We made several attempts at getting a Guinness World Records Title.
The dream started before 2010 but it wasn’t till 2013 that we had a team with the necessary skills to make the attempt.
We were ambitious. We decided that a 32 metre Sierpinski Tetrahedron made from modelling balloons was a suitably adventurous objective. It was a dream, a pipe dream!
Our venue was a field and our headquarters and inflation centre a scout hut.
We started at about 5pm one Friday in June. We had a team of 30 volunteers that worked through the night inflating balloons. We inflated enough balloons to make a stage 7 fractal. We had been praying for a windless overcast day but it wasn’t to be. It was windy and the sun was was out.
We had dozens of young volunteers creating the tetrahedra and they were stored in a large marquee.
All seemed to be going well until we heard it.
Pop…. Pop…. Pop Pop Pop…. Pop Pop Pop Pop Pop Pop Pop Pop…. Pop Pop Pop Pop Pop Pop Pop Pop Pop Pop Pop Pop Pop Pop Pop Pop. It was like popcorn!
We lost over half the balloons and once we started building the sculpture with what was left, the wind made the job impossible.
We persevered until we at least managed to make a wibbly wobbly stucture.
Our next attempt was in 2014 at the Oxford Science Festival. This time we made it indoors and were less ambitious. We aimed for a stage 5, 8 metre structure. However we were still foiled by the Sun through the sun roof popping lots of balloons and we inflated twice as many balloons as you see here. We actually ran out of balloons and the fabulous Michael Abrahamson came to the rescue to provide the multi-coloured stage 2 apex.
Again, we failed in the attempt. The structure was too wobbly and the recording of the evidence did not satisfy Guinness World Records
In 2015 our founder, Caroline was invited to help with a giant Lego mini figure build as part of #BRICK2015, where she met the Editor in Chief of THE Book, The Guinness World Records Book and he asked us to attempt the record at the GWR headquarters in London. Delighted, we arranged a date and on the 24th February 2015 we FINALLY got our world record.
Ironically, the structure was much smaller than our earlier attempts. It took eleven of us 7 hours and we built a stage 5 fractal which measured 2.64m along every edge with +/-2cm tolerance. The GOOD news is that breaking our own record is achievable. We only need a team of 44 people 3,000 balloons.
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