Getting into Guinness Read online

  Piano smashing would become a microcosm of all “intended” Guinness World Records, meaning those that people apply for, rather than those of the “first man to the moon” variety. These records tend to follow a pattern: There would be an initial hotly contested period, until the record improved to the point where it eventually became unassailable (a trend that would later be seen in Ashrita Furman’s endurance feats of brick carrying and distance milk bottle balancing). At that point, the record would mutate and breed spin-off variations (fastest milk balancing mile). Such feats also challenged the editors to draft and apply standards at a formative stage in the book’s history, something that would forever be a sticking point for would-be record holders. Since each record is so different, the editors and rules officials have historically relied more on a set of principles than on written code. In most cases, it seems like the first object or distance chosen becomes the standard, as when Ashrita attempted to balance a baseball bat on the palm on his hand but was told that tradition dictates a pool cue be the officially balanced object of choice for such feats. And in the mile record for pushing fruit with one’s nose, history requires that an orange be used, and the underlying presumption is that the Keeper of the Records wouldn’t approve an identical effort with an apple, cantaloupe, or grape. Similarly, there are records for swimming the English Channel, for walking Ireland end to end, and for reaching the poles, but not for swimming any old channel, walking any island, or reaching any remote point. At the same time, there have been enough exceptions to these time-honored principals to cause a Guinness World Records purist consternation, such as multiple records awarded for largest pies based on flavor (apple, banana, etc.) and for biggest ice cream sundaes, depending on whether they contain bananas. Fixing rules for each attempt has been an ever-evolving learning process, and while some records have pages of detailed rules, others operate under standards that seem arbitrary and capricious. Piano smashing reflects these growing pains. When a group of students from Medway College of Art and Medway College of Technology in Chatham, England, decided to wrest the coveted record back across the Atlantic from their American peers, they upped the ante, employing seven students when both previous records had only used two, and using a bigger 10" diameter ring for the wreckage—both clearly advantageous rule changes that the book still strangely allowed. A bigger ring meant the destruction did not have to be as thorough, and the extra inch and additional five bodies allowed them to take the time down to 3 minutes and 11 seconds. Notably, this was also the first time the book detailed the weapon of choice, a seven-pound sledgehammer.

  By 1979 piano smashing was down to a hard-to-fathom 97 seconds, almost a tenth of the time it took the record’s pioneers some eighteen years earlier. That meant smashing aficionados had to look at other alternatives. The traditional approach to variations on Guinness World Records that have worked countless times is to do the same thing but backward or underwater, but this logic couldn’t be applied to piano smashing. As the standards for the original Guinnessport achievement became harder and harder to beat, two different schools of thought emerged, both removing the sledgehammer of any weight from the equation. One new tactic was successfully tried in 1971, when the fastest time for sawing an upright piano in two was first entered in the record book, at over two hours, joining the (by then) more traditional smashing method. This proved that in the fast-paced world of Guinnessport, rarely does the original record last or even remain the standard. Simply being the first with the vision to smash or saw an upright piano falls short of the immortality achieved in other more conventional firsts, such as walking on the moon, running a four-minute mile, or conquering Everest, feats that have remained glorious despite being surpassed. When it comes to made-for-Guinness efforts such as destroying pianos and the like, readers take a decidedly “what have you done for me lately?” approach.

  In 1973 the practice of destroying an upright piano saw the abandoning of implements of destruction altogether, when yet another new approach to piano mayhem was realized. Whether inspired by an austere sense of Guinness record purism or simply years of martial arts training is unknown, but a group of karate practitioners decided to take matters into their own hands—and feet—when they smashed a piano to smithereens using no tools in just over forty minutes. While impressive, this time was quickly denounced as amateurish. Six years later, three karate instructors in Lexington, Kentucky, would attack the record in earnest and demonstrate just how defenseless a piano truly is, when they destroyed one in 2 minutes and 39 seconds—a mere 62 seconds slower than that year’s mark for those using sledgehammers.

  With limits on how many ways a piano could be destroyed, and other musical instruments apparently too fragile to make an impressive target, would-be smashers were forced to once again expand their horizons, and, in true Guinnessport fashion, soon looked beyond the music room at the bigger picture. Fortunately for fifteen members of an English karate club, in 1972 a vacant six-room Victorian home presented itself and in about six hours, they destroyed it using “head, foot, and hand,” earning a new record for “Demolition Work.” This record would stand for more than a decade, until 1984, when fifteen members of a Canadian karate club located a seven-room farmhouse ripe for the kicking in Alberta. While the same number of assailants apparently raised the bar by one room, this record also goes against the general Guinness record spirit of “oranges to oranges.” Who judges which house is more difficult to karate chop to pieces? Is the seven-room house actually larger than the six-room one? Is one older, more rotted, or otherwise of flimsier construction? What if one has concrete walls, lots of pipes, or even insulation? For these kinds of reasons, almost all records are based on isolating one variable, like being fastest to do something over a standardized distance, or to cover the greatest distance in a standardized time. But with multiple uncontrolled variables, house destroying seems to be a judgment call that appealed to editors not for the usual Guinness World Records reasons, but rather for the sheer theater implicit in kicking a house to pieces. It also marks one of the first examples of made-for-Guinness record creativity coming full circle, tracing the trajectory of a single, made-up activity, piano smashing, into several different Guinnessports, including piano sawing, piano karate smashing, and whole-house karate demolition. The move from pianos to different kinds of smashing helps explain why there are well over 45,000 records in the files of Guinness World Records, and more being added all the time.

  The appeal of record setting is so strong that even highly regarded adventurers and acclaimed writers aren’t above a little Guinnessport. Despite his very real and risky achievements in aviation and sailing, Sir Richard Branson also has a less serious record-setting side. On the same day I was nabbing my second Guinness World Record, he was at it as well, piloting a prototype amphibious car from London to Paris over land and the English Channel—a first and probably last for that particular record, since Branson believes he owns the only existing version of that Aquaticar. “It was such a fun thing that I have never laughed and had a more enjoyable day in my life. It was a great car, a real James Bond car that turned into a boat. It drove beautifully at 125 mph on the road, and it turned into a fantastic speedboat, sort of an every boy’s dream vehicle. The picture of that Aquaticar that is in the Guinness Book of Records I think will be the only picture people will ever see of that vehicle but it was magnificent. It is still possible that the technology will result in the car of the future, or the car boat of the future, and the good thing about people pushing technology forward is that occasionally they get fantastic breakthroughs but at other times they disappear.” Branson can philosophize about the implications of scientific progress in his feat all he wants, but the made-for-Guinness aspects of the event are clear in the video, as he goes all out, indeed James Bond style, wearing a tuxedo at the wheel, arriving to a sea of popping Champagne corks. Unlike his Blue Riband, or his historic first crossings of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans by hot air balloons, or even his failed quest to be the
first to pilot a balloon around the earth, Branson had no standard to beat and no competitors dogging him for the Aquaticar record.

  Like Branson, acclaimed novelist, journalist, and actor George Plimpton got into the game, further blurring the lines between mainstream sport, which he became famous writing about, and Guinnessport. Plimpton is best known for taking firsthand shots at the sports he covered, often to the point of putting himself in harm’s way, such as when he played in preseason National Football League games with the Detroit Lions for his book Paper Lion. Likewise, he got into the ring with boxing legends Archie Moore and Sugar Ray Leonard for an article, trained with the National Hockey League’s Boston Bruins for his book Open Net, and even pitched against the National League’s All-Star team for his baseball work Out of My League. Regarded as a pioneer in the world of participatory journalism, the author of Fireworks and the honorary Fireworks Commissioner of New York took the same approach to his beloved pyrotechnics. Like Ashrita Furman or Jackie Bibby, who channel their longtime passions for childhood pursuits into world records, so did Plimpton when he lit the fuse of a 720-pound firework, Fat Man II, the largest such shell ever exploded. His sporting accomplishments are legend, but in the end, only a match could get him into the record book.

  After its debut with Mr. Rogers’s watershed drumathon, Guinnessport continued to creep into the book with rapidly increasing frequency. The 1960s saw more and more such entries as brick throwing, which first appeared in 1961 and quickly became a perennial favorite. Like piano smashing and many of the most interesting Guinnessport records, brick throwing would also morph and multiply quickly, spawning one of the book’s largest subsets of popular records, all under the “throwing” umbrella. So popular has this catchall category become that it has spun out of control and moved from things that logically should be thrown, like Frisbees, boomerangs, and paper airplanes, to bricks and early Anglo-eccentric oddities such as gumboots and haggis to eggs and cow chips and even the Guinness World Records book itself. Most of these examples appeared relatively early in the book’s history, but less creative record setters still prey on this category today, to the point where it seems that if one cannot think of a truly original record, one just needs to throw something that has not been thrown before. This tradition is still going strong: one brand new record making its debut in the 2008 edition, forty-seven years after the first brick was hurled 114'5", is the Guinness World Record for throwing a washing machine (11').

  Other early additions that shaped the flavor of the book included seesawing, telephoning (cramming as many people into an English or American phone booth as possible), submergence in a wetsuit, riding a Big Wheel, being buried alive, spitting, slinging (using a slingshot), pram (stroller) pushing, endurance pipe smoking, coal carrying, marathon showering, car cramming (getting the most people in a Volkswagen Beetle, later expanded to a second category for Mini Coopers), and the one that would inspire Ashrita Furman a decade later—brick carrying, which debuted in 1960.

  “It was in the mid-sixties when the book began to evolve,” Stuart Claxton, a Guinness World Records spokesman and head of U.S. business development, explained to me. “In the space of about ten years it evolved into something people tried to get into. The look and feel of the books during this time went from a studious academic tome to something popular.” In the preface to the black 1960 edition, the McWhirters wrote that “Record breaking in the 1960s is proceeding at such an exhilarating pace that even historic landmarks of human achievements are often short-lived as records. To compensate for this, some progressive tables showing records step by step along with their dates, have been put into this edition.” Such tables charted not just man’s race to the heavens but also endurance “marathons” in everything from bowling to playing Monopoly—everything except actual marathons.

  1969 was a pivotal year for the book, the last time it would ever appear in its original almanac form. The first inside photo page, traditionally reserved for the most impressive superlatives, was once again suitably reverent, celebrating Neil Armstrong’s first steps on the moon, which would become one of the book’s most reprinted and beloved records, “Lunar Conquest.” But change was afoot, and the sixties went out with a bang, seeing the continued explosion of Guinnessport categories including Eating Out, Apple Picking, Bag Pipe Playing, Bed Pushing, Coal Shoveling, Hairdressing, Hoop Rolling, Hop Scotch, Plate Spinning, Shaving, Tunnel of Fire, and so on. These changes, gathering steam and increasing in number annually since the 1956 drumathon, had become too much for the book’s original format to bear. In 1970 an edition much closer to the one we have today was launched, measuring 12" x 8.5", with a glossy cover instead of linen cloth, covered front and back with images, both cartoon and photographic, of bed pushing, seesawing, circus weight lifting, and, reflecting its more human element, a man with a huge beard, the famously fat McCrary twins, and of course, Robert Pershing Wadlow. Perhaps the only visible connection this harpless version had with the previous sixteen editions was the small photo of a bottle of Guinness stout on its back cover.

  Changes would continue to be introduced over the next thirty years, including a major design overhaul in 1996, with greatly increased reliance on color photographs. In 1997, the book officially changed its name from The Guinness Book of Records to Guinness World Records (the U.S. edition had been published under the compromise title The Guinness Book of World Records since the late fifties). By 1999, the Wall Street Journal reported that the editors’ target audience had switched from ten-to fifteen-year-old to seven-to fifteen-year-old boys. Accordingly, categories were again updated and embellished, with, for instance, statistics about battleships moved from the humdrum section “Ships” to the new and improved “Killing Machines.” According to the Journal, other category casualties in this seismic shift were Highest Price for a Painting, First Person to Walk on Both Poles, and Biggest Bottle Collection, replaced by Largest Sports Salary, Highest Paid Child Performer, and Biggest Social Climb. The book continues to evolve today, with increasing celebrity influence, but the fundamental shift from records about the world around us to records about us was in place by 1970. As the Independent’s highly critical Miles Kington lamented, recollecting the original edition and its inspiring foreword by the Earl of Iveagh, describing a book that could turn the heat of disputes into the light of truth:

  Except that it’s not that kind of book anymore. I have been through the new, gold-plated Guinness World Records 2005 as carefully as I can, and can find no information on who was the first to swim the Channel. Or the fastest. Or the youngest. Or anything about swimming the Channel at all. I have also been unable to find any information on the deepest well in England, or indeed much about that sort of thing at all…. Nor is there anything about Scotland’s highest tree. Or Ireland’s oldest church. Or Parliamentary majorities. Or even, I think, rail crashes. With the partial exception of weight-lifting, not a single one of the questions playfully raised by Lord Iveagh in 1956 can be answered by the book known as “Guinness World Records 2005.”

  Lord Iveagh likely did not anticipate Guinnessport or expect it to take off with the fervor it has. The resulting change from demure reference book to in-your-face visual began in the early 1970s, driven by unrelenting twin forces: the compelling need of many readers to get into Guinness, and television.

  “There was a very successful BBC TV show called Record Breakers,” explained Stuart Claxton.

  A gentleman by the name of Roy Castle and Norris McWhirter were the co-hosts. People who set records on the show often got into the book, but it was not guaranteed, still an editorial decision. At that point, the book still had its original editorial direction, the result of a massive research project. But by the mid-sixties, the book had begun to evolve, in large part due to the show, where people would come on and try to break records, and McWhirter was the face of the Guinness book. In the space of about ten years it became something people wanted—and tried—to get into. The whole thing was catapulted forward by th
e show, and the certification procedures for records, the guidelines, the certificates of recognition, all of that came about in the mid-[to] late 1960s. I think it’s that whole 15 minutes of fame element. People out there watching and reading either have a talent, or think they can beat a record, and they want to do it because it is an accomplishment.

  The show was an instant hit for BBC, running in prime time for the next thirty-two years. Roy Castle, OBE, was a sort of vaudevillian entertainer, a singer, dancer, comedian, and musician who became an incredibly popular children’s entertainer and had his own eponymous variety show on BBC before achieving greater fame with Record Breakers. Greg Childs, producer of the show from 1988 to 1998, said of Castle, “He was sort of like the Sammy Davis Jr. of the U.K. He was the world’s fastest tap dancer, played all these instruments, sang. He would set records himself as well, like when he parasailed under all the London River bridges.” During his two decades as host, Castle also set records for speedy tap dancing, wingwalking on a biplane from London to Paris, and playing the same tune on forty-three different instruments in less than four minutes. He even wrote and performed the show’s theme song, “Dedication,” which became the mantra of many English would-be Guinness World Record holders. Here is one representative stanza: