Bodybuilding

A sport that began as music-hall entertainment and became an argument about what a body is for. Eugen Sandow turned strongman lifting into muscle display in the 1890s and sold the look as health; Bernarr Macfadden sold it as a moral cause; Charles Atlas sold it by post. Meanwhile India had akhara wrestlers and Iran the zurkhaneh, strength traditions far older than any of it, and Monotosh Roy and Manohar Aich were winning Mr Universe titles in London in the early 1950s. Women built their own sport from November 1977 and had it absorbed, then spent forty years being told by rule changes to be smaller. Anabolic steroids arrived from a Swiss laboratory in 1955 and the sport has never resolved what to say about them, which is why this archive covers the autopsies as carefully as the trophies. It runs from Victorian physical culture to the 2026 Olympia, and about half of it is not American.

A chronological documentary of 1,066 moments spanning 1830–2026 on Loreline.

Curated by Olivier · last updated 2026-09-03

1. 1830 - Queen Victoria's Indian clubs, Kensington Palace. Exercise clubs used by the young Victoria, dated 1830 to 1835 by Kensington Palace. The implement is the mugdar of the Indian akhara, absorbed into British domestic exercise decades before Sandow.
2. 1831 - Roper's Gymnasium, Philadelphia. An American commercial gymnasium advertising in 1831, more than half a century before Sandow. The gymnasium as a paid urban institution predates bodybuilding as a sport.
3. 1836 - Exercises for Ladies. An 1836 manual of exercises for women, using light dumbbells. The high-repetition, light-weight prescription sold to women in this book is substantially the one still sold to them.
4. 1840 - Zurkhaneh athletes photographed by Sevruguin. Antoin Sevruguin's Qajar-era studio images are among the earliest photographic records of the zurkhaneh, the Persian house of strength. The building's defining feature is a sunken pit, the gaud, ringed by seating for athletes, musicians and spectators.
5. 1840 - Four Persian wrestlers, Sevruguin studio. Koshti pahlevani, the wrestling arm of the zurkhaneh tradition, is one of the two ancestors of Indian pehlwani, the other being indigenous South Asian malla-yuddha.
6. 1854 - Madame Caplin's chest expander. From Roxey Ann Caplin's Health and Beauty, 1854. Caplin argued for muscular development in women through resistance apparatus at a point when the corset was the assumed instrument of female form.
7. 1854 - Chest expander exercise, plate two. Caplin's apparatus plates are among the earliest published depictions of a woman using resistance equipment for the express purpose of building the body.
8. 1854 - Chest expander exercise, plate four. Health and Beauty was published in London in 1854, more than twenty years before Sandow left Prussia.
9. 1870 - Pehlwans at Hyderabad. Pehlwani formed under the Mughal empire as a synthesis of Persian koshti pahlevani with malla-yuddha. The name comes from the Persian pahlavan, meaning hero or champion.
10. 1877 - Eugen Sandow as a boy of ten. The opening plate of Sandow's photographic autobiography, showing him at about ten. He said he was a delicate child who took up physical development after seeing classical statues.
11. 1885 - Milwaukee club-swinging team. Indian club swinging, the mugdar of the akhara, was exported into 19th century British and American military and gymnastic training. It is a documented transmission from a non-Western tradition into Western physical culture, running against the usual direction of the story.
12. 1886 - Eugen Sandow at nineteen and twenty. Two studies of Sandow at about 19 and 20, reproduced in his own book. Born Friedrich Wilhelm Mueller in Koenigsberg in 1867, he had left Prussia the previous year.
13. 1888 - Eugen Sandow at twenty-one. A back study made when Sandow was 21, during the period he trained under Louis Durlacher, the Brussels strongman known as Professor Attila.
14. 1888 - Eugen Sandow at twenty-one, arm development. Sandow photographed at 21. He first appeared in London around this period, in the music-hall challenge contests that made his name.
15. 1890 - Strongwoman, from Acrobats and Mountebanks. From the 1890 volume Acrobats and Mountebanks. The music hall and circus were the only public venues where a muscular woman could perform, and the strongwoman act was a recognised bill item across Europe.
16. 1890 - Sandow as a gladiator, painted by Aubrey Hunt. Reproduced from a painting by Aubrey Hunt, who met Sandow near Genoa. Sandow was 23. The classical framing was deliberate and central to his self-presentation.
17. 1890 - Eugen Sandow at twenty-three. A study of Sandow in his early twenties from his own photographic autobiography.
18. 1890 - Louis Cyr with his wife Melina Courtois and daughter Emiliana. Cyr photographed with his family. He toured with his wife and daughter as part of the act.
19. 1891 - Louis Cyr, Canadian strongman. Louis Cyr of Quebec, born 1863, was the most celebrated strength athlete of the era. His feats were performed on the variety and circus circuit.
20. 1892 - Eugen Sandow at twenty-five. Sandow at 25, the year before Florenz Ziegfeld brought him to the United States for the Chicago World's Columbian Exposition.
21. 1893 - Eugen Sandow, statuesque pose with muscles relaxed. Sandow at about 26 in a relaxed classical pose. He derived his proportions by measuring Greek and Roman statuary in museums.
22. 1893 - Sandow photographed by Napoleon Sarony in New York. A cabinet card by Napoleon Sarony, the leading American theatrical photographer, made during Sandow's first United States tour.
23. 1893 - Bernarr Macfadden posing on a pedestal. Macfadden billed as Professor B. A. McFadden, posed in imitation of classical statuary. He founded Physical Culture magazine six years later and ran the Madison Square Garden contest of 1903 to 1904 won by Al Treloar.
24. 1893 - Bernarr Macfadden with hands behind his head. A second study from the same sitting. The fig leaf was the convention that kept near-nude physique photography inside the law.
25. 1894 - Eugen Sandow at twenty-seven. Sandow at 27, at the height of his American tour under Ziegfeld's management.
26. 1894 - Sandow reclining, wearing a fig leaf. An albumen silver print. The fig leaf was the convention that allowed near-nude male physique images to circulate legally in the 1890s.
27. 1894 - Sandow leaning on a pillar in a Samson pose. Sandow posed against a studio column in what contemporaries called a Samsonesque attitude, wearing a fig leaf.
28. 1894 - Poster: Sandow lifting the human dumbbell. A lithographed poster for the Sandow Trocadero Vaudevilles under the direction of Florenz Ziegfeld Jr. The human dumbbell act had men hanging from each end of a bar.
29. 1894 - Colour lithograph poster for the Sandow Trocadero Vaudevilles. A colour lithograph in poster format advertising Ziegfeld's Sandow touring company. The economy of the strongman era was theatrical entertainment, not sport.
30. 1894 - Edison Kinetoscope souvenir strip of Sandow. A souvenir print of the Edison Kinetoscope film of Sandow, shot and copyrighted by W. K. L. Dickson at the Black Maria studio. Sandow was among the first people ever filmed.
31. 1894 - Academic figure study of Sandow, Rijksmuseum cabinet card. A cabinet photograph held by the Rijksmuseum, catalogued as an academic figure study. Such prints were sold to artists as anatomical reference.
32. 1894 - Sandow academic figure study, second pose. A second cabinet card from the same Rijksmuseum series of Sandow figure studies.
33. 1894 - Sandow photographed by Steckel in Los Angeles. One of a series of cabinet cards made by the Steckel studio at 220 South Spring Street, Los Angeles, during Sandow's American tour.
34. 1894 - Sandow from behind, hands on head. A rear study from the Steckel series, made to display back musculature. Poses like this became the template for competitive posing decades later.
35. 1894 - Sandow leaning on a pillar, Steckel studio. A Steckel cabinet card. The studio column and drape were standard properties borrowed from classical portraiture.
36. 1895 - Victorian Music Hall Act, 1890s - Archive Film 1000111. Archive film of a Victorian music hall act of the 1890s, tentatively identified as the eccentric comedian Will Evans. The bill on which Sandow appeared was this: variety turns, comic business and physical novelty, sold to a paying audience.
37. 1895 - Sandow photographed by Benjamin Falk. A panel-card portrait by Benjamin J. Falk, a New York photographer known for theatrical portraiture.
38. 1897 - Eugen Sandow at thirty, muscles in contraction. Sandow at 30 with the musculature contracted. Ziegfeld's innovation was to sell muscular display rather than feats of lifting.
39. 1897 - Sandow being prepared for a plaster body cast. An unsigned photograph showing Sandow prepared for the moulding of a full body cast, made to serve sculptors and artists as a model of ideal proportion.
40. 1898 - Burlot resistance apparatus. A resistance apparatus illustrated in a German manual of 1898. Spring and pulley devices dominated home training before the loadable barbell became cheap.
41. 1898 - Madame H. Cloutier, strongwoman. A La Presse article on Madame H. Cloutier, a young Canadian athlete who set out to repeat the feats of Louis Cyr. Women performed strength acts on the same circuit as the men.
42. 1898 - Charmion at the Folies-Bergere. Laverie Vallee, 1875 to 1949, performed as Charmion, a trapeze strongwoman act. The Folies-Bergere poster is the promotional face of a career that put a visibly muscular woman on a Paris stage nightly.
43. 1898 - Charmion at the end of her act. Photographed by Alfred Ellis, 7 September 1898. Charmion's act combined trapeze work with displays of strength and muscular development.
44. 1898 - Laverie Cooper, seated. Charmion off stage. Her Edison-filmed Trapeze Disrobing Act of 1901 made her one of the earliest women photographed in motion for a mass audience.
45. 1898 - Charmion at the Folies-Bergere, lithograph. A lithographic poster from the Musee Carnavalet collection. The strongwoman act was a paid stage engagement with no contest structure at all, and it preceded competitive women's bodybuilding by roughly seventy years.
46. 1898 - Charmion, strongwoman. Laverie Vallee, 1875 to 1949, billed as a strongwoman. Her Edison-filmed Trapeze Disrobing Act of 1901 made her one of the earliest women recorded in motion for a mass audience.
47. 1898 - Poster: Louis Cyr, strongest man on earth. A poster for John Robinson's circus billing Cyr as strongest man on earth, lifting 4,300 pounds at a salary of 2,000 dollars a week. The billing was advertising, not an adjudicated title.
48. 1899 - Plate from How to Get Strong. From the 1899 edition of How to Get Strong. Nineteenth century strength manuals mixed apparatus work, calisthenics and dietary advice in proportions a modern reader would recognise.
49. 1900 - Exercise apparatus. A resistance apparatus of the period. Nineteenth century home apparatus ran to pulleys, springs and elastic straps rather than free weights.
50. 1900 - Anna Abs. From the George Grantham Bain collection at the Library of Congress. Abs was one of a cohort of professional strongwomen working the American variety circuit at the turn of the century.
51. 1900 - Anna Abs, second study. The Bain news service photographed strongwomen as news subjects, which is why an unusually complete free-licensed record of them survives.
52. 1900 - Katie Sandwina, the Lady Hercules. Katharina Brumbach, 1884 to 1952, performed as Sandwina, a name built to echo Sandow's. She headlined for Barnum and Bailey.
53. 1900 - Sandwina holding three men. The lift is the act's signature. As with the male strongmen of the same circuit, the promotional weights and measurements should be read as showmanship rather than record.
54. 1900 - Star of vaudeville. Vaudeville was one of the few paid public arenas in which a visibly muscular woman could work, and it was an entertainment economy rather than a sporting one.
55. 1900 - Sandow's anatomical chart. An anatomical chart issued under Sandow's name, part of the mail-order apparatus of courses, charts and appliances that made up his business.
56. 1900 - Louis Cyr, l'homme fort. A studio portrait of Cyr. He died in 1912 at the age of 49, of chronic nephritis.
57. 1900 - Physique study from the Edmond Desbonnet collection. From the collection of Edmond Desbonnet, who ran a school of physical culture in Paris and was the leading French figure of the movement.
58. 1901 - Hugh McAllum. Published in the May 1901 issue of a physical culture magazine. New Zealand and Australia had their own strongman circuits connected to the British one by touring.
59. 1901 - Indian Clubs and Dumb Bells. An instructional volume of 1901 pairing the imported Indian club with the Western dumbbell, showing how completely the akhara implement had been absorbed.
60. 1901 - Club and dumbbell drill. The tone and bulk framing, high repetitions for one and low for the other, is not physiologically meaningful, and it is specifically the framing that was and is sold to women.
61. 1901 - Woman's Physical Development, January 1901. Bernarr Macfadden published Woman's Physical Development from 1900. Macfadden's physical culture publishing empire addressed women directly, decades before any organisation would run a contest for them.
62. 1901 - Woman's Physical Development, August 1901. Macfadden ran the first major American physique contest at Madison Square Garden over the 1903 to 1904 New Year, won by Al Treloar. His women's title had no comparable prominence.
63. 1901 - Woman's Physical Development, December 1901. The magazine's existence is evidence that a female physical culture readership was commercially real in 1901.
64. 1901 - Bernarr Macfadden in Strength from Eating. The frontispiece portrait from Macfadden's book Strength from Eating. Diet, fasting and hydropathy were as central to his system as exercise.
65. 1902 - Cartoon: Sandow in the Days of Their Youth. A comic strip by Tom Browne published in The Sketch on 29 January 1902, imagining Sandow's childhood. He was famous enough by then to be a newspaper joke.
66. 1902 - Eugen Sandow at thirty-five. Sandow at 35, the year after he judged and staged the Great Competition at the Royal Albert Hall.
67. 1902 - Sandow instructing police in Bendigo, Australia. From Sandow's Magazine of Physical Culture, showing him drilling the police at Bendigo in Victoria during his Australian tour.
68. 1902 - Sandow and the Perth Metropolitan Fire Brigade. Sandow inaugurating the adoption of his physical culture drill by the Metropolitan Fire Brigade of Perth, Western Australia. He sold his system to institutions as well as individuals.
69. 1902 - A New Sandow Pose, in leopard skin and sandals. Sandow in leopard-skin trunks and classical sandals, published in his own magazine. The costume is pure music hall, borrowed from the Hercules iconography.
70. 1902 - A New Sandow Pose, number eight. A companion plate from Sandow's Magazine of Physical Culture. The underlying photograph was taken by a Melbourne firm.
71. 1902 - Newspaper advertisement for Keith's Theatre, Boston. A Boston Globe advertisement for a Keith's Theatre bill. Strongman acts were sold alongside other variety turns on the vaudeville circuit.
72. 1904 - Sandow in the French magazine La Culture Physique. A page of new Sandow poses in La Culture Physique, showing how quickly the physical culture press spread across Europe.
73. 1904 - La Culture Physique. Edmond Desbonnet's Paris magazine La Culture Physique carried the French wing of the physical culture movement. Physique publishing was international from the outset and was never only an Anglo-American business.
74. 1904 - La Culture Physique, cover. The magazine's covers used the same classical-statuary grammar Sandow had established with his photographers.
75. 1904 - La Regeneration du Snob, a satire. A satire published in La Culture Physique. The movement attracted mockery in its own press almost immediately, which is a useful corrective to reading it as uncomplicated enthusiasm.
76. 1904 - Max Unger in classical pose. The classical pose is the movement's central visual claim: that the developed modern body is a recovery of an antique ideal.
77. 1904 - Georg Hackenschmidt in La Culture Physique. Hackenschmidt was a wrestler as much as a strongman, and the two categories were not yet separate in the way they later became.
78. 1904 - Fred Winters at the 1904 Olympics. The 1904 St Louis Olympics included barbell and dumbbell events. Competitive weightlifting and physique display had not yet fully separated into distinct sports.
79. 1904 - Winner of the 1904 dumbbell competition. Winters won the dumbbell competition. Olympic weightlifting would keep the loaded barbell; bodybuilding would keep the developed body and abandon the measured lift.
80. 1904 - The Desbonnet school. Edmond Desbonnet ran a physical culture school in Paris and photographed its pupils extensively. His archive is one of the largest surviving bodies of early physique photography.
81. 1904 - Sandow's Body Building. Sandow's own book carried the title Body Building. The phrase predates the sport it now names by decades.
82. 1904 - Poses from La Culture Physique. The compulsory poses used in contests a century later are recognisably these.
83. 1904 - La beaute moderne. The magazine argued the developed body as modern beauty, an aesthetic claim rather than an athletic one.
84. 1904 - Pose de l'Hercule moderne. The modern Hercules pose. Hercules would return as the sport's screen vehicle fifty years later through Steve Reeves and the Italian peplum films.
85. 1904 - Alexandre Maspoli on the cover. Maspoli was one of the French school's regular cover subjects. Edmond Desbonnet's magazine sold the apparatus and the courses in its own pages, so the conflict of interest that would define Weider publishing was structural from the start.
86. 1904 - Laverie Vallee as Charmion. Photographed by Frederick Whitman Glasier, whose circus work is the best single photographic archive of the American variety strength acts.
87. 1904 - Charmion in a pair of poses. Glasier's paired study. Charmion is catalogued on Commons as a bodybuilder, which is a later reading of what was billed at the time as a strength and trapeze act.
88. 1904 - Miss Charmion. The strongwoman act preceded competitive women's bodybuilding by roughly seventy years and had no contest structure at all. It was paid performance, not sport.
89. 1904 - Charmion on the trapeze. The trapeze framing let a muscular woman be presented as an aerialist, a legible variety category, rather than as a strength athlete.
90. 1904 - Charmion posing on the trapeze. The trapeze framing allowed a muscular woman to be presented as an aerialist, a legible variety category, rather than as a strength athlete in her own right.
91. 1904 - Eugen Sandow at thirty-seven. Sandow at 37 with muscles relaxed. By this date he ran a magazine, a mail-order course and a chain of Institutes of Physical Culture.
92. 1904 - Portrait of Bernarr Macfadden. Macfadden, born Bernard Adolphus McFadden in 1868, industrialised the physique contest, the before-and-after narrative and the fitness magazine.
93. 1905 - Strong-Man In Leotard, 1900s - Film 96305. An early French comic film in which a circus strongman in a leotard beats off a pair of thieves. It records what the strongman was to the public before he was an athlete: a fairground and variety character.
94. 1905 - Bernarr Macfadden posed as a boxer. Macfadden in a boxing attitude. He ran physique and perfect-body contests, including at Madison Square Garden, and was prosecuted under obscenity law for advertising them.
95. 1906 - The strong man of the police school, Egypt. Photographed by G. Lekegian in Egypt. Egypt would later build an unusually deep amateur base, and Mohamed Nasr won a NABBA Mr Universe title in 1952.
96. 1906 - Maurice Deriaz. One of the Deriaz brothers, Swiss strongmen who worked the French circuit as wrestlers and physique performers.
97. 1906 - Lindinger and Maurice Deriaz. Physique performance was a paid stage act. The idea of a contest judged purely on the built body would take another half century to become the sport's centre.
98. 1906 - Maurice Deriaz, wrestler. Photographed for the French press. Deriaz is catalogued as a wrestler, which is how physique men earned a living before physique itself was a paying category.
99. 1906 - The Three Roeder. A hand balancing act. The acrobatic tradition would resurface at Muscle Beach in the 1930s, where tumbling and adagio came before physique.
100. 1906 - Charmion flexes for the camera. A deliberate muscular display for the lens. Photographs like this are the closest early twentieth century equivalent to a physique shot of a woman, made seventy years before any contest would judge one.
101. 1906 - Eugen Sandow at thirty-nine. Sandow at 39. Every measurement and photograph issued under his name was commercial material for his physical culture business.
102. 1906 - Sandow posed with sword and shield. Sandow semi-recumbent on an animal skin with a sword and shield, an image sold as the product of physical culture.
103. 1906 - Body building poses by Bobby Pandour. Bobby Pandour, a Polish-born music hall strongman whose real name was Wladyslaw Kurpiewski, in a sequence of posing studies.
104. 1908 - Louis Cyr on the cover of La Culture Physique. The cover of La Culture Physique for 15 February 1908, showing Cyr in a gymnast's costume embroidered with the word Canada.
105. 1908 - Ecole Desbonnet. The Desbonnet school's own advertising. The commercial gym as an institution begins here and in Sandow's institutes, decades before Vic Tanny industrialised it.
106. 1908 - La Culture Physique, 15 August 1908. Physique magazines were the sport's only distribution channel for most of the twentieth century, and their publishers were also its promoters and its equipment sellers.
107. 1908 - Advertisement in La Culture Physique. The magazine sold apparatus and courses in its own pages. The conflict of interest that would define Weider publishing was structural from the start.
108. 1908 - Emile Royer. A studio physique photograph from the French school. Desbonnet's Paris archive is one of the largest surviving bodies of early physique photography anywhere.

…886 further moments continue the chronology here. Full text archive: /loreline-text/bodybuilding.md

995. 1908 - Eugene Rapin from behind. The rear double biceps became a compulsory pose and remains one. The pose vocabulary photographed in Paris around 1908 is substantially the one judged today.
996. 1908 - Professor Desbonnet. Desbonnet styled himself professor, as did most physical culture proprietors of the period. The title was commercial, not academic.
997. 1908 - Edwardian women in exercise tunics. Published in a physical culture magazine. Women's exercise was presented in terms of posture, health and figure rather than development, and that framing lasted into the 1970s.
998. 1908 - Edwardian women in corsets. The corset and the exercise programme were sold side by side. Roxey Ann Caplin had argued against exactly that pairing in 1854.
999. 1908 - Article contrasting the clothed and unclothed body. Physical culture publishing argued constantly about how much of the body could be shown, an argument that produced Bernarr Macfadden's obscenity arrests in the 1900s.
1000. 1908 - Splendid physical types. A magazine spread of physique studies. Physique photography's later entanglement with early gay visual culture, and with obscenity prosecutions, runs directly back to this publishing tradition.
1001. 1908 - Bodybuilders with their trainer. A trainer with his pupils. The coach as a distinct paid role is as old as the commercial gymnasium.
1002. 1909 - Charmion, back. Dated May 1909. The back study is a physique convention, and its use here on a woman is decades ahead of any contest that would judge it.
1003. 1910 - George Poppoff. From the Library of Congress. Strongman and physique performance was still a variety act in 1910, and the international touring circuit was how the form spread.
1004. 1910 - Gama Pehalwan’s Tour of London 1910 I जब गामा पहलवान विश्व विजेता बने. On the Great Gama's London tour of 1910. Ghulam Mohammad Baksh Butt, titled Rustam-e-Zaman, defeated Stanislaus Zbyszko in the London world championship sequence that year. His career is documented in contemporaneous British press, unlike much strongman legend.
1005. 1910 - Eugen Sandow at forty-three. Two studies of Sandow at 43, captioned in his book to point out abdominal and triceps development.
1006. 1911 - Marguerite Martyn's sketch of Sandwina. Drawn for the St Louis Post-Dispatch, 4 June 1911, by the newspaper artist Marguerite Martyn. The sketch is imaginative rather than documentary and the archive presents it as such.
1007. 1911 - Marguerite Martyn draws Sandwina. The newspaper artist Marguerite Martyn drew herself into the sketch alongside Sandwina, for the St Louis Post-Dispatch of 4 June 1911. Sandwina was a leading figure in the circus performers' suffrage organisation, which links the strongwoman act directly to the women's political movement.
1008. 1912 - Katie Sandwina. Sandwina was a leading figure in the circus performers' suffrage organisation, which links the strongwoman act directly to the women's political movement of the period.
1009. 1912 - Physical culture class at the Grand Hotel, Leigh-on-Sea. A gymnastic physical culture class photographed at the Grand Hotel, Leigh-on-Sea near Southend in England.
1010. 1913 - Wrestlers at the Nouveau Cirque. The circus and the music hall were the physique performer's employers. The sport's economics have never fully escaped the entertainment model.
1011. 1918 - Macfadden advertisement, Are You in the Grip of Glasses?. An advertisement for Macfadden's eyesight course. His publishing empire extended the physical culture promise well beyond muscle.
1012. 1918 - Bernarr Macfadden cabinet card. A cabinet card of Macfadden held in the Harvard Theatre Collection, a reminder that physical culture was sold as theatrical performance.
1013. 1919 - Eugen Sandow at fifty-two. Captioned Power in Repose, showing Sandow at 52. Photographed by Warwick Brookes of Manchester. He died six years later.
1014. 1919 - Sandow posed against the Farnese Hercules. A plate pairing the ancient Farnese Hercules with Sandow in the same pose. The comparison with classical sculpture was the core of his claim to an ideal physique.
1015. 1920 - Athletic training at the Carpentier academy. Albert Carpentier's Paris academy of physical culture and boxing. The combined boxing and physical culture school was the standard European commercial form before the specialised bodybuilding gym existed.
1016. 1920 - Training at the academy. Interwar Paris. Weight training was still framed as preparation for a combat or athletic sport rather than as an end in itself.
1017. 1920 - Musculation at the Carpentier academy. The French word musculation, still the standard term for weight training in French, comes out of this milieu.
1018. 1920 - Athletic training. Progressive overload across load, volume and frequency is the operative training principle, and it was understood in outline long before it was named as such.
1019. 1920 - Portrait at the academy. A pupil photographed at the academy. The studio portrait was the school's advertising, as it had been for Sandow and Desbonnet before it.
1020. 1920 - Georges Carpentier. The boxer Georges Carpentier. Strength training entered mainstream sport through combat athletes and throwers well before it was accepted in most other disciplines.
1021. 1920 - Charles Atlas. Angelo Siciliano, born in Acri, Calabria in 1892, took the name Charles Atlas. In 1922 he won Macfadden's America's Most Perfectly Developed Man contest at Madison Square Garden.
1022. 1924 - Billed as the strongest woman in the world, Berlin. Berlin, April 1924. Titles like this were promotional claims made by performers and promoters, with no adjudicating body behind them.
1023. 1924 - Macfadden and family demonstrating fitness at the US Capitol. Macfadden brought his family to the Capitol to demonstrate keeping fit to legislators. He courted political influence throughout his career.
1024. 1924 - United States senators taking a physical culture lesson. Macfadden instructing senators including Arthur Capper, C. C. Dill and Magnus Johnson. Physical culture reached the centre of American public life.
1025. 1924 - Macfadden and Senator Brookhart stage a boxing match. Macfadden and Senator Smith W. Brookhart of Iowa staged a boxing match outside the Senate office building. Macfadden understood publicity as well as any showman of the era.
1026. 1924 - Bernarr Macfadden photographed in Washington. A glass negative from the National Photo Company. By the 1920s Macfadden ran True Story, True Detective and the New York Evening Graphic.
1027. 1925 - Press photograph of Eugen Sandow. An Agence Rol press portrait held by the Bibliotheque nationale de France. Sandow died in London in October 1925 at the age of 58.
1028. 1925 - Charles Atlas in Artists and Models magazine. Atlas photographed for an article in the August 1925 issue of Artists and Models. He worked as an artists' model before the mail-order business took over.
1029. 1925 - Charles Atlas, second Artists and Models study. A second plate from the same August 1925 magazine article.
1030. 1926 - La Culture Physique, 1926. The magazine survived into the interwar period, by which point the physical culture movement had spread into state programmes across Europe.
1031. 1930 - Charles Atlas enrolment letter, The World's Most Perfectly Developed Man. An enrolment letter using the billing The World's Most Perfectly Developed Man. Atlas never won a title of that name; the contest he won in 1922 was America's Most Perfectly Developed Man.
1032. 1930 - Joseph Greenstien, The Mighty Atom- 1930's strong man. Footage of Joseph Greenstein, who performed as the Mighty Atom, biting a nail in half and driving another through a plank by hand. Greenstein worked the American variety circuit, where the strongman's stock in trade was the demonstration rather than a measured lift.
1033. 1931 - Franklin Roosevelt and Bernarr Macfadden at Warm Springs. Macfadden with Franklin D. Roosevelt at Warm Springs, Georgia. Held by the US National Archives.
1034. 1932 - Charles Atlas Dynamic Tension course application form. An application form for the Atlas mail-order course. Dynamic Tension was an isometric self-resistance method; the phrase was coined by the advertising man Charles P. Roman.
1035. 1932 - Crowd outside a Macfadden penny restaurant. A queue outside a one-cent restaurant run by the Bernarr Macfadden Foundation for unemployment relief during the Depression.
1036. 1934 - Langridge's School of Physical Culture, Sydney. Women of Langridge's School of Physical Culture performing in Sydney on 6 September 1934, photographed for the Sun newspaper.
1037. 1934 - Women's class, Bjelke-Petersen School of Physical Culture. Photographed by Sam Hood in Sydney. The Bjelke-Petersen schools ran women's physical culture classes in Australia from the 1890s, one of the longest-running such programmes anywhere.
1038. 1934 - Class exercise, Bjelke-Petersen School. Physical culture for women was framed institutionally as health and posture, not as development for display. That framing held until the 1970s.
1039. 1934 - Bjelke-Petersen School, Sydney. Group drill rather than individual loading. Barbell work for women was outside the accepted programme.
1040. 1935 - Exercise, Hungary. From the Fortepan photographic archive. Interwar physical culture in central Europe ran through clubs and associations rather than commercial gyms.
1041. 1935 - Dear Mr Atlas. Charles Atlas mail-order material. Atlas never won a title using the word World's, despite the persistent claim, and the Dynamic Tension course was the business rather than the competition.
1042. 1935 - Don't waste your time or money on ROT. Atlas advertising attacking apparatus-based competitors. The physical culture market was already crowded and litigious by the 1930s.
1043. 1935 - Analysis and enrolment form. An enrolment form for a mail-order physical culture course. The measurement chart was both a sales device and the origin of the sport's obsession with numbers.
1044. 1935 - Charles Atlas montre ses muscles. French archive footage of Charles Atlas demonstrating his physique. Atlas was born Angelo Siciliano in Acri, Calabria, in 1892, and won Macfadden's America's Most Perfectly Developed Man contest at Madison Square Garden in 1922.
1045. 1936 - Rudolf Ismayr's dumbbells. Dumbbells belonging to the German Olympic weightlifting champion Rudolf Ismayr. The 1936 Berlin games were the point at which state physical culture programmes and competitive strength sport most visibly converged.
1046. 1937 - Physical culture display, Brisbane Botanic Gardens. Students of the Teachers' Training College giving a physical culture display in the Brisbane Botanic Gardens on 21 April 1937.
1047. 1937 - Massed physical culture display in Brisbane. A second view of the Teachers' Training College display of 21 April 1937. Mass drill was the dominant form physical culture took in schools.
1048. 1940 - Joe Weider, The Master Blaster's first magazine, Your Physique Aug 1940. Joe Weider's first magazine, Your Physique, from August 1940, examined issue by issue. Weider launched it at 19 in Montreal, and the magazine business preceded the supplements and the federation.
1049. 1941 - Hamzeh Pahlevanpur. An Iranian strongman portrait from the early 1940s, the period when the zurkhaneh tradition had been diminished under Reza Shah and had not yet been revived by his successor.
1050. 1941 - Women's PT (1941). British Pathe newsreel of the Women's League of Health and Beauty exercising in formation in London. The League, founded by Mary Bagot Stack in 1930, was mass physical culture for women decades before anything called women's bodybuilding existed, and it was drill and callisthenics rather than resistance training.
1051. 1941 - Charles Atlas advertisement in Weird Tales. An advertisement for Dynamic Tension in the September 1941 issue of the pulp magazine Weird Tales. The campaign ran for decades and sold physical training through shame and bullying rather than sport.
1052. 1944 - Joe Weider's Your Physique magazine 1944 Oct/Nov, with Eugene Sandow!. The October and November 1944 issue of Your Physique, featuring Eugen Sandow, who had died in 1925. The sport was already citing its own origin myth within four years of Weider's first issue.
1053. 1945 - York Barbell Gang 1940's - Grimek, Hoffman, Bacon, Terpak, Terlazzo, Batchell Vintage Weightlifters. Restored 8mm film from the Osmo Kiiha collection of the York Barbell group in the 1940s, including Bob Hoffman, John Grimek, John Terpak and Tony Terlazzo. York was simultaneously a barbell manufacturer, a magazine publisher and the effective controller of American Olympic weightlifting.
1054. 1946 - Nothing stops 'The Mighty Apollo', c.1946. Australian National Film and Sound Archive footage of the Melbourne strongman known as the Mighty Apollo, having stone blocks broken on his body, being driven over by a car and pulling a vehicle with his teeth. Filmed around 1946, and a reminder that the circuit was worldwide.
1055. 1947 - Joe Weider: Gain 36 pounds in a few months!! Your Physique 1947 June. A June 1947 Your Physique advertisement promising 36 pounds of gain in a few months. Weider settled with the Federal Trade Commission in 1985 for a minimum of 400,000 dollars over claims made for a supplement, which is a regulator's finding rather than an accusation.
1056. 1947 - John Farbotnik's amazing story! Joe Weider's Your Physique magazine May 1947. A May 1947 Your Physique feature on John Farbotnik. The magazine's method was to make its readers into characters, which is how the sport built an audience.
1057. 1948 - Muscle Beach (Joseph Strick, 1948). Joseph Strick's 1948 short film Muscle Beach, presented by the Academy. Muscle Beach at Santa Monica was a 1934 WPA New Deal installation rather than private enterprise, and this is the earliest substantial film of it.
1058. 1948 - Strength and Health, November 1948. Bob Hoffman's Strength and Health, published from York, Pennsylvania. Hoffman's York Barbell was the American equipment and supplement business that Weider's would later eclipse.
1059. 1949 - Cecil Phillips. An American physique competitor of the immediate postwar years, the period when the AAU still controlled amateur competition in the United States and the Weiders' IFBB was newly formed.
1060. 1950 - Early Chinese bodybuilding, Shanghai. A physique display in Shanghai. Chinese strength practice has its own institutional history in the stone locks, shisuo, used in Qing military examination training, distinct from the Western physique lineage.
1061. 1950 - Shaban Jafari. Jafari was an Iranian zurkhaneh figure whose later political role made him one of the most contested names in the tradition. The archive records the strength-culture standing, not a verdict on the politics.
1062. 1950 - The Beautiful Val Njord! The First Full Colour Female Cover on a Weider Mag! Your Physique Oct 1949. The first full colour female cover on a Weider magazine, featuring Val Njord. Women appeared on the covers decades before women's bodybuilding existed as a contested sport, and in a very different role.
1063. 1950 - Joe Weider's first magazines, Rare IronMan mags, Muscle Power and Muscle Builder!. Early Weider magazines alongside rare IronMan issues, Muscle Power and Muscle Builder. Your Physique was renamed Muscle Builder in 1953.
1064. 1951 - Campeonato de Complementos, first edition. A first-edition physique championship, held the same year Monotosh Roy took a NABBA Mr Universe title in London.
1065. 1951 - Bernarr Macfadden at eighty-three. A press photograph at Teterboro, New Jersey. Macfadden made parachute jumps into his eighties and died in 1955 after refusing medical treatment.
1066. 1952 - Bodybuilders on the front page of Suara Rakyat. Front page of the Indonesian paper Suara Rakyat, 26 April 1952. Physique culture reached Southeast Asia through the same magazine and newsreel economy that carried it through Europe and the Americas.

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