The World Record Attempts of Human Dominoes; Current Guinness World Record Holders: China
Human dominoes are very interesting: they are basically people who fall in sequence just like dominoes do and the reason behind doing it is to break the world record of the most human dominoes ever. That record was recently broken in China when over 10,000 students got together and fell down in sequence to break the world record for most number of people to fall over in a row. Why do people do these types of things and what benefit do they get from breaking a strange world record like this?
There are two types of human domino events that take place in the world. One involves people sitting down in patterns and then falling over one after the other, and the other one involves people holding mattresses and falling backward onto them one after the other. No one really knows when the first attempt at setting up a human domino chain took place. The activity has no governing body, so is not a proper sanctioned event. It is simply a bunch of people with too much time on their hands who try to break a world record. World records are interesting because they get people to do the strangest and newest things in order to break previously set records. The spirit of competition is very strong in trying to break records because you are trying to outdo an activity or a sport that someone else has already done. By setting the bar at a certain level, competitive people are trying to stop others from bettering their attempt. However, eventually it seems all records are broken.
The world record for most people involved in a continuous domino chain was recently broken in China. Over 10,000 high school students got together and all sat down in a massive courtyard. They then all proceeded to fall backwards in a pattern and managed to spell out some words in Chinese. The group spent over twelve hours over a three day period trying to practice for the event. The previous world record had been set in 2000 in Singapore when about 9000 people had fallen over in sequence. What is very odd here is the fact that it took ten years to break the last attempt. Ten years is a long time to get a lot of people together and get them all to fall in sequence. Nobody in the last ten years anywhere in the world could organise something at the grand scale that the students in China did. This also proves an interesting (and, come to think of it, rather obvious) point: not a lot of people have the time or want to spend the energy to get ten thousand people together to try and break a pretty odd world record.
The other type of popular human domino activity is one involving mattresses. This version sees a bunch of people getting together with their mattresses in tow and they then try to see if they can all fall in a sequence over each other. The mattresses are held behind a participant’s back and they then fall backwards onto another falling person just like proper dominoes do when stacked in a line. The previous world record was set in Dubai in 2009 when 344 human dominoes fell onto each other. This record was broken this year in Germany when over 700 people fell in unison and set a new world record in the process. A few spectators of the event have said that it is one of the most popular record attempts in the world because it does not require a lot of skill or talent. Whoever said this should try to get 10 people to stand in a straight line and see how long it takes. Now imagine trying to get 700 people to all fall in sequence or getting 10,000 to do the same for that matter. It seems these people who take part in this activity have a lot of skills in leadership and teamwork.
In the years to come, we will see many more attempts being done all over the world to try and break the world record for human dominoes. The spirit of competition is very strong in people from all walks of life and from many different parts of the world. Now all some country needs to do is get 15,000 people to fall like dominoes to break the Chinese record.
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