A 5-Year-Old Spotted A Guinness World Record And Convinced His Family To Break It
When five-year-old Axel Luchsinger discovered slinkies, he did what most five-year-olds do when something captures their imagination: he immediately wanted to know the most extreme version of it that had ever existed. His father Joe, a neuroscience resident at the Yale School of Medicine who had attempted a Guinness World Record before, looked up the record for most stairs descended by a slinky, found that it stood at 30 steps and had been set in 2014, and came to the same conclusion his son had: that seemed beatable. The family drove to Columbus, Ohio, tested seven different slinky models to find the one with just the right dimensions and flexibility, cold-called a college athletic director with what Joe described as surely the strangest request of his week, and on a Wednesday afternoon were let into a deserted football stadium to attempt the record. Two hours and many failed runs later, their six-inch rainbow plastic slinky descended 53 consecutive steps without stopping, beating the previous record by 23 stairs.
It took about 10 months for Guinness World Records to verify the attempt and send the certificate, so while the record was set in May of the previous year, the official recognition arrived recently, and Guinness has since published a full feature on the story. Joe said the real challenge was never the slinky itself but finding the right staircase: you need a long, uninterrupted run with no landings and the exact right height-to-depth ratio on each step, which rules out most ordinary staircases and requires the kind of lateral thinking that, apparently, a Yale medical education prepares you for. The family said Axel was deeply invested in the outcome and has since graduated from this being very early in his slinky career, as Joe put it, to knowing more about slinky physics than most adults ever will. Guinness described the attempt as exactly the kind of record that reminds people why the record books exist: not every entry belongs to a professional athlete or a laboratory, and some of the best ones belong to a family, a spring toy, and a Wednesday afternoon in Ohio.
