The fall equinox, which happened on Friday afternoon, has come and gone, and with it, some believe, the chance to balance an egg on its end for another six months.
Interestingly, the notion long predates the Internet, the usual culprit for misinformation — the Associated Press was debunking it back in 1987.
Skeptical Inquirer traces it back to an article in Life magazine in 1945 which was widely misunderstood in the United States. Life‘s reporter described a spring festival in Chungking, China which involved most of the population standing eggs on end on the first day of spring in that culture, which in 1945 was February 4.
Egg-balancing became a fad in the U.S., but on the first day of spring in the West, which is the equinox. Attached to this, somehow, was the idea that egg-balancing works better at the equinox, for reasons. At the exact moment of the 1983 spring equinox, a peace activist balanced 360 eggs on end in front of the United Nations in New York. (She also set off 52 highway emergency flares.)
But just to show that you can do it anytime you like, try it now.
h/t Snopes.
Brian Spotts places one of the 439 eggs he balanced in their end to smash the Guinness World Record, in Melbourne, 14 September 2005. (AFP)
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