It seems that every day of this century has seen events like Mary Tuft turning into a rabbit or an egg into a chicken. However, this has not always happened before and a scientist once brought himself to find out what the most boring day in history was. He came up with an answer: April 11, 1954. In 2010, computer scientist William Tunstall-Pedoe decided to run a program that would his current flawed fact-indexing website True Knowledge.
True Knowledge, which listed more than 300 million pieces of data at the time of its analysis, now owns a company called AV, owned by Amazon, and is an “integral part of the Amazon Alexa.” “It happened to us that with over 300 million truths, a large percentage of which events, people and places point to time; we asked ‘What was the most boring day in history?’ Could we calculate the unique purpose of the question? For fun, we wrote a script to scan all day (since the early 20th century) and kept it running,” he wrote in a blog post on the website.
Of course, boring isn’t the most effective word you can use – so to count the most “boring” days in history they were really looking for the most disturbing day when virtually nothing important happened. There are plenty of candidates, including April 17, 1930, when the BBC news announcer in the UK announced “no news” and then played the piano for the next 15 minutes.
However, the date of the Tunstall-Pedoe’s analysis was set for April 11, 1954. “Lots of famous people are born, famous people die, events happen,” Tunstall-Pedo told NPR. “This special day was very significant because almost nothing happened.”
The only notable events that happened that day through the analysis were the death of Oldham athletic footballer Jack Shufflebotham and the birth of Turkish academic Abdullah Atalar. “Ironically, though, the day after the countdown is now interesting for being exceptionally boring,” the team wrote at the time. “Perhaps we need to count the second annoying day …”
