JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post  Overall Post 5153

Answering the great North Call, to reach the North Pole, has been a quest for hundreds of explorers reaching back hundreds of years The image here depicts one iteration from 1890 of an attempt utilizing a 100′ diameter balloon. The pilot adventurers here were Georges Besancon (1866-1934) Gustav Hermite (1863-1914), whose aims were to pilot the 17.5 ton aircraft (complete with a darkroom) to the Pole—and as you can see in the cutaway view of the balloon car, their’s was an ambitious project. But their attempt to fly over the Pole was not to be, as they couldn’t raise the funds to put it all together. They did however concentrate on atmospheric research using balloons and became leaders in that brand-new field, and were successful in establishing the use of balloon in this area. (The attainment of the North Pole came probably in 1909, generally regarding Robert Peary (b. 1852) reaching it in 1909…though Frederick Cook may have done so in 1908. And perhaps it was Matthew Henson, who may have stood at the coordinates before Peary. And so on. Two things seem to be certain in the uncertain list of “firsts” and the North Pole: the first over the Pole was probably Roald Amundsen in 1926, though Richard Byrd flew over the Pole in a Fokker-tri-motor at about the same time. It is a definite thing though that the first under the Pole was the USS Nautilus in 1958.

• [Source: Scientific American, volume 91, 1890.]