Domino Day was usually a world record attempt of trying to topple the most dominoes in a given time frame.
It was organized from 1998 till 2009, when apparently the sponsors didn't give a fu*k about dominoes anymore.
Domino day way organized mostly in Netherlands (With a few exceptions), at the WTC-Expo, since they needed a huge place to do it. Every attempt had a theme, and the builders had to make up shapes and all kinds of tricks to make the dominoes fall - without actually touching them, of course.
These themes varied from "visionland" to "music in motion", and quite frankly the organizers came up with a beautiful show every year. In fact they somehow managed to outmatch themselves year after year with the masterpieces they whipped up.
And I guess every single person watching the show must have felt not only awe at the builder's patience and care with which they set the dominoes up, but also excitement of what was yet to come. A simple and boring thing you do when you are bored turned out to be an art-form.
The best part in this was that starting from 2004 these domino days featured builder' challenges.
These were attempts to make the whole event even more exciting, not only for us, but for the actual people who worked for who knows how much time to set the whole thing up.
The builders are just sitting around the huge domino field cheering at their work toppling down, and waiting to see if they would be the ones to make history. In a challenge a pair of people would get chosen randomly out of the whole place - and there were a lot of teams from all over the world.
These chosen ones then had to fill up a left-out gap in the whole machine to make it possible for the dominoes to keep falling. They had to do it while the first part of the dominoes were already coming down on them, and they had to make the bridge ready for crossing until it did. And they had to do this live, in front of millions of people watching on, and knowing that the world record's success was hanging on their shoulders.
Out of 24 challenges throughout the ages there were only 10 successes. And I'm proud of this, because in 2009 a Hungarian girl was chosen and she made it possible to finally break the record - out of 4,800,000 dominoes a whooping 4,491,863 fell.
In 2008 there were 9 additional world records broken in a single night:
Longest domino spiral (200 m)
Highest domino climb (12 m)
Smallest domino stone (7 mm)
Largest domino stone (4.8 m)
Longest domino wall (16 m)
Largest domino structure (25,000 stones)
Fastest topple of 30 meters of domino stones (4.21 sec)
Largest number of domino stones resting on a single domino (727 stones)
Largest rectangular level domino field (1 million stones)
Now, if anyone has a couple of free minutes, here is the starting point of the 2009 Domino Day, and after that the attempt (and success) at the new record. Feast your eyes on the brilliancy of people!
