The Tallest Man in History

You may have never seen a man as tall. The tallest man to have ever lived was a humungous 8 feet and 11 inches tall, a record that has yet to be broken! Had he survived to reach adulthood Wadlow would have been more than 12ft 1.7in (229cm) I've always been tall, his claim to fame was built on more than just being that tall and was more of a story about struggle, adaptations to his special circumstances and the legacy he left with the people who knew him". An icon for his size as well as the fact that he was the subject of universal attention during his lifetime as a medical oddity, Wadlow was born on February 22, 1918, in Alton, Illinois.

A simple beginning to the life of ''Mahatma''

Robert Wadlow was the son of Harold F. Wadlow and Addie Johnson Wadlow. He was born in Alton, Ill. ''All my kids, he was normal, like how all babies are supposed to be born,'' said DeLeon, partaking of the doting dad's unmitigated joy as the pudgeball was carried into the world healthy, at a healthy average weight of 8.7 pounds. But they are the ultimate state of solid that the human body would see (for those of us who might call it ''normal'').

Roberts showed from the very beginning that he was developing fast. When he was 6 months old, he had already outgrown most of the baby clothes that should have fit him. As he grew, Robert's parents noticed he was growing faster than the other children. Robert was a 5-foot-4-inch 8-year-old, bigger than most of the adults around him.

A Unique Medical Condition

Robert Wadlow shot up so tall due to gigantism, a condition where the body creates excessive amounts of growth hormone. Gigantism, with the characteristic thickening of the bones, can be traced to a pituitary tumor that forces the pituitary to produce too much growth hormone. This leads to an excessive, irregular growth of the bones and the body's other tissues.

Robert's tumour was in his pituitary gland… and it was what made him keep growing and growing and growing forever! Robert didn't slink away like most children after hormones had kicked in. A teenager in Ohio at the time, he was already taller than 7 feet, and his growth had not yet topped out.

The fact that Robert was too tall was not just a health issue, but a personal one as well. His organs and body were forced to work harder than they were designed to, and he struggled with everything from joint and circulation problems to the physical discomfort of attempting to live in an abnormally large physical frame.

A Unique Path in Life

Physically, Robert wasn't all that, but he wasn't a wuss, either, for sure. He was an Alton High School student whose rapid growth had made him a local sensation. When Robert left, he measured 8 ft. 4". His size they had become accustomed to his size associated with freakishness because he wasn't. But not Robert, he was just a typical student who enjoyed doing the same thing everyone else did at school. Now he had jolly friends, jolly friends, smart and jolly friends, to open the path for him.

Robert was ambitious and hardworking. Then, he came to know how to use his unparalleled size to his advantage. His stature made him a local and even international celebrity, an atypically tall human who served him well in many professions. Among the more widely advertised ones was his advertising pitch for a shoe company.

The Gig in the Shoe That Made Him Famous

Date: 2018-07-24 When you get right down to it, it probably was the best job that Robert Wadlow ever had. He was a mammoth size 36AA, a size gargantuan because no size was larger than what was carried in most shops at the time. It was a fact that a shoe company, in the interests of capitalizing on Robert's unusual dimension, was more than happy to prove in an advertising campaign that made Robert its pin-up.

V Robert was tall, with A long stride, which had served him well working in the company when he had to travel and go from place to place in the country. He was an upbeat, professional guy, not for clout. His grand form and his great influence over the fortunes of the race drew thousands, and, indeed, it was said to be literally so that he was the favorite of his city and his country. Robbie made an effort to earn a living and to live in it even with his handicap.

The Last Measurements

As Robert grew older, he learned to make it an ever-so-slightly bumpier part of his adult life. He needed a cadre of doctors on hand to help manage his health and the often grotesque physical challenges that, of course, accompanied his size. Still, he tried to have a good attitude and not to have his size define who he was.

In his last recorded measurement, made just three weeks before he died, in 1940, Robert came back for a last visit: three weeks before his death. He was 8 feet 11 inches at the time, nearly 9 feet. It was the scale,491 to get in there. And at 491 pounds, he was just letting himself balloon up. The span from his wrist to the tip of his middle finger was 13 inches, a remarkable girth today, and far too much for just about anyone.

Yet with all his power, Robert was not a long-lived man. He died on July 15, 1940, at the age of twenty-two, of an infection that had developed from wearing a leg brace. The infection had caused septic shock, which was fatal. It was a risk not just to his family, but the world in general, for losing this gem(the boy) "Robert wadlow" the living symbol of resilience and strength.

The Legacy of Robert Wadlow

Robert Wadlow may have been a young man, but his memory keeps inspiring many people to this day. But it's more than just a story of a man's remarkable size, it's the story of how he met the challenge of gigantism with dignity and tenacity. I came across Robert in the first place because I was inspired by his refusal to let his illness dictate how he lived his life, both in terms of what he did and in how he was defined by other people. He couldn't get away with that, anyway, so he had to learn to work, to do something meaningful, to have a possible career where he could make a difference, even if he didn't live it up in a world that thought he was strange.

(Medical examiners declared in 1979 that Wadlow died of an infection caused by his overgrown foot.) He is still recorded in the Guinness Book of World Records as the tallest man who ever lived, but his story is about so much more than height. This is a good example of how the human spirit can conquer anything! And human spirit can prevail … and be raised to the hilt, notwithstanding the obstacles.

Today, Robert is also honored in numerous ventures. A life-size statue (over 8 ft or 2.44 m tall) of Wadlow, sculpted according to precise measurements to represent his actual appearance and size, stands in Alton, Illinois. Most of us in Australia have no connection to the statue, but others from the other side of the world actually visit to see the statue. Robert still manages to find a home wherever his story is shared.