Guinness World Records (GWR) is celebrating its 70th anniversary by highlighting unclaimed titles you might fancy going for.
The bookkeeper of weird and wacky achievements – the first volume of which was published on 27 August 1955 – is inviting people to try their hand at such extraordinary feats as:
• The most whoopee cushions sat on in one minute;
• The fastest time to blow a stamp 10 metres;
• The furthest distance bottle flip;
• The most high-fives in 30 seconds;
• The fastest 400-metre sack race;
• And the fastest time to ascend the height of Everest by bicycle.
GWR’s editor-in-chief Craig Glenday said the records are “there for the taking”, and looks forward to celebrating “the next generation of record-breakers”.
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But it’s not just quirky milestones that GWR concerns itself with.
It recently celebrated the 116th birthday of the world’s oldest person, and oldest Briton ever, Ethel Caterham, while Taylor Swift’s recent album announcement also secured a record.
She announced The Life Of A Showgirl on the podcast of her fiance Travis Kelce and his brother Jason, helping it pull the most concurrent views ever for a podcast on YouTube with 1.3 million.
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How did GWR begin?
“What’s the fastest game bird in Europe?”
A question which triggered a debate at a 1950s shooting party in County Wexford, Ireland, attended by the then managing director of Guinness brewery Sir Hugh Beaver.
When their discussion and search through reference books failed to come to an answer, the idea for a record book was born. Sir Hugh thought it’d be a great way of settling pub arguments and recruited researchers from Fleet Street to compile a book of facts and figures.
Decades worth of editions and 155 million copies later, we’ve learned of records for everything from the largest collection of Spice Girls memorabilia (Elizabeth West, UK, with more than 5,000 pieces) to the longest female tongue (Chanel Tapper, US, 9.75cm).
Sky News is in the GWR for the most concurrent live web streams for an event: 138, during coverage of the 2015 general election.
