The story behind 241543903? [Head in Freezer]

Have you come across 241543903 in the recent past? You will note that this is a trending meme online. It’s mainly a photo of a person with his head inside the freezer. Once you browse the internet, you will discover random photos of people sticking their heads inside the freezer. This might seem insane to you. Chances are, that you are having more questions than answers right now. However, this article will break down this phenomenon for you so that you can understand it clearly.

First, the head-in-freezer craze has been there for quite some time now. According to an article that was written by Hathaway, this phenomenon started in 2009 at the social networking site known as Tumblr. The meme was initially started by David Horvitz in April 2009. He was a New York-based artist known for initiating a subscription service for the photos of the sky that he would take daily. It was during this time that this artist was running his social networking site where he used to post to his audience different instructions daily. This would include off-the-wall things such as recording a melodramatic reading of a YouTube comment.

One of these instructions was to take a photo of yourself with your head deep in a freezer and tag it with what looked like a random number 241543903. Where did Horvitz get this idea from? First, this artist got this idea after suggesting to Mylinh Nguyen, a friend who was feeling unwell, to try to stick her head in the freezer. Horvitz then picked a mixture of his freezer’s serial number, and the barcodes on an edamame bag to come up with the number.

A few days later, a Tumblr post provided instructions about how to do it and one has to tag the file with 241543903 so as to rank on the search engines. The idea here was that if you search for this cryptic tag, you will be able to find all the photos of heads in freezers on the search engine. When Horvitz was interviewed, he said that he got this idea after he suggested to Mylinh to put her head in a freezer simply because she was having a headache. Hardly did he know that posting this photo online would make it a meme.

A few weeks later, on 23^rd April 23, a blog about heads in freezers was registered as 241543903.com.Come January 2010, there were many Flickr photos showing people putting their heads inside the fridge, under the tag 241543903. This meme then spread on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms. In fact, it included the creation of short videos on YouTube where people had put their heads inside the fridge. Most of them have been featured on 241543903.com

It is worth noting that Horvitz shared the credit with a Brazilian friend for making this meme go viral internationally. This is because he printed 100 small fliers with the random number 241543903 that he sent to his friends in Brazil. This in turn made this image go viral throughout the country. The meme populated Orkut which is one very popular website in Brazil. 

If you want to see this meme online, just Google head in the freezer and tag, 241543903 and you will see numerous images of people who have put their heads in a freezer. It might seem fun. Well, people like trying out new things. The trick here is to take a photograph of your head in the freezer and then tag the file name with the number 241543903 and then post it online. It is a reminder of what David Horvitz did on April 6^th, 2009.

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