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Big and powerful hands


Arne

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This gentleman was extremly big and strong, especially in  his hands. Look at the size of his hands and overallsize at the two lower pictures, and remember he was very tall 205 cm (6' 7"). He was known as the biggest and strongest miner ever in Sweden. This pictures are the only known pictures of him.

http://w1.240.telia.com/~u24006697/jatten.htm

Unfortunately, only on Swedish.

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Wow, huge hands!

Arne, for those of us who can't read swedish, tell us some of his feats of strength.

David

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This is unusual, since I've never heard of him before.

Maybe Roark has.  You might want to ask him.

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I can't find a site that translates swedish. Google & Altavista have translators, but they don't do swedish. I want to see what that guy could do. He looks like an ogre!  :0

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Still couldn't make head nor tail out of the translation. Arne, help us!

David

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I'll try to tranlate some of his "feats". He used to walk 2 km between the brewery and his home carrying two kegs weighing over 40 kg. He uses only his thumb and forefinger and grip over the rim. The rim was only 2-3 cm high. He could also carry two sacks wieghing 100 kg each and walk 3 km without putting them down. He was able to load, only with his hands,  more than 100 metric tons  of ore? rock? on special minewagons? under one day.

Sorry, I hope you can understand what I mean.

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Arne,

Thank you. A very strong individual indeed. Those hands are huge though!

David

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Guest 115-1005574997

Interesting indeed Arne, thanks for sharing it with us, he seems quiet a guy.

Dave

I thought Jim and Marc's hands were big :)

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I wish someone snapped some pics of him performing some of those feats.  Sitting down and standing poses don't offer much.  :(

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Perhaps it is a translation problem, but I am not

understanding what exactly happened.

What was the total weight of the kegs; was one

pinched in each hand, or was one atop the other

horizontally, the the bottom keg pinched with both

hands. ?

Would not large hands be a hindrance in the pinching

of something so small?

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It's too bad, for us anyway, that guy didn't have a strength show that he took on the road. He was around about 50 yrs too early I think. Louis Cyr started out as a lumberjack & then got famous & npw everyvody knows what he could do. If Anders Ansersson did the same, maybe Sweden would have had it's own version of Cyr. Or Canada would have had it's version of Anders Andersson in Louis Cyr. I wonder if that guy could have held a dozen eggs in one hand (without the carton!). I remember when we went to Ripley's in L.A. seeing pics of guys doing that.

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Roark: He carried one keg in each hand. The kegs weights over 88 lbs each and I suspect that the type of grip he used was subtermino-lateral opposition. That's the anatomical name of that type of grip. The sack's did he carried under his arms.

I wish my english had been a little bit better so I could have translate the whole page.

Nathan: It seem that he died in 1918 in the Spanish flu.

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Andersson does look extremely impressive, especially for that height and weight (6'8"-6'9", around 350). His overall shape in the standing photo reminds me of a leaner, less obviously agromegalic Andre the Giant.

One comment I did wish to make was the hands. They are massive, but have the look of the hands of an acromegalic - which are generally not that strong, or at least not as strong as their size would indicate.

I do not know how old he is in these photos, but those hands look like those of an old man - and by that I mean very large, almost rheumatuc knuckles and thin (proportionally) fingers. The way he holds his hands also appears to support this (at least to my eye, although of course that could be just the way he held his hands anyway.)

Just an opinion based on the photos - did anyone see these things the way I did? In any case, they are just observations - I wouldn't have said that Kinney could close the 4 from looking at him.

Anyway, I think it's time that I start trying to carry 2 x 40kg kegs home from the brewery ;)

Chris McCarthy

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Guest StrongerthanArne

Based on the Swedish text it seems that he was well known locally not only by his huge size but rather by his huge strength, which perhaps would speak against him being the result of a genetic defect.

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After looking at the pictures I agree completely with the Mac. All of the mans features...the face, hands,and twisted torso all point to acromeglia BUT THAT DOES NOT SAY he was not a strong man. I would think he could carry the Inch bell for a good distance!The loading of 100 metric tons (2200000lbs in a day) by hand and carrying the barrels by the rims single handed seem to be a folk lore embellished story however.

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Yes, I agree that acromegaly does not mean that he was not a very strong man, it is just what I noticed from looking at the photos. I also agree that the "more than 100 tonnes" (I think you might have got carried with the 000's there, 1st COC, as 100 tonnes is 220,466.2lbs) in a day, especially bare-handed, does sound like the stuff of legend. But then with feats like that, they are so rarely practised these days that I don't know how amazing that feat would be. I have deadlifted around 35 tonnes in an hour (100kg x 350+ reps - falling over afterwards!!)) and I know that over 1,000,000lbs (about 454 tonnes) has been deadlifted in a day, so maybe, given a 12 hour day the feat is possible. I assume that the loading job would involve picking rocks up from a ever-replenishing pile and loading them onto a trailer about waist-height, like the old strongman loading events. Perhaps someone might like to give this a try one day?

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I think that guy could EASILY have moved 100 tonnes of stuff in a day. Frank Richards, the same guy who used to shoot himself with a cannon 2x a day had a job where he had to load freight cars with crates of oranges. Each crate of oranges weighed 78 (or 88?) lbs & he could load 400 of those in 40mins & total 500,000lbs in one day. He weighed about 240lbs & I think that Anders Andersson guy could easily be just as productive at 360lbs especially if he worked up to it over the course of sevral years.

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Anders could load 500 kg blocks of ore by hand. The mining company and Oxelosund's harbour had an agreement that all the ore arriving to the harbour should be loaded by hand.  The harbour officials were soon complaining since many of the blocks were weighing up to 500 kg. The mining company answered that they are loaded by hand and sent Anders to Oxelosund's harbour. There he showed his strength to the harbourmaster. After that there were no more complaints about 500 kg blocks being to heavy to be loaded by hand.

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