Darwin Awards - History

History

The origin of the Darwin Awards can be traced back to posts on Usenet group discussions as early as 1985. This early post, on August 7, 1985, describes the awards as being, "given posthumously to people who have made the supreme sacrifice to keep their genes out of our pool. Style counts, not everyone who dies from their own stupidity can win." This early post cites an example of a person who pulled a vending machine over their head and was crushed to death trying to break into it. Another widely distributed early story mentioning the Darwin Awards is the JATO Rocket Car, which describes a man who strapped a JATO (Jet-Assisted Take-Off) unit to his Chevrolet Impala in the Arizona desert and who died gloriously on the side of a cliff as his car achieved speeds of 250 to 300 miles per hour. This story was later confirmed to be an urban legend by the Arizona Department of Public Safety. The official Darwin Awards website run by Northcutt does its best to confirm all stories submitted, listing them as, "confirmed true by Darwin." Many of the viral emails circulating the Internet, however, are hoaxes and urban legends.

The website and collection of books were started in 1993 by Wendy Northcutt, who at the time was a graduate in molecular biology from the University of California, Berkeley. She went on to study neurobiology at Stanford University, doing research on cancer and telomerase. In her spare time, she organized chain letters from family members into the original Darwin Awards website hosted in her personal account space at Stanford. She eventually left the bench in 1998 and devoted herself full-time to her website and books in September 1999. By 2002, the website received 7 million page hits per month.

She encountered some difficulty in publishing the first book, since most publishers would only offer her a deal if she agreed to remove the stories from the internet. Northcutt refused to do so, saying, “It was a community! I could not do that. Even though it might have cost me a lot of money, I kept saying no.” She eventually found a publisher who agreed to print the book containing only 10% of the material. The first book turned out to be a success, and was listed on the New York Times bestseller list for six months.

Not all of the feedback from the stories she Northcutt published was positive, and she would occasionally receive email from people who knew the deceased. One such person wrote, "This is horrible. It has shocked our community to the core. You should remove this." Nevertheless, Northcutt would keep the stories on the website and in her books, citing them as a "funny-but-true safety guide", and mentioning that children who read the book are going to be a lot more careful around explosives.

The website also recognizes individuals who survive their misadventures with their reproductive capacity intact with Honorable Mentions. One example this is Lawnchair Larry, who attached helium filled weather balloons to a lawn chair and floated far above Long Beach, California, in July 1982. He reached an altitude of 16,000 feet (4,900 m) and was later fined for crossing controlled airspace. Another notable honorable mention was given to the two men who attempted to burgle the home of footballer Duncan Ferguson (who had four convictions for assault and had served six months in Glasgow's Barlinnie prison) in 2001, with one burglar requiring three days' hospitalization after being confronted by the player.

In 2006, a comedy film, The Darwin Awards, was written and directed by Finn Taylor, that was based on the website and many of the Darwin Awards stories.