World records are trivia in its purest form: a number, a name, and the outer limit of what a human, animal, or vegetable has ever done.
What is the fastest 100m ever run?
9.58 seconds — Usain Bolt, Berlin, 2009.
Who is the tallest person ever reliably measured?
Robert Wadlow — 8 feet 11.1 inches (1918–1940).
What is the longest anyone has verifiably lived?
Jeanne Calment of France — 122 years, 164 days.
What is the deepest a human has ever dived in the ocean?
About 35,850+ feet — Victor Vescovo's submersible dives in the Challenger Deep.
What is the highest recorded temperature on Earth?
134°F (56.7°C) at Death Valley's Furnace Creek in 1913.
And the lowest?
Minus 128.6°F (−89.2°C) at Vostok Station, Antarctica, 1983.
What is the tallest building in the world?
The Burj Khalifa in Dubai — 2,717 feet.
What is the fastest bird — and how fast?
The peregrine falcon, diving at over 240 mph.
What is the best-selling video game of all time?
Minecraft — over 300 million copies.
What is the longest-running TV cartoon in the United States?
The Simpsons, on the air since 1989.
How heavy was the heaviest pumpkin ever grown?
Over 2,700 pounds — roughly the weight of a small car.
What is the largest living structure on Earth?
The Great Barrier Reef — visible from space at about 1,400 miles long.
What is the loudest sound in recorded history?
The 1883 Krakatoa eruption — heard nearly 3,000 miles away, circling the globe as a pressure wave multiple times.
Calment's 122 years has stood since 1997 and no one has come within a few years of it since — the rare record that gets more impressive as time passes.
