10 Records Nobody Would Want To Break

Many of us dream of setting a world record. Who wouldn’t want to break the record for blowing the world’s biggest bubblegum bubble or owning the largest collection of traffic cones? But some record holders never planned or wanted the record they now hold, and few will seek to dethrone them.

10 Farthest Distance Thrown By A Tornado And Survived

Matt Suter was a 19-year-old high school senior on March 12, 2006, when a storm rolled over his hometown of Fordland, Missouri. Suter was at his grandmother’s mobile home that Sunday night with grandma and a disabled [amazon asin=B00KN0K6EM&template=*lrc ad (left)]uncle. As gusts of wind and rain pelted the trailer, Suter stood on a sofa and tried to close a window while dressed only in his boxer shorts.

That’s when Suter heard a roar. “It got louder and louder, like 10 military jets coming right at us,” he said. The mobile home’s front and back doors blew out and the walls, floor, and ceiling began moving “like Jell-O.” The trailer began to tip over and the walls began to collapse. Then a lamp hit Suter in the head, knocking him out cold. As his grandma watched, Suter’s limp body was sucked out into the maelstrom.

It was an F2 tornado and it carried Suter 398.37 meters (1,307 ft)—the length off our football fields. He awoke in a field, alive and unharmed except for a small scalp wound. Miraculously, his grandmother and uncle also survived the disintegration of their mobile home after being pinned to the ground by heavy furniture. Suter’s record-breaking flight is not without precedent. In 1999, an Oklahoma baby survived when a tornado threw her 30 meters (100 ft). A South Dakota girl and her pony were unharmed when a tornado flung them 300 meters (1,000 ft) in 1955.[amazon asin=B00CNW9ZI6&template=*lrc ad (right)]

9 The Most Prolific Parents

We all shake our heads at the Duggars, the Arkansas family who have a reality show that documents how they survive 19 kids. But how would anyone survive 87 offspring? As unlikely as that number seems, Guinness World Records cites a contemporary newspaper account of Feodor Vassilyev, an 18th-century peasant from the Shuya District in Moscow. Feodor and two wives sired 22 sets of twins, 9 sets of triplets, and 4 sets of quadruplets.

Vassilyev was born around 1707 and began fathering rugrats at the age of 18. Forty years later, he stopped. He said that all but two of his children survived infancy, a remarkable number for that time. And by the time he was interviewed at the ripe age of 75, 84 of his kids were still living. His fecundity was so extraordinary that he was sent to St. Petersburg to meet Empress Catherine II.

[amazon asin=1609614798&template=*lrc ad (left)]And who was the most prolific mother? That would be Feodor’s first wife. No one seems to have bothered to discover her first name, which is a shame because she deserves far more accolades than her husband. She, after all, endured 27 pregnancies and 69 births. Feodor’s second wife—also unnamed—endured a paltry eight pregnancies and 18 births.

8 The Heaviest Humans

It shouldn’t surprise anyone that the heaviest man and woman ever recorded were both Americans. Of all the countries, the US had the highest percentage—34 percent—of obesity in 2013.

Jon Brower Minnoch hailed from Washington state and at age 12 he weighed 135 kilograms (298 lb). His weight increased steadily until he reached a peak weight of 635 kilograms (1,400 lb) in 1978. That March, he suffered heart and respiratory failure and 12 firemen were needed to transport him to University Hospital in Seattle. Once there, he was diagnosed with massive edema and the doctor estimated that he carried 400 kilograms (900 lb) [amazon asin=B005S28ZES&template=*lrc ad (right)]of accumulated fluid. He remained in the hospital for two years, lying on two beds lashed together. It required 13 people to roll him over.

While in the hospital, Minnoch married a woman named Jeannette and, because she weighed only 50 kilograms (110 lb), they set a record for the biggest weight difference between spouses. He was put on a 1,200 calorie diet and by the time he was discharged in 1980, he had lost 419 kilograms (924 lb), the largest weight loss ever recorded. But it took a toll on his body and he died in 1983 at the age of 41.

Guinness gives the nod for the heaviest woman to Floridian Rosalie Bradford, who reached a peak weight of 544 kilograms (1,200 lb). Like Minnoch, Bradford fought obesity all her life, but it wasn’t until she married and had a child that her weight skyrocketed. She became so depressed that she tried to commit suicide with painkillers, but her weight was so great that the pills merely made her sleep for days.

After being contacted by weight-loss guru Richard Simmons, she started a diet and exercise program. At first, exercise consisted of clapping her hands. In one year, she dropped 190 kilograms (420 lb) and eventually lost a total of 317 kilograms (699 lb), a record weight loss for a woman. In 1992, she weighed under 136 kilograms (300 lb) and went to school, earned a degree in psychology, and began touring the country delivering motivational speeches. She died in 2006 at the age of 63.

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