Today is National Handshake Day in 2024. 10 things you might not know about handshakes:
Handshakes go back a long way. One of the earliest known depictions of a handshake is an ancient Assyrian relief dating to the 9th century BC. It shows the Assyrian king Shalmaneser III shaking the hand of the Babylonian king Marduk-zakir-shumi I to seal an alliance.
Images of people shaking hands are fairly common in Ancient Greek art. Common enough that there’s even a technical name for it in the fine art world: dexiosis. Homer described handshakes several times in his “Iliad” and “Odyssey,” most often in relation to pledges and displays of trust.
Even Shakespeare mentions a handshake in As You Like It: two characters “shook hands and swore brothers.”
That said, historians have noted that a handshake as a greeting doesn’t appear until the mid-19th century, and that it was seen then as a slightly improper gesture which should be kept strictly between good friends. According to an article from 1884, people in France intensely disliked the custom, to the extent that a society was formed to abolish ‘le shake-hands’ which they saw as a vulgar English innovation.
It’s thought that the handshake began in ancient history as a way for two people to demonstrate that they weren’t about to kill each other. Typically, the right hand is offered, the hand which would most often be used to hold a weapon. The up and down movement of the handshake is thought to be an extra test, because it would dislodge any daggers concealed up sleeves.
When people shake hands to seal an agreement, it isn’t fully binding until the hands are parted.
At time of writing the Guinness World Records website says that the longest handshake record is held by Claes Blixt and Dennis Oscarsson from Sweden who shook hands for 27 hours in April 2023. However, it seems this record is frequently broken, and the comments suggested there was already a 43 hour handshake and the site had not yet updated the entry.
President Theodore Roosevelt set a record when he shook hands with 8,510 people at a White House reception on January 1, 1907. Mayor Joseph Lazarow broke that when he shook hands with 11,000 in a day as part of a publicity stunt in 1977. The current record, though, belongs to Lance Dowson shook 12,500 individuals' hands in 10+1⁄2 hours, in Wrexham, N. Wales in 1963.
An American study carried out in Washington in 2000 found that a person’s handshake is consistent over time and that it’s possible to relate it to personality traits. Firm handshakes were associated with extroversion and men had firmer handshakes than women.
Secret handshakes, by which people in a society or group can recognise one another, may be as old as the handshake itself. Sports teams, fraternities and even families might have a particular secret handshake that they use. The most famous group to use one is the Freemasons. In fact, the Freemasons have more than one. They actually have about a dozen, so that each rank within the organisation has a specific handshake so Masons can not only tell that the person they’re pressing palms with is a Mason, but also what rank they are.
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The six richest people in Britain decide to hold a contest to settle the question of which of them is most successful. It will be a gladiator style contest with each entrant fielding a team of ten super-powered combatants. Entrepreneur Llew Powell sets out to put together his team, which includes his former lover, an employee of his company with a fascinating hobby, two refugees from another dimension (a lonely giant and a drunken sailor), two sisters bound together by a promise, a diminutive doctor, a former Tibetan monk initiate and two androids with a history. As the team train together, alliances form, friendships and more develop, while others find the past is not easy to leave behind.
Meanwhile, a ruthless race of aliens has its eyes on the Earth. Already abducting and enslaving humans, they work towards the final invasion which would destroy life on Earth as we know it. Powell’s group, Combat Team Alpha, stumble upon one of the wormholes the aliens use to travel to Earth and witness for themselves the horrors in store if the aliens aren’t stopped. Barely escaping with their lives, they realise there are more important things to worry about than a fighting competition.
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