According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word “daredevil” first entered the English language in the late eighteenth century, when it defined a person or action characterized by a reckless sense of daring. And if you hear that word and you happen to be of my particular vintage, it’s Evel Knievel that probably leaps to mind.
From the 1960s until about 1980, Knievel was most famous for doing ramp-to-ramp motorcycle jumps over all sorts of dangerous objects, lines of vehicles, or geographical features. (For a long time, he tried to get permission and technology to allow him to jump the Grand Canyon, but it never happened.) His consistent, even compulsive, thrill-seeking is a real thing in entertainment and in psychology textbooks: author William Goldman describes work in social psychology about people who engage in active “sensation seeking,” a trait “defined by the need for varied, novel, and complex sensations and experiences and the willingness to take physical and social risks for the sake of such experience.”
Knievel was only the latest in a long line of thrill entertainers and events going back to the earliest fairs and circuses in young America. John Bill Ricketts’s first circuses in the late eighteenth century included high-wire walkers, some of the oldest legacy thrill acts. And since entertainment, especially of the circus type, always reflects its time, the thrill acts only became more thrilling from there. In a period of intense technological and media development, with the hope to stay current in the mind of the public, nineteenth-century showmen worked to come up with newer, more thrilling ways to catch the crowd’s collective breath: aerialists, human flies, high-divers, iron jaw acts, even eventually stunt bicyclists and human cannonballs.
Charles Blondin became globally famous in the middle of the nineteenth century for gallantly walking on a tightrope across Niagara Falls. His feat and the fame it accrued to him even led President Lincoln to invoke Blondin as a symbol—a Harper’s cartoon from 1864 shows Lincoln in tights, pushing a wheelbarrow across a tightrope with political foes heaped on his shoulders. The caption reads: “Mr. Lincoln said recently that he was like Blondin on the tightrope, with all that was valuable in America, the Union, in a barrow.”
Eventually everyday folks realized that they didn’t have to join the circus to siphon off a bit of its shine and fame. (This is part and parcel of Warren Susman’s theory that the United States had shifted from an original culture of character to a culture of personality by the twentieth century.)