00:00This place has no time zone, no landmass, and the sun rises and sets here just once a year.
00:06For over 400 years, since the era of King Henry VIII,
00:11thousands of explorers from all over the world were trying to reach this elusive spot, the North Pole.
00:17Some were hoping to find a northwest or northeast passage to China and the Indies,
00:22and others just wanted to see what it was like.
00:25In 1773, the British Royal Navy organized the first scientific expedition to the North Pole.
00:32Constantine Phipps volunteered to lead the mission.
00:35It was difficult for the two ships to move through thick ice, and they had to be towed using smaller boats.
00:41At some point, Phipps was ready to leave the ships as they saw a completely frozen sea.
00:46But in the end, they broke free from the ice and escaped into the open sea to return home without reaching the goal.
00:53In 1882, American explorer James Booth Lockwood managed to get closer to the goal than anyone else.
01:01By that time, at least 750 people in 42 expeditions had lost their lives trying to make it to the pole.
01:08On the 7th of September, 1909, the New York Times came out with a sensational front page.
01:17Perry discovers the North Pole after eight trials in 23 years.
01:22Robert E. Perry, an American explorer, claimed to have reached the North Pole in April of the same year.
01:28But communication back then was slower than now, so the message had only reached New York by September.
01:34A week before the famous headline, the New York Herald had published its own front page sensation.
01:40The North Pole is discovered by Dr. Frederick A. Cook.
01:44Cook, another American explorer, had vanished into the Arctic for over a year,
01:48and had everyone convinced he reached the pole in April 1908, a whole year before Perry.
01:55It was tricky to provide evidence any of them had actually reached the goal back then.
01:59Their goal was constantly moving on sea ice, unlike the South Pole on steady land,
02:05so they couldn't just leave a flag or some other proof there.
02:08A travel diary full of details of the journey, including daily distances,
02:13the position of the stars, and the like, would probably do as evidence.
02:17But neither Cook nor Perry were able to provide any of this backup information.
02:22So each of them started a campaign to prove they were honest and trustworthy.
02:26Perry was mentioned as the North Pole discoverer until 1988.
02:31That's when the National Geographic Society revisited the evidence
02:35and found that his records really didn't prove his claim.
02:38Cook's claim was neither proven nor disproven.
02:43Australian-born British explorer Sir Hubert Wilkins went on his first expedition to the North Pole in 1913.
02:51That's when he got the idea to reach the goal by submarine.
02:54In 1931, he borrowed a special submarine named O-12 from the U.S. Navy.
03:01The future mission had two goals.
03:03To do scientific experiments while floating on ice and moving underwater,
03:07and to reach the North Pole by traveling beneath the ice.
03:11They planned to study the weather, take temperature measurements,
03:14and collect water samples from both the surface and the seafloor.
03:18The submarine Sir Hubert used was brought to a shipyard in New Jersey to be modified.
03:22They added the latest scientific equipment and changed the outside so the submarine could travel under the ice.
03:29On March 16th, the submarine left the shipyard to start its journey to the Brooklyn Navy Yard in New York.
03:35But even before leaving the Delaware River, they faced delays.
03:40A snowstorm forced them to stop at the Philadelphia Navy Yard,
03:43and they had to stop again to get more fuel.
03:46When the submarine was entering New York Harbor, a crew member, who was just 27 years old, fell overboard and drowned.
03:54The submarine was officially renamed Nautilus, and the grandson of Jules Verne,
03:58the author of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, which inspired the new name, was there to see it.
04:04Before starting their journey, the crew tested the Nautilus in different spots off the New England coast.
04:11They faced criticism and were already two months behind schedule, so they decided to head straight to England.
04:17During their trip across the Atlantic, they sailed into severe storms.
04:22On the 13th of June, the starboard engine broke down.
04:25Then, the port engine failed because it was overused.
04:28While crossing the Atlantic, Sir Hubert Wilkins kept radioing the submarine's position back to the United States.
04:35After both engines failed, they sent out an SOS.
04:39On June 15th, the USS Wyoming, a huge ship on a training cruise with naval students, reached the Nautilus.
04:46The Wyoming towed the broken submarine to Queenstown, Ireland, and then it was taken to Davenport, England, for repairs.
04:53They had to wait for spare parts from the United States, which caused more delays.
04:57Once the Nautilus was fixed, they headed to Bergen, Norway, to meet the submarine's science officers and get more equipment.
05:05One of the most important additions in Bergen was a diving chamber, which allowed them to lower scientific tools into the water through a special hatch.
05:15On August 5th, the Nautilus finally left Bergen and headed north to find ice flows.
05:21They had lots of delays because of mechanical problems and storms.
05:24One storm even made the submarine tilt at crazy angles.
05:29Finally, on August 19th, they saw the first ice flow.
05:33For a few days, they followed the ice's edge, looking for a good spot to dive.
05:38Three days later, they tried to dive under the ice, but discovered that the submarine's diving rudders were missing.
05:44One diver went overboard to check and saw that someone must have broken off the rudders on purpose.
05:50This made Wilkins think that someone on the crew had sabotaged the submarine because they didn't trust the mission.
05:57Even without the rudders, Wilkins still wanted to do some of his scientific experiments.
06:02On the last day of August, they found a way to force the Nautilus under a three-foot-thick ice flow.
06:08They had to fill the ballast tanks and adjust the trim.
06:12They managed to make more dives under this ice this way before the journey ended.
06:16After a few more days of trying to do research, Wilkins decided it was too dangerous to stay at sea.
06:23The Nautilus arrived at Svalbard, the Norwegian archipelago between mainland Norway and the North Pole, on September 8th, after going through the worst storm of the trip.
06:33They planned to go to a port in England, but another storm caused a lot of damage and made the engines fail, so they had to stop in Bergen again.
06:41After getting permission from the United States shipping board, the Nautilus was towed out of Bergen and sunk in a Norwegian fjord on November 13th, 1931.
06:52In 1958, a U.S. submarine with the same name, Nautilus, became the first vessel that reached the North Pole by traveling under the ice.
07:01This Nautilus was much bigger than the submarines that came before it.
07:06It was 319 feet long and weighed 3,590 tons.
07:11For comparison, the other Nautilus was 175 feet long.
07:15Unlike other submarines, the new Nautilus could stay underwater for a longer time because of its special atomic engine didn't need air and only used a tiny amount of nuclear fuel.
07:26On July 23rd, 1958, it left Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on Operation Sunshine.
07:33There were 116 people on board, Commander Anderson, 111 officers and crew, and 4 civilian scientists.
07:41The Nautilus traveled north through the Bering Strait and only surfaced once at Point Barrow, Alaska.
07:47On August 1st, the submarine left the north coast of Alaska and dove under the Arctic ice cap.
07:52The submarine traveled at a depth of 500 feet, with the ice above it between 10 to 50 feet thick.
07:59At 11.15 p.m. on August 3rd, Commander Anderson told his crew,
08:05For the world, our country, and the Navy, the North Pole.
08:09And the Nautilus went right under the North Pole without stopping.
08:13On August 5th, the submarine came up in the Greenland Sea.
08:16And then, two days later, it finished its historic trip in Iceland.
08:22Congratulations!
08:23F
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