Nik Wallenda the seventh generation of the legendary Great Wallendas, set a Guinness world record October 15, 2008 for the longest distance and greatest height ever traveled by bicycle on a high wire. Wallenda walked 150 feet out on a high wire from the roof of Newark, N.J.’s Prudential Building, suspended 20 stories over the street without a safety net. He returned on a bicycle for the Guinness World Record.

Nik Wallenda’s precision, athletic skills and fearlessness in his blood can be traced back to his Wallenda roots as early as 1780. In the cafes of Old Bohemia in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the ancestral Wallenda family traveled as circus troupe of acrobats, jugglers, clowns, aerialists and animal trainers with the next two generations adding the flying trapeze.

The great Karl Wallenda, born in 1905 in Magdeburg, Germany, was set on bringing his family touring act to the world, featuring an amazing 4-person, 3-level pyramid, quickly catching the attention of John Ringling with The Greatest Show On Earth® and eventually coming to the United States from Germany in the 1920s at the invitation of Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey circus. The high wire spectacles developed by Karl make the Wallenda troupe most well known to this day.

By 1947 Karl created his crowning achievement -- the seven-person chair pyramid. From a wire 35 feet in the air four men stood as two pairs yoked together by shoulder bars with two more men on a second level and finally a woman first sitting then standing on a chair at the pinnacle of the pyramid. The Wallendas successfully performed this trick for decades, until January 30, 1962. On that fateful day in Detroit, at the State Fair Coliseum, the front man on the wire faltered and the pyramid collapsed. Three men fell to the ground and to their deaths

In the years following the catastrophic fall in Detroit, Karl continued performing "Sky Walks," walking between buildings and across stadiums, including Busch, Veterans, JFK, 3 Rivers Stadiums and the Astrodome, among others. His most famous walk was a 1200-foot long trek across the Tallulah Falls Gorge in Georgia, where 30,000 people watched as this 65-year-old legend performed two separate headstands at a height of over 700 feet in the air. It was during a promotional walk in San Juan, Puerto Rico, in March, 1978, that the patriarch of the Great Wallendas fell to his death at age 73, not because of his age, capabilities, or the wind that day, but because of bad rigging.