Lincoln Ellsworth

Lincoln Ellsworth
Birthday	Wednesday, May 12, 1880
Birthplace	Chicago, Illinois
Died	Saturday, May 26, 1951
Nationality	United States
Occupation	exploration

Ellsworth, Lincoln

(1880–1951) explorer, engineer; born in Chicago (son of James William Ellsworth). After studying at Yale and Columbia University, he worked in the Canadian and American West as a surveyor, prospector, and mining and railroad engineer. He received army flight training during World War I and was the first person to fly over both the North Pole (1926, in a dirigible) and the South Pole (1935, in an airplane). He claimed some 380,000 square miles of Antarctic territory (Ellsworth Land) for the U.S.A. as a result of his overflights (1935, 1939). In 1941 he led an expedition to Peru.

The Cambridge Dictionary of American Biography, by John S. Bowman. Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1995. Reproduced with permission.

The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Ellsworth, Lincoln

 

Born May 12, 1880, in Chicago, III.; died May 26, 1951, in New York, N.Y. American polar explorer and aviator.

In 1925, Ellsworth served as a navigator on one of the two aircraft on R. Amundsen’s expedition to the North Pole. In 1926 he took part in Amundsen’s expedition aboard the dirigible Norge, which traced a route from Spitsbergen to Alaska via the North Pole. In 1931 he was on board the dirigible Graf Zeppelin when it made a flight to Franz Josef Land. In November and December 1935, Ellsworth and the aviator H. Hollick-Kenyon made the first transantarctic flight, from the Antarctic Peninsula to Little America, during which they discovered the Eternity Range, the Sentinel Range, and Ellsworth Land and the Ellsworth Mountains, which Ellsworth named in honor of his father, J. Ellsworth. In 1938 and 1939 he flew into the interior regions of Antarctica. A cape on Young Island in the Balleny Islands, a mountain peak in the Queen Maud Range, and an antarctic station have been named in honor of Ellsworth.

WORKS

Beyond Horizons. New York, 1938.

REFERENCE

Treshnikov, A. F. Istoriia otkrytiia i issledovaniia Antarktidy. Moscow, 1963.

The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, 3rd Edition (1970-1979). © 2010 The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved.