FanPost

Hamsterdam Is Fascinated By Giants

I went on a bit of a tangent below. If you 're interested in a brief list of giant men, by all means read on. If you just want to skip to the comments, feel free to do so. I won't be too upset about it.

Robert Wadlow

Most people have heard of Robert Wadlow, and with good reason. He was the tallest human ever recorded, and almost certainly the tallest that ever has lived due to the ability of modern nutrition and health to accomodate his kind of size. Dude was 8'11". Yes, that's an 8. He's pretty famous for it because of two big reasons: it happened in the modern era so there's plenty of photographic evidence, and he was American so his story had access to the entire connected world. You've probably seen his pictures in the well-thumbed copy of Guiness Book of World Records from middle school, below is one of the famous ones:

But Hamsterdam digs deeper than just the most famous, easily accessible giant. I want to bring you knowledge about other giants that have graced our planet. (Link: Wiki's list of tallest known people in history)

Sultan Kosen

Mr. Kosen is from Turkey and was discovered in 2009 at 8'1" and 27 years old, instantly making him the tallest known living person. His height is due to a tumor on his pituitary gland. To try to stop him from growing and prolong his life, he had an operation at the U of Virginia in 2010. It appears to have halted his height at 8'3", hopefully giving him longer to live than all the other known (20 or so in history) giants over 8' that die, as a rule, quite young.

Angus MacAskill

My personal favorite is Angus MacAskill (1825-1863), a giant from Scotland that is widely regarded as the largest-ever "natural" giant. Most giant men grow to their enormous size due to some form of glandular or chromosomal issue. For instance, Robert Wadlow had hyperplasia of his pituatary gland, which gave him such excess amounts of HGH that he never stopped growing until the day he died and gave him the strange, angular body he inhabited. But Angus MacAskill was a normally-proportioned man with no apparent medical reason for being so big, he just ended up being one giant man at 7'9". His normal proportions also made his other measurements outside of his height remarkable. He had the largest known chest for a non-obese man at 80 inches (!), shoulders 44 inches wide, and the palms of his hands were 8 inches wide by 12 inches long (!!). These measurements gave him a career as a strongman of some renown and the ability to travel around the world doing shows. He is still regarded as one of the greatest strongmen of all time. There aren't many good pictures of MacAskill because his lifespan caught only the beginning of the photography age, but the lifesize statue of him at his boyhoood home in Scotland is shown above. The short guy next to him is a 6'4" descendant.

Potsdam Giants

The Potsdam giants were a strange creation of a mad king of the mighty Prussian Empire (Frederick I, 1688-1740). King Frederick had an unhealthy obsession with tall soldiers from a very early age. He formed an entire regiment of very tall soldiers (minimum 6'2") as his personal guard. He adored them so much that he would grant huge favors to anyone sending him tall soldiers, so that a lot of his men were forced into service by kidnapping to be sent to him, from all corners of the world. Even though a lot of the men were unfit for actual military service due to gigantism or other defects, he personally drilled them every day, past the point of obsession. He never had them actually fight a war due to fear they would be harmed. He is famously quoted as saying "The most beautiful girl or woman in the world would be a matter of indifference to me, but tall soldiers--they are my weakness."

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