Bankier’s invention is of a piece and a pace with the integration of technological devices intended to facilitate techniques of muscular development. Despite circling around the same theme of physical culture, each bodybuilder could nonetheless build a unique identity to better interface with the public whom their very discourse sought to shape. The decisive role of media technologies owes to their discursive capabilities, which undergirded the construction of bodybuilder identities. These bodybuilders all used a range of media materials like books, magazines, pamphlets and trading cards to advocate for the pursuit of physical culture through the cultivation of the body (which was always presumed to be male). The book emerges within a broader context of the physical culture movement of the late nineteenth century, which included other self-publicizing bodybuilders like Prussian émigré to London, Eugen Sandow, and his more eccentric American imitator, Bernarr MacFadden. This developer is not an aberrant technology but rather involved within a larger framework of physical development. If Bankier’s remarks are anything to go by, muscle developers were apparently quite common at the turn of the century, for he adds that “as a mere muscle developer it stands a long way ahead of any other so-called developing-machine” (124). Bankier claims the device was functional, since “veryone who has tried it is enthusiastic about its efficiency in driving rheumatism away” (124). The device was intended as both an aid to muscle development and a restorative cure. He describes it as “a combination of electricity and light dumb-bell exercise at the same time” (124). Though he provides no details of its construction, nor any diagram, his remarks offer some clue as to what it might have been. In his 1900 book, Ideal Physical Culture, professional strongman William Bankier (aka ‘Apollo’) ambiguously described a ‘muscle developer’ he had invented.
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