Getting into Guinness

by Larry Olmsted

  Amazingly, Wadlow was still growing fast right up until his untimely death at the age of twenty-two and a half, and had added nearly three full inches just since his twenty-first birthday, having actually broken the world record by age eighteen. Even without the book, he was a celebrity, and reporters would stand on stepladders to interview him face to face. After his death, Wadlow’s brother Howard recalled that life was far from rosy for the giant and that “he couldn’t go anywhere without drawing a crowd.” Echoing this sentiment, Chris Sheedy, Guinness World Records’s representative in Australia, told a Melbourne paper the tallest-person record is both the book’s greatest and its most tragic. “They are very sad people who have been thrown the world’s most vicious curve ball. They are going to die earlier than anyone else and they are stared and pointed at everywhere. They are such grand creatures, but they all have sadness in their eyes.” Howard Wadlow’s recollections of his brother support this. “He had to duck to go through all doorways. No room on a bus, no room on a train, no seats on an airplane. Everything was made for a person six feet tall or under. He probably wished that he wasn’t as tall as he was and wanted a normal life, which he couldn’t possibly live.”

  Wadlow’s staggering height helped create a lasting fascination with tallness as a record, the record Sheedy called the book’s greatest. Considering how difficult Wadlow’s mark is to break, the book has been driven to add categories for the tallest living man and woman, and has awarded a record for Europe’s tallest man as well. Guinness World Records recently went so far as to hold an uncharacteristic search, proactively seeking out the tallest men in the U.K., Canada, and the United States respectively, fostering an entire record industry in tallness. Given that he also held the records for having the world’s largest hands and feet, with hands that stretched more than a foot from his wrist to the tip of his middle finger, and he wore size 37 extrawide footwear over his eighteen-and-a-half-inch feet, Wadlow truly had big shoes to fill. He paved the way for the likes of Sandy Allen, the world’s tallest woman (7' 7.25"), who is also re-created in life size at Guinness museums, and whose fame (derived from the book) led the renowned Italian director Federico Fellini to cast her in the film Casanova. The New York Times devoted a lengthy feature article to the simple event of Ms. Allen meeting Chris Greener, at the time Europe’s tallest man. More recently, Chinese giant Bao Xi Shun, who held the record as tallest living man until 2007, was in the news on a regular basis. The New York Times reported that Bao saved the lives of two dolphins at the Beijing aquarium when he used his 41.7" extra-long arms to reach his hand down their throats and remove the plastic that they had swallowed after it fell into their pool. “Attempts to remove the plastic surgically failed,” the paper reported, and for Plan B, somewhat astonishingly, “veterinarians decided to ask for help from Mr. Bao,” who saved the dolphins like a cartoon superhero. Likewise, Bao’s marriage three months later was widely covered by international media outlets such as CNN, which cheekily noted that “After searching high and low, the world’s tallest man has married a woman two-thirds his height.” This unceasing media interest in human height proves that society’s fascination with Wadlow and company, which made the Guinness book an instant hit, remains undiminished today.

  Things came full circle for Bao when he leveraged his newfound stature as a Guinness World Record holder to be granted permission to travel outside of China for the first time—where else but to London and the offices of the Guinness World Records? Current editor Craig Glenday reported that the visit went fine, with the notable exception that Bao could not fit into the airplane’s lavatory during the long trip, just the kind of annoyance Wadlow’s brother had described that historic giant as having to endure. “The best part of the job for me is getting to meet these people. I mean where else are you going to meet a giant?” Glenday asked. Where else indeed?

  “The World’s Tallest Man has been in it since the beginning,” Stuart Claxton, U.S. head of business development for Guinness World Records, and a frequent spokesperson for the book, told me. In trying to explain the book’s unique appeal, he noted that

  the fascination I think is in all of us as human beings. Learning what the limits are in all these fields, the tallest, biggest, etc. is always going to be interesting. A record is a report documenting change. If you have an awareness of the limits, the smallest and the largest, then you can place yourself, or the tree in your garden into that spectrum and it gives you context. You know where you stand, how your tree compares to the world’s tallest tree. If that’s the fastest someone can run 100 yards, how can I do? It gives you a place in the world.

  Craig Glenday agreed, telling an interviewer that, “Everyone wants to know what their place in the world is. The book provides an image of the world and shows you where you stand.” Michael Roberts, executive editor of Outside magazine, has spent years documenting, debunking, and often just shaking his head over people’s obsession with records and record breaking and superlatives, something his magazine covers regularly in the fields of athletics, mountaineering, and exploration. Roberts believes “It’s something innate in our culture. It’s a way to compare yourself to others. If life is a race, then how am I doing?” Jason Daley was also an editor at Outside, where he specifically covered record attempts for the magazine’s “Dispatches” column, and later wrote a similar column called “For the Record” for Men’s Journal magazine. “After years of going through this, I saw that the bottom line is just people’s fascination with the E.S.T: Fastest, longest, tallest.” The book and many of its most enduring records do provide something of a framework of our realities, no matter how extreme. Regardless of your own height or weight, the two Roberts of Guinness fame, Wadlow and Hughes, will put you in your place, at least perspective-wise.

  In many cases, a Guinness record comes to define the person who holds it and becomes the most important thing about them. As readers, we don’t know Sridhar Chillal, we know the guy with the really long fingernails. This may not be true for celebrity record holders such as Tom Hanks or Sir Richard Branson, but it clearly is for the guy who lifts weights with his eyelids and for most of his fellow human record holders. Among these, there are a handful of record holders who have become truly iconic, usually for their images, such as the obese McCrary twins on motorcycles or Jackie “the Texas Snakeman” Bibby with his swarm of poisonous rattlesnakes dangling from his mouth, but even among this exalted group, Wadlow stands out. He needed no props to improve the audacity of his appearance, nor did he attempt to get into the book. He was the first new human hero the book introduced to its readers, and he immediately changed the way people viewed the book. While images of Mount Everest and the lunar landing came and went, Wadlow’s photo would return year after year.

  Obesity became another favorite reader obsession, not only with Wadlow’s counterpart Robert Earl Hughes, who so inspired Ben Sherwood, or the McCrary twins whose images Ken Jennings could not forget, but also with record holders for fattest man living, fattest woman living, and the fattest man and woman in Great Britain and Ireland respectively. As if readers could not get enough of weight, there were similar records for lightest categories, for greatest weight differential in a married couple, and both the greatest recorded weight gain and loss (this last quaintly called “slimming”). Alongside the tallest and heaviest were the oddest, such as Sridhar Chillal’s grotesquely curling and twisted fingernails, which were left uncut for more than fifty years and proved unforgettable to anyone who saw his picture. Never ones to be accused of sexism, the editors also added the woman with the longest fingernails. In this mold, the book also featured the longest mustaches, beards, and hair. There were the potent Siamese twins, Chang and Eng, the original pair from Siam who inspired the very lexicon—and fathered twenty-two children between them. And then there was a category that would become as compelling as tallest and fattest to Guinness readers and compilers, that of longevity, or in the-est world of Guinness, oldest. While offering readers the same “framewo
rk of limits” that gave an idea of their place in the world, this record category had far more action. Wadlow has gone unchallenged for more than half a century, and living giants often hold their spot for years, but the oldest living person is one of the most regularly broken records, since its holders have the unfortunate habit of dying. In less than a one-year span between mid-2006 and mid-2007, the oldest living woman record changed hands at least four times.

  “One of the marvelous things about doing this job is meeting superlative people. I have met the tallest man in the world, the tallest woman in the world, oldest man in the world—every possible kind,” said Norris McWhirter. As history’s ultimate arbiter of the superlative, and one who for most of his years at the book’s helm actually committed every printed record to his prodigious memory, Norris’s opinion of which records are most impressive cannot be taken lightly. His choice? Oldest. “The one that has made the biggest impact on me is the champion of the all-time most competitive of all records, which is staying alive. There are five and a half billion people on earth and every one is trying to stay alive and he is the supreme champion.” At the time, “he” was Japan’s Shigechiyo Izumi, who later died at his home in 1986 just shy of age 121. Norris continued, “The thing about him that was so amazing, and so annoys the doctors, is that he drank like a fish and smoked like a furnace. He began smoking when he was 70 years old. His wife died at what he regarded as the pathetic age of 90 and he was born a few weeks after Lincoln was assassinated in 1865.” David Boehm, the publisher of the American edition, had Izumi on his television show when he was 115 and explained his secret to longevity: “He starts the day walking his dog, then sits around drinking whisky.”

  McWhirter was very proud of the self-proclaimed fact—or record—that he was the only person on earth to have met both living people aged 120 or older, Izumi in 1986 and then in 1997 Madame Jeanne Calment, of Arles, France, who was approaching 122. “It was very fascinating—she remembers Vincent van Gogh going into her father’s shop.” Calment, who finally succumbed at 122 years and 164 days, joined Wadlow in the world record Hall of Fame when she became the longest-lived confirmed person of all time, which proved to be very good news for everyone except the French notary public who tried to make a killing by buying her house. In France, they have a creepy combination of real estate investment and gambling called viager. The macabre transaction works like this: Find an elderly person with a desirable home, and agree to buy their house when they die. The buyer begins making the mortgage payments immediately based on the agreed sales price, but when the owner passes away, no more payments are made, and the buyer often gets the home for a fraction of its market price. The upside to the seller is that they can begin to cash out of the equity in their home without having to move out. The notary who agreed to buy Calment’s home must have thought he was getting a steal when he closed the deal with her at age 90. Thirty-two years of payments later, she was still having the best of both worlds, living in her home with a long and unexpected stream of payments. Talk about bad luck: the very worst-case scenario in viager is making a deal with the longest-lived person in human history, exactly what Calment became, complete with a framed Guinness World Record certificate hanging in her bedroom. When explaining her amazing span, she said, “I’ve been forgotten by God.” To this day the oldest living person record continues to fall regularly; it is described on the Guinness World Records website as among the most frequently broken of all records. Calment was an exception to the rule that the title, while desirable, is usually short lived.

  Remarkably, for a period of time in 2007, both the men’s and women’s record were held by denizens of Kyushu, Japan. Japanese holders of this record aren’t uncommon, as the nation has nearly 30,000 residents 100 years old or older, but Kyushu is a rural island some 560 miles from Tokyo, and it seems too good to be true that both Yone Minagawa and Tomoji Tanabe lived there holding the women’s and men’s longevity records respectively. Proving that it really does take all kinds, Tanabe uses a much different strategy than his predecessor, Izumi, and drinks a glass of milk daily, does not smoke, and credits his longevity to his temperance. “I don’t drink alcohol—that is the biggest reason for my good health.” Then again, the teetotaler is still a decade shy of the standard set by his hard-drinking, chain-smoking, dog-walking countryman.

  Thanks to the oldest, tallest, and fattest humans, a generation of readers would not be able to put down the stories of the book’s characters. No sooner had the Guinness Book of Records been invented than Robert Pershing Wadlow quickly became the living embodiment of the public’s fascination with the book’s records. He became an icon for the fascination that generations of Guinness readers have shared with the extreme limits of the human form, from the shortest to the tallest, skinniest to fattest, youngest to oldest, for both men and women. No reader could set out to break Wadlow’s record, but at the same time, he helped make the very notion of being in Guinness popular, and many of his fellow real people in the first edition laid the groundwork for the search for “vulnerable” records. Just before the book came out, Roger Bannister’s breakthrough sub–4-minute mile had been heralded as one of the most important events in all of sports history, yet in less than two months it had fallen in equally publicized fashion, putting Australian runner John Michael Landy in the pages of the inaugural Guinness Book of Records, and demonstrating that even the loftiest records could be broken, and broken quickly. Like Wadlow, Landy’s record may have been out of reach of virtually every reader, but for readers encouraged by these very human heroes, it was not much of a leap to notice that the very first edition had a handful of the type of quirky records, which have since become its hallmark. When the book jumped onto the best-seller list, those fascinated by human record holders must have also been drawn to the potential in the Longest Dog Team Ever Harnessed (73 Siberian huskies); Brick-Laying (fifty-eight per minute for sixty minutes); Juggling (ten balls or eight plates); Highest Stilts (22' at the ankle); and Most Hamburgers Eaten (seventy-seven in one sitting), all tempting benchmarks of that first edition. As Ross McWhirter explained the soon-to-be-popular craze of record breaking in the United States, “Records are used there as a substitute for frontiers.” The looming presence of Wadlow, Hughes, and others must have made those frontiers seem worthy of exploration, and in addition to making the book incredibly popular for decades to come, would inspire the very first readers set on joining their ranks.

  The original 1955 edition of The Guinness Book of Records was a slight and slender reference book, written for an adult audience of legal drinking age. Austere in appearance, it had very few pictures, and human entries constituted just a small percentage of the superlatives, mostly natural, mechanical, and scientific, catalogued within. There was no website, no suitable for framing record certificates, and most significantly, not a single person had applied to be in the book.

  Fifty-three years later, Guinness World Records is a coffee-table-sized volume, with color pictures on practically every page, many of them shocking to behold. It features glow-in-the-dark ink, and recent editions have showcased holograms, fold-out sections, and even trading cards. “The old Guinness looked more like a psalm book, or even a Bible, with a sober dark blue cover enlivened only by the discreet golden Guinness harp. The new Guinness has huge lettering on a glitzy gold cover. It’s the difference between a librarian and a man with a megaphone,” chided London journalist Miles Kington of the Independent, critiquing the fiftieth anniversary edition of 2005. No longer requiring the ID of bar patrons, today’s book is aimed solidly at preadolescents, mainly male, and accordingly is filled with accounts of people skipping, unicycling, juggling, and frog hopping their way to records, and also of doing almost all these things and many more backward or upside down. Today’s most photogenic record holders lift enormous weights with their ears, attach them to their beards, and even pull them with their eyelids. Nasal ejections, full-body tattooing, and speed gluttony are all surefire roads to inclusion. The nu
mber of records in the company’s files has increased dramatically, and over 65,000 record-setting inquiries reach the book’s offices each year, almost all via the Internet. As a result, the number of staffers (nine) employed simply to handle the paperwork of these inquiries exceeds the entire group that compiled the original book. In 1955, Sir Hugh Beaver wrote to the McWhirters after reading the first edition and was amazed at its interesting and thorough content. Were Sir Beaver to return from the grave today and pick up the 2008 version, it is reasonable to assume he’d find it almost completely unrecognizable.

  What happened in the past half century? How did the book change so dramatically that while it has remained a perennial best seller, it now has a completely different format, appearance, and audience? The short answer is an almost immediate compulsion among readers to join the ranks of record makers and breakers in the pages of Guinness, fueled by the glory of television and accomplished chiefly through the advent of “Guinnessport.”