America conquered the North Pole from beneath the ice
Posted in America, Exploration, Historical articles, History, Sea, Technology on Thursday, 9 August 2012
This edited article about the North Pole originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 762 published on 21st August 1976.
Experts argue as to who was really the first man to reach the North Pole, there is no doubt who were the first to get there under the ice – the crew of the US nuclear submarine Nautilus, commanded by William R. Anderson.
Novelist Jules Verne had given birth to the idea of taking a submarine under the polar ice 90 years earlier, in his book “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea”. In 1931, Australian-born Sir Hubert Wilkins had made an unsuccessful attempt in an old American submarine to turn fiction into fact.
The coming of nuclear power revived interest in the project. Traditionally equipped subs travel by diesel propulsion on the surface, and use electric motors when submerged. But they have to surface to recharge their batteries.
A nuclear power unit needs no air. Submarines powered by this means can stay under water as long as there is air for their crews to breathe.
It was America’s Admiral Hyman G. Rickover who persuaded his government to build nuclear submarines, and it was his drive and forceful leadership which launched Nautilus on her historic voyage. As a naval man, he saw the growing importance of the route across the pole as a short cut between northern Europe and North America. But the project was obviously of great interest to scientists as well.
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