Indonesia’s Mbah Gotho was an adult before Australia became a nation and has lived through 27 US presidents.

The man, who Indonesian authorities claim to be a staggering 145 years old, was born to a world that bears little resemblance to ours.

It was a world without household electricity, the telephone or radio, and manned flight and the motor car were topics of science fiction.

According to his identity card, Mr Gotho was born on December 31, 1870 – well before both World Wars.

When he entered the world in the same year as Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin, the Franco-Prussian War was still going strong and Italy was still not a unified nation.

Sliced bread came along in 1928 – when Gotho was 58.

If his age is independently verified, Mr Gotho will smash the previous world age record of 122 – set by Frenchwoman Jeanne Calment in 1997.

He told local media his secret to longevity is “patience”, but it seems his patience is running out.

“What I want is to die. My grandchildren are all independent,” he said.

And after 145 winters, that may be fair enough.

Mr Gotho is registered under the name ‘Sodimejo’. Photo: CEN

His 10 siblings are all long gone, as are his four wives, and sadly his children.

Mr Gotho was 63 when Adolf Hitler rose to power in Germany. Photo: Getty

Mr Gotho’s only remaining family are his grandchildren, great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren.

He can’t be sure if his multitude of descendants looked like him as a baby because it wasn’t until he was seven years old that Thomas Edison patented the phonograph. And cameras didn’t reach the mass market until 1901.

That year saw Australia federate as a nation, and two years later, the Wright brothers successfully launched the first aeroplane into the sky.

At 44, Mr Gotho was probably too old to serve when World War I was declared and he was 75 at the end of the second World War.

At birth, he was registered simply as ‘Sodimejo’ – as Indonesians were only given one name back at the time.

Mr Gotho was born when the Netherlands held dominion over Indonesia, or the Dutch East Indies as it was then known.

1886: Mr Gotho is 16 when Karl Benz invents the petrol-powered car.

Luckily, in that year the Netherlands ceased forcing slave labour on the Indonesians they ruled over.

He was 75 years old by the time Indonesia became an independent nation in 1945.

He’s been waiting to die since purchasing a plot near his children when he was 122.

“The gravestone there was made in 1992. That was 24 years ago,” Mr Gotho’s grandson told local media.

Alexander Graham Bell invented the first telephone in 1876.

Mr Gotho can no longer feed or bathe himself, and his eyesight is too poor to watch television. Instead, he sits and listens to the radio most days.

His incredible claim will need to be verified by an independent body before Mr Gotho officially wins his place as oldest human on record.

*The original article stated that Thomas Edison patented the ‘photograph’. This should be, of course, the ‘phonograph’. We apologise for the error.