By Airship to the North Pole

For reasons that seem to defy explanation, the North Pole has been a lure for men (never women) for at least four centuries. When it was established that the world is round, the Pole came to be seen as a possible waymark along a passage to the Orient from Europe. (It had yet to be determined that the Pole sits in the middle of a giant frozen ocean without any geographical landmarks to show precisely where it is.) P. J. Capelotti, an archeologist, became intensely interested in what might remain as remnants of two early attempts to reach the pole by air from Danes Island in the Spitsbergen archipelago. The first of these was by Salomon Andree, a Swede, one of hundreds of early aeronauts who sought fame and fortune by inflating cloth bags with inflammable hydrogen and trying to fly farthest. Andree had gone aloft as early as 1893, and he made many flights before succumbing to the lure of the pole in 1897. The basic deficiency of free balloons is that they are at the mercy of the breezes and of the variability of air pressure, which can cast them in unforeseen directions at unplanned altitudes. The latter problem can be managed somewhat by valving gas and shucking ballast. As to direction, Andree thought he had a solution: guide ropes that would drag along the ground to stop or slow down and sails to catch the wind when it flowed in the desired direction. Andree went to Danes Island in 1896 but did not find a favorable wind. He returned the next year and launched Eagle with two companions. None was ever seen alive again, and their bodies were not found for more than thirty-three years. The only artifacts retrieved were messages sent by carrier pigeons, undeveloped film, and diaries that showed they had been aloft for three days and had traveled less than 300 miles

Aeronautics · Archaeology · Archaeology and ancient environmental studies · Engineering · Geology · History · Indigenous Studies and Ecology · Space Science and Extraterrestrial Life