Dumbbells and pots

Half of the year is gone and far more than half the people whose New Year’s resolution was to get in shape have long since put away the dumbbells and let their bodies go to pot. Which brings up the questions, why are exercise weights called “dumbbells”? And just what “pot” did their body go into?

Dumbbell—the exercise equipment, not the name siblings throw at one another—traces its origin back to church bell ringers. Church bells are heavy, about 400 to 7,000 pounds heavy. So while the thought of youthful bellringers being pulled off their feet and riding the rope on the bell’s upswing is delightful, the reality is that getting the bell to move in the first place took some serious muscle power.

The bell’s rope is attached to pulleys, which makes maneuvering it a bit easier. But there is a skill to bellringing, especially in a larger church with six to eight bells of different weights and different corresponding tones. Around the 1600s, “change ringing” came into vogue. Change ringing required timing and coordination to produce a specific harmony, a pattern of ringing memorized beforehand or called out by a conductor.

Obviously, bell ringing demanded a person who had enough muscle to control the bell and enough skill to ring at the right time and in the right manner, all of which required practice. Thus came into existence an apparatus rigged like, and of the same weight as, the bell but with no clapper—a silent or “dumb” bell. Since the weight, not the shape, was the important element in practicing, in lieu of an actual bell the machine consisted of four iron bars with a leaden ball at each end, similar to the exercise dumbbells of today.

Eventually the apparatus became used not only by apprentice bellringers but also by people looking for a way to pump up their muscles. Lord Sackville had one installed at his Knowle estate. The weights were set up in the attic and their attached rope extended down to a galley beneath where, presumably, the Lord himself or whomever he ordered to do so exercised much as body builders do today.

As for the phrase “going to pot,” some insist on connecting it to hippies smoking marijuana in the 1960/70s, but its origins are much earlier than that.

The phrase is referenced in Plato’s “Apophthegmatum,” translated by Erasmus in the sixteenth century and given the lengthy subtitle “prompt, quick, witty, and sententious sayings of certain Emperors, Kings, Captains, Orators, as well Greeks as Romains, both very pleasant and profitable to read.…” The section “How Dionysius the Tyrant used his familiar friends,” employs the simile: “as if they were bottles, the full he hangs up, and the empty he casts aside in a corner.” The passage elaborates. “Signifying that by the said Tyrant Dionysius the rich and wealthy of his subjects went daily to the pot, and were chopped up…”

A similar use of the phrase appears in a work published in 1657 entitled, “A true and exact history of the island of Barbados.” The passage explains the situation when food aboard the ship was “at a very low Ebbe” and the prospect of cannibalism began to be entertained. “But the Sea-men, who were the greater number, resolv’d the Passengers should be dressed [stuffed] and eaten, before any of them [the seamen] should go to the Pot.”

So, faced with the prospect of being chopped up and eaten or getting out those silent weights, it might be time to renew that New Year’s resolution.