Answer: Phone Booth Stuffing

It’s easy to think that the bizarre fads teenagers partake in are a new thing, but the history of strange antics dates back well into the 20th century. Long before there was planking, for example, there was phone booth stuffing.

In 1959, a group of twenty five students in Durban, South Africa came up with a bizarre stunt they could submit to the Guinness Book of World Records: the most people stuffed into a phone booth. Somehow they managed to fit all twenty five people (with some spill over) into the telephone booth. The stunt made the news, the news spread knowledge of the stunt, and pretty soon students in the United States, England, and other countries were trying the stunt.

The fad was a brief but widely adopted one: by the end of 1959, it had already fallen out of favor and by the next year it was all but forgotten.