April 11th, 1954 has been said to be the most boring day in human history. Ironically enough, this day has become so regarded as tedious that it seems not be anymore, but rather a piece of trivia.
It is quite astonishing to know that a day could be so internationally useless. I tried to research a bit, and couldn’t find anything noteworthy that happened during this day. In fact, the site On This Day could not report anything on April 11th. Nor did the Library of Congress!
How did people come to the conclusion that this day was indeed the most boring one?
A Computer Scientist called William Tunstall-Pedoe analyzed over “300 million facts, a big percentage of which tie events, people and places to points in time, [to] uniquely calculate an objective answer to the question ‘What was the most boring day in history?’ For fun, [they] wrote a script to scan all days (from the beginning of the 20th century) and set it going.”
As William further notes in his blog, it is difficult to determine what a boring day is when the perceptions we have towards this term differs depending on who we are. He says that “a 14-year old has a very different idea of boring to a 45-year old. In this case we used the almost equivalent concept [of] ‘uneventful’ and found the day when the smallest number of important things happened.” Thus, that day was April 11th, 1954.
But what did happen during this day?
If we conglomerate all the information from almost every newspaper that was published on that day, only three relatively important events occurred:
Belgian General Elections – The Christian Social party won 95 of the 212 seats in the Chamber of Representatives in Belgium.[2] The politician that won the election was Achille Van Acker. Coincidentally, his mandate proved to be one of the lesser-significant ones, as well. For instance, one of his most impactful measures was to create the Act of June 1954, which increased the minimum pension of the country.
A Turkish academic was born – His name is Abdullah Atalar, a Stanford University graduate which now serves as the Rector of Bilkent University, as well as being a professor in the Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering.
Biafra Day: It Was A Peaceful Celebration – Nnamdi Kanu
An English footballer died – His name was Jack Shufflebotham. He played as a defender in the Football League for Notts County, Birmingham and Oldham Athletic.
The image below depicts the front page of the Daily Mail from the 12th of April – the day after the most boring day ever. In fact, this newspaper refused to publish their paper on April 11th. So this is what they expressed instead:
scanned by EPD from photocopy
Daily Mail front page April 12, 1954
However, here is the amount of news that was reported on the next day:
…including many others.
In spite of everything mentioned above, the beauty of all of this is that although the 11th day of April of the year of 1954 will forever be perceived as the most boring 24-hour time span in history, take a moment to think about the quantity of people who had their first kiss that day. Or that maybe lost their virginity. Or that had a promotion in their jobs. Or that were born around the world. Or that passed away.
The irony is though, that having done the calculation, the day is now interesting for being exceptionally boring! Perhaps another boring day need to be calculated...
(Source: Gianluca Salles from Quora)
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