23. The 1950s Silliest Fad?
The Ice Bucket Challenge, planking, and similar viral crazes have a long history. Their 1950s equivalent was the phone booth stuffing craze, in which people competed to see how many folks they could cram into a phone booth. It began in 1959 in Durban, South Africa, where twenty-five students tried to see if they could fit into a phone booth. They pulled it off, and submitted their accomplishment to the Guinness Book of World Records. Word of their bizarre stunt spread, and before long, a fever of phone booth stuffing had spread to England, Canada, and the US.
To participate, people – usually college students – would squeeze themselves into a phone booth, one after another, until nobody else could fit in. While seemingly straightforward, there was a lot of complexity involved. In 1959, college kids began skipping class to devise plans to beat the record. Schematics were drawn to try and figure out the optimal configuration for cramming the highest number of human bodies into a phone booth, like a 3-D Tetris.