In 58 blistering seconds, Bellevue resident Bennett Haselton set a Guinness World Record by naming 58 out of 58 world capitals.After sending a video to the Guinness people on Dec. 12, Haselton heard back on Dec. 18 with an email congratulating him for breaking the previous record.
“I wasn’t sure they would count it,” he said. “In the video the guy filming it dips down and you can’t see my eyes for a second. Although I guess I could have been looking at something behind the camera and you wouldn’t know. The only way they could prevent it is if I wore a bucket on my head.”
Haselton said he was extremely concerned with doing things properly, and as such, he was able to convince several strangers at Cafe Mox Boarding House on Bel-Red Road to be his witnesses to the feat.
“I was actually at an IHOP and asked the manager if I could buy two people dinner if they would agree to be my witnesses,” he said. “But it was a slow night so I went to Mox, and people there were happy to help.”
A Polish programmer named Damian Woroch working off of Freelancer.com designed a program for Haselton which would help him by listing random countries for a volunteer to read aloud, to which he would respond with the correct capital.
Starting with Guineau’s Conakry and ending with Switzerland’s Bern, Haselton nailed all 58 capitals in 58 seconds for a perfect and (as of the challenge) unbeatable score.
Haselton said the record is currently set up so that only one country may be read per second, and the remaining two seconds are given for the record holder to finish naming capitals. Previous record holder Boris Konrad, who scored 56/58 on an Italian television show, could tie Haselton’s record, but unless Guinness changes the rules, beating the record is impossible.
How he even began to attempt the challenge was pure happenstance.
“I was in Barnes and Noble and saw the 2015 Guinness Book of Records and opened it up,” he said. “The first page I turned it to was naming the most country capitals in one minute. I was like ‘I could beat that.’ Which sounds weird to say, but it was sheer astronomical luck that I opened that book to the one record in there I had even had a chance of beating.”
Haselton, 37, said he has studied capitals for a trivia challenge previously, so a little honing of his skills and he was able to get ready for the record.
Even so, with some lengthy capitals and countries (which were read aloud by Jordan Lamb, with Brandon Landry and Jonathan Chen as witnesses) one second isn’t a lot of time, so Haselton had to play “catch-up” during the record-breaking challenge.
Watch Bennett Haselton break the record here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NH_Rff_1xgI
