A six-man team of students at Derby College of Technology in the UK, working with hand tools such as axes, sledgehammers, crowbars and brooms, were the first to discover the joys of demolishing a piano and passing its pieces through a small hole.
Their time was a bare 14+ minutes.
The fad quickly travelled across the Atlantic and at Cal Tech, where the fad began its American run, competitors organised a “Piano Reduction Study Group” which proclaimed its desire to “reduce the piano in the shortest possible time, to such a state that it may be passed through an aperture of 20 centimetres in diameter”.
One Cal Tech team turned in a time of 10 minutes, 44.4 seconds.
That record was overturned by the wrecking crew from Wayne State, who did it in a smashing 4 minutes 51 seconds.
Related Posts
Protest Movement Protests in the 1960s can be divided into two main categories; those provoked by racial tensions, such as the ghetto…
Walkman The technology behind the Sony Walkman - a portable personal device for listening to cassettes - might never have developed without…
Boombox/Ghetto Blaster A boombox (or Ghetto Blaster) - basically a large but portable cassette player with two or more loudspeakers - was…
Farrah Ferrah Leni Fawcett was born in Corpus Christi, Texas, in 1947. While studying at the University of Texas at Austin…
Hula Hoop The Hula Hoop is the standard by which all fads are measured. Somewhere inside that plastic ring lay the key…
Sinclair C5 "Imagine a vehicle that can drive you five miles for a penny. A vehicle that needs no petrol - just…
Yo-Yo A playground favourite for millions of schoolchildren the world over, the Yo-Yo is actually, according to some historians, one of…
Roller Skates Roller skates are an ultimate icon of the 1970s - but the first demonstration of roller skates in Britain actually…
