Ten performers and showmen who turned the traveling circus, from the 1870s to the 1970s, into the greatest show on earth, one impossible feat at a time.

For roughly a hundred years, before film and radio and television reached into every town, the circus was the biggest thing most people would ever see. It arrived by rail at dawn, raised a canvas city on the edge of town, and for two nights offered the whole exotic world in a single ring of light. This was the great century of the traveling big top, from the moment P.T. Barnum branded his railroad show the Greatest Show on Earth in the 1870s to the last decades before the tent gave way to the arena. Its stars were global celebrities who traveled in private cars and drew crowds that no theater could hold.

Choosing ten from a century of spangle and sawdust meant favoring influence over mere fame. Everyone here changed how the circus was built, performed, or understood: the impresarios who invented the spectacle, the aerialists and riders and wire walkers who redefined what a human body could do, the clowns who taught it to feel, and the animal trainers who staged pure danger as theater. The list crosses continents, from Wisconsin to Australia to Mexico, and it makes room for women who conquered the most male corners of the ring. A couple of entries should be discoveries even for readers who think they know the circus. They appear in no particular order, because these ten belong together as a single company, not a countdown.

1. P.T. Barnum

1810-1891

Phineas Taylor Barnum did not invent the circus, but he turned it into an American institution and a marketing machine. Already famous as a museum showman, he entered the business in 1871 at sixty and branded his traveling operation the Greatest Show on Earth, a phrase that has never stopped working. In 1882 he bought Jumbo, an African elephant from the London Zoo whose name passed into English as a synonym for enormous. He understood before anyone else that the show began with the poster and the parade, and the great century of the traveling circus is unthinkable without the man who taught it to advertise.

2. The Ringling brothers

Baraboo, Wisconsin, from 1884

If Barnum gave the American circus its swagger, the five brothers from Baraboo, Wisconsin gave it discipline. Sons of a harness maker, Albert, Otto, Alfred, Charles and John Ringling started a modest wagon show in 1884 and built it, with legendary organization and a clean-dealing reputation, into Barnum & Bailey’s great rival. They bought that show in 1907 and in 1919 merged the two into Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey, the combined giant that ruled the American imagination for the rest of the century. The railroad circus they perfected, a canvas city that rose before breakfast and vanished by the next dawn, was a logistical marvel, and to picture circus day in small-town America is to picture their train pulling in.

3. Lillian Leitzel

1892-1931

No performer embodied the circus’s glamour and its danger like Lillian Leitzel, the tiny German-born aerialist who was the Ringling show’s first true superstar. Her signature feat was the one-arm plange: hanging from a single Roman ring, she threw her body over her own shoulder again and again, the joint audibly dislocating with each turn, sometimes past a hundred revolutions while the crowd counted aloud. In February 1931, performing in Copenhagen, she fell when a metal swivel crystallized and snapped, and she died two days later at thirty-nine. She had married the greatest flyer of the age in 1928, which leads straight to the next name.

4. Alfredo Codona

1893-1937

Alfredo Codona, the Mexican star of the Flying Codonas, was the first man to perform the triple somersault on the flying trapeze as a dependable part of his act, a feat so dangerous it had killed others who tried it, and his form was so clean that later flyers studied footage of him to learn how it should look. He married Lillian Leitzel in 1928, making the couple the closest thing the circus had to royalty. Her death in 1931 broke him, and a shoulder injury soon ended his flying; in 1937 he took his own life. Seek out any film of his triple: even ninety years on, the line of his body is the definition of grace.

5. May Wirth

1894-1978

The traveling circus produced no greater rider than May Wirth, the Australian bareback equestrienne who joined Barnum & Bailey in 1912 and was billed at once as the world’s greatest. She turned a forward somersault from the back of one galloping horse to another, a trick most male riders never dared, and she would leap onto a moving horse with wicker baskets strapped to her feet. Trained from childhood in an Australian circus family, she fused tumbling, contortion and horsemanship into something audiences had never seen. For a quarter of a century she was the standard against which every rider was measured.

6. Karl Wallenda

1905-1978

Karl Wallenda carried the high wire into its heroic age. The German-born founder of the Great Wallendas worked without a net on principle, and in the 1940s he built the seven-person pyramid, three tiers of family members balanced on a single wire. When it collapsed during a 1962 performance in Detroit, two of the troupe were killed and his adopted son was left paralyzed, yet the family rebuilt the pyramid and went on. Wallenda himself died in the act at seventy-three, falling from a wire strung between two hotel towers in San Juan in 1978. His name has become shorthand for the refusal to come down.

7. Emmett Kelly

1898-1979

Emmett Kelly reinvented the clown by making him sad. During the Depression he created Weary Willie, a defeated hobo with a stubbled chin and a mournful frown, and gave circus comedy a pathos it had never carried. His most famous routine needed no words at all: alone in the ring, he would try to sweep up a pool of spotlight with a small broom, chasing the light as it shrank to nothing. He joined Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey in 1942 for fourteen seasons and became the most recognized clown in America. Every melancholy clown since works in his long shadow.

8. Lou Jacobs

1903-1992

If Kelly made the clown tragic, Lou Jacobs made him immortal. The German-born auguste spent more than sixty years with Ringling and designed the white-domed, red-nosed face that became the very picture of an American circus clown. He perfected the gag of unfolding himself from an impossibly tiny car, which audiences still expect from every circus. In 1966 his clown face appeared on a United States postage stamp, an honor almost never granted to a living person, and he later helped found Ringling’s Clown College, where he trained hundreds of the clowns who came after him.

9. Clyde Beatty

1903-1965

Clyde Beatty turned the wild-animal act into pure theater of danger. Rather than parade tame cats, he pioneered the fighting act, striding into a single arena with dozens of lions and tigers at once, a chair in one hand and a blank-firing pistol in the other, staging their snarling defiance as spectacle. At his peak the act held as many as forty big cats together, a record still unbroken. Films like The Big Cage in 1933 made him a national star and carried the circus to movie audiences. Whatever a modern viewer makes of the animal act, no one ever performed this one with more nerve.

10. Mabel Stark

America’s first tiger queen

Mabel Stark broke into the most male preserve the circus had, becoming its foremost female big-cat trainer at a time when the cage was thought no place for a woman. Working chiefly with tigers, which trainers considered far less predictable than lions, she built a celebrated wrestling act with a Bengal tiger named Rajah that reared up and grappled her to the ground on cue. She starred with the Al G. Barnes and Ringling shows and kept performing into her seventies, mauled many times and undeterred each time. The genuine discovery here for most readers, she is best met in the old photographs that show her in white amid a ring of tigers, entirely calm.

Final thoughts

What binds these ten is not a single skill but a single bargain: they asked audiences to watch a real body do something that might truly fail, and they made that bargain the largest live entertainment on earth for a hundred years. These performers and showmen are the reason the traveling circus earned its name. Some of them built the machine and some of them risked their lives inside it, and more than one paid for the spectacle with that life. That is the uncomfortable, unrepeatable grandeur of the era: the danger was never an effect.

Any list this size leaves greatness in the wings. Con Colleano, the Australian Wizard of the Wire, was the first to land a feet-to-feet forward somersault on the tightwire and could easily have claimed a place, and no account of the era feels complete without Fred Bradna, the elegant ringmaster who ran the Ringling performance for some forty years and kept its three rings moving like clockwork. Consider them the encore. If the world of sawdust and spangles has caught you, CreARTivity’s history of circus arts is the natural next step, following the form from Philip Astley’s first sawdust circle all the way to the animal-free spectacle of the present day.

Corrected on 2 October 2026. An earlier version of this article said that Lillian Leitzel married Alfredo Codona two years before her death, which conflicted with the date given in the Codona entry. The correct information is that they married in 1928.

Sources consulted

Circus Ring of Fame Foundation, Lillian Leitzel
Wikipedia, Alfredo Codona