The Man Who Spent 49 Days Sitting on a Flag Pole

Haven’t you always wondered how people manage to make it to that list of world records? Let’s look at some of the most outrageous record breakers out there, shall we? From the longest wedding dress train to the tallest man and the woman with the longest fingernails, to even the man holding the record for most records, let’s explore these awesome stories together.

The world record for hosting the largest barbeque doesn’t belong to a person but to a whole city. I mean, it does really take some power to grill all that food, so the small city of Minas in Uruguay came together in 2017 to smash this one. About 200 people cooked over 36,000 pounds of food. Aaand they were doing it for a total of 14 hours!

Why would they even start such a project, you might ask? Well, because of the magical spirit of competition, of course. They wanted to snatch the world record back from Argentina, which had previously surpassed them back in 2011.

The party in Uruguay didn’t end up producing the biggest burger, though. That’s a whole other story. The record now belongs to the people at Mallie’s Sports Bar & Grill, located in the Detroit suburb of Southgate. How did they manage to break this one? Simple, they produce the Godzilla of burgers, weighing about 1,800 pounds. That’s about the size of an American Bison!

It did take some kind of investment on their part since they had to custom-make an oven large enough to fit the burger in the first place. Obviously, they couldn’t find one of those available on the market, so they fashioned one out of a shipping container. Never thought this one would be a record to break, but turns out there’s a record for the largest gathering of people to eat breakfast in bed!

I sure would have wanted to participate in this one, but unfortunately for me, I wasn’t one of the 418 people that ended up participating. They broke the record at the Sheraton Langfang Chaobai [Lan-fan Cha-bai] River Hotel on August 16, 2015. A lot of young ones also ate their breakfast in bed with their parents, but they didn’t make the official count, so if you think about it, the number was actually higher!

And speaking of world records that brought people together, according to Official Guinness Records, the one for the most people doing fist bumps simultaneously was achieved by Skiatook Public Schools in Skiatook, [ski-tuk] Oklahoma, USA. This was back on November 5, 2011, and the total number of people that participated was an impressive 1,820. One of my favorites is the story of Alvin Kelly, a World-champion flagpole sitter from the 1920s.

He was nicknamed “Shipwreck” Kelly, but why was that? Well, because he claimed to be a survivor of the Titanic! He worked in shipyards as a steeplejack and a stuntman before starting his flagpole sitting endeavor. His Titanic story proved to be far from the truth, but Kelly did have a lot of close calls throughout his whole life, having survived five shipwrecks, two plane crashes, three car accidents, and one train derailment! Or at least that’s what he said.

Back to the flagpole thing: Alvin Kelly would climb on top of a specially designed flagpole and would sit there on a small platform for days or even weeks. OK, he might have enjoyed it, but he was paid for it, too. He became a sort of a weird celebrity at the time and even charged as much as $100 to $500 (roughly $1,500 to $8,300 in today’s money) for every hour he had to stay perched on a pole.

He broke the world record when he sat on a flagpole for a total of 1,177 hours, which is 49 days plus an hour! He learned to take naps sitting upright and was often photographed doing random things while up there, like reading the newspaper or shaving.

They say he had spent a staggering 20,613 hours flagpole sitting over the course of his lifetime. Caudry [kod-ri], a French town famous for its production of lace, snatched the title for the world’s longest wedding dress train.

They produced a spectacular white gown that featured a super long [26,560 ft] train. That’s almost long enough to cover Mount Everest, which has 5.5 miles! They did need the help of 15 volunteers to finish the project. The team also spent two months initially stitching individual pieces of the train, and afterward, they sewed them together.

There is also a world record for the longest fingernails. At some point, it belonged to Ayanna Williams from the US, whose astonishing nails had a combined length of over 24 ft when measured back in March 2021. She started growing her nails in 1993, and the record was confirmed in 2017.

Ayanna lost her record in 2021, as she was no longer comfortable with doing day-to-day tasks, like making her bed or putting on shoes. To remove those incredible nails, she had to seek an appointment with a professional who used a special device to cut them. It’s easy to imagine why a simple pair of clippers just wouldn’t have done the job, right?

The first-ever recorded “tallest person in the world” is known as Robert Wadlow, who was born on February 22, 1918, and had regular-sized parents, surprisingly. He was also pretty average at the time of his birth, weighing just 8.7 lb. But things rapidly took off, and he reached 5 ft 4 in by the age of five and was 5 ft 11 in tall by the time he was 8. At 17, he became the tallest teenager ever, surpassing the 8 ft mark. When they last measured his height on June 27, 1940, Robert stretched a mind-boggling 8 ft 11 in height!

Due to a condition that meant he had abnormally high levels of human growth hormone, he continued to grow throughout his life. Even though he was a celebrity in his own right, life wasn’t always easy for Robert, given his size. He had to consume about 8,000 calories a day and needed leg braces and a walking stick to move around. He never used a wheelchair, though. His legacy stretches across many life-sized statues of him all over the world, and even a song telling his story!

If breaking world records is something you aspire to do, you might have a thing or two to learn from Ashrita Furman. He is known to have set more than 600 to the day and currently holds over 200! Ashrita began his journey of becoming a multiple titleholder in the early 1960s. He had a complete fascination with the annual Guinness World Records book.

He accomplished his first record by doing the most consecutive jumping jacks. It took him a total of six hours, 45 minutes, and 27,000 jumping jacks to complete this one. Ever since, he’s gathered multiple records in his unusual portfolio, such as the one for the farthest distance trekked balancing a bike on his chin, for most fire torches lit and extinguished in one minute, and the one for the fastest mile on a pogo stick.

He’s even added the one for the longest time to hula-hoop underwater and for most arrows broken with his neck in one minute. To top it all off, he even tackled the greatest distance traveled on a bicycle, balancing a milk bottle on his head. And that’s just to name a few!

Ashrita is also one of the very few individuals in the world known to have broken a record on every single continent on the planet. He’s also part of the exclusive club of holders of more than 100 records at any given time. He may have dialed down a bit in recent years, but he doesn’t plan on stopping any soon. Currently living in Queens, New York, Ashrita has even been the subject of a documentary of his own, showcasing the major moments of his amazing, record-setting career.