Pilates Universal Reformer
name: label: user
content: Sinatra, Nancy
label: maker
content: Pilates Studio of Contrology
notes: label: Description (Brief)
content: This machine was owned and used by Nancy Sinatra in the 1960s for exercise and made by the Pilates Studios of Contrology and patented in March of 1927, patent number 1,621,477.
label: Description (Brief)
content: Joseph H. Pilates (1880-1966), a sickly, frail child (like so many other exercise entrepreneurs) who overcame his weakness with physical exercise, emigrated from his native Germany to England, where he worked as a circus performer and physical therapist. As an "enemy alien" during World War I, he practiced rehabilitation therapy
label: Description (Brief)
content: with springs (taken from beds) on bedridden wounded soldiers, experimenting with muscle movement and resistance. Here he developed his system of platform, pulleys, and springs that exercise the whole body. Moving to New York in 1926, he opened a studio
label: Description (Brief)
content: for physical training for dancers; Martha Graham and George Balanchine and their students were his primary clients. He designed and made many exercising machines, and patented 13, some in Germany and 6 in the United States, including the 1927 Reformer
label: Description (Brief)
content: (patent #1,621,477, March 15, 1927, included in this document). He said that his invention improved "personal appearance and health by reducing such conditions as bow-legs, knock-knees, flat-feet, spinal curvature, drooping shoulders, flat chests, etc. and induced a proper circulation of the blood throughout the entire system." Pilates
label: Description (Brief)
content: developed a method of exercise and physical movement designed to stretch, strengthen, and balance the body. With systematic practice of specific exercises coupled with focused breathing patterns, Pilates has proven itself invaluable not only as a fitness endeavor itself, but also as an important adjunct to professional sports training and
label: Description (Brief)
content: physical rehabilitation of all kinds. The career of Pilates, whose fame for body-toning flourished long after his death, shows how exercise products often developed in the context of health, moved on to training the muscles of athletes, only to end up in the beauty arena.
label: Description (Brief)
content: Pilates patented his first device in 1927, just over one hundred years after the first American patent for an exercise machine was granted to physician Daniel Harrington in 1831. By the 1930s exercise equipment were common home and gymnasium objects that
label: Description (Brief)
content: had undergone several transformations in design and usage. Among the most interesting aspects of that change was that sports like basketball had pushed such equipment off the main gym floor where they had reigned for over half a century into exercise rooms and
label: Description (Brief)
content: their use for building up bodies. Shifts in body-shape fashions from brawny to svelte made machines for slimming down more in demand. Innovations in small electric motors that were added to exercise machines accommodated less strenuous exercisers.
label: Description (Brief)
content: Advertising and design of exercise machines began to focus away from men and toward women, a trend that continued through the 1960s. Ironically, exercise entrepreneur Charles Atlas was a leading opponent of exercise machines for men and his system of
label: Description (Brief)
content: "dynamic tension" shunned them as unnatural and unmanly.
label: Location
content: Currently not on view
setName: label: See more items in
content: Culture and the Arts: Sport and Leisure
dataSource: label: Data Source
content: National Museum of American History
identifier: label: ID Number
content: 2005.0115.01
label: catalog number
content: 2005.0115.01
label: accession number
content: 2005.0115
objectType: label: Object Name
content: Pilates Machine
physicalDescription: label: Measurements
content: overall: 80 in x 26 in x 14 in; 203.2 cm x 66.04 cm x 35.56 cm