Evel Knievel Faces the Abyss

Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford

This episode of Cautionary Tales explores the infamous 1974 attempt by daredevil Evel Knievel to jump Snake River Canyon using a rocket-powe

Key takeaways

• Evel Knievel's overreliance on 'positive mental attitude' as taught by Napoleon Hill and W. Clement Stone failed to account for practical risks and engineering realities.
• The Skycycle jump was sabotaged by a premature parachute deployment, likely due to poor design or operator error, leading to a near-fatal crash.

Main topics

• Evel Knievel's Snake River Canyon jump
• The influence of self-help philosophy on risk-taking behavior

Notable quotes

"You can do it if you believe you can." – Napoleon Hill's central tenet, critiqued as dangerously simplistic.

Conclusion

Evel Knievel's failed canyon jump serves as a cautionary tale about the

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:00) This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human. Speaker 1 (0:10) Pushkin. Speaker 1 (0:22) Bobby Knievel, Evil Knievel, is all alone now, strapped into his X2 sky cycle with its star-spangled paint job. Thousands of spectators have trekked to see him jump the broad gap of Snake River Canyon. In darkened cinemas across the globe, hundreds of thousands more fans gaze up at the close-circuit TV feed, waiting for Evil. to hit the button to launch. The X2 sits on a red, white and blue take-off ramp. It's steep, 56 degrees, and is topped with a Stars and Stripes flag, which whips madly in the gusty Idaho wind. The X2 is like no other motorcycle Evil's ever ridden. For although it has wheels, this cigar-shaped craft isn't a motorbike. It's a steam-powered rocket. When it leaves the ramp, it will be travelling at 400 miles an hour. And Evil will certainly need all that speed. The furthest he's jumped to bike is 140 feet. over the fountain at a Las Vegas casino, and that put him in a coma for a month. Snake River Canyon? Well, it's nearer 4,000 feet. 35-year-old Knievel has been talking, no, bragging, about this stunt for years, and invested a million of his own dollars to make good that boast. But now the brashest showman on earth is having second thoughts. I wish I didn't have to do this and that I wasn't here, he'd admitted to a gaggle of journalists. But he is here, sat in X2. And he does have to jump or face global humiliation, financial ruin and the anger of an increasingly restless crowd below. Speaker 1 (2:29) When it comes to leaping buses, trucks and fountains, evil barely breaks sweat. He's not a man to worry much or dwell on the consequences. He's a man of grand action, not diligent preparation. His philosophy has always been to think positive and open the throttle. But today, September 8th, 1974, evil's having trouble thinking positively. His primary thought is that if he presses the X2's launch button, it will be the last thing he ever does. It's 3.36pm and the countdown begins. Speaker 2 (3:12) Evil Speaker 1 (3:23) and the sky cycle hurtle into the brilliant blue sky. But it's immediately clear something's gone wrong. Very wrong. I'm Tim Harford and you're listening to Cautionary Tales. Speaker 1 (4:05) Joey Chitwood's auto daredevil thrill show had come to Butte, Montana, and seven-year-old Bobby Knievel was transfixed. As Chitwood's stuntmen rolled cars, jumped motorbikes and generally filled the air with noise, excitement and engine fumes, a plan formed in Bobby's young mind. I went home and took the mudguards off my bicycle, he said, and I put cards in the spokes so it would sound like a motorcycle. Bobby then took his grandpa's garage doors off their hinges to fashion a crude ramp and charged neighbourhood kids two cents to watch him furiously pedal himself and his bike into the void. Speaker 1 (4:55) When the spectators grew bored, Bobby promised he'd leap across a raging fire. Unfortunately, the pile of brush he set alight soon licked at Grandpa's garage doors, leaving Bobby without a ramp, but with lots of explaining to do. Speaker 1 (5:16) Bobby Knievel left school without graduating, and a life in Bute's copper mines beckoned. But he was saved from the darkness and dangers of the subterranean world by landing a driving job at the pit head. He found his duties dull, though, and enlivened his shifts by scaring passengers with the recklessness of his driving. Speaker 1 (5:40) At the wheel of a truck, he asked a colleague to dump a heavy boulder in the back so he could pull a wheelie. The truck tipped back violently, severing an overhead cable and earning Knevel a firing. Speaker 1 (5:57) A stint in the army, a foray into petty crime and some dead-end jobs all followed. But it was an unlikely-sounding 9-5 position that finally halted his slide into Palookaville. So what was the job Knievel credited with saving his life? Insurance. The young man turned out to be an imaginative salesman and soon claimed he'd broken all records at the Combined Insurance Company of America. He boasted of selling 110 policies in one day by targeting the staff at a mental institution, though some vulnerable patients undoubtedly fell prey to Knievel's patter and signed up too. Odd as it may sound, this job was every bit as vital to the evil Knievel story as his youthful exposure to Joey Chitwood's auto daredevils. Puffed up by his success, Knievel insisted on going to head office to demand an immediate promotion to vice president. The firm's founder, W. Clement Stone, duly made time for Knievel and duly turned the promotion down flat. The disappointed salesman resigned on the spot. But the meeting wasn't nearly as acrimonious as you might imagine. Present alongside W. Clement Stone was his friend and collaborator, Napoleon Hill. And the two older men probably chuckled indulgently at young Knievel's moxie, for Stone and Hill were America's greatest proponents of such unabashed self-belief. The older man, Napoleon Hill, was arguably the father of the modern self-help book. As an example of personal success, his pedigree was impeccable. President Woodrow Wilson had sought Hill's advice on how to fight World War I, and when it was won, had sent Hill to oversee the Versailles peace negotiations. The wealthy steel mogul, Andrew Carnegie, also took a shine to Hill. After sharing the secrets of his own success, he opened his address book to Hill, leading to scores of interviews with other millionaires. Henry Ford, J.P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller and Alexander Graham Bell all lent their wisdom for Hill's blockbuster book, The Laws of Success. in 16 lessons. The main lesson, if you're interested, is you can do it if you believe you can. Perhaps it should have been, don't believe everything you read, because Napoleon Hill was, of course, a huckster and a fraud. There's no evidence, he advised Woodrow Wilson, and his claim that the laws of success was written under the tutelage of Andrew Carnegie came only after the millionaire had died. Biographers of Carnegie can find no proof in the archives. Speaker 1 (9:25) Hill's own notes from his interviews with the great and good were conveniently lost in a fire. Still, the law of success made Hill a rich man, but the wisdom he had gathered for its 16 lessons wasn't sufficient to prevent the Great Depression ravaging his finances. So the author reverted to the grifts and scams that had sustained him before his writing career. He continued to claim presidential connections, though. He said he'd advised Franklin D. Roosevelt and coined FDR's famous Depression-era rallying cry. The only thing Speaker 2 (10:07) we have to fear is fear itself. Speaker 1 (10:11) Hill rehashed the law of success, slashing his thousand-page tome to a more manageable 230 pages, describing the 13 steps to riches. Think and Grow Rich flew off the shelves and remains in print today. It sold 100 million copies, with Oprah Winfrey and Larry Ellison said to be amongst its fans. Some of the 13