Arthur Jones; Times UK obit (Nautilus inventor)
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Arthur Jones
US entrepreneur whose multifarious activities included devising the
Nautilus exercise machine
Arthur Jones was not only a wild-animal importer and a film-maker but
also one of the most important figures in the field of exercise
science.
He invented the Nautilus exercise machine, which, in promoting short
bursts of high-intensity exercise rather than hours of lower-intensity
exercise, and replacing the "dead weight" of barbells with variable
resistance, transformed strength training and opened it to
recreational athletes.
Jones was born in Arkansas in 1926 into a medical family that moved to
Seminole, Oklahoma, in 1929. He had little interest in formal
education, left home in his early teens and spent several years
travelling in the US, Canada, Mexico and Central America, doing a
variety of jobs along the way. During the war he served in the US Navy
in the Pacific.
On his return from the war he opened a zoo in Slidell, Louisiana.
Having learnt to fly aircraft, he also operated an airline, using
surplus B-25 medium bombers, to carry cargo from Latin American
countries. Jones's interest in wild animals inspired him to start
importing them for zoos, pet shops and researchers.
"Over a span of several years, I imported a greater variety, and far
greater numbers, of animals than everybody else in the world
combined," he said later. These animals included hundreds of thousands
of monkeys and fish.
In 1956 he made a film while capturing hundreds of crocodiles in
Africa. It was aired on the ABC network the following year, and Jones
worked subsequently as producer for more than 300 films for
television, including the series Wild Cargo, Capture and Professional
Hunter. In the mid1960s he moved to Rhodesia but returned two years
later, when the Government, objecting to Jones's wild-game business,
took over his assets.
Another long-term interest was exercise; Jones had been lifting
weights in order to bulk up since his teens. While other people
admired the results, he was not satisfied: "I ended up with the arms
and legs of a gorilla on the body of a spider monkey," he said. "I
figured there was something wrong with the exercise tool."
But he was unable to find anything helpful in the scientific
literature on exercise physiology, and many scientists of the day
believed that barbell training was worthless and even dangerous,
making people "muscle bound" and causing heart problems. So Jones
designed and built a score of exercise machines based on his own
observations about strength training.
He observed that muscles need time to recover, and that he could
therefore achieve good results even through short bursts of activity;
and that leverage can affect results. Jones designed his machines so
that they created different sorts of resistance - "direct", "rotary",
" variable" and "balanced", and enabled athletes to move a varying
amount of weight during one repetition.
Jones was unaware of the work of the Swedish doctor Gustav Zander, who
had made similar machines for therapeutic exercise 100 years before:
"If I had known about, and understood, Zander's work," he said, "it
would have saved me a lot of time and a rather large fortune in money,
because that man was a genius; his only problem was that he lived
about a century ahead of his time."
Having completed his first Nautilus machine, the Blue Monster, in the
late 1960s, Jones presented it at a Mr America contest in California.
Planning to sell his machines, he took Arthur Jones Productions as a
company name; it was later changed to Nautilus, because of a
resemblance between the shape of the nautilus shell and the eccentric
pulleys used in Jones's machines.
Fitness training became more popular among ordinary people in the
1970s, and Nautilus Inc expanded quickly, opening clubs throughout
North America. Sales of the machines put Jones on the Forbes 400 rich
list, and at one time it was estimated that Nautilus was grossing $300
million a year.
Jones sold his interest in Nautilus in 1986 for $23 million. He used
some of his money to buy 600 acres in Florida, where he installed his
private zoo - claimed to be the largest private zoo in the world -
containing 90 elephants, three rhinos, a gorilla and 4,000 alligators,
crocodiles, caimans and gavials. He also founded Jumboair Aviation
Estates, a "fly-in" community in Ocala, one of whose residents is the
actor John Travolta.
He later began to develop a machine particularly for those with lower
back pain that analysed the strength and range of joint movement in
the lumbar muscles and exercised them accordingly. The invention
turned into the company MedX, which he eventually sold in 1996.
Jones's financial record was not unmixed, and his relations with the
US tax authorities and with some of his business partners were
occasionally fraught. Among his less successful projects was an
abortive venture into video production with G. Gordon Liddy, notorious
for his role in Watergate.
Jones was proud to be a generalist but reserved a particular
enthusiasm for "younger women, faster airplanes and bigger crocodiles"
- as his motto went.
Jones married six times (all his wives being between the age of 16 and
20 at the time), and divorced six times.
He is survived by two sons and two daughters.
Arthur Jones, inventor of the Nautilus exercise machine, was born in
1926. He died on August 28, 2007, aged 80