Today in 1922, a guy named Charles Osborne had an accident with a very unusual side effect: it gave him the hiccups for nearly seven decades.
Osborne was from Iowa; he later moved to Nebraska, where he worked on a hog farm.
He said he was lifting a heavy carcass up for butchering one day when he fell down.
There were no serious injuries, cuts or bruises, but after that fall, Osborne started hiccuping… and hiccuping… and hiccuping.
A doctor later explained that probably the fall had a small spot in Osborne’s brain that turned hiccuping off.
Other researchers have suggested the fall damaged his diaphragm, which also regulates hiccups, or it caused a stroke.
Whatever the cause, it meant that none of those cures that we all try when we get the hiccups were going to work on Osborne.
And people offered up all kinds of solutions when word spread about the man who couldn’t stop hiccuping,
Osborne’s standard reply was two words long: “Tried that.”
Not that it stopped people from offering more ideas.
Once he was out in town and a friend decided to fire both barrels of his double barreled shotgun, to see if he could scare the hiccups out!
It didn’t work.
So Osborne did his best to live with the hiccups.
He said eating was easier when he put food through a blender.
He also learned a breathing technique that made the hiccups less noticeable.
In a lot of ways, Charles Osborne lived a pretty normal life: he raised eight kids, he had friends, he even worked for a time as a livestock auctioneer.
But he hiccuped through it all.
And while he didn’t mind making appearances on radio and TV for having the world hiccuping record, it was a lot of hiccups.
Some estimates say he hiccuped over 430 million times.
He said he’d give everything in the world if they would just stop.
And one day in 1990, after 68 years straight… they did.
Osborne only lived a short while longer after that, but at least he could say the hiccups ended before he did.
It was around this time in 2021 some travelers planned a trip to a spot well off the beaten path.
They were paying thousands of dollars each to take a tall ship to Rockall, a small and rarely visited island several hundred miles west of Scotland’s Outer Hebrides.
It’s so small that there’s nothing there except bird guano, and the entire time spent on Rockall was going to add up to 20 minutes.
But I guess at least they could say they’d been there.
Anthon’s Charles Osborne had hiccups for 68 years straight (Sioux City Journal)
People Are Spending About $2,000 to Visit an Uninhabitable Scottish Island for 20 Minutes (Travel + Leisure via Archive.org)
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