Thanks to NPR‘s All Things Considered yesterday, we now know that April 11, 1954, was the most boring day ever.

Robert Siegel interviewed William Tunstall-Pedoe, a Cambridge educated computer scientist, who has developed some sort of computer algorithm that has determined this day in April of 1954 to be the winner of the dubious honor. The search engine developed by Tunstall-Pedoe that currently employs this algorithm is Trueknowledge.com, where you can go and type in questions like “Who is the most prolific author?’ (Mary Faulkner, 904 books), “Who is the fastest typist?” (Barbara Blackburn, 212 wpm), or “Who is the best selling writer of all time?” (Agatha Christie, 2 billion books) and find their answers.

But back to boredom. Why did True Knowledge decide to put their technology to the test on this particular subject? Here’s the explanation from their blog:

It occurred to us that with over 300 million facts, a big percentage of which tie events, people and places to points in time, we could uniquely calculate an objective answer to the question ‘What was the most boring day in history?‘ For fun, we wrote a script to scan all days (from the beginning of the 20th century) and set it going.

So why was the 11th of April, 1954 so damn boring? Well, not many famous or notable people were born or died (Tunstall-Pedoe cites one exception on their website: Turkish academic and electrical engineer Abdullah Atalar) and no major natural or political calamities occurred or were reported. Tunstall-Pedoe put it to Seigal rather succinctly when he said, “this particular day was extremely notable for having almost nothing happen.”

Go figure. Even so, I imagine there are several historians already hard at work on books just to prove him wrong.