SortStack #963 — 2029-01-27
By duration · Order from shortest to longest.
- The men's 100 m freestyle world record swim 46.4 sec
Pan Zhanle's 46.40 at Paris 2024 stunned the field — he won by over a second, an eternity in a sprint event decided by fingernails.
- A typical national anthem performance at a sports event 1.5 min
Uruguay's full anthem runs about five minutes, while Japan's 'Kimigayo' has just four lines — the shortest lyrics of any anthem on Earth.
- Charles Lindbergh's solo flight from New York to Paris 33.5 h
Lindbergh went without sleep so long he reported hallucinating ghostly figures in the cockpit somewhere over the Atlantic.
- The Apollo 11 mission, launch to splashdown 8.1 days
Of the whole voyage, Armstrong and Aldrin spent barely 22 hours on the lunar surface — and only about two and a half walking on it.
- A horse's pregnancy 340 days
Foals can stand within an hour of birth and gallop within a day — a survival feature for a prey animal born on open grassland.
- The construction of the Sagrada Família in Barcelona (so far) 143.9 years
Begun in 1882 and still unfinished, it only received an official building permit in 2019 — Gaudí said 'my client is not in a hurry'.