Nautilus Inventor Pumped Up Fitness,
But Lost Women, Planes, Crocodiles
By STEPHEN MILLER
September 1, 2007; Page A4
Paunchy and chain-smoking Pall Malls, Arthur Jones was an unlikely model for physical fitness.
Yet his Nautilus exercise machines, introduced in 1970, became the byword for bodybuilding at a time when fitness was becoming fashionable. By the mid-1980s, Mr. Jones was wealthy enough to be on the Forbes list of ultrarich Americans. He had a menagerie of rattlesnakes, crocodiles and elephants on his Florida game preserve, a fleet of 707s parked at what he claimed was the world's largest private airport, and a brand-new wife, his fifth. By the end of the 1980s, his empire was gone.
Mr. Jones sold Nautilus abruptly in 1986 to a Dallas businessman who took it into bankruptcy before the decade was out. The herd of elephants and fleet of planes had been sold to raise funds for his next venture, a lumbar rehabilitation machine. Wife No. 5 decamped amid bitter allegations. The tycoon whose oft-stated personal motto had been "Younger women, faster planes, bigger crocodiles" was bereft of all three.
Mr. Jones, who died Aug. 28 at his Ocala, Fla., home at age 80, was a child of the Depression and a high-school dropout who began his quest for what he once called "a thinking person's barbell" at a Tulsa, Okla., YMCA gym in 1948. In ensuing decades, he pursued careers as a rattlesnake wrangler, crocodile trapper, tropical-fish importer, and bush airline entrepreneur in Africa and South America, selling animals to zoos and pet shops. He also produced "Wild Cargo," a series of TV nature documentaries.
Wherever he went, he continued to tinker with ideas for better exercise machines.
In the late 1960s, after he was expelled from Rhodesia in murky circumstances, he began writing articles for the fitness magazine "Iron Man." A California entrepreneur commissioned Mr. Jones to build a machine featuring Mr. Jones's newest gizmo: a cam -- a wheel on a shaft -- with segments like the shell of a nautilus to let users progressively vary the amount of weight hefted. The machine was a hit at a 1970 Los Angeles weightlifters' convention and got an even bigger boost after the 1971 AAU Mr. America, Casey Viator, revealed he had trained under Mr. Jones on one.
"He showed me how we could do it with much less exercise," says Mr. Viator of the intense Jones technique. Mr. Viator, who worked for Mr. Jones developing Nautilus for much of the 1970s and is now a personal trainer, credits him with transforming weightlifting. "Arthur showed it didn't have to be a greasy little gym on the corner with hooligans inside," Mr. Viator says. "Arthur made it happen that the average man wouldn't feel uncomfortable. The equipment builders are still copying him today."
Top-flight athletes including running back Mercury Morris of the Miami Dolphins and tennis pro Chris Evert said their careers benefited from working out on a Nautilus. Celebrities including Victoria Principal and Bo Derek endorsed it, too. Clubs with Nautilus in their name and featuring the company's equipment -- but which were otherwise independent -- began popping up across the country.
At the center of the juggernaut stood Arthur Jones, "contradictory, bombastic, and tinged with menace" as an article in The Wall Street Journal once described him. He would brief physicians, insisting his machines were based on millions of dollars worth of scientific research he had funded. Yet he delighted in giving interviews in which he darkly alluded to men he had killed.
The buzz on privately held Nautilus was tremendous -- its annual revenues in the mid-1980s were said by Time magazine to exceed $300 million -- but the reality was less than a quarter of that, The Wall Street Journal reported in 1988. Revenues began declining after 1984 as competitors like the Cybex Eagle emerged. Mr. Jones seemed less interested in propping things up than in using his fleet of 707s to fly doctors to seminars he ran in Mexico on his pet medical rehabilitation projects. By 1986, he told the Journal, he had enough.
An exit strategy emerged in the person of Travis Ward, a Dallas businessman who in August 1986, offered Mr. Jones $23 million for the company. After an initial payment, the deal was bogged down in lawsuits. When the deal was finally closed at a Philadelphia bank tower in 1987, the two men refused to sit in the same room together. With proceeds from the Nautilus deal and the sale of his jets and other property, Mr. Jones began financing MedX Corp., devoted to producing exercise machines to solve lumbar back problems. Mr. Jones claimed to have invested $100 million in research to develop tools to measure muscle strength, and therapeutic exercise machines. Privately held, the company doesn't issue sales figures. Mr. Jones sold his stake in 1996.
Brian D. Johnston, director of education and president of the International Association of Resistance Trainers and a long-time friend, says that Mr. Jones's last decade was morose. "He became very discouraged and said to hell with this," says Mr. Johnston. "He was bitter in his last decade. 'Just waiting to die' is what he said to everybody."
Nautilus Inc., now reorganized as owner of Stairmaster and Bowflex equipment, says it is once again the largest seller of gym machines. This year it is introducing a new line, but, says a spokesman, "Arthur's cams can still be found inside; maximizing muscle activation."
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PAUL MACCREADY (1925-2007)
Innovated the Impossible, From Bicycle Plane to Solar Car
"The Revenge of Icarus," a Paris newspaper headlined in 1979, the day after Paul MacCready's Gossamer Albatross flew across the English Channel, powered by a furiously pedaling bicyclist.
The 23-mile cross-Channel effort was a bookend to the flight of the Gossamer Condor two years before, which established that human-powered flight was possible on a one-mile course.
[Maccready]
The Gossamer flights were perhaps the apotheosis of Mr. MacCready's career as an imaginative engineer. Few of his inventions were ever commercialized, but he was an influential designer, with a cadre of impressive inventions. Among them: The GM Sunraycer, a solar car that crossed Australia averaging 41 miles per hour; the Gossamer Penguin, the first piloted plane to fly solely by solar power; and the Pathfinder and Helios, solar-powered planes that flew as high as 100,000 feet. He also invented the "speed ring airspeed selector," standard equipment on sailplanes everywhere.
"Although the airplanes themselves are trivial, we have learned much that has application to smaller, cheaper forms of transportation on the ground. Anything that reduces our dependence on fossil fuels and other nonreplenishable resources seems worthwhile," Mr. MacCready told U.S. News & World Report in 1982.
The cross-Channel flight wasn't the first time Mr. MacCready made waves crossing a strait. Aged 8, he shocked his parents by piloting his sailing dingy from their Connecticut home across Long Island Sound. By his early teens, he was building model aircraft -- not from kits, but exotic contraptions like ornithopers (with flapping wings à la Icarus) and autogyros (plane plus helicopter).
Shy and ungainly in high school, he excelled as an aviation engineer. Shortly after World War II -- he attended Navy flight school and Yale during the war -- Mr. MacCready bought a war-surplus glider. He soon began setting height records, and winning a series of National Soaring Championships. He married in 1957 and that year also gave up sailplanes after a close call.
His most famous achievement was born of necessity. When a new design he came up with for catamarans lost $100,000, he was determined to recoup his investors' losses. So he decided to vie for the Henry Kremer Prize, established by a British industrialist in 1959 for sustained human-powered flight. "The Kremer Prize, in which I'd had no interest, was just about equal to my debt," he told the authors of "Inventing Modern America" in 2003. "Suddenly human-powered flight seemed important."
His first entry into the field, the Gossamer Condor, consisted of aluminum tubing, cardboard, balsa, plastic and mylar. At 17 feet tall, with a 96-foot wingspan, it was really big. Its pilot once compared it to "pedaling a house."
Typical for a MacCready project, it was inspired by a daydream epiphany -- this one made while observing the wing shapes of turkey vultures while on a family vacation in the desert. The testing process was typically low-tech: repeatedly crashing the craft and rebuilding it. The Gossamer Albatross followed, and then even more ambitious craft.
Spending time among the updrafts and clouds helped make Mr. MacCready an expert meteorologist, as well. His company, AeroVironment Inc., had been founded in 1971, to monitor air pollution. AeroVironment -- which went public in January of this year -- also later got into the business of manufacturing tiny drones equipped with video cameras for the Department of Defense.
Grave and understated, Mr. MacCready cherished creative thinking and became expert at gathering teams of world-class specialists. "We had to have complete redundancy," with all staff qualified as engineers, pilots, builders and athletes, says Morton Grosser, a member of the team that built the Gossamer Albatross in England, and author of "Gossamer Odyssey."
The Gossamer Condor's staff held a reunion in Shafter, Calif., last weekend. Mr. MacCready, who died Tuesday at age 81 at his home in Pasadena, Calif., was too weak to attend, but sent a message of congratulation.
In recent years, he stepped back from design work and often addressed groups of schoolchildren on the wonders of science and the work of imagination. |
