The Guinness Book of World Records started out as a fun conversation starter for pubs selling Guinness beer. It has become a worldwide phenomenon that people literally risk their lives get their names into. But there are some records that should maybe stay unbroken. Here’s a list of some of the biggest ones.
TRANSCRIPT:
The Guinness World Records book began with a bet on a bird. It was November 1951, and Sir Hugh Beaver…
Hugh was the managing director of the Guinness Breweries. He went on a shooting party in Ireland and missed a shot at a golden plover.
His hunting mates and Hugh then got into an argument about whether the golden plover or the red grouse was Europe’s fastest game bird.
When he got home, he looked through a few reference books but couldn’t find an answer. He realized that there could be other trivia facts that people debate in the pubs, and they needed a book to answer their questions.
And thus, the Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader was born. Just kidding.
Hugh invited two fact-finding researchers named Norris and Ross McWhirter to assemble a book of facts and figures. After the research phase was completed, they began writing the book. It took a little more than thirteen ninety-hour weeks, including bank holidays and weekends.
When they were done, they had produced the Guinness Book of Records, one of the world’s most recognized and trusted books. And one that thousands of people want to see their name appear in.
By the way, the golden plover is faster than a red grouse, but it’s not Europe’s fastest game bird. That would be the red-breasted merganser [mr·gan·sr].
In 2025, a little over three thousand two hundred records were approved. Those came out of forty-nine thousand record applications.
Currently, there are seventy-one thousand five hundred and seventy-one active record titles. And some of those will never be broken.
But let’s start with some that will probably stand the test of time. They could be broken, but highly unlikely.
And technically, this next one isn’t in the Guinness World Records, but it’s one that’s universally believed to stand the test of time.
The 1972 Miami Dolphins
The 1972 Miami Dolphins football team went seventeen and zero, including their Super Bowl victory. They’re the only N.F.L. team in history to complete an undefeated and untied season.
The 2007 New England Patriots are the only team that has ever come close. They went sixteen and zero in the regular season, but then lost to the New York Giants in the Super Bowl.
There were fourteen games during the regular season in 1972. Today, there are seventeen. Those extra games allow for a greater chance of player injury, decreased stamina, or any combination of bad luck.
The 1972 Dolphins also had a depth of great players. For example, when quarterback Bob Griese [GREE-see] got injured and missed nine games, backup quarterback Earl Morrall stepped in. Today, the difference between a starter and backup is much starker.
Nowadays, coaches prioritize health and rest with a goal of reaching the playoffs. They’re not going to risk starting their best players in their seventeenth game if it could mess up their playoff run. This strategy alone makes it hard to complete an undefeated season.
But as the 2007 Patriots showed, it’s not impossible. Just highly unlikely.
Wilt Chamberlain’s 100-point game
Wilt Chamberlain’s one hundred-point basketball game is another sports record that will probably never be broken. It happened on March 2, 1962, in a game between the Philadelphia Warriors and the New York Knicks.
In fact, the game was set up to give Chamberlain the record. The Warriors were far ahead late in the game, and his teammates kept passing him the ball every time they went down the court. The Knicks knew what they were doing, so they would foul other players to keep Chamberlain from getting the ball. The Warriors would then foul Knicks players to get possession back. It was almost like a farce.
But that doesn’t take away from what Chamberlain achieved. He shot thirty-six of sixty-three from the field and twenty-eight of thirty-two from the free-throw line. Even though he was usually a bad free-throw shooter, he used the underhanded “granny style” in that game, which helped increase his percentage.
Today, it’s much harder for a player to score that many points in a game. Zone defenses can collapse around a player, pace-and-space offenses spread defenders across the court, and referees are more aware of when a team is feeding the ball to one player.
Bam Adebayo of the Miami Heat came the closest to Chamberlain’s record. He scored eight-three points on March 10, 2026.
The Titanic death toll
Around fifteen hundred lives were lost when the RMS Titanic sank on April 15, 1912. It’s one of the deadliest peacetime disasters in maritime history. And it’s unlikely to happen again, thanks to updated safety regulations, construction improvements, and new maritime laws.
The ship held around two thousand two hundred and twenty-four people. It had a lifeboat capacity for about one thousand one hundred and seventy-eight. That was actually in compliance with the British Board of Trade regulations at the time.
The Titanic’s designers also thought the ship’s watertight compartments provided enough safety that the reduced number of lifeboats was okay.
But after the disaster, international maritime law changed. The Safety of Life at Sea convention in 1914 established requirements for lifeboat capacity, crew training, and radio communication. They’ve been revised and strengthened many times since then.
Modern cruise ships also carry enough lifeboats and rafts for every person on board. They’re required to conduct safety drills, and they have multiple, independent communication systems.
Another thing is that today’s cruise ships are built with damage-control systems that allow crew members to respond quickly to flooding, something that wasn’t available in 1912.
Today, the biggest danger you may experience on a cruise is disease and/or poop-related issues.
Now, let’s talk about some records that have a very good chance of never being broken. Yeah, yeah, there’s always a chance… got to have hope in these trying times, but it’s pretty certain these records will stand forever.
Best-selling album of all time
It had seven top ten singles. It won eight Grammy awards. And its self-titled music video was a cultural phenomenon featuring dancing zombies and the voice of Vincent Price.
Thriller by Michael Jackson was released in late 1982. It arrived at a time when the sound of eighties music was just starting to form. Jackson knew he could influence that sound.
Quincy Jones produced the album, featuring highly polished musical styles like disco, funk, rock, and soul. Jackson’s vocals are often at times magnetic, paranoid, or vulnerable.
You could dance to it, let it play in the background, or study it deeply. That made it appealing to a wide variety of people. And those people bought it in bulk.
It’s estimated that almost seventy million copies of Thriller have been sold since its release. This includes vinyl, CDs, and cassettes. Physical items. And no other artist or band will achieve that record.
Because of streaming, people just don’t buy many physical releases today.
And before you start typing Taylor Swift in the comments, her numbers are influenced by streaming.
For example, equivalent album sales include streaming numbers and digital sales. According to ChartMasters, the equivalent album sales for her album, 1989, are almost forty-four million, ranking it at thirty-first place.
The same chart lists Thriller’s equivalent album sales at over one hundred and thirty million, putting it in first place.
Sure, you may have some opinions about Jackson’s personal life, but it’s no denying that Thriller is the best-selling album of all time and will most likely stay that way.
Oldest Person Ever
Speaking of life… Science is making progress every day on extending our lifespans. But for now, there’s one person who holds the authenticated record for the oldest person to have ever lived.
Her name was Jeanne Louise Calment [kahl-MAHN], and she was born on February 21, 1875, and died in southern France on August 4, 1997.
For those not quick with the math, that’s one hundred and twenty-two years and one hundred and sixty-four days old.
To put it in perspective, she was born fourteen years before the Eiffel Tower was built and fifteen years before movies appeared. Tolstoy published Anna Karenina and Alexander Graham Bell patented the telephone a year after she was born.
Her longevity may have been influenced by her lifestyle. She married a wealthy distant cousin, so she never had to work for a living. She was free to bicycle, play tennis, and swim as much as she wanted.
She was healthy for most of her life. And her diet was good. She ate a lot of things rich in olive oil, which she also rubbed into her skin. She drank wine in moderation, but she did have a sweet tooth. She ate around one kilogram of chocolate each week.
Oh, and she smoked cigarettes, but only from ages twenty-one to one hundred and seventeen.
She appeared in a film as herself about Vincent Van Gogh called Vincent et moi when she was one hundred and fourteen years old, making her the oldest film actress ever. She had sold painting canvases to Van Gogh when she worked in her father’s shop in Arles [aarlz], France. She said, “He was ugly as sin, had a vile temper and smelled of booze.”
Her tranquil state of mind and her humor may have also played into her longevity. She was famous for her wit. When journalists asked her what kind of future she expected during her one hundred and twentieth birthday, she said, “A very short one.”
As of this writing, Ethel Caterham in the U.K. is currently the oldest living person at one hundred and seventeen years old.
Tallest Person Ever
Now, this category should probably be in the “never again” section, but you know that saying: never say never.
That said, thanks to science, we’ll probably never see someone like Robert Wadlow ever again. He holds the record for the tallest man ever at two point seventy-two meters.
Wadlow was born in 1918, and by age six, he was already one point seven meters tall. He set the record for being the tallest man shortly after his twenty-first birthday.
But it’s unlikely that any human will reach his height again. The tallest people in the record book are there because of the overproduction of growth hormones, which the brain’s pituitary gland regulates. If it malfunctions, it can release too much, causing huge growth spurts.
Today, doctors can slow or stop excessive growth and deal with gigantism before anyone gets close to Wadlow’s height.
And with the world being as connected as it is, it’d be hard for any child to grow up with an extreme pituitary issue without being noticed or treated by doctors.
You could say that this record has reached the top of its limit.
Guinness has retired quite a few categories for safety reasons. That makes it one hundred percent certain they will never be broken. Let’s look at a few of them.
Strangest diet
While long-living Jeanne Louise Calment had a pretty healthy diet, another French person decided to eat a little differently. His name was Michel Lotito, and he was known as Monsieur Mangetout, Mr. Eats All.
He had been eating metal and glass since he was a kid. His diet included eighteen bicycles, fifteen supermarket trolleys, seven T.V. sets, six chandeliers, two beds, a pair of skis, a computer, and a Cessna light aircraft.
He first noticed his ability to eat non-food items when a glass broke while he was drinking from it. He began chewing the fragments.
By October 1997, he had eaten almost nine tons of metal. Doctors who X-rayed him said that he had a thick lining in his stomach that allowed him to eat all those metal objects.
He also didn’t eat them all at once. Like that Johnny Cash song, “One Piece at a Time,” he’d consume something over months or years. For example, the airplane that he ate took him two years to complete. The tires were the worst part of it, he said.
As far as real food goes, he said that bananas and hard-boiled eggs made him sick.
Monsieur Mangetout died of natural causes in 2007. And his record is permanent, because Guinness is no longer accepting applications for the world’s strangest diet.
Longest note on a saxophone
We can all agree that a well-placed sax elevates any rock song.
Whether you’re a sax fan or not, it’s pretty incredible when a player can hold one note for an extended period of time. Like, for so long that you’re wondering how they’re even breathing.
In 2000, Vann Burchfield held a continuous note on a sax for forty-seven minutes and five point five seconds. He beat Kenny G’s record of forty-five minutes and forty-seven point seventy-seven seconds.
Burchfield and G both accomplished their records by using circular breathing.
Wind instrument players have used this technique for ages to help them sustain longer notes. It’s done by breathing in through the nose while pushing air out through the mouth at the same time, using air stored in the cheeks.
But research has shown that it’s dangerous. It can cause a build-up of pressure in the neck that stops oxygen from getting to the brain, which could lead to death.
Guinness retired the category based on this medical evidence, so Burchfield’s record will never be broken.
That is, unless it can be done without circular breathing.
Longest Kiss
Thai couple Ekkachai and Laksana Tiranarat set the record for the longest kiss ever in February 2013. It lasted fifty-eight hours and thirty-five minutes.
But it’ll never be broken because Guinness deactivated the category soon after it was set.
That’s because it had become too dangerous when the category’s rules had to be followed.
Those rules were:
— The kiss must be continuous, and the lips had to be touching at all times.
— Contestants may consume liquids via a straw, but their lips must not part.
— The couple has to stay awake the whole time.
— The couple has to stand during the attempt and can’t be propped up by any aids.
— No rest breaks are allowed, and the couple can’t wear any adult diapers.
— But, they’re allowed to use the toilet. They just have to remain kissing while doing so. And a referee will accompany them to ensure they’re following the rules.
Since the record was getting longer and longer and no rest breaks were allowed, participants were known to suffer from the effects of sleep deprivation, like passing out or psychosis.
So, no more longest kiss. But there is the longest kissing marathon category. For it, people are permitted rest breaks. They can also eat, sleep, and use the bathroom in private.
There’s no current record holder for the longest kissing marathon. So… anyone? Anyone?
Add comment