Arthur Jones is a man of many interests. The inventor of the hottest exercise equipment began his career as a World War Two bomber pilot and afterward began to seek out real adventure. He flew freelance cargo missions all over Central America and Africa, tracked big game and hosted a TV show called Wild Cargo in the Sixties. He holds strong views on subjects as diverse as pumping iron and geopolitics. He regales listeners with tales of mercenary strike missions and coups that failed. He boasts that he has eluded hit teams that emerging nations have dispatched to stalk him, but when pumped for details on the subject, he demurs. Apparently, if you have to ask the price of danger, you can't afford to take the chance.

Warren Kalbacker tracked Jones to his closely watched compound in central Florida. "We rendezvoused beside a darkened airstrip," Kalbacker tells us. "Somehow, it seemed to set just the right tone for the interview, but Jones was in no hurry to begin taping. He insisted that I meet every one of his reptiles, tour his immense video-production complex and pit my strength against his latest Nautilus prototype. It was a tough assignment, but somebody had to take it on."

Q 1

PLAYBOY: We couldn't help noticing the pistol, the locked door and the television-camera surveillance. Do you resent interruptions, or are you worried that somebody's gaining on you?

Arthur Jones: If you have any doubt about the extraordinary security measures around here, walk out the door and across the lawn. Roll the dice. The stakes are your ass. If you think I'm joking, try me. Recognition has a price. The price is danger.

Q 2

PLAYBOY: Nautilus equipment has achieved a great deal of recognition. Gym shorts and jockstraps are de rigueur in a gentleman's wardrobe. Do you possess an uncanny marketing sense, or were you the man with the right product at the right time?

Arthur Jones: I hadn't the slightest idea of becoming involved commercially. In 1948, I was staying at the Y.M.C.A. in Tulsa, and I built the first serious attempt at a Nautilus machine. Later that year, I built another one, and I kept building them wherever I went. I built them by the hundreds. They're sitting in schools, police-department gyms and rotting in jungles all over the world. I was building machines for my own purposes. I was interested in efficiency of exercise. In 1970, I built a prototype machine and hauled it to California and put it on exhibit, more or less to see what would happen. The roof fell in. People started writing and calling and placing orders for machines that did not exist. I told them there was nothing to buy. They said, "When you have them, we'll take one of each."

Q 3

PLAYBOY: What got you interested in exercise? Were you a 97-pound weakling who wanted to develop biceps to impress girls?

Arthur Jones: I was never a 97-pound weakling. Even as a child, I was considerably stronger than average and have been most of my life. But from a very early age, I was interested in exercise. I started lifting weights, training with barbells long before it was popular. In the Thirties and Forties, you did it in secret, because you didn't want your friends to know. I wanted the benefits of weight training, but I didn't want to be branded a lunatic.

With the introduction of the barbell into this country around the turn of the century, it became possible to produce degrees of muscular development and strength previously thought impossible. The adjustable barbell--a bar and plates with holes in them so that you can hold weight--was almost magic. When people did what appeared to be impossible, they became freakish. Perhaps some people were overawed by the first examples of weight lifters who developed their muscles to a very large size. All the myths started: If you lifted weights you became musclebound. That's totally untrue. Weight lifting of any kind makes you more flexible. Weight lifters are very close to being on a par with gymnasts and even ballet dancers in certain ranges of motion. And you were slow and clumsy and dumb. Quite the contrary. I really don't know what the relationship is between the size of a man's muscles and his I.Q.

Q 4

PLAYBOY: If the barbell worked like magic and you kept your workouts secret, what made you think you could improve on that?

Arthur Jones: I noted as far back as the Thirties that some bar-bell exercises produced very rapid rates of growth and some did not. A barbell provides one-directional resistance--straight down as a result of the force of gravity. But human beings are rotational animals. We don't move in straight lines. We move by rotating around the axis of a body joint. You move your hand, for example by rotating around the axis of your wrist. Even if a movement is in a straight line, it's result of two or more rotational movements.

So the first requirement when it came to improving the barbell was to design a device that provided rotational resistance for exercise. With a barbell, you're exercising part of a muscle, and you will develop that part of the muscle. But then another part of the same muscle is not being exercised; it doesn't receive any benefit.

Another problem with movement is that the strength of a human being changes. It varies as your advantage of leverage gets better or worse. With a barbell, as a consequence, you're always limited by the amount of weight you can handle in your weakest position--which is not necessarily the starting position. In the bench press, for example, when the bar is resting on your chest and you start to lift it, you're fairly strong. But you're rapidly growing weaker as you reach the so-called sticking point. Then you suddenly become much stronger again; and at the very end of the bench press, as far as your muscles are concerned, you're infinitely strong because you have the advantage of leverage. You're locked out. You could move the world in a bench press. You could handle 1,000,000 tons if your bones could support them.

But by using a barbell in a bench press, you're limited by the amount of weight you can handle at the sticking point. At the end of the movement, you may be able to handle 300 pounds. But you're forced to train with the 100 pounds you can handle in your weakest position.

Q 5

PLAYBOY: Was there a sticking point in your development of the Nautilus machine?

Arthur Jones: It was a long, slow process. I started out trying to solve the problem of adding variable resistance to the barbell by adding chains to one: At the start of a movement, most of the chain would be lying on the floor, so that as you lifted the barbell, more of it came into the air, thereby adding weight. That helped, but it didn't solve the problem, because in some cases, you need a decrease in the weight. In others, you may need an increase and then a decrease. I tried pulley devices. I tried hanging by my knees from a trapeze. I tried hanging by my heels, but that has certain problems, especially when you fall on your head.