Records Facts

Salvatore Pagliuca was stuck in a wooden hut atop Mount Washington on April 12, 1934. Two other observers were there. Ice was jamming their wind gauge in a growing storm. One of them went outside into 150 mph winds. He knocked the gauge clear with a wooden club. Hours later, Pagliuca clocked a gust at 231 mph. It's still the fastest wind ever measured by a person at a staffed weather station.

A Stegosaurus skeleton nicknamed "Apex" sold at Sotheby's on July 17, 2024 for $44.6 million - the most ever paid for a fossil at auction. Sotheby's had estimated it at $4 to $6 million; bidding ended in 15 minutes. Of its 319 visible bones, 254 are original fossil. The rest are sculpted.

Plennie Wingo walked backwards out of Fort Worth in 1931, with mirrors fixed to his glasses and postcards at a quarter to pay his way, until Turkish police jailed him at the border and an American consul talked him into coming home from Istanbul. Guinness still lists the 8,000-mile trek as the longest walk ever made backwards.

Crews in Richmond, California launched a 441-foot cargo ship 4 days and 15 hours after laying its keel. They built the SS Robert E. Peary around the clock in November 1942, during World War II. They lifted in giant sections built ahead of time, about 250,000 parts in all. No ship that size has ever been built faster.