Getting into Guinness: One man’s longest, fastest, highest journey inside the world’s most famous record book

Like peeling and eating a whole lemon, which he must like better than onions, since he set the record in 2007, for the second time, at under 11 seconds.

Another thing Furman has become famous for is the locations he chooses to set records. His first seven, including milk-bottle balancing, were all done in New York City on a high school track or in Central Park. But his eighth was the start of something new in his spiritual and record quest. Despite having been thwarted in his initial attempt at getting into the record book, he tried the pogo-stick route again and became the very first person to jump up and down Japan’s Mount Fuji, on a rough hiking trail to and from its summit. This feat inspired him to begin choosing his record-setting locations carefully, but in one memorable case, perhaps not carefully enough. Following the Mount Fuji stint, his newfound focus on spiritually or historically significant settings would lead him to his longest-standing Guinness World Record and, in his mind, the most difficult ever. This record will almost surely never fall, because Guinness ‘retired’ it, in part due to the danger it entails. For his landmark tenth record, Ashrita took somersaults, or forward rolls as they’re known in Guinness-speak, to the extreme.

At the time, Ashrita still was not obsessed with record-specific training the way he is today.

Now I have a much better idea of how much I have to train for a record. In those days I really didn’t train a lot. I was basing it a lot more on my faith. Now I am pretty demanding as far my training and I won’t try a record until I feel like my body is there. In those days it wasn’t like that. I was planning on breaking the somersault record somehow. People magazine called and they wanted to cover the somersault thing, and there was no time to train, and I had only trained up to a few miles. I just went out and did it, and that all contributed to the difficulty. Plus, I never even looked at the course. It was a terrible course. I had only trained on a flat path and it was all up and down. I just said, “I’ll go out and do Paul Revere’s ride.”

This, of course, refers to the historic American Revolutionary War route Paul Revere rode on horseback at midnight between Charlestown and Lexington, Massachusetts, to famously warn the populace that ‘the redcoats are coming!’ As Furman recalled, “I sort of always had this idea of making the records more creative and more interesting. It started with Paul Revere’s ride, the somersaults. That was the first one where I picked a place, and that just happened spur of the moment.” In the case of the Mount Fuji run, Furman was in Japan for Chinmoy-related business, and once there, decided to try to set a record but had not travelled for that specific reason. Paul Revere’s ride came about because, as he puts it, after his People magazine interview, “I was just kind of stuck.” Paul Revere’s route spans some 19.66 kilometres (12 miles and 390 yards), much of it on dirty city streets. It took Ashrita ten and a half hours.

Even in his colourful litany of records, ten and a half hours of somersaulting stands out. Furman has since covered many miles by pogo sticking, sack jumping, unicycling backwards, juggling, stilt walking, carrying a person on his back and crawling while pushing an orange with his nose. But somersaulting Paul Revere’s ride seems the most impossible: the length is comparable to a hilly half-marathon, exacerbated by rolling over and over on your head - on pavement. He had to throw up several times along the way. “It is really like banging your head against the wall,” Ashrita said, grimacing and clearly not fond of the memory. “I find that when I train my brain is always dull for a day or two after. The Paul Revere somersault thing was the hardest one. The somersault thing was brutal.” Strong words from the eternally nonplussed meditation fan.

It took decades for the memory of the agony of the somersaults to wane enough so he would consider trying to break his own record; even in the hypercompetitive world of Guinness, with Ashrita’s records the most coveted, no one else bothered in the more than 20 years since. But when he submitted an application to try it again, Guinness refused.

I got this enquiry back saying “when you did it the first time, was it truly continuous?” and I had to say no, there were a few times I stopped to throw up. I don’t think you could literally do it continuously, because you do have to throw up. So they said “by the strict rules it wasn’t consecutive so if you want to do it now, it has to be the most somersaults in 12 hours.” So they are allowing what I did to stand, but if I want to break it, they redefined it and it has to be a new category. So I said “fine, let’s do that.” But then they must have had a meeting or something because they got back to me and sent me an e-mail saying “we don’t want to do that, we don’t want to have a category like that.” I think they thought it was too dangerous. I’m stuck. But that’s okay because there are so many other things I can do. I’m not going to go crazy about it because there are so many other challenges.

Like pogo sticking up Mount Fuji, somersaulting Paul Revere’s ride taught him the importance of location, and how a superlative setting could make a Guinness superlative even more so, and thus attract more publicity for his spiritual cause. This historic route endeared him to the media, and his non-stop record-breaking pace has made him the closest thing to a mainstream celebrity ever produced through purely Guinness World Records feats. Besides having the most records, he has many colourful, if sometimes bizarre ones, set in exotic places. His record breaking also travels well to the television studio, where he can break records live and on demand. For these reasons he has become a media darling, using his prominence to spread the word of Sri Chinmoy. Ashrita has been the subject of hundreds of newspaper and magazine stories, and a guest on numerous television shows, including those of David Letterman, Oprah Winfrey, Joan Rivers and Bill Cosby. As recently as late 2007, he was featured on the US television newsmagazine show 20/20. He has frequently appeared on the various Guinness-related shows in the US and UK, and these days is contacted at least weekly by radio, television and newspapers from around the world. Television crews from Japan have come to film him at his house in Queens, and he appeared on a show whose host he described as ‘The Jay Leno of Bulgaria’ - during which he leapt onto the host’s desk and began doing deep knee bends.

Ashrita’s curriculum vitae of records has grown far too long to list, but it includes numerous odd combinations of and variations on his ‘child-like pursuits’, such as jumping rope while on stilts or pogo-stick jumping underwater (he calls this variation ‘aqua pogo’). He has crafted a whole genre of juggling records: while pogo-stick jumping, hanging upside down, even underwater. One of the more demanding combos is ‘joggling’ - juggling while jogging - and Furman says he trained harder for his first joggling marathon record (an impressive 3:22) than any other attempt. He still holds the ultramarathon 50-mile joggling record. Like so many of his feats, it sounds wacky but passes the test of ‘if you think you can do better you should try it’.

Another now-common approach to Guinness record setting that Ashrita helped popularize is to take some existing feat and do it backwards. He has claimed backwards records in unicycling and (ten-pin) bowling, scoring a very respectable 199 with his back to the pins. Likewise, he takes old-fashioned exercises such as jumping jacks, squats, crunches and sit-ups, and adds a twist. He’s done them in the baskets of hot air balloons, while balancing on exercise balls, even on the backs of elephants. “I love elephants, so naturally, it’s been my lifelong dream to do a Guinness record on the back of an elephant,” he said, as if any explanation were necessary.

For the past two years he has averaged more than three records per month, which is logistically extremely difficult. To do so, Ashrita has piled up certificates not only with odd combinations of skills but also by doing the same activities for varying lengths. He has revisited his unassailable skill at milk-bottle balancing by substituting the fastest mile for endurance. Besides pogo sticking up Mount Fuji (twice), he set records for the pogo-stick 10K, the pogo-stick mile (on the same Oxford University track where Roger Bannister first broke the four-minute mile AND at Australia’s iconic landmark, Ayers Rock AND near the South Pole), and the vertical record for pogo-stick jumping up the stairs of the world’s tallest free-standing structure on land until 2007, the CN Tower in Toronto (twice), ‘climbing’ all 1899 steps in under an hour. The first attempt was captured on film for Record Breakers, the popular BBC show based on the Guinness Book. Longtime Record Breakers producer Greg Childs recalls the shoot.

One of the nicest guys, but crazy, is Ashrita Furman. The terrible dilemma of being a record-breaking producer is not knowing the outcome. But with Ashrita you sort of know: if he says he can do it, he does. We had him on at least a half a dozen times during my time at the show. He is part of a sort of cult, and we never would have dealt with him if he didn’t seem so nice and above board. He stays with people from the cult wherever he goes, so it really kept the costs down, which BBC loved. He did a fantastic thing where he pogo sticked up the stairs of the CN Tower in Toronto, the world’s tallest free-standing building. We filmed the whole thing. He went so fast the crews couldn’t stay with him. Then we tried to get him to forward roll the entire course of the London Marathon, but there was no way we could get permission.

Furman’s use of wondrous settings has taken him from that humble start at Mount Fuji to numerous landmarks and all seven continents. The most difficult trip, logistically, was the time he hitched a free ride on an Argentinean Air Force cargo plane for a brief landing in Antarctica, where he barely had time to rush out, measure off a mile with a surveyor’s tape, and then pogo stick the frozen distance in record time. He did his somersault mile on the Mall in Washington, DC (prompting random passerby and renowned campaign strategist James Carville to tell him, “You’re not crazy (#litres_trial_promo). Kidnapping a school bus, that’s crazy. You’re not crazy. Maybe half a quart low…”). He has detoured from the Middle East to Iceland to break a record there, and his most memorable record-breaking sites include Stonehenge, the Great Wall of China, the Eiffel Tower, the Parthenon, the Pantheon, the ruins of Tikal in Guatemala, Yellowstone’s Old Faithful geyser, the Amazon (underwater pogo-stick jumping), the Great Pyramids, St Basil’s Cathedral in Moscow, Ayer’s Rock, and Cambodia’s Angkor Wat and Indonesia’s Borobudur, Asia’s two pre-eminent ancient temple complexes.

“I’m always trying to be creative and come up with interesting places and ideas, but a lot of times it is a struggle. One thing here and in a lot of Western countries is the insurance issue. Places don’t want to take the risk and they don’t see a benefit from the publicity. They are totally worried about the risk. Radio City I thought was a cool idea [he wanted to break a high-kick record on the Rockettes’ famous stage but they turned him down]. The sit-up record I wanted to do at the Atlas statue with the famous abs in Rockefeller Center but they said no.” Even Ashrita’s fabled pogo-stick assault on Canada’s CN Tower was the result of the Empire State Building, World Trade Center and Eiffel Tower all turning down his request (#litres_trial_promo). Yet foreigners, including the Canadians, seem to get it. “In some other countries they are eager. The book’s pretty well known and widespread here, but in some of the Asian countries,” he rolled his eyes in amazement.

Like I was in Malaysia last year, and they are totally into records, it’s just incredible. I was a celebrity in Malaysia and I didn’t even know until I got there. That juggling with the sharks thing I did? There were like 40 people from the media there. For me it was great because I had my pick of wherever I wanted to do the records. They were like “sure, so what if there are sharks and you might not come out alive? That’s fine, go ahead. You want the convention centre? City Hall? Sure.” Pretty much anywhere I wanted. In India it is really big, and some of these other Asian countries, like Singapore. I saw this article in India about how Guinness World Records there are like Olympic medals. They don’t do well in the Olympics for some reason but they take their Guinness records to that level. In the article this guy, who had done some impressive athletic feats, and he was, I think, a mountain climber, he said “yeah, I want to break that Ashrita Furman orange record and then maybe I’ll get some respect.” It’s kind of funny because here you don’t get much respect for it.

Perhaps the oddest choice of landmarks on Ashrita’s scenic record world tour was in front of the famous canine statue of Greyfriar’s Bobby, in Edinburgh. This reflects another of Furman’s deep and heartfelt passions, animals. “I love animals. I set the record in New Zealand with the shark [underwater juggling, 48 minutes, the record he was later attempting to better when a different shark collided with him]; the one on the elephant; last year in Malaysia I did a record for hopping on one leg and I hopped with an owl. The dog one is one of my very favourites. Guinness came out with a new record, they invented it, not me, the most jumps on a pogo stick in one minute. I knew I could do it, so to make it even more challenging I decided to hold a dog in one hand. It was so exciting! I had to have a vet on hand. That was my hundred-and-first.”

If exotic locales and animals are good for record setting, then it only stands to reason that exotic animals are even better. “So, a few days before I was scheduled to go to Mongolia,” Ashrita blogged, “I began thinking about what kind of exotic animal I could meet in Genghis Khan’s homeland. And then I remembered reading that Mongolia has the second-largest population of yaks in the world, after Tibet. Now you can’t get more exotic than a yak! I don’t think I had ever even seen a yak in a zoo. So with yaks on my mind, I boarded the plane to Ulaan Bataar, and somewhere over the Pacific Ocean, the idea came to me. I had been practising for the sack-racing record - why not race a mile against a yak in a sack?” The actual record attempt was for the fastest mile jumping in a sack, so it didn’t really matter if he beat the yak or not, yet Ashrita’s competitive streak came out and he edged the animal at the finish line. But his fun with Mongolian animals did not stop there. Having already run the fastest mile on a conventional pair of stilts, he had been planning to conquer the same distance on stilts made entirely of cans and string, the kind children make from empty cans, its own separate Guinness record category. Inspired by his yak victory, he impulsively lashed the cans to his feet and returned to the mile course, this time leaving a Mongolian camel in the dust.

On one occasion, Ashrita’s fondness for animal records led to questionable decision making. He decided to try to break the 5K skipping mark at the Wat Pa Luangta Yanasampanno Forest Monastery in Thailand, where Buddhist monks care for injured and orphaned tigers. His plan was to skip the first 25 metres with a full-grown tiger on a lead, despite the handlers’ worries that he might get mauled. He ended up breaking the record unscathed, but Sri Chinmoy was very unhappy with his pupil because of his strong belief that a life is valuable and should not be risked unnecessarily.

While Sri Chinmoy supported most of Ashrita’s non-tiger record attempts, even he drew a line somewhere between sublime and absurd. According to the New York Times (#litres_trial_promo) in 2003, several years earlier Ashrita had begun eating a large birch tree near his home in Queens after he learned that someone else had set the world record for tree eating. He was trimming branches and grinding them up in a kitchen blender, when his teacher found out. “He heard about it and said: ‘That’s absurd. Tell him to stop.’”

In the case of the tiger, Ashrita may have gotten carried away by his own name. In Sanskrit, Ashrita means ‘protected by God’. The name, given to him by Sri Chinmoy years ago, has served him pretty well, both with animals and his 30 years of breaking records. His only two significant injuries have been in training: he cut his hand seriously with broken glass while practising balancing a huge stack of pint glasses on his chin, severing a nerve and requiring hand surgery. Later, he broke a rib while training with a giant, aluminium hula hoop (another niche in which he holds several records). “Sri Chinmoy, when he looks at a person, rather than seeing the outer form he gets the feeling of their inner quality. Everybody has a soul and they are all different and express different inner qualities, so after you’ve been a student for a while he’ll give you a name that is descriptive of your inner qualities. Most people, their name doesn’t mean anything, it’s just something their parents gave them. It reminds you of your soul’s mission, because everyone has a mission in life. So he gave me that name, and of course, I’d much rather use that name, so I made it my legal name. My father wasn’t that happy about it.”

That was not the first time. The deeply religious elder Furman was very upset when his son abandoned Judaism for what he saw as a cult, and the two did not talk, on and off, for years. Interestingly, Ashrita thinks that it was his pursuit of Guinness World Records that ultimately led him to reconcile with his father. “The Guinness thing actually helped because it was something he could relate to. He couldn’t relate to my joining this group, and he thought I was giving up my religion, even though I had already become totally disillusioned. When I started getting media attention, it was something he could understand and it really helped a lot. He came when I set a jumping-jack record, but then he said it was too painful to watch and that was the only one he came to.”

Over the years, Furman has amassed an impressive list of record-breaking locales, but like the ski bum, he has worked out a lifestyle to do it on the cheap. “The travel sounds better than it is. My teacher holds these free concerts and I organize the trips and get a tour conductor’s ticket, and I also get air miles. There are times when I specifically go to a place, like Egypt, because I wanted to set a record at the Pyramids and I use air miles, but most of the time, it’s wherever I am travelling with the band. Last year we went to Turkey, Bulgaria and Thailand and I didn’t have to pay. Also you always need witnesses and that can be hard in other countries but on our concert trips we have all these people who are credible witnesses for Guinness, like professors and doctors, so I’ll use them.”

The last few years have been especially intense, because his record-breaking velocity has picked up. In 2006 he set 39 different records, and then added 36 more in 2007, a pace that shows no sign of slowing down. In historical perspective, it took him 18 years to notch his first 50 records; just eight years for the next 50; and in the two years since he has added 77 more. Part of this has been the self-fulfilling prophecy of his success: the more he does, the better he gets at logistics and fitness, and the more he can do. But structural changes at the book have also made it easier. Whereas early on he scoured the pages for existing records he could break, in recent years Guinness World Records management has grown much more permissive about new, invented records. In all likelihood, 20 years ago, the existence of pool-cue balancing would have precluded the acceptance of his baseball-bat balancing, and Hula Hoop Racing While Balancing Milk Bottle on Head, Fastest Mile, would never have been accepted, full stop.

Ashrita recalled how the many changes in the book over the past three decades have affected him and his spiritual quest.

The Guinness book was a reference book, an encyclopedia, a place where you could ask “what’s the most push-ups anybody has ever done?” and then open it up and it would be there. It was like that for years and years and years, until maybe 1996. Around then it changes. It stopped becoming a reference book and it became just a list of fascinating facts. That affected me in a number of ways. It is more difficult to find records. They cut out a huge chunk of records and everything is in a database that the public does not have access to and that’s a problem because you really are in the dark, you don’t know if there is a record. There is a tiny percentage of all the records, something like 2 per cent [actually, about 8 per cent of all official Guinness World Records are published in the book each year]. That allowed them to expand the categories and changed the philosophy from having to do something that was already in the book to get in, and I think that was a good thing, because now they are much more open minded about new categories. It’s a tremendous opportunity for me and I am having a great adventure, but there is some feeling of loss, because it’s no longer a book where you can go through it and say “wow, let me try that, or that would be great to break.” That’s the major change. But I still go through the new book as soon as it comes out. I devour every new edition and I think I’ve already broken eight or nine records from the 2007 book.

He told me this in March 2007, just six months after the book had hit the shelves.

The other change for me personally is that because all the records aren’t published in the book anymore, each record is not as competitive. Someone could do a record, like one I just saw for throwing the Guinness book the farthest distance. I would never have known about that if I hadn’t read an article about it. That guy threw the book, and it was accepted. Okay, so you are supposed to have media coverage, but let’s say his local paper covers it and it never shows up on the Internet. He’s got the record, he gets the certificate, it’s not in the book, I have no idea, and no one is going to try to break it so he could have that record for ten years and no one knows. I don’t know what the solution is, and I’m not complaining, but it changes things. That definitely diminished the level of competitiveness and maybe the standards somewhat.

Competitiveness is a huge factor in the book’s appeal and history, but most would-be record breakers are simply competing against essentially faceless opponents. They are, in fact, named, but for all purposes are anonymous to readers who do not actually know them. Not Ashrita. He is a prized target, and by virtue of his all-time Guinness champion status, his records carry more cachet, both for the one-off record breaker and for a handful of challengers who have emerged over the years to make a run at the King of World Records. “I love some of the rivalries,” says Ben Sherwood, former executive producer of CBS’s Good Morning America. Sherwood is also a longtime Guinness World Records fan, and author of the Guinness-inspired novel The Man Who Ate the 747. “Ashrita has some great rivals. There’s some dude in Morocco who walks farther with a brick than he does, so one year it’s him, and the next year Ashrita has to walk five miles farther with the brick without putting it down, and then the next year the guy in Morocco walks five more miles than that. There are those kinds of funny rivalries over who can walk the longest distance with a certain kind of brick without putting it down. But in Ashrita’s case it has a lot to do with his faith, and that’s an unusual thing and he is not typical.”

Ashrita admits that records can become somewhat personal possessions, and losing them hurts, but at the same time he makes himself an easy target. Knowing that records actually published in the book are much more likely to be broken, as public knowledge makes them easy targets, Furman could keep the bulk of his 170-plus records, nearly half of which are current, out of the public eye simply by not mentioning them. Perhaps five to ten of his records are printed in the book itself each year. But his regularly updated website offers a detailed chronological list of his feats - along with advice on how to go about being a record breaker. This supports what he claims is the real purpose of his mission, to inspire others, and he cannot do that by hiding his records.

When my records are broken there is a part of me that says “oh no,” especially if it is one of the longer ones that takes weeks or months of training, but it doesn’t really bother me, I’ve really come to a good place about it. Now I really see it as an opportunity. Because for some reason I don’t have the same motivation to break a record if I still have it. I think there is an innate push inside of everyone to make progress and I think this is progress. Why do people climb mountains or race cars? I think there is an urge to transcend. That is a lot of the motivation, to be the best and push past the limits. I’m not going against any person, but against the ideal. When someone breaks one of my records, I’m happy because he’s just raised the bar and, in some way, increased the level of progress of humanity.

He insists it never gets personal - at least for him. “It’s not about competing with someone else, it is about finding the talent within yourself, the inner strength, doing the best you can and making spiritual progress. But over the years there have been a few people who wanted a rivalry.”

Like Steve the Grape Guy, whose record for catching thrown grapes in his mouth Furman recently broke. Ashrita says the Grape Guy’s agent called, trying to set up a high-profile grape record showdown in New York. Ashrita passed. “I wished him the best of luck, but I’m not breaking his record. I’m not going against the person but against the record.” He says Suresh Joachim has also challenged him. Joachim is the closest thing in the world of Guinness to Ashrita, both in terms of numbers of records, types of records and stunning physical endurance feats. Despite still being far behind Ashrita in total records, Joachim is another leading example of the extreme of serial Guinness record setting. His website refers to him as ‘Suresh Joachim (#litres_trial_promo), The Multiple Guinness World Record Holder’, and he claims to have broken more than 30 different records, some of them mundane (riding escalators), some romantic (most bridesmaids and ushers at a wedding, his own), some mind-numbingly difficult (standing on one leg for over 76 hours). Ashrita recalled looking at Joachim’s website and reading about his intention to become the man with the record for having the most Guinness World Records, Furman’s most important ‘possession’. Nonetheless, Ashrita has deep admiration for his fellow record holder, especially since Joachim excels at phenomenal feats of endurance, such as running for 1000 hours. “He’s been doing records for years and he does more long-term ones, some of them are incredible. Some of the things overlap, like he had a crawling mile record and I broke it and he broke it back and I broke it. I think in his mind he would like to be the guy with the most records so obviously that’s a rivalry, but for me I am really trying to keep it at a different level, to inspire other people.” In speaking with Ashrita, it becomes obvious that he is pulled in opposite directions by his devotion to his religion and the understandable pride he has in his feats. “I don’t want to be the king of Guinness, that’s not my goal,” he insists. “I want to transcend my physical and spiritual boundaries. In that way, the Guinness book is part of my spiritual quest.”

Ashrita’s record curriculum is a microcosm of the book itself: it is impossible to say one record is necessarily better than another, but some are stunning in their apparent difficulty, while others seem like technicalities that somehow snuck by the Guinness staffers, or were cheap shots at easy marks, like finger snapping. Both the 81-mile (130.35-kilometre) milk-bottle balance and the 12-mile (19.3 kilometre) somersault over Paul Revere’s route stand out as unfathomable - and untouchable

- the kind of feats Norris McWhirter, the book’s creator, liked to call, “Almost very nearly impossible.” (#litres_trial_promo) But the record I will always associate with Ashrita Furman is the one journalist Ben Sherwood spoke of: brick carrying. Even thinking about it hurts. Imagine picking up a standard construction brick. It weighs 4 kilograms (9 pounds). Hold it in your fingers, palm down, as rules stipulate. As soon as you have a good grip, begin walking. The goal is to keep going, brick in hand, for as long as possible. If you stop walking, or drop the brick, the event is over. You cannot change hands, touch the brick to your body, or in any way rest the brick on anything, ever. If you need to adjust your grip, you have to do so nimbly, without using the other hand or any outside agency. How long could you walk? At first I thought a few minutes, and on further reflection, maybe I could go half an hour. Maybe. No one I know who has pondered this question has answered more than two hours. The forearm cramps just imagining it. Ashrita has held this record many times, but like his great advancement in milk-bottle balancing, I doubt his best will ever be challenged. He carried the brick for 31 hours. To make matters worse, as if things could get worse, he did it on a cinder track and pebbles got in his shoes. He got terrible raw blisters. Then it rained. He never faltered. Looking back, even the unshakable Ashrita cannot believe what he did. “Afterward I had these blisters, all infected, and I went to a podiatrist. He said it was the third-worst case he had ever seen in his life.” It is probably the only time Ashrita Furman will ever finish a mere third in anything.

Not long after our lunch, Ashrita was back to his usual antics, breaking the rope-jumping-on-stilts record in Mongolia’s Gobi Desert. Never one to waste a trip, Furman also broke records in baseball-bat balancing, along with his can-and-string-and-sack-jumping-with-animals miles while in Mongolia. Along the way, he stopped in Key Largo, Florida, to set the duration record for underwater hula hooping, then in Norway for a (different) can-and-string record. His scuba hula-hoop record, set in May 2007, was his landmark 150th, and by year’s end he had added 27 additional records to his total - more than most serial record breakers accumulate in a lifetime.

2 The Greatest Record of All: Birds, Beaver, Beer and Sir Hugh’s Impossible Question (#ulink_098dd308-5bb0-5a7c-80ba-b79b053f112f)

The next best thing to knowing something is knowing where to find it.

- SAMUEL JOHNSON

The original edition has an introduction by the chairman of Arthur Guinness & Co, Ltd, the Earl of Iveagh. What his Lordship wrote in October 1956 is very interesting, more interesting perhaps now than it was then.

Wherever people congregate to talk, they will argue, and sometimes the joy lies in the arguing and would be lost if there were any definite answer. But more often the argument takes place on a dispute of fact, and it can be very exasperating if there is no immediate means of settling the argument. Who was the first to swim the Channel? Where is England’s deepest well, or Scotland’s highest tree, Ireland’s oldest church? How many died in history’s worst rail crash? Who gained the biggest majority in Parliament? What is the greatest weight a man has ever lifted? How much heat these innocent questions can raise!

Guinness hopes that it may assist in resolving many such disputes, and may, we hope, turn heat into light.

- THE INDEPENDENT (LONDON)

Since its inception more than 50 years ago, the Guinness World Records book and its readers have always had an infatuation with animals. The very first edition applauded the exploits of a terrier named Jacko, a canine rodent-killing machine whose prodigious ‘ratting’ skills made him a record holder. Years later, Ashrita got into the book on the back of an elephant, skipping with a tiger, and pogo-stick jumping with a dog in his hand. Jackie ‘the Texas Snakeman’ Bibby became one of the book’s all-time icons by sharing a bathtub with poisonous rattlesnakes and dangling them from his mouth. It is only fitting that animal-related records have been such a mainstay of Guinness, because the book itself is the direct result of the chance interaction between two animal species, bird and man. The birds in this historic case were a grouse and golden plover, and the man Sir Hugh Beaver, a corporate titan whose improbable animal name was a perfect one for the father of the Guinness Book of Records.

The original 1955 edition of the book has a notable entry for another business genius associated with animals, Walt Disney, whose claim to fame was for having won the most Oscars, some two dozen of them. After achieving unparalleled success in creating one of the world’s best-known brands and a diverse entertainment empire worth billions, Walt Disney was famously quoted as saying, “My only hope is that we never lose sight of one thing, that it was all started by a mouse (#litres_trial_promo) .”

It is easy to forget such humble beginnings when a brand goes global and becomes a household name transcending borders and languages. Walt’s surname, Disney, is just such an iconic name, one instantly recognizable in all corners of the earth. Whether it is employed to refer to a man, a company, a library of cartoons, a film studio or a collection of theme parks, everyone knows Disney. Very few brands have achieved this level of universal pervasiveness and The Guinness Book of Records is one, enjoying Disneyesque global recognition - and for good reason: it is the best-selling copyrighted book in the history of mankind and is available in the native languages of most citizens of the world. Amazingly, it may have even surpassed the brand recognition of the famous brewery and stout for which it was named. One would be hard-pressed to find anyone, anywhere, who does not recognize Guinness records, yet at the same time, the famed collection of superlatives and astonishing feats remains cloaked in mystery and misinformation. Everyone knows what The Book is, but almost no one knows much about it. While Walt Disney’s hope remains fulfilled, and everyone understands that ‘it was all started by a mouse’, who recalls that the Guinness Book of Records was all started by a pair of birds?

The mid-fifties were the dawn of the Golden Age of Trivia on both sides of the Atlantic, represented in the United Kingdom by the explosion of interest in pub trivia, and in the United States by the many ‘quiz shows’, beginning with The $64,000 Question, first aired by CBS in 1955. The show’s popularity has never since been equalled on network television. “It was the first and only pre-Regis Philbin [an American game-show host on US television famous since the 1950s] game show ever to be the nation’s top rated television programme,” according to Ken Jennings, the all-time winningest player in Jeopardy! game show history, and the author of Brainiac, a history of trivia. Jennings goes on to state that “America’s crime rate (#litres_trial_promo) , telephone usage and theatre and restaurant attendance would all drop measurably on Tuesday nights, as an astounding 82 per cent of viewers were tuned to CBS.”

In 1955, $64,000 was a lot of money by any standards, and especially for answering a question, proving, as Jennings loves to point out, that not all trivia is trivial. In recent years television game shows attempting to re-create the drama of this original hit have had to up the ante considerably, offering million-dollar prizes just to get viewers to tune in. Certainly the chance to answer a question worth this much money does not come along every day. But even these riches pale in comparison to the payoff Sir Hugh Beaver got in 1954, when he innocently enquired of a hunting companion, which was the fastest game bird in Europe, the golden plover or the grouse? Sir Hugh had no way of knowing that his would be the most significant trivia question ever asked.

Born in Johannesburg in 1890, Hugh Beaver moved around (#litres_trial_promo) quite a bit in the first half of his life, and his professional career began with a 12-year stint in India on the national police force. He then relocated to London, where he joined the engineering firm of Alexander Gibb & Co, becoming a partner in the firm in 1932. Shortly thereafter, Gibb was selected to construct a large new brewery in Park Royal, on the outskirts of London, for Arthur Guinness & Sons, then the world’s largest brewer. Beaver was put in charge of the huge project, and for several years worked closely with C. J. Newbold, Guinness’s managing director. Newbold formed a very favourable impression of his younger colleague, and in 1945, almost certainly at his urging, Rupert Guinness, better known in England as Lord Iveagh, tapped Beaver to become the assistant managing director of the company. Beaver accepted, and when Newbold died suddenly a year later, Beaver succeeded him as managing director, a position he would hold for 14 years, until his retirement in 1960. During and after his stint at Guinness, Beaver assumed many other important positions, including chairman of the British Institute of Management, chairman of the Advisory Council of the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, chairman of the Industrial Fund for the Advancement of Scientific Education in Schools and chairman of the Board of Governors of Ashridge Management College. He was also president of the Federation of British Industry and of the Sino-British Trade Council, treasurer of the University of Sussex and served on the board of the Ministry of Works as well as on many other boards and several charities. In his scant spare time, the tireless Hugh Beaver led official trade missions to China and East Germany.

Hugh Beaver was the kind of classical, colonially inspired child of the British Empire, hard to imagine in this day and age, one for whom the world was almost too small a place and whose talents and achievements in so many fields seem more the stuff of novels than reality. He was indisputably the father of the far-reaching Guinness World Records empire, yet this remains just a small entry on his curriculum vitae. In addition to running the world’s largest brewery (#litres_trial_promo) and chairing or serving on the boards of numerous government and non-profit entities, Sir Hugh was passionate about causes, especially air pollution and social reform. He considered his duty as chair of the Committee on Air Pollution among his most significant roles, and was quite passionate and vocal on the topic, writing letters to the editors and giving speeches as a sort of proto-environmentalist. Likewise, he was a champion of racial equality in the workplace and used his position to advance the cause of minorities both within Guinness and in the greater society. One of his personal files is devoted to clippings about this topic in which he was quoted, alongside his many letters to the editors where he made his position crystal clear. At the time, his brewery did not just supply beer to bars; it was one of the UK’s largest landlords, leasing many pubs to the those who operated them. Sir Hugh was not shy about wielding Guinness’s power for what he considered the greater good, and one of his treasured newspaper clippings is an article about the giant brewery’s revocation of a publican’s London lease for refusing to serve ‘coloured customers’. The same file contains hate mail in the form of numerous bigoted letters attacking him for his progressive positions, some exceptionally vicious, violent, and disturbing.