Most boring day ever?

Boredom is a subjective feeling. But on some days there is demonstrably less happening than on others. British entrepreneur William Tunstall-Pedoe wanted to look at these quieter days to objectively determine what was the most boring day of all time in that sense. In 2010, with the help of artificial intelligence, he analyzed every day since 1900 – and got a clear result.

Accordingly, April 11, 1954 was the dullest day of the century. This was the result of a database consisting of more than 300 million facts about people, places and events. According to the database, there were exactly three notable events on April 11.

On the one hand, elections took place in Belgium that day. In addition, Turkish scientist Abdullah Atalar was born and former England defender Jack Shufflebotham died. At the beginning of the 20th century he played football for clubs such as Aston Villa and Oldham Athletic. The database recorded no other events of global importance for this day. And the day was also relatively quiet in Germany.

According to the “Hessische/Niedersächsische Allgemeine”, the only German television program broadcast on the evening of April 11 was the program “On the Swinging Trapeze: An International Variety Show from the Kaiserhof” in Cologne”. And in football, Hamburger SV won 2-0 against eventual champions Hannover 96. These events are not taken into account in the True Knowledge database.

True Knowledge was founded by William Tunstall-Pedoe. The company that developed the database mainly specialized in knowledge bases and semantic searches. In June 2012, “True Knowledge” changed its name to “Evi” before being acquired by Amazon in October of the same year. The company’s research results played a key role in the development of the AI ​​assistant “Amazon Alexa”.

William Tunstall-Pedoe was also involved in another world-famous project. For the book adaptation of ‘The Da Vinci Code – Sacrilege’, in which Tom Hanks plays the leading role, the Brit created the anagrams that can be seen in the film. Anagrams are words made up of the same letters as another word: for example, ‘flour’ is an anagram of ‘helmet’. Tunstall-Pedoe also used software for this. The Brit has already attracted a lot of attention with his work. But not everyone agrees with the results of his work.

The BBC has previously put forward another contender for the most boring day of the 20th century. According to the British Public Broadcasting Corporation, April 18, 1930 was the dullest day of the century. That day a newsreader on the radio said, “There is no news.”

It is not known what events William Tunstall-Pedoe’s database determined for that day. Neither the BBC nor William Tunstall-Pedoe can say whether a day before 1900 was any more peaceful than either of the two candidates for the dubious title. Because there are not enough records for this time. So it is entirely possible that there were days before 1900 when even less happened.