Getting into Guinness

by Larry Olmsted

  The term was coined by Sports Illustrated in a seminal 1979 article in which the normally tight-lipped record book staffers gave surprisingly candid interviews and access. In a lighthearted but well-researched piece by Jerry Kirshenbaum, this article remains the most thorough one ever published about the book, its creators, and its fanatic followers. Kirshenbaum summed up the fixation with getting into Guinness, and the inventiveness it can drive readers to, when he wrote:

  Nothing, however, points up the book’s success more dramatically than the zeal with which people try to get their names into its pages—and of course, onto those cereal boxes and greeting cards. Fraternity boys, failed athletes, assorted crazies and maybe even some normal folk eagerly participate in what might be called Guinnessport, whose main purpose is to “get into Guinness.”…Guinnessport flourishes because the book contains such a wealth of categories for would-be record-breakers to choose from, including many that rely less on talent than on brass and tenacity. Among these are underwater violin playing…. The U.S. is a hotbed of Guinnessport. There appears to be no shortage of people in this country like 17-year-old Lang Martin of Charlotte, NC, who made it his mission to crack the pages of Guinness by balancing six golf balls vertically.

  According to Kirshenbaum, it took Martin weeks to perfect his special skill, working late into the night, sticking with it as stack after stack toppled because he “was wanting to get into that book real bad.” He was neither the first nor last driven by such motivation.

  In the simplest terms, Guinnessports are new “sports” made up just to get in the book. For instance, if breaking Lance Armstrong’s record for seven consecutive victories in the Tour de France seems beyond your reach, you might instead choose to eat a bicycle. “There’s not much left to do that is fastest, highest, or first, so you have to redo it with your own statistics, the youngest, shortest, first with some disease, first left handed. We’re all firsts in some sense,” said Jason Daley, a records expert who closely followed world records in sports and exploration as an editor at Outside magazine and the “For the Record” columnist at Men’s Journal magazine. Individuals seeking recognition regularly peppered Daley with accounts of their feats, often bizarre firsts. One of the most popular outdoor magazine subjects is climbing Mount Everest, and more than a half century after Sir Edmund Hillary bagged the coveted first ascent, climbers are still claiming numerous firsts on the mountain every year, including the guy who wanted recognition for being the first to summit while wearing shorts. Really. “When it gets absurd is when it’s something they made up out of whole cloth, a sport they invented so they can call themselves world champion of it, with nobody else doing it and no objective way to measure its difficulty,” Daley said, perfectly describing most Guinnessports. It may be absurd, but it is a sure path to the record books, since there is no previous benchmark to beat when you make up a new category. When CNN.com ran a story about Guinness World Records titled “Shortcuts: How to Get into the Record Books,” one of its six tips was, obviously, “Invent a record: If all else fails, think up a new category in which you can claim to be the world’s best.”

  It is easy to see where readers got the idea for Guinnessport. Despite its reference library pretenses, the book was never exactly stoic and sober, and some of the most colorful records and seemingly made-up contests stem from long before the first edition was even published. In the premier edition, just for example, all the most important “ratting” records were claimed by Mr. J. Shaw’s terrier “Jacko,” who killed 1,000 rats in less than 100 minutes in London, including a prodigious 100 rats in the first 5 minutes and 28 seconds on May 1, 1862, nearly a century before Jacko or his owner could have intentionally set out to achieve Guinness World Records immortality. In way of comparison, today the company has had to ban weight records for dogs as a record category, for fear of owners so eager to get into Guinness that they force-feed or starve their pets for a glimpse of Jacko-like immortality. Likewise, while much more limited in scope, even the earliest editions had a clear reverence for odd feats that remained outside the boundaries of traditional sports, yet were worthy of the label “human achievements.” These included the “rockathon” (rocking chair marathon), pole squatting, and prodigious facial hair growth, as well as a short section on gastronomic records, with several that might be considered dangerous today, featuring mass and speed consumption of alcoholic beverages. Readers might have also been encouraged to try odd new feats by the book’s tone, with an underlying emphasis on the bizarre and macabre, a flavor apparent from the very beginning with record categories like longest coma, greatest ritual murder, and most fingers (twenty-six!) sprinkled liberally throughout the book. Early Guinness books also had a rather bleak preoccupation with natural and man-made disasters, serial killers, fastest-acting poisons, and the like. Tornadoes, floods, earthquakes, and any kind of mass devastation, along with train wrecks and related accidents, soon became a popular subject for charts and tables. Each book had a chapter titled “Accidents and Disasters” that featured records for the worst pandemics (Black Death), famines, floods, earthquakes, landslides, bombings (conventional and atomic), dam failures, fires, explosions, tornadoes, and accidents of the mining, plane, train, road, and submarine variety. By the 1960 edition, such disasters were thoroughly detailed in their own page-long chart.

  The earliest readers could find examples of Guinnessport they might consider imitating in the original book, even though the concept and practice had yet to be invented. The first record holder for Longest Beard had begun growing his in 1912, the Longest Mustache had been maintained since 1949, and while longest fingernails did not appear as a record until the 1964 edition, a sign of the book’s increasing reliance on oddities, the nails themselves had been grown back in the 1920s. Of course, none of these feats had been undertaken with the goal of setting Guinness records, which did not yet exist. The same can be said of various records such as marathon piano playing, talking continuously, stilt walking, walking on hands, and the ever popular skipping, all of which have record-keeping histories predating the Guinness book. But their very inclusion opened the door to new feats in similar veins.

  A final encouragement to would-be Guinnessport practitioners was the chance to see hotly contested records change hands frequently, even in the earliest years of the book. While no one could go back in time and be the first to reach the poles or climb to the world’s highest point, readers watched as real-life adventurers and explorers continued to grab records, often from each other, with each new edition. In the early years of Guinness World Records, the most frenetic and contentious record breaking occurred not in pogo sticking miles or joggling races but in areas of mechanical and transportation speeds. The books featured numerous such records, and for Atlantic crossings alone some editions listed separate entries for first, fastest, fastest roundtrip, and fastest submerged. The fastest car speed contest was a slugfest, soon becoming a back-and-forth war of burning rubber between the United States (represented by Mickey Thompson and later Craig Breedlove), and Great Britain (Donald Malcolm Campbell, CBE). Until the likes of Ashrita Furman came along, these speed junkies were the serial record holders of the book, appearing over and over in its pages. After crashing and wrecking his first-generation Bluebird, built especially for the attempt at a cost of over £1 million, Campbell achieved success in 1964. (Notably, this was the year the McWhirters switched gears, chapterwise, and moved car speed records from Human Achievement to the Mechanical World, making more room in the former for the growing number of Guinnessport “achievements”—such as haggis throwing.)

  Rivals Breedlove and Campbell would exchange records for years afterward, and Campbell, who had also set the waterborne speed record in 1956 in his turbojet engined ship, not so creatively named Bluebird, at 225.63 mph on a lake in England, eventually claimed eight world speed records on land and water, and won four Seagrave trophies (awarded annually to a British subject who accomplishes the most outstanding demonstration of transportation b
y land, air, or water). His last Seagrave was awarded posthumously, as Campbell was killed trying to rebreak the water speed record. Breedlove, in an equal case of name fixation, christened all of his cars Spirit of America, and in the course of setting five world records, became the first to ever drive at 400, 500, and 600 mph respectively. In 2006 he finally retired and sold his latest jet-powered version of Spirit of America to adventurer, aviator, fellow Guinness World Record holder, and speed freak Steve Fossett. Fossett was killed in 2007 when the plane he was piloting crashed. He was airborne in order to scout dry lakebed locations suitable for his upcoming land speed record attempt in Spirit of America.

  Unlike brick carrying and orange pushing, land, sea, and air records have long been highly competitive with or without Guinness, and have their own rewards, like the Seagrave and the coveted Blue Riband Trophy for fastest boat crossing of the Atlantic. Sir Richard Branson, the billionaire founder of the Virgin empire, including retail stores, an airline, record label, publishing house, and more, has both kinds of records. “I’ve been very fortunate to have lived in an era when there are still records to be broken. Scott of the Antarctic is a great, great uncle of mine or something, a distant relative, who was a very famous Englishman who tried to get to the Antarctic and actually perished on the way back. England is full of its Drakes and Raleighs and people who went out and explored the world, and as young English people we were brought up to admire them.”

  Branson’s record-setting personality is not inherited solely from Robert F. Scott of the Antarctic: his grandmother, Dorothy Huntley-Flint, was also a Guinness record holder, as the ninety-year-old passionate golfer made a hole in one with a 7-iron from 112 yards out at her local club in Barton-on-Sea, England, making her the oldest woman to ever have done so (since surpassed). Branson himself joined such illustrious ranks in 1986, a year after capsizing in his Virgin Atlantic Challenger, when he succeeded in bringing home the Blue Riband and in getting into Guinness by crossing the Atlantic in the Virgin Atlantic Challenger II, breaking the existing speed record by two hours. The next year he made the first ever crossing of the Atlantic by hot air balloon, in the Virgin Atlantic Flyer, and in that successful attempt also broke the record for the largest hot air balloon ever flown.

  Having set records in the air, on the water, and on a combination of roads and water, next on Richard Branson’s agenda is outer space and an attempt to extend his family’s Guinness record-breaking tradition to four straight generations. “I’ll be going into space with Virgin Galactic in eighteen months’ time and a few of us will be breaking records. My son will be the youngest to ever go into space, twenty-two at the time, and my parents will be the oldest, ninety-one and eighty-nine respectively. My daughter will be twenty-five and she may well be the youngest woman, I’m not sure. That trip will be taking place and will be the start of space tourism, which will be very exciting.” Youngest and oldest in space may or may not fit the mold of Guinnessport, but either way, if it works it might well also set the record for the most expensive record-breaking undertaking of all time.

  “I think that the actual record itself, just the two lines someone gets in the book for achieving something, is nice but it’s not that important,” Branson continued. “It’s the actual doing and experience and accomplishment that really gives the satisfaction, but that being said, the Guinness Book of Records is something that has been incredibly well respected and I suspect it has encouraged people to do things which they should never have dreamt of doing. I think it has added a lot of fun to British life and world life and it has recognized people who have accomplished incredibly brave things and some incredibly stupid things as well.”

  My nominee for the stupid thing category is Jim Rogers of Columbus, Ohio. Rogers’s claim to fame will forever be that of the man who introduced marathon drumming to the world. Other than the McWhirters, Sir Beaver, and a handful of Guinness executives who knew that the first edition was coming, no one could make an advance effort to be in the book. But given its 167,000 copies and instant popularity as a best seller, it is not surprising that readers immediately saw opportunities to overtake printed records—and invent their own. By definition, the earliest an activity created explicitly to get into the book could have appeared was in late 1956, with the release of the blue edition, which is exactly where you can find Mr. Rogers. In the very first revised version of The Guinness Book of Records, there were less than half a dozen new records added in the “Miscellaneous” and “Endurance” sections of the “Human Achievement” chapter, which at that point were the only parts of the book suitable for intentional acts of “getting into Guinness.” Of these, several were in the works long before the book existed. For instance, while Los Angeles bartender Beverly Nina O’Malley certainly deserved her record for Most Marriages when she divorced her thirteenth husband to marry number fourteen in 1955, that marriage marathon presumably had been going on for more than a year. Not so for nonstop drumming, which requires more stamina than musical ability. A close examination of the first few editions suggests that by pounding away on his drum, Rogers was the first person ever to gain entry for a new and pointless category of human achievement, basically inventing Guinnessport, and paving the way for Ashrita Furman, Jackie Bibby, and thousands of others. This breakthrough must have prompted readers, which by that time included many in the United States, to ponder the question, “If he could get into Guinness by sitting around banging a drum, what can I do?” Watching television, playing board games, and going bar hopping were all obvious answers—and all correct ones, Guinnessport “feats” that would get countless entrants into the pantheon of world record holders. The book would never be the same.

  Fifteen-year-old Roger McEwan was another early ground-breaker of Guinness lore. While the drum playing Mr. Rogers appears to be a pioneer, the first to get into the book through Guinnessport, or by inventing a new category of record, young McEwan seems to be the first to do it the more conventional way—by breaking a previously published record. Assuming that the athletes, explorers, financiers, and longevity champions had other motivations, and that disasters, either man-made or natural, were not undertaken solely to get into Guinness, one can surmise that McEwan’s assault on the crisp-eating record, Brit-speak for potato chips, was done for Guinness glory alone. In November 1959 he raised the bar for most potato chips eaten in an hour without a drink, from twenty-nine bags to thirty, leaving himself a full minute to spare, making him likely the first Guinness-inspired record breaker, rather than record setter.

  In 1960 another cornerstone of Guinnessport lore was laid by Felicity Ashton, Valerie Cleverton, and Patricia Frend, when they set a marathon record for forty-eight hours of nonstop knitting. While endurance knitting is clearly an example of Guinnessport, this was not their groundbreaking innovation. That would be the earliest known introduction of charity into the record-setting mix, as they knitted blankets for refugees, and in the process raised £50 in donations while casting on and casting off. Over the years, this would become an oft-repeated strategy that would make it easier to get the book’s approval, as well as to help round up bodies for mass participation record-setting events, obtain sponsorship, and receive all important media coverage.

  “Everyone is always interested in the biggest and the best, the most, the tallest, the highest, the largest, and the greatest. It’s a book of superlatives, and media feasts on superlatives, so the book of records is made for media because they love superlatives,” said longtime television news producer Ben Sherwood, explaining why record breaking gets disproportionate news coverage. “Secondly, the media loves entertainment, and the combination of superlatives in entertaining categories makes it even more perfect. So it’s superlatives in an entertaining fashion, and the trifecta, the iron triangle connecting media and the Guinness Book of Records, is average people, ordinary people, the person next door. So it’s the greatest, the most entertaining or curious or freak value, and folks like you and me doing it.”

  But ac
cording to Sherwood, the addition of the charity component takes media interest to a whole other level. “Most of these people have publicists now, and we get pitched all the time. Organizations have figured out that it’s a sure way to get media attention, and people now definitely manipulate the book in order to get attention for their charities. Someone will say ‘we’re going to make the most pancakes for breast cancer awareness.’ If you can break a record and raise money for cancer…if you add charity to the mix of the three keys I described, entertainment, superlatives, and the guy next door, then it’s not just the trifecta, I don’t even know what you call it, maybe the Final Four. Once you add charity to it, the ‘we’re actually going to do good,’ then who can resist it? Every local television camera shows up to see 10,000 people jumping rope to fight colon cancer.”

  If Mr. Rogers’s first use of a made-for-getting-into-Guinness activity, McEwan’s 1959 assault on an existing quirky record, and the knitters’ introduction of charity into record setting created a trifecta of Guinnessport pioneers, then rounding out the inspired Final Four of early Guinness World Record seekers were Gerry Germeny and David Gascoyne, students at England’s Derby College of Technology. Mr. Rogers may well have invented Guinnessport with his drumathon, but these guys perfected Guinnessport through their inspired piano smashing on May 13, 1961, and it became a model for the evolution of many other bizarre records. It was not just one of the first stunts tailor-made for securing a spot in the book, but most likely the first with its own arcane rules included in the record. Almost as soon as people began making up new records to get into the book, lines had to be drawn, apples compared to apples, so that records could be fairly contested under similar circumstances. By specifying that it had to be an upright piano, the students took away the vague choice of baby grand or concert grand piano. By working in tandem they set a two-person standard, but their real coup was the invention of a device for precisely defining the meaning of “smashed.” Hence their record, in a time of 14 minutes and 3 seconds, for demolishing an upright piano and passing the entire wreckage through a 9" diameter ring. This combination of senselessness and precision was perfect for Guinness, and predictably, the record became a favorite of college students everywhere. By the next edition, two years later, one college’s record had been shattered by another: two members of the Delta Chi fraternity at Michigan’s Wayne State University demolished a different upright piano, passing the mess through a 9" diameter ring in just 4 minutes and 51 seconds—just over a third of the original time.