Tightrope walking across the Twin Towers

Obsessed with tall buildings as I currently am, I found this old story quite interesting:

In 1974, French Philippe Petit did a tightrope walk across the 43m gap between the Twin Towers of the then recently opened World Trade Center in New York. To accomplish this "artistic crime of the century", he spent 6 years researching the towers, including several incognito visits to the roof and aerial reconnaissance while the buildings were still under construction.

On the night of August 6, 1974, Petit and his team snuck on the roof and managed to attach the tightrope by means of shooting a fishing line from one tower to the other with a bow, then passing larger and larger ropes until they could fasten the 220 kg tightrope. In the morning of August 7, Petit spent nearly one hour walking, dancing and prancing on the tightrope, to the clear amazement of a crowd on the ground and the policemen that were sent to arrest him.

Even though he was arrested on the spot, Petit was credited as having brought much-needed publicity to the rather unpopular World Trade Center, and all formal charges against him were dropped. A documentary on Petit titled Man on Wire won the Academy Award for Best Documentary in 2008.

Philippe Petit - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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A very strange phenomenom on Google Trends, the ASCII art of a plane approaching the World Trade Center towers has reached "Volcanic" activity.

Search Engine Land: Google Trends Features ASCII Art Of 9/11

The falling man

They began jumping not long after the first plane hit the North Tower, not long after the fire started. They kept jumping until the tower fell. They jumped through windows already broken and then, later, through windows they broke themselves. They jumped to escape the smoke and the fire; they jumped when the ceilings fell and the floors collapsed; they jumped just to breathe once more before they died. They jumped continually, from all four sides of the building, and from all floors above and around the building's fatal wound. They jumped from the offices of Marsh & McLennan, the insurance company; from the offices of Cantor Fitzgerald, the bond-trading company; from Windows on the World, the restaurant on the 106th and 107th floors -- the top.

For more than an hour and a half, they streamed from the building, one after another, consecutively rather than en masse, as if each individual required the sight of another individual jumping before mustering the courage to jump himself or herself. One photograph, taken at a distance, shows people jumping in perfect sequence, like parachutists, forming an arc composed of three plummeting people, evenly spaced. Indeed, there were reports that some tried parachuting, before the force generated by their fall ripped the drapes, the tablecloths, the desperately gathered fabric, from their hands. They were all, obviously, very much alive on their way down, and their way down lasted an approximate count of ten seconds.

Esquire Online: The Falling Man - Tom Junod - 9/11 Suicide Photograph

More World Trade Center jumpers at Flickr.com