Eleven world records

Eleven records.
Here is what
each one took.

Some of these needed half a million people moving within the same hour. One needed a single hand, a magnifying glass, and several months of not making a mistake. All eleven are below, in full.

Recognised by the record bodies that adjudicated them. The certificates are in the evidence at the foot of this page.

01 Three kinds of record

They divide
cleanly into three.

Not by which body certified them or what year they happened, but by what each one actually asked of somebody. Four needed a crowd. Four needed a workshop. Three needed one steady hand and a great deal of patience.

  • Four

    Gathered

    Counts of things brought together — trees, photographs, children, birth dates. None of them could have happened without thousands of people agreeing to be in the same place, doing the same thing, at the same moment.

    Trees · Photographs · Dance · Birthdays
  • Four

    Built

    Objects made at a size nobody had made them before. A spoon you cannot lift, a calendar that covers a wall, a screw twice the height of a person, and a calendar built to keep working long after everyone involved has gone.

    Calendar · Spoon · Screw · Perpetual calendar
  • Three

    Drawn by hand

    The opposite discipline. One person, one postcard, and work small enough that it needs magnification to be seen at all — where the whole record is lost if the hand slips once in sixty-four thousand strokes.

    Ram · Ganesha · Mirror script
Four records

Gathered

What it takes to make several thousand people do one thing at one time, and be counted doing it.

Volunteers planting saplings during the Ek Ped Maa Ke Naam drive
Ek Ped Maa Ke Naam — 508,603 trees, one hour
Gathered · 01

508,603trees

Half a million trees, planted inside one hour

The Ek Ped Maa Ke Naam initiative — a tree for your mother's name. The record is not the number of trees. It is that all of them went into the ground within the same sixty minutes, which meant tens of thousands of people holding a sapling at the same moment, across a whole region, waiting for the same signal.

  • 508,603trees in the ground
  • 60minutes, start to finish
  • Environmentalthe reason it was run
The exhibition of 197,610 photographs at Triton Mall, Jaipur Visitors walking the length of the photograph exhibition
Triton Mall, Jaipur · 17 September 2018
Gathered · 02

197,610photographs

The largest photo exhibition ever held on one person

One hundred and ninety-seven thousand, six hundred and ten photographs of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and no image repeated anywhere in the hall. They were gathered over six months, with the students of GSSS School, Laxman Dungri, before a single one went on a wall.

  • 197,610photographs, none repeated
  • 6 monthsof gathering beforehand
  • 17 Sep 2018Triton Mall, Jaipur
Three thousand and fifty children dancing in formation The dance formation seen from above
3,050 children · 9 minutes 58 seconds
Gathered · 03

3,050children

Three thousand children, and not one of them out of step

The largest continuous dance performance: three thousand and fifty children holding one routine together for nine minutes and fifty-eight seconds. Continuous is the difficult word in that sentence. If the formation breaks anywhere, at any second, the whole attempt stops being a record.

  • 3,050children in formation
  • 9:58unbroken minutes
  • Continuousthe condition that made it hard
The gathering of 366 people, one born on each date of the year
366 people, one for every date of the year
Gathered · 04

366birthdays

One person for every date on the calendar

Three hundred and sixty-six people in one room, each born on a different day of the year — the twenty-ninth of February included, which alone rules out three years in every four. It is the easiest of these records to describe and not the easiest to finish.

  • 366people, 366 different dates
  • 29 Febthe one that is hardest to fill
  • 1 roomall of them at once
Four records

Built

Made at a size nobody had bothered to make them before, largely because there was no reason to.

The hand-painted wall calendar, 120 feet by 40 feet A detail of the hand-painted calendar
120 ft × 40 ft, hand-painted
Built · 05

4,800square feet

A calendar the size of a building

One hundred and twenty feet across and forty feet high, painted by hand — not printed, not projected. Four thousand eight hundred square feet of surface where every date had to be right, and where a mistake in the last week of December is visible from the far side of the road.

  • 120 × 40 ftthe finished sheet
  • 4,800 sq ftpainted surface
  • By handevery date of the year
The forty-foot carved wooden spoon The spoon seen alongside people, for scale
Alankar Museum, Jawahar Kala Kendra, Jaipur
Built · 06

40feet

Forty feet of spoon

Forty feet of carved wood, at a scale where the bowl alone is taller than the people standing under it. It is not kept in a warehouse: it stands in the Alankar Museum at Jawahar Kala Kendra in Jaipur, where anyone can walk up to it and work out how long forty feet actually is.

  • 40 fttip to handle
  • Carved woodnot cast, not assembled
  • On displayJawahar Kala Kendra, Jaipur
Against a person of average height
Built · 07

11′3″tall

The world's largest screw

Eleven feet and three inches of engineering, threaded end to end, built for no reason other than that nobody had done it. It is the most honest object in this list. It solves nothing. It exists because somebody wondered whether it could be made, and then went and made it.

  • 11 ft 3 inoverall height
  • Threadedthe full length
  • No purposestated, and none needed
The perpetual calendar The launch of the perpetual calendar
Copyright registered with the Government of India
Built · 08

∞perpetual

A calendar that does not run out

Not a calendar for a year — a device that will give you the weekday for a date far into the future, and keep doing it long after every printed calendar in the house has been thrown away. Its copyright is registered with the Government of India, and it was launched by Vasundhara Raje, then Chief Minister of Rajasthan.

  • Perpetualno end date
  • Copyrightregistered, Government of India
  • Launched bythe Chief Minister of Rajasthan
Three records

Drawn by hand

The opposite discipline entirely. No crowd, no workshop. One postcard, and work small enough to need a lens.

The postcard carrying the word Ram written 64,691 times
64,691 inscriptions · one postcard
Drawn by hand · 09

64,691inscriptions

“Ram”, written sixty-four thousand times on one postcard

More than one hundred and ninety-four thousand characters, on a piece of card you could post. Micro-writing at this density is a test of endurance rather than speed: the work has to stay legible under magnification from the first stroke to the sixty-four thousandth, with no way to correct anything.

  • 64,691inscriptions of one word
  • 194,000+characters in total
  • 1 postcardthe whole surface
One mark for each of the 11,111 miniatures
Drawn by hand · 10

11,111miniatures

Eleven thousand Ganeshas, on one side of a postcard

Not repeated stamps — drawn miniatures, eleven thousand one hundred and eleven of them, on a single side. The figures above are one mark each, drawn to the same count. Look at how much card that fills, and then remember that each of these marks is a whole figure with a face.

  • 11,111individual miniatures
  • One sideof a single postcard
  • Micro-artdrawn, not printed
Five of the sixty-three · left is as written
Drawn by hand · 11

63languages

Sixty-three world languages, every one written in reverse

Mirror script across sixty-three writing systems — each one legible only when held up to a mirror. It asks for two unrelated skills at once: knowing sixty-three scripts well enough to form their letters correctly, and being able to draw every one of them backwards without thinking in the right direction by accident.

  • 63writing systems
  • Reversedevery character
  • By handno tracing, no template
02 How a record is proved

A number nobody
can check is a claim,
not a record.

The difference between the two is a paper trail built while the thing is happening — because none of it can be assembled afterwards. This is the part of the work nobody photographs.

  1. 01

    The count

    Every item, person or tree counted as it enters, by people whose only job that day is counting, and recorded in a way that can be added up again later.

  2. 02

    The stewards

    Independent observers positioned so that no part of the attempt is unwatched. They are not participants, and they are not ours.

  3. 03

    The timing

    Start and stop, on a clock everybody can see. For a continuous record this is the whole difficulty: one break anywhere and the attempt is over.

  4. 04

    The adjudication

    The record body's own criteria, applied on the day by somebody empowered to say no — and who has said no before.

  5. 05

    The evidence file

    Photographs, video, steward statements, the count sheets and the timings, assembled into one submission while everything is still fresh.

  6. 06

    The certificate

    What arrives at the end. It is the smallest part of the work and the only part most people ever see.

Certificates, adjudications and the days after

The paperwork, the recognitions, and the press — the tail end of eleven attempts.

A record certificate
Certificates and adjudications
The CPR record attempt at St. Xavier's College, Jaipur
Two Guinness World Records on CPR · St. Xavier's College, Jaipur
A felicitation ceremony
Recognition and felicitations
Newspaper coverage of a record attempt
Press coverage
The launch of the perpetual calendar in Jaipur
The perpetual calendar, launched · Jaipur

See the full photograph archive

The twelfth

Eleven is not
a finished number.

Every record on this page began the same way — somebody said they could get a certain number of people into one place. Not one of them had done it before. If you can gather a room, the rest is our job.

Start the twelfth How it works