Jeanne Calment was born in Arles, France on February 21, 1875 - the year Alexander Graham Bell was working on the telephone. She died on August 4, 1997, at the age of 122 years and 164 days. She is, by a comfortable margin, the oldest human whose age has been verified by reliable documentation.
Her life spanned an entire transformation of modern history. As a teenager, she met Vincent van Gogh in her father’s shop (she described him later as “dirty, badly dressed and disagreeable”). She lived through two world wars. She saw the invention of the airplane, the radio, the television, and the personal computer. She rode a bicycle until age 100. She quit smoking at 117. She got her own internet connection.
What made her live so long? Genetics, mostly - but she also stayed physically active, ate olive oil regularly, drank a glass of port wine each day, and had a famously good sense of humor about everything. Despite millions of people now alive worldwide, no one has yet officially broken her record. Most attempts to verify older-claimed ages have run into problems with paperwork.
