Transcript

I say - have you ever wondered what the fastest flying species of bird is?  We’ve all wondered that, haven’t we, though perhaps not while out grouse hunting. Back in Ye Olden Days, this might have led to silent musing, conversation with like-minded friends, or perhaps the more diligent types would make the effort to try to look it up…somewhere. But where?  Or – in most cases – dropped the matter altogether because where in the world would you find such an obscure factoid, and … who really cares?

In Ye Less Olden Days, as you likely know, there was – is – a singular repository of just this sort of thing, with stories of its own to tell, satisfying a world of wonderers, even in an age of instant search and there’s no excuse to be ignorant, begging a number of questions about the nature of superlatives, leaving a record of achievements and bests and mosts and fastests, no matter how trivial they might seem. 

A document that changed the world: The Guinness Book of Records, now styled as Guinness World Records and available online, compiled by Norris and Ross McWhirter and published in London, 1955.

I’m Joe Janes of the University of Washington Information School and I want to thank my student Brooks Scheibler, who researched and collaborated on this episode.  The bird question was really how this whole thing started.  In November 1951, Sir Hugh Beaver and his party, back at Castleford House after a day’s shooting in the North Slob by the River Slaney in Ireland whatever that is, were in disagreement as to whether the golden plover, of which they had missed several during the day, was in fact Europe’s fastest bird.  Reference books they consulted failed to deliver a conclusive answer.  Today, wisdom of a sort is a few clicks away.  A Google search on “fastest bird Europe” produces, well, we’ll just leave that as an exercise to the listener, not to mention what you might get from a voice assistant or AI or whatever else comes down the pike in the years to come.

For most people, in 1951, the matter would have ended there, with someone remarking “I guess we’ll never know….” before turning once more to the sherry decanter.  Sir Hugh, however, wasn’t just any knight of the British realm.  He happened to be the managing director of a certain brewing company and it occurred to him that these kinds of disagreements must arise all the time in the 80,000 or so pubs his company owned up and down Britain and Ireland.  Wouldn’t it be worthwhile to have a book that would resolve these kinds of discussions? (And, although nobody comes out and admits it, that forestalls bar brawls?)

Indeed it would.  Twin brothers, Ross and Norris McWhirter, who borrowed each others’ passports, read newspapers and almanacs as kids, and who later separately ran unsuccessfully for Parliament in different constituencies getting almost the same number of votes, were running a fact-finding agency in London.  They were engaged in 1954 to compile such a book, after having been recommended by a record-breaking athlete whose first job was with the brewery and who knew the twins as sprinters at Oxford.  Since nothing like this existed at the time, one of their first challenges was how to do it, so working over the course of three jampacked months, they sent out letters to experts in various fields, and rather than asking direct questions about superlatives, they would write with something they thought was close and ask about that; they’d discovered over the years that experts might be cagey with their own knowledge but loved correcting somebody else’s mistake.  Genius.

Thus was born in August of 1955 the first 198 page version of the Guinness Book of Records; sources differ a bit on its early success, perhaps 1,000 were printed initially as a promotional giveaway, or maybe the first run was 50,000 and started slowly but in any event by Christmas 1955 was #1 on the UK bestsellers list and became a regular resident there and elsewhere for years to come.  In the decades that followed, more than 150 million copies have been sold, in 40 languages and there are more than 50,000 “records” in their database.  It spawned television shows, museums starting with one in the Empire State Building in 1976, a board game, video games, and inevitably a web site; at time of recording there is still a print version aimed primarily at a youth audience.

They also employ a staff of “adjudicators” who, well, adjudicate whether or not a record has been set or broken – for a price. Nominally, anybody can apply to set or break a record for $5, with a wait time of several weeks; however, if you’re willing and able to pony up for “priority review” or “consultancy” for your corporate branding strategy, ranging anywhere from a few hundred dollars to half a million or more, go to the head of the line.  Which means in many ways they are seen as much an advertising or publicity agency as a repository of facts, including accusations of burnishing and whitewashing the reputations of authoritarian regimes with hundreds of “new” and entirely contrived records from the UAE, Egypt, Russia, Turkmenistan, and so on.

They set the rules and the terms of record attempts, so more or less by dint of having been doing this for decades, they have become, more or less, “the” authority. One special case: they rely on the work of the Gerontology Research Group, which since 1990 has undertaken the somewhat macabre task of compiling ever-changing lists for the world’s oldest people.  They are not, however, the only game in town; the “World Record Academy” boasts a very colorful website claiming to have faster service, more categories and requirements for polygraph and drug testing.

There are limits; over the years, Guinness (spun off from the brewers when they were bought out in 2001)  have “closed” or discontinued categories that are now deemed too dangerous or unsavory or just plain gross to discourage “bad behavior”: those involving alcohol consumption or gluttony including eating things like bicycles and trees, heaviest pets, fastest driving around the world, or potentially environmentally dangerous activities like releasing balloons or paper lanterns.  They also won’t take things they can’t objectively measure such as beauty.  Also, for the record (sorry, couldn’t resist) – no more entries for most prolific serial killer, fasts or hunger strikes, longest kiss, longest time buried alive, fastest violinist, or the largest audience for camel wrestling (ok, 20,000 in Turkey in 1994 because I know you were dying to know.)

Let’s step back for a moment to consider “world records” – the question of who is the fastest or the strongest or the smartest or whatever must be as old as humanity; the International Olympic Committee lists several “Best of the Best” ancient athletes, but without sophisticated and reliable timekeeping or measurement methods, comparing across the generations is impossible, and if you want a world record, then you sorta have to have knowledge of, and communication with, the “world” in some meaningful fashion. The first citations of the phrase in the OED are from the 1880s and 1890s in the contexts of horse racing and sports, which aligns with the organization and codification of many sports and on the cusp of telegraphy and faster and more global communication methods.  It’s likely an old concept that could only be realized in modern times.  The first officially-recognized world record in the 100m dash is from 1912 for men and 1923 for women; for swimming 100m freestyle it’s 1905 and 1908, and in some timed or measured sports, financial bonuses from sports federations or sponsors can be on the table for world records.

Almost nobody ever needs to know a world record, like the tallest person or the smallest book or the fastest bird in England (finally revealed in the 36^th edition as the red grouse).  The continuing popularity of the Guinness Book and now its web site tells us, though, that lots of people care enough to find out or just be fascinated by what people will go through to get themselves a world record, not to mention the people who are fascinated enough with the work itself to produce a very thorough and well-maintained web site devoted entirely to collectors of the published books. 

I’ll admit to a marginal personal connection; as the nerdy, facty kid I was, there was usually a Guinness Book in the house when I was growing up, and I remember being deeply freaked out by the photograph of the man with the longest fingernails as I just read through the book for the heck of it.  And at the American Library Association conference in 1982, the very first professional meeting I ever went to, I won a free copy at their booth. 

So we come down to “who cares?”; if it’s not you or someone you know who’s trying to break a record then so what?  Without going too far overboard, this gets at the roots of human curiosity:  I wonder…what’s the tallest building, the highest waterfall, the largest cowboy boot sculpture?    Yet world records, ridiculous as they might often be, can also at times be among the highest achievements of humanity. 

Guinness’ tag line is “Officially Amazing,” in that kind of punny, slogany way.  It’s easy to dismiss all this as “trivia” or “trivial” which now connotes things of little worth.  The word “trivia” enters English around 1900 by way of 16^th century “trivial”, originally meaning “commonplace” morphing into “unimportant” and deriving from the Latin “trivium”, the place where 3 roads meet, and also the term for one of the foundations of medieval university studies, the disciplines of rhetoric, grammar, and logic.  In an ever-more-automated world of “facts” true and otherwise, some people still value knowing them; witness the thousands of people, including your genial host, trying every year to get on Jeopardy!  (Helloooooo!)

Somehow, a world where getting facts right, and making them – and logic while we’re at it – commonplace seems amazing indeed.

References

“About Us | World Record Academy.” n.d. Accessed July 16, 2025. https://www.worldrecordacademy.org/about-us/about.

Gerontology Research Group – Dr. Coles’ Supercentenarian Institute | Gerontology Research Group. n.d. Accessed July 16, 2025. https://www.grg-supercentenarians.org/.

“Guinness Book History 1950 - Present.” 2006. May 13. https://web.archive.org/web/20060513093133/http://spyhunter007.com/spy_guinness_book_history.htm.

“Guinness Record Book Collecting.” n.d. Accessed July 16, 2025. https://guinness.book-of-records.info/history.html.

Guinness World Records. 2015. “60 Years on, the Categories That Guinness World Records No Longer Monitors.” August 26. https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/news/2015/8/60-years-on-the-categories-that-guinness-world-records-no-longer-monitors-393758.html.

Guinness World Records. 2022. “Why Was the Guinness World Records Book First Published?” September 16. https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/news/2022/9/why-was-the-guinness-world-records-book-first-published-714607.html.

Guinness World Records. n.d. “Guinness World Records Archive.” Accessed July 16, 2025. https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/products/books/history-of-the-book/book-cover-archive.html.

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Martin, Douglas. 2000. “David Boehm, 86, Record-Keeper to the World.” Arts. The New York Times, February 10. https://www.nytimes.com/2000/02/10/arts/david-boehm-86-record-keeper-to-the-world.html.

Saakashvili, Eduard. 2017. “Episode 795: Is Record Breaking Broken?” Planet Money. NPR, September 20. https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2017/09/20/552203402/episode-795-is-record-breaking-broken.

“The All-Time Greats of the Ancient Olympic Games.” n.d. Accessed July 16, 2025. https://www.olympics.com/ioc/ancient-olympic-games/all-time-greats.

“Trivial, Adj. & n. Meanings, Etymology and More | Oxford English Dictionary.” n.d. Accessed July 16, 2025. https://www.oed.com/dictionary/trivial_adj.

Wikipedia. 2025. “Men’s 100 metres world record progression.” June 26. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Men%27s_100_metres_world_record_progression&oldid=1297465951.

Wikipedia. 2025. “Women’s 100 metres world record progression.” July 3. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Women%27s_100_metres_world_record_progression&oldid=1298639033.

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Wikipedia. 2025. “World record progression 100 metres freestyle.” July 5. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=World_record_progression_100_metres_freestyle&oldid=1298873960.

“World’s Record, n. Meanings, Etymology and More | Oxford English Dictionary.” n.d. Accessed July 16, 2025. https://www.oed.com/dictionary/worlds-record_n.