Lincoln Ellsworth
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Lincoln Ellsworth (May 12, 1880 - May 26, 1951) was a U.S. explorer.
Son of James Ellsworth and Eva Frances Butler, he was born in Chicago, Illinois. He also lived in Hudson, Ohio as a child.
Arctic/North Pole exploration
Lincoln Ellsworth's father, James, a wealthy coal man from the United States, spent US$100,000 to fund Roald Amundsen's venture from Norway to the North Pole in 1925. Ellsworth was a pilot for this trip.
Along with Amundsen, Ellsworth sighted the Geographic North Pole in 1926 from the airship Norge, designed and piloted by the Italian Umberto Nobile, in a flight from Svalbard to Alaska. This was the first undisputed sighting of the area.
Antarctic exploration
Ellsworth made four expeditions to Antarctica between 1933 and 1939, using as his aircraft transporter and base a former Norwegian herring boat that he named Wyatt Earp after his hero[1].
On November 23, 1935, Ellsworth discovered the Ellsworth Mountains of Antarctica when he made a trans-Antarctic flight from Dundee Island to the Ross Ice Shelf. He gave the descriptive name Sentinel Range, which was later named for the northern half of the Ellsworth Mountains.
Mount Ellsworth and Lake Ellsworth, both in Antarctica, are also named after him.
Honors
In 1927, the Boy Scouts of America made Ellsworth an Honorary Scout, a new category of Scout created that same year. This distinction was give to "American citizens whose achievements in outdoor activity, exploration and worthwhile adventure are of such an exceptional character as to capture the imagination of boys...". The other eighteen men who were awarded this distinction were: Roy Chapman Andrews; Robert Bartlett; Frederick Russell Burnham; Richard E. Byrd; George Kruck Cherrie; James L. Clark; Merian C. Cooper; Louis Agassiz Fuertes; George Bird Grinnell; Charles A. Lindbergh; Donald Baxter MacMillan; Clifford H. Pope; George Palmer Putnam; Kermit Roosevelt; Carl Rungius; Stewart Edward White; Orville Wright. [2] The Boy Scout's Book of True Adventure, Fourteen Honorary Scouts, published by G. P. Putnam's Sons in New York in 1931 includes an essay "The First Crossing of the Polar Sea" by Lincoln Ellsworth.
The United States Postal Service once produced a stamp with his picture.
See also
- Airship Norge
- List of firsts
- North Pole
- List of people on stamps of the United States - Scott catalogue 2389, 25c stamp
References
- ^ HMAS WYATT EARP, Royal Australian Navy - Sea Power Centre Australia (Historical Section), accessed 4 January 2008
- ^ "Around the World". Time (magazine). 1927. Retrieved 2007-10-24.
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