Page 9 - Demo

By 1871, three teams had tried to reach the North Pole over the ice, but none had gotten past 83 degrees north. When Fridtjof Nansen only made it as far as 84 degrees north in 1895, many people believed it was an impossible goal. Yet, in an age when all sorts of adventurers and explorers were setting records, an intrepid Swede, Salomon August Andr%u00e9e, decided to fly a balloon over the Pole. Andr%u00e9e was a good promoter, and he drew support from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, King Oscar II, and Alfred Nobel. After poor weather conditions prevented a launch in 1896, he and two crew members took off on July 11, 1897 in the balloon %u00d6rnen (Eagle) from Danes Island in the Arctic Ocean. While they covered 298 miles in 65 hours, they didn%u2019t get any further north than the previous expeditions, and were forced down onto the ice. Pulling sledges with food and supplies, they eventually made it to the small island of Kvit%u00f8ya, not far from where they started%u2014and died there, likely in mid-October. Their fate remained unknown to the outside world until 1930 when their bodies were finally discovered. It took until May 12, 1926 before the North Pole was reached by air%u2014during the Amundsen-Ellsworth 1926 Transpolar Flight. The driving force behind the expedition was Roald Amundsen, using the Norge, a semi-rigid dirigible designed by an Italian aeronautical engineer, Umberto Nobile, who was also the pilot. Amundsen%u2019s claim of being first to the Pole wasn%u2019t fully accepted at the time, because Richard E. Byrd, along with Floyd Bennett, had claimed to have flown over the Pole on May 9 in a Fokker F-VII aeroplane%u2014but Byrd%u2019s claim has since been discredited.