The weather broke on September 2, and Wellman and two crewmen boarded the America for its first excursion over the polar waters. Summer - the time to safely attempt a journey to the North Pole-was slipping away. Severe gales damaged the hangar on July 4, and unfavorable weather continued well after the hangar was repaired. ![]() Wellman hoped to lift off in late July, but the weather hampered his plans. He arrived in late June with a refurbished America - he had lengthened the airship to 185 feet and extended the steel car to 115 feet. The hangar for the America under construction in Spitsbergen / THF285398 Wellman's first attempt never got off the ground, but he vowed to try again. But when Wellman's team mounted the engines to the airship in Spitsbergen, the driving gear fell apart, the propellers could not stand the strain, and the car in which the crew would work and live as they flew over the icepack could not take the vibration. The engines performed well by themselves when designers tested them in France. (Wellman planned to carry these vehicles onboard the airship and use them instead of dogs if the airship failed to stay aloft.) But most damaging: the airship's engines caused problems. ![]() The expedition's experimental motor vehicles, designed by Wellman to pull sleds over the ice, proved useless. When Wellman arrived at his remote outpost in July 1906, he found the hangar, that he planned to have built to protect the airship while he prepared it for flight, unfinished. But delays and crippling mechanical failures plagued the enterprise. The following year, Wellman shipped the America to Spitsbergen, Norway - the westernmost bulk of land in the Svalbard archipelago bordering the Arctic Ocean - to make his first attempt to fly over the polar icecap. It would carry the crew and equipment, including two gasoline engines to drive the wooden propellers. A metal-sheathed car, 52 1/2 feet long by 6 feet wide, hung below the hydrogen-filled bag. The sausage-shaped airship, which he christened America, was 165 feet long and 53 1/2 feet in diameter. In 1905, Wellman, funded by his employers at The Chicago Record-Herald, secured a French-built balloon. And those backing his expeditions used Wellman's exploits to lure readers to their publications.Īfter a near-fatal attempt in 1898-99, Wellman decided the best way to reach the pole was by an airship. Wellman used his celebrity to secure funding, mainly from his employers at The Chicago Record-Herald, for future adventures. The public eagerly followed Wellman's progress through newspaper and journal articles. But his reports of the harrowing exploits - of men battling the cold, "ice-quakes," and polar bears - enthralled readers. Neither attempt advanced far into the Arctic, and his second expedition nearly cost him his life. Walter Wellman, an American journalist, adventurer, and self-styled expert on an array of topics-mounted two unsuccessful expeditions in the 1890s to reach the North Pole by trekking over the ice. Walter Wellman (1858-1934) and the America Walter Wellman's airship America, 1907 / THF701652 ![]() From the late 1890s into the 1930s - before robust and reliable airplanes made it possible to fly long distances in relative safety and comfort - some explorers turned to balloons and airships to face the challenges posed by the polar icepack. ![]() Trekking across the ice, however, was hazardous. (Explorers finally navigated a ship through the Northwest Passage in the early 1900s.) Around the turn of the 20th century, more adventurers - some for personal glory, others for scientific advancement - voyaged into the unexplored Arctic region to uncover its secrets and be the first to reach the North Pole. Native peoples survived by harvesting the polar seas' bounty, and within the past several hundred years, explorers probed the ice-bound waters to locate quick trade routes to distant lands. Humans have traveled the edges of the iced-covered Arctic for thousands of years.
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