of bodily perfection by mail order. And he had tens, if not hundreds of thousands
00:03:19.200of adherents all around the world. And then he went on to build up an even more ambitious
00:03:24.420business empire, for example, manufacturing coffee and cocoa powder. And I'm afraid to
00:03:33.480say that it all went badly wrong at the time of the First World War, and his business failed.
00:03:38.420And after the First World War, he went into obscurity. And when he died in 1925, he was actually buried
00:03:47.380in an unmarked grave in Putney Bale Cemetery in southwest London.
00:03:52.700Wow. So he was really the proto Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Jack LaLanne. I mean, he was one of the
00:03:59.980first people who kind of got involved in the physical fitness movement then.
00:04:03.380Yeah, he invented, they didn't call it physical fitness in those days, they call it physical
00:04:08.540culture. And he really was the pioneer of that. And Schwarzenegger explicitly credits some of his
00:04:15.320own training and some of his own motivation to Sandow. Sandow invented a certain exercise
00:04:20.200regime, and Schwarzenegger based his own regime in his early days as a strongman, as a bodybuilder,
00:04:26.560on Sandow's recommendations. And as you'll know, if you win the Mr. Atlas bodybuilding competition,
00:04:33.160you get a Sandow statuette, a little statue of Sandow, not wearing very many clothes, but
00:04:39.500he had this kind of body that is still to this day celebrated in those circles. Charles Atlas
00:04:44.940also owed debt to Sandow. So he really was the very first person to be anything more than,
00:04:51.700if you like, a kind of circus strongman.
00:04:54.060So, I mean, that's one of the impressions I got when I was reading this book, was that
00:04:57.220what Sandow was doing was something new. It was bizarre. I mean, the whole idea of
00:05:03.360shaping your body and being obsessed about your, you know, your muscles and exercising and nutrition,
00:05:09.740that it was sort of a novelty. And during the Victorian times, what was the state of
00:05:16.740physical culture, as you said, around the turn of the century? And how did Sandow change the
00:05:23.900conversation about it and, or get people excited about physical fitness?
00:05:28.540He started off as, um, a, like a circus strongman. He wasn't actually on the circus stage, but he
00:05:35.140had performed in musical, which is popular culture at its most lively. Um, in London, there were four
00:05:41.960or 500 of these musicals and the American equivalent was of course Vodafil. And, and there were many
00:05:47.220strongmen. And, and what you had to do was to keep your audience entertained by doing
00:05:50.900feats of strength. Um, and just being ever more ingenious in lifting up people sitting on a piano,
00:05:57.520for example, or elephants or, um, cannons. He found that one point balanced a cannon on his nose.
00:06:04.920So in his early days, he was kind of like a showman, but what he did, um, quite remarkably was
00:06:10.640take the celebrity that he won from the stage to, uh, to propagate this philosophy of physical culture.
00:06:17.960And, and, and this was very scientific. He had, uh, what appears to be a very detailed knowledge
00:06:23.220of anatomy. Uh, he claimed to have studied, uh, university in Germany. We don't know whether
00:06:27.880that's actually true, but he knew the name of all the muscles in the body. And he had a philosophy
00:06:32.900which was basically, if you exercise a little and a lot in a very controlled fashion, using a
00:06:39.800dumbbell, we'll come back to that, but he recommended that you use his own patented dumbbell,
00:06:43.720that with a relatively small investment of time and effort, you could actually change the way you
00:06:49.940looked, change your shape, uh, in fact, transform your whole personality. And I mean, this is a very
00:06:55.080modern concept by, by, by exercising in the privacy of your own room. This wasn't something you did in
00:07:01.300the gym, particularly something you could do at home. You could actually look like him. So he,
00:07:06.200what he did was he turned his own body, not just his name, but his own body into a kind of global
00:07:10.480brand. And his message was, look, if you follow my regime, you too can look like me.
00:07:17.280And one of the things I remember reading that I thought was really interesting was how, um,
00:07:22.940the, the British military were, they were concerned about the, the fitness level of,
00:07:28.340of British men. Um, and you know, at this point they were trying to manage a vast empire and they
00:07:34.140were concerned that British men weren't up to the task of, of doing that because they're just
00:07:38.760so out of shape. I mean, did the people just not exercise back then? I mean, was that, I mean,
00:07:43.260did they not really think about that? They just, what was their idea of physical fitness before
00:07:47.460Sandow came in and actually showed them his scientific approach to physical culture?
00:07:53.480Well, people clearly played sports, uh, and the kind of sport that you pursued did depend on your
00:07:58.940social class. So upper class men would go hunting, for example, or they would fence, uh, or working
00:08:05.300club men would play football. And in parts of the colonies, like, uh, New Zealand in particular,
00:08:10.720people would play rugby even in those days. But what people didn't do was train in a systematic
00:08:16.260way to achieve physical fitness. And Sandow made this distinction between recreational exercise.
00:08:22.360So in other words, the exercise you get when running around a football pitch and this kind
00:08:26.360of disciplined scientific exercise, which had a very clear objective of increasing, um, your physical
00:08:33.120fitness. So that was, that was his philosophy. Now, how did that touch on, uh, the need of the
00:08:37.860British nation at this time? Of course, in the late 1890s, Britain had the biggest empire that the
00:08:44.120world had ever seen. But why were they worried? They were worried because firstly, there were
00:08:49.000challenges to their power wherever they turned, but in particular in South Africa. Um, and this was
00:08:55.000the time of the second borough war. And, um, this was a challenge to, uh, British power from, uh, a, a, a, a, a, a, a race of, uh, farmers, uh, outdoors, tough,
00:09:07.000wiry, Boer farmers who were of Dutch, uh, origins. And they very, very, very close to defeating the British
00:09:16.580empire and humiliating the British empire in a whole series of battles in, in, in, uh, 1900, early 1900.
00:09:23.740And to your point, when Britain looked for volunteers among its own population, there were many, many tens of
00:09:30.800thousands of men who wanted to sign up and go and fight, but their physical condition turned out to be
00:09:36.260quite appalling. Uh, and it's especially true of kind of working class men, uh, from the cities like
00:09:43.540Manchester in the north of England, for example, and also London, of course. These people had a very poor
00:09:49.060diet. They didn't really do any sport or exercise at all. They were much shorter than people who were
00:09:55.140of higher social economic status. So up to half the, um, volunteers, um, from Manchester, for example,
00:10:03.120were turned down on the basis that they were not physically fit. So Sandow came along and said,
00:10:08.360I can help this nation. If you follow my exercises, I can turn these weaklings into paragons of strength.
00:10:15.320So something somewhat ironic, because of course, Sandow himself was not British. He wasn't even
00:10:20.980a British citizen at this point. He came from Germany, but he was helping Britain to, uh, become,
00:10:25.540uh, more effective as a, as a military machine.
00:10:28.180Hmm. Um, so earlier you talked about how Sandow got his start as a stage show strongman. I, I, I find
00:10:34.920this whole aspect of the time period just very fascinating, the whole, this whole aspect of
00:10:38.600popular culture during Victorian times. There was this obsession with strongman. And I, and I,
00:10:42.600it's one of those, I guess, iconic images of the, the man in the leotard with the handlebar mustache
00:10:47.500lifting up, you know, a dumbbell that says a thousand pounds, how much of that, you know,
00:10:53.700stayed to those feats of strength. How much of that was actually Sandow, a display of his strength
00:10:59.220and how much of it was a little bit of, you know, wink, wink showmanship going on there?
00:11:05.280Well, that's a very good question. There was a lot of showmanship, but, um, it's interesting
00:11:10.520that, that Harry Houdini, um, who was no stranger to showmanship himself, actually investigated
00:11:15.840the whole question of stage strongman. And he came to the conclusion, actually, that Sandow
00:11:19.780was not a fraud. There were other people who were often caught out, uh, being fraudulent.
00:11:25.540So they would have, uh, dumbbells, uh, that were, that were hollow and they would pretend
00:11:29.600that they were very heavy. Or they would have machines, uh, that it would, it would look
00:11:33.360as though they were lifting up a horse, but actually they were using mechanical aid, um,
00:11:37.620to, to help them with that. But Sandow, Sandow, he was intelligent. He had served some time,
00:11:43.380um, in a circus. He knew all about, um, putting together an act which looked exciting and looked
00:11:50.480convincing and, um, uh, and deployed tricks as well as just outright strength. So for example,
00:11:57.340one of his party pieces was to, uh, lift up a man who was sitting playing, uh, a piano. Uh,
00:12:04.080and he lifted up the man and the piano and he carted them off stage, uh, uh, apparently,
00:12:08.900um, with, uh, just using one arm, one hand and one arm. And there was a trick to this because
00:12:14.580what he did was he put his hand behind the piano and there was a handle specially built
00:12:18.620where he could kind of slip his, his forearm in there and, and lift it up. Now it was still
00:12:23.500an incredible feat of strength, but it wasn't quite the naked, um, show of force that the audience
00:12:30.040might've seen. And there were other examples. I mean, he was very good at supporting, uh,
00:12:35.980very heavy weights. So what he'd do is he'd lie on his back and put his chest and torso
00:12:39.920upwards and they would put a plank or a platform on, on top of him. And on top of this, they
00:12:46.720would then load up, uh, people, all the equipment on the stage, sometimes actual wheel horses,
00:12:53.420uh, cannons when he was pretending to be, uh, doing a military scene and they'd load up,
00:12:58.840you know, more than a ton weight would go on his, uh, up to a stomach and he could hold
00:13:03.320on to that. He couldn't lift it, but he could certainly support it. And, uh, that's another
00:13:08.220example. Um, Edison, Thomas Edison filmed, uh, Sandow in an early visit to the U S I think
00:13:14.420it was about 1896 and Sandow is doing, um, um, full, um, somersaults from a standing start
00:13:22.680holding, um, to, I think that's 56 pound dumbbells. So one in each hand, he's doing, um, um, he's
00:13:30.840doing somersaults, uh, with that. And there was nothing fake about that. He was, he was
00:13:34.960very strong. He was very gifted and he was very elegant.
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