"His wonderful performance, lifting the human dumbell."

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That's "Today's featured picture" at Wikipedia, from the article on Eugen Sandow.

I love the poster, and I love the idea of a literal human dumbell.

Is "dumbell" the correct spelling? The OED has "dumb-bell." The double "B" is important to understanding the meaning. From the unlinkable OED:

1. (a) Formerly, An apparatus, like that for swinging a church-bell, but without the bell itself, and thus making no noise, in the ‘ringing’ of which bodily exercise was taken. (b) Also, applied to a similar apparatus, used in learning bell-ringing.

You need "dumb" (for silence) and "bell" (for the familiar object, a bell).

The slang term, meaning a stupid person, goes back to the 1920s:

1920 Collier's 3 July 8/1 The gent..stands alone as the Crown Prince of dumb-bells.
1922 S. Lewis Babbitt xviii. 227 The poor old dumb-bells that you can't get to dance.
a1930 D. H. Lawrence Etruscan Places (1932) i. 21 They gave the usual dumb-bell answer.
1936 Punch 15 Apr. 430/3 Next came one of those series of Dumb-bell Letters which seem to be very popular, a dumb-bell being the kind of person who writes to the manufacturer asking him to replace a gadget that has been lost, and then adds a postscript telling him not to bother as the missing gadget has just been found.

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