Getting into Guinness

by Larry Olmsted

  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, The Multiple Guinness World Record Holder,” and he claims to have broken more than thirty different records, some of them mundane (riding escalators), some romantic (most bridesmaids and groomsmen at a wedding, his own), some mind-numbingly difficult (standing on one leg for over seventy-six 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 one thousand 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 eighty-one-mile milk bottle balance and the twelve-mile 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.” 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 nine 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 from 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 thirty-one 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 twenty-seven 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

  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 fifty 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, since 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.”

  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. Amazingl
y, 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 equaled on network television. “It was the first and only pre–Regis Philbin game show ever to be the nation’s top rated television program,” 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, telephone usage and theater and restaurant attendance would all drop measurably on Tuesday nights, as an astounding 82 percent 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 inquired of a hunting companion, which was the fastest game bird in Europe, the golden plover or the grouse? Sir Beaver 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 quite a bit in the first half of his life, and his professional career began with a twelve-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 favorable 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 fourteen 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 resume. In addition to running the world’s largest brewery and chairing or serving on the boards of numerous government and nonprofit 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 U.K.’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 “colored customers.” The same file contains hate mail in the form of snumerous bigoted letters attacking him for his progressive positions, some exceptionally vicious, violent, and disturbing.

  His accomplishments were certainly impressive, and if anyone deserved a knighthood, it was Sir Hugh Beaver, KBE. Most of his credentials as a business leader, social progressive, and man of charitable works are beyond doubt, as was his tireless approach to juggling the many responsibilities he undertook. Perhaps the only remaining unanswered question about the life of Beaver was how good his aim was.

  Depending on who tells the almost apocryphal story of Sir Hugh’s “Guinness Book hunting moment,” he is either a very good shot or a lousy one, and it remains uncertain whether his question about which bird was faster, the golden plover or grouse (in some accounts it is the closely related teal or snipe), was brought on by his success at bird hunting that day—or his frustrating stream of misses. According to his 1967 obituary in Guinness Time, the brewing company’s in-house newsletter, “He was a particularly fine shot,” and this one, like other accounts, has him pondering the speed of flight issue over a collection of downed birds of both types after a day of shooting in County Wexford, Ireland. But the most accurate account seems to come from Norris McWhirter, the editor of the very first edition of The Guinness Book of Records, recalling a conversation at which he was actually present. It is his retelling of the story in Ross, the biography of his twin brother Ross McWhirter, which rings truest.

  [W]hen a golden plover had come high overhead and he had missed it. Later, in the home of his host, conversation turned to whether or not the plover, of which the eight members of the shooting party had bagged 20 that day, was indeed the fastest game bird in Europe as someone there had claimed. When various expensive encyclopedias in the library failed to really settle the point whether or not teal were as fast, an irritated Sir Hugh announced that “books as expensive as these ought to provide the answer to so simple a question.” Another member of the party…remarked that encyclopedias did not necessarily give that sort of information. Sir Hugh retorted that records were just the things that started pub and bar arguments and it was about time somebody produced a book full of records to settle this kind of dispute.

  Not a man to mince words or delay action, Sir Hugh took it upon himself to do just that after returning to England and discussing the matter with his colleagues. At the time, Guinness was on tap in some 84,400 pubs throughout the British Isles, and Sir Hugh saw this market alone as big enough for a book of records, one that would also be a branding opportunity, clad in the green of Ireland and sporting the Guinness logo, not much different than the bar mats or signage the brewery supplied to pubs as part of its marketing efforts.

  In addition to the question of Sir Hugh’s shooting aptitude, a further mystery surrounds the date of the shoot itself. It is known that the shoot occurred at Castlebridge House, the country estate of a friend in Cou
nty Wexford, in the southeast of Ireland, where the issue was passionately discussed over port that evening. Although Guinness began in Dublin, where scion Arthur Guinness had started making stout at the now world famous St. James Gate brewery in 1759, Sir Hugh lived and worked in London, where Arthur Guinness & Sons was publicly traded on the London Stock Exchange. Most histories, including the “official” one listed today on the Guinness World Records website and in promotional materials, date the shoot to 1951, but this makes little sense in light of other evidence. All accounts describe Sir Hugh acting quickly on his intuition, and most versions of the story have the debate continuing into the libraries of London upon Beaver’s return from the shooting excursion, this research unfolding over a period of just weeks or months. The conversations and actions leading to the hasty production of the first Guinness book, which was a rush job (the first edition was written in just sixteen weeks), all took place in early 1955, with no justification to explain a four-year hiatus from Beaver’s grouse vs. plover frustration. For what it’s worth, both the New York Times and the Scotsman attribute the genesis of Sir Beaver’s idea to 1954, which seems much more plausible. In Beaver’s meticulously detailed personal appointment diaries, in which his days were constantly jammed with meetings and business travel, from 1951 to 1953 there is not one mention of shooting. However, on Wednesday, September 8, 1954, Sir Hugh wrote, in his perfect penmanship, the single word SHOOT across two full pages of the diary, representing an entire week. The absence of previous trips and the timing of this one suggest that it was in mid-September 1954 that Sir Hugh’s moment of world record enlightenment struck like a lightning bolt. The diaries also support the contention that he couldn’t have been that fine a shot, unless he made do without practice for years at a time. Given that he had so many business responsibilities, it is hard to imagine him keeping sharp with the shotgun. Leisure in any form was largely unknown to Sir Hugh, and over the first half of the decade his sole shooting trip equals the length of his only other weeklong break, a voyage to Italy, the only vacation with Mrs. Beaver recorded in his diaries. Aside from these two trips, in five years he seemingly satisfied himself in the way of leisure with a single night at the theater with his wife, a few games of lawn bowls, and a lone round of golf every few years.