Tryst G. asks: Who first noticed Kevin Bacon could be connected to any actor in just six degrees or less?
The basic premise of any person being within six degrees of relationship to each other traces back to at least 1929, mentioned in the short story “Chain-Links” from the book Everything is Different, by Hungarian author Frigyes Karinthy. In the story, Karinthy was putting forth the idea that, with advances in technology, despite vast distances between people and the growing world population, the world was actually shrinking from an interconnectedness standpoint- a trend that would no doubt only continue over time.
As such, a game is proposed in the story as follows:We should select any person from the 1.5 billion inhabitants of the Earth – anyone, anywhere at all. He bet us that, using no more than five individuals, one of whom is a personal acquaintance, he could contact the selected individual using nothing except the network of personal acquaintances.
Although a few toyed with this general idea (though not necessarily six degrees specifically) over the following decades when studying network theory- most notably Stanley Milgram in his famous “Small-World Experiment“- the specific idea of a supposed maximum of six degrees of separation between everyone on Earth didn’t really enter into popular culture until John Guare incorporated it into his play, Six Degrees of Separation, in 1990. This was later made into a 1993 film starring Will Smith, Stockard Channing, and Donald Sutherland. (Ironically, Donald Sutherland for a time held the crown as the actual most interconnected actor, as we’ll get into shortly.)
This all brings us around to Kevin Bacon and a trio of college students with nothing better to do owing to a snow storm in 1994. The students in question, Craig Fass, Mike Ginelli and Brian Turtle of Albright College in Reading, PA, were watching Footloose on TV. After it ended, the 1994 The Air Up There either came on or was being advertised. The three naturally noticed Bacon in both and began to discuss the amazing number of movies Kevin Bacon had starred in and with whom he worked.
Inspired, they came up with a game in which someone would mention a random actor or actress’ name and they would try to figure out how to connect that person to Bacon in six degrees or fewer. For example: Julia Louis-Dreyfus is connected to Kevin Bacon by two degrees, as Bacon worked with Wayne…
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