Scientist of the Day - Lincoln Ellsworth

The Polar Star, Lincoln Ellsworth’s aircraft for his trans-Antarctic flight of 1935, on Antarctic ice, photograph (smithsonianmag.com)

Lincoln Ellsworth, an American polar explorer, was born May 12, 1880, in Chicago. His father was a wealthy coal mine owner. Lincoln achieved very little in his first 43 years of life, doing poorly at school, dropping out of the engineering schools at Yale and Columbia, and then working for his father and other firms, mostly in Canada, as an engineer of sorts. He learned to fly in World War I, but never flew in combat.

 Portrait of Lincoln Ellsworth, photograph, 1936, Fram Museum (frammuseum.no)

But during the War, in Paris in 1917, he met polar explorer Roald Amundsen, and the two apparently hit it off. Amundsen had been the first to the South Pole in 1911, and after the War, he set his sights on flying a plane over the North Pole, which still had not been reached, the claims of Robert E. Peary and Frederick Cook notwithstanding. I am cynical enough to suspect that Amundsen kept up a friendship with the under-achieving Ellsworth because the latter's father was very rich. And indeed, when Amundsen took off in 1925 in his two Dornier flying boats to cross the Pole, Ellsworth Sr. had kicked in $85,000 to fund the venture, and Ellsworth Jr. was in one of the navigator’s seats. It seems that Ellsworth Sr. had bought his son a ride on his first exploring venture.

Lincoln Ellsworth and Roald Amundsen, photograph, 1926 (Wikimedia commons)

That expedition was not successful, as one of the flying boats had mechanical failure and both had to land on the ice well short of the Pole.  Amundsen immediately decided to try taking a dirigible over the pole. This was in 1926, and again he asked Lincoln Ellsworth to come along.   Ellsworth Sr. had died in 1925, so Lincoln was now rich himself, and he funded the bulk of the expenses of the 1926 attempt.  And it was successful, and Amundsen and Ellsworth quietly propelled the Norge over the North Pole on May 12, 1926 (fourth image).

The Norge dirigible at Spitsbergen (now Svalbard), which would carry Roald Amundsen and Lincoln Ellsworth over the North Pole on May 12, 1926, photograph (historynet)

So Ellsworth’s initial experiences in polar exploration were the result of social privilege.  But from 1933 to 1939, at the other end of the Earth's axis, Ellsworth showed he had the right stuff after all. He purchased a small ship, renamed it Wyatt Earp, refitted it to withstand polar ice and to carry a small plane, and headed for the Weddell Sea in Antarctica, where Shackleton had taken the Endurance twenty years earlier. The plane was called the Polar Star and had been built by Northrop and equipped with broad sturdy skis for landing on the ice (first image). 

The Wyatt Earp, Ellsworth’s ship, with the Polar Star lashed on deck, photograph, ca 1935, University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee Libraries (collections.lib.uwm.edu)

After several failed attempts, on Nov. 22, 1935, the Polar Star took off from the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula and headed for the Ross Sea. It was not quite a trans-Antarctic flight, more like from 2:00 o'clock to 10:00 o’clock, if the continent were a dial-face, but it would be a flight of some 2,400 miles over territory no human had ever seen before (sixth image). They (Ellsworth and his pilot) had to land on the ice four times en route, which must have been incredibly tense each time, since no one could ever reach them if the Polar Star were unable to take off. And they had lost their radio early on.  On one of those landings, they were beset by a blizzard for a week and had to dig the plane out. As it happened, they ran out of fuel 40 miles short of Little America, the abandoned camp that Richard Byrd had set up in 1929, and their planned destination, so they had to hike their way to the camp.  Since they were without a radio, no one knew where they were. They camped out at Little America and waited for someone to come looking, which eventually someone did, almost two months after they had taken off.

Map of the planned 1935 trans-Antarctic flight by Lincoln Ellsworth, 1935; the flight as flown followed this path more or less, but the plane landed five times, the last time 40 miles short of Little America at the very left, University of Miami Libraries (digitalcollections.library.miami.edu)

Ellsworth went back to get the Polar Star, loaded it on the Wyatt Earp, and steamed to Washington, D.C., where he gave the plane to the Smithsonian, which put it on display (seventh image). He had finally earned his laurels as a true polar explorer.  On the flight across Antarctica, he had claimed a vast territory for the United States and named it James Ellsworth Land, after his father, as you can see on the map (sixth image).  It has since been truncated to Ellsworth Land, as if it were named after the explorer, but it wasn’t, at least not initially. 

The Polar Star as it was once displayed in the National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian (airandspace.si.edu)

I spent most of my military years with the 28th Bomb Wing at Ellsworth Air Force Base, just outside Rapid City, South Dakota.  I always assumed it was named after Lincoln Ellsworth. Not until I was writing this piece did I discover that it was named after some other pilot named Ellsworth.  You would think I would have looked it up.  But I was young and not yet a historian.  I never looked anything up. And there was no Wikipedia anyway.

William B. Ashworth, Jr., Consultant for the History of Science, Linda Hall Library and Associate Professor emeritus, Department of History, University of Missouri-Kansas City. Comments or corrections are welcome; please direct to ashworthw@umkc.edu.