“The World’s Longest Popcorn String (and how to measure it)”
On a beautiful Michigan fall weekend in October, the fine people of Marine City banded together and set out on an ambitious endeavor to set the Guinness Book of World Records for Most People Carving Pumpkins at One Time and to create the Longest Strand of Popcorn String. The original purpose of these events was to celebrate the city, while at the same time provide a push for the populace to get out to vote. The marketing idea was to associate ‘dissociative things’ in the hope that more people would exercise their rights.
While the idea was a good one, there were some particulars with attempting to set a world record that came as a surprise to the organizers. The one that set in motion my involvement was the fact that they needed a professional land surveyor to measure and certify the length of the popcorn string.
On the Thursday before the event, I received an urgent email from one of the engineers in my office with close ties to Marine City. He asked me and my colleague if we would be interested and available to help out. Our firm takes great pride in our community and are always willing and able to help out for worthy causes.
The organizers of the event had already come up with a game plan for how we were to measure the string of popcorn. We were not able to meet ahead of time due to busy schedules so no assumptions were made. Every single piece of measuring equipment was loaded into a survey crew van; we were ready for anything.
Upon arrival, we found that the organizer’s a team had actually come up with an ingenious plan for measuring the string. In a downtown city park, on the shore of the St. Clair River, they had set up a stretch of one-inch PVC pipe cut in half lengthwise, laid end to end, screwed down to wooden 2x4s, which were connected to sawhorses. The entire apparatus stood waist high and was over a hundred feet long.
Our job was to cut the PVC pipe at exactly one hundred feet in length, then the string would get measured in one hundred feet increments. We pulled out our steel HI-WAY tape, laid it in the PVC trough, and using what felt like 15 pounds of tension, marked off the one hundred feet. The temperature at the time of the measurement was 64°F so any adjustment needed for steel expansion/contraction was negligible. Shortly thereafter, the popcorn started being placed on the string and measured. I monitored the end and Travis monitored the start of each hundred-foot-long section. For each section, efforts were made to make sure each kernel touched the next kernel and then the entire section was filmed for documentation. This was completed 12 times in about 6 hours which put our popcorn string at 1,200 feet long, besting the previous record by over 130 feet!
We were honored to make our services available to the good people of Marine City and their noble effort to bring out the vote. BMJ has been a part of the Blue Water area and its environs since 1970 and we all enjoy being active members of our community.
