• by January 4, 2001

To launch the Guinness Book of Records' new website, www.guinnessworldrecords.com, scientists created the world's smallest ad, slightly bigger than the diameter of a human hair, and mounted it on the knee of a bee.

"On a day-to-day basis, we handle the claims and evidence of the most amazing facts and feats," said Stewart Newport, Guinness' keeper of records. "We knew we had to have something pretty extraordinary given the nature of our business and we set out to capture the whole sense of 'wow' which surrounds the record book."

Though the ad cannot be seen by the human eye, "we've proved it can be done," Newport said. To create the ad, scientists used a laser to layer evaporated gold onto a piece of film through a stencil reading "guinnessworldrecords.com." The film then was mounted on a band and fitted to the bee's knee.

Why a bee's knee?

"Because of that play on words, to be the business, to be the bee's knees, to be the best," Newport explained.

He said the new advertisement breaks the existing record for the world's smallest ad, which had been a 0.67-inch by 0.47-inch notice published last year in Brazil's Vossa Senhoria, the world's smallest newspaper.

The Guinness website initially contains only about 4,000 records, 15% of the material in the latest book. But entries are steadily being added, Newport said.

"The purpose of the Web site is to fill in the story behind the records we have ... why people do these records and how these records were achieved," he said.