On the morning of August 7th, 1974, the people of New York City woke up to witness one of the most incredible sites that the city has ever seen.

Between the two towers of the New York World Trade Center, 1,350 feet off the ground was a man who was walking on a wire.

It was audacious, it was dangerous, and it was also totally illegal.

Learn more about Philippe Petit and the artistic crime of the century on this episode of

Everything Everywhere Daily. If the events of August 7th 1974 hadn't occurred, if people hadn't seen it with their own eyes,

and if we didn't have documented evidence that had happened, the story might be written off as fiction. The story actually began

years earlier in 1968. If you remember back to my episode on the World Trade

Center, construction of the North Tower began in 1968 and of the South Tower in 1969.

Born in France in 1949, Philippe Petit was a street performer.

He wrote a unicycle, juggled, and did a street wire balancing act.

He took his first steps on a high wire when he was 16 years old and was trained by the legendary

aerialist and circus performer Rudy Ominowski.

In 1968, a 17-year-old Philippe Petit was sitting in the waiting room of a dentist's office and saw an article in a magazine about the construction of the two World Trade Center buildings.

When completed, they would be the tallest buildings in the world.

According to Petit, the idea of walking between the two towers came to him immediately when he saw a photo of the two proposed buildings.

He faked a sneeze, tore the photo out of the magazine, rushed out of the dentist's office, and began what would be six years of planning.

There was an enormous amount that went into the planning for what Petit had dubbed LeCou.

For starters, Petit wasn dubbed Le Koo.

For starters, Petit wasn't at that point a very experienced high-rope walker.

He came up with the idea for the world's most audacious highwire walk a little over a year after

he first learned how to walk on a wire.

So much of the next several years simply was practicing his craft and getting more experience.

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