For the record: Guinness book open to industry's greatest hits

Traditional fare still there, but so are wireless LANs, 'Net cafes.

David Hawksett doesn't particularly care if you can juggle chainsaws or pop your eyeballs a half-inch out of their sockets. But zip a multi-gigabyte file across an intercontinental network or show him the first electronic message, and you'll get his attention.

"The public has an appetite for science and technology, especially when it's well explained and presented," says the 31-year-old Hawksett, who for the past four years has served as the Guinness World Records book's first full-time science and technology editor.

"Times have changed. We're still tracking remarkable feats in the living world, but we no longer keep records for hunting tigers on safari, for example, and a lot of the gluttony records are out. Meanwhile, cyberhistory is being taken more seriously," says Hawksett, who boasts of having copies of the world's first JPEGs on his computer.

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David Hawksett doesn't particularly care if you can juggle chainsaws or pop your eyeballs a half-inch out of their sockets. But zip a multi-gigabyte file across an intercontinental network or show him the first electronic message, and you'll get his attention.

"The public has an appetite for science and technology, especially when it's well explained and presented," says the 31-year-old Hawksett, who for the past four years has served as the Guinness World Records book's first full-time science and technology editor.

"Times have changed. We're still tracking remarkable feats in the living world, but we no longer keep records for hunting tigers on safari, for example, and a lot of the gluttony records are out. Meanwhile, cyberhistory is being taken more seriously," says Hawksett, who boasts of having copies of the world's first JPEGs on his computer.

It's not that the 50th anniversary edition isn't celebrating the sensational as well as the more serious. It's just that Hawksett has his focus. Among the new Internet-related entries is the record for the largest networked chess system, which earlier this year tapped the power of 2,070 computers in 50-plus countries to take on a Danish grandmaster (the match ended in a draw after 34 moves). Last week, Hawksett was busy trying to verify a claim for the world's highest-capacity router. Also being considered is a claim by ACT Teleconferencing and customer Herbalife that in March they smashed erstwhile presidential candidate Howard Dean's record for the greatest number of participants in a conference call by topping the 10,000 mark.

Hawksett, who can view the world's tallest observation wheel (a sort of Ferris wheel called the London Eye) from his eighth-floor office in London, says the rise of the Internet has resulted in a corresponding increase in network-related records worthy of inclusion in the Guinness book.

Guinness gets pounded with roughly 100,000 inquiries about new records per year, fewer than 5% of which are accepted in a process that can take anywhere from hours to months. The publication, which is produced by a team of about 10 writers and editors, keeps mounds and mounds of records in an electronic database, far more than can be squeezed into the book each year.

Hawksett says he doesn't have hard numbers on how many of the inquiries relate to his beat, but 20-plus items fill the Internet section of the 2004 paperback edition, including the largest Internet café (EasyEverything's spot in Times Square) and the earliest e-mail (Ray Tomlinson's message sent in 1971). In addition, another 40-plus entries fall under technology and communications headings. There wasn't even an Internet section before the 1996 edition, Hawksett says.

Record holder Bill Cheswick says he and cohort Hal Burch, while at Bell Labs in the late 1990s, never envisioned that the massive cyberspace map they designed would land them in the Guinness book alongside the world's most accomplished fire-breathers and yodelers. Cheswick says he suspects the colorfulness of the map, not just the 88,000 endpoints highlighted in the book, is what caught the publisher's eye.

"It's fun to be in there, though it's not like I have it on my [résumé] - though now that I think about it, maybe I should," says Cheswick, a noted network security author and currently chief scientist at Lumeta, a company that grew out of his Internet mapping work.

Record breakers The Internet, communications industry and computing are making their mark in the Guinness World Records book, as this sampling shows:

Largest Internet café: EasyEverything in Times Square, home to 648 computer terminals. Smallest telephone: Jan Piotr Krutewicz in 1996 created a working phone measuring 1.8 by .03 by .08 inches. Largest single e-commerce transaction: Business tycoon Mark Cuban spent $40 million on a Gulfstream V jet in 1999. Longest telephone cable: FLAG, or Fiber-optic Link Around the Globe, which runs for 16,800 miles from Japan to the U.K. Earliest JPEG: The original images, from 1987, are known as “Boat,” “Barbara,” “Toys” and “Zelda.”

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