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To help him complete his journey along a 1,400-foot-long, 2-inch-thick steel cable that had been stretched across the Little Colorado Gorge, Nik Wallenda, a seventh-generation member of the legendary Flying Wallendas family of acrobats, brought with him a cross necklace, a pair of thin-soled shoes, and a flexible, 30-foot-long, 43-pound pole.
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The reasons for the devotional object and the footwear are obvious to most of us who watched Mr. Wallenda teeter over the river some 1,500 feet below, but what was that huge drooping pole for? And why did it have to be so heavy?
To help him keep his balance. To prevent their death-defying acts from becoming life-defying ones, high-wire artists seek to increase their rotational inertia and lower their center of gravity.
First, rotational inertia: If you're walking on a tightrope hundreds of feet above the ground, the very last thing you want to do is start rotating around it. The way to prevent that is to increase your rotational inertia.
Just as more force is needed to accelerate a more massive object from rest, more rotational force – or torque, as physicists like to say – is needed to spin an object with more rotational inertia. You can increase this by carrying more mass, and by keeping as much of that mass as far away as possible from your tightrope. Your tightrope is the one thing that you definitely don't want to become an axis of rotation.
Physics teachers like to bring up the example of figure skaters' arms. As a twirling skater draws her arms in, she begins twirling faster. That's because, by bringing her arms closer to the center of her axis, she decreases her rotational inertia. Her angular momentum is the product of her angular velocity and rotational inertia, so because momentum must be conserved, her speed changes as she decreases her rotational inertia. Rotational inertia increases as the square of the distance from the axis, which is why such an apparently small change in position can have a huge effect on her velocity.
And the same thing works in reverse. By increasing his rotational inertia, Nik Wallenda's pole helps to slow his rotation around the tightrope, giving him more time to react as he starts to tip in one direction or another.
The other advantage to Wallenda's heavy, flexible pole is that it lowers his center of gravity. If you're standing on the ground, the easiest way to make yourself harder to knock over would be to spread your feet apart and bend your knees. But that wasn't really an option for Wallenda as he walked across the gorge.
This is why the poles he carried was flexible instead of rigid. The weight causes the pole to droop, bringing the center of gravity of the Wallenda plus pole system closer to the steel cable.
For all its advantages, however, Wallenda seemed to be happy to be rid of the pole as soon as it was safe.
"My arms are aching like you wouldn't believe," he told Reuters, after he finished his 22-minute journey.

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Last night, tightrope walker Nik Wallenda crossed a 1,400-foot wide channel of the Grand Canyon in just under 23 minutes, a stunt that was viewable online and through the Discovery Channel. The tightrope walk, which stretched over a distance long as four football fields and 1,500 feet above the canyon floor, was watched by many, including celebrities like Carrie Underwood and Piers Morgan. Two of our interns, Colby Bermel and Casey Lee, watched it live. Here's what they thought.

Skip to next paragraph Colby Bermel

Contributor

Colby Bermel is an intern at The Christian Science Monitor, working in the op-ed and People Making a Difference departments. Born in Atlanta and raised in Boston, Colby is a rising sophomore at Principia College in Elsah, Ill., where he is double majoring in political science and mass communication. He is passionate about Twitter, music, and general shenanigans.

Casey Lee

Contributor

Casey Lee was born and raised in Indiana, a proud Hoosier. She is currently interning at the Christian Science Monitor under Marjorie Kehe in the Book Section. She's pretty sure this is the best summer ever. Casey is a rising senior at Principia College where she is majoring in Mass Communication and minoring in Spanish. She is also the book reviewer for the school's news paper, Principia Pilot. 

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Colby Bermel: Casey, I thought this was a really cool experience overall. Nik Wallenda obviously did something really bold, and it was fun – is that the right word? – to watch him walk on the wire from all the different camera angles.

Casey Lee: It was amazing! I feel like we hardly get to see dangerous stunts pulled off anymore, with all the waivers you have to sign for everything these days. But this was great entertainment! Of course, I’m only saying that now because I know he got across OK.

Colby: Yeah, when he walked across Niagara Falls last year, he had to be cabled in at the last minute. But just to clarify for our readers, he was NOT hooked in to anything when crossing the Grand Canyon at a height that's the equivalent of the Empire State Building! Yowza! And this was all live – but there was a ten-second delay, probably in case anything did happen.

Casey: He crossed the Niagara Falls, too?! Kudos to this guy, but I think he might be a little bit crazy. I couldn’t believe he wasn’t hooked up to anything. The way his shirt was billowing, it must have been so windy up there!

Colby: He was wearing bootcut jeans. Bootcut jeans!

Casey: Right? I can’t even move in my jeans in day-to-day life, let alone trapezing across the Grand Canyon. What about those cameras? No. 4 was my least favorite (secretly my most favorite!).

Colby: I did like No. 4 – it was essentially a GoPro attached to his chest pointed downwards – but I got bored of it after a while. So I switched to Camera No. 2, which was the helicopter swirling around him. That was super intense. I kept waiting for “Survivor” host Jeff Probst to poke his head out of the helicopter and go on some spiel. I just LOVE this clip of Probst on a helicopter in last year’s “Survivor: One World.”

Casey: I could only watch No. 4 camera for a bit, too; it started making me dizzy. But there was that moment when he kneeled – KNEELED – on the stupid cable thing and I was like, “What are you doing?! This is already hard enough! Just CROSS!” I really got into the spirit of the thing. A lot of other people did, too, like Piers Morgan, as you could tell from the Twitter comments appearing on the side.

Colby: Yeah, this was clearly orchestrated to be a “social” event for viewers. People could tweet about the event with the hashtag #skywire, which is what the Discovery Channel was calling this whole spectacle. My favorite tweet was from Frankie Muniz. Where has he been since the mid-2000s?

Casey: Living in his mansion – I just Googled it. I’d get lost in that place. Plus I’d buy a Segway with a GPS to navigate the halls with. You’ve seen that Samsung commercial with Ozzy Osbourne, right? The one where he’s using the map function to get around his house? It’d be like that.

Colby: My favorite celebrity-cellphone commercial is last year’s Apple ad with Samuel L. Jackson, where he’s asking Siri how to make risotto. I mean, how can you not love that guy?

Casey: Talented, funny, and he cooks. This is why Samuel L. Jackson is a keeper!

Colby: Agreed. Case closed.

Colby Bermel and Casey Lee are Monitor contributors.

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