Salomon August Andrée

Salomon August Andrée, during his lifetime most often known as S. A. Andrée (October 18, 1854–October 1897) was a Swedish engineer, physicist, aeronaut and polar explorer who perished during a failed attempt to reach the Geographic North Pole by hydrogen balloon, the S. A. Andrée's Arctic balloon expedition of 1897, which ended with the death of all three participants.

Technics

Andrée was born in the small town of Gränna and received an engineering degree in mechanical engineering from the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm 1874, working as an engineer until 1880. From 1880 to 1882 he was an assistant at the Royal Institute of Technology, and in 1882–1883 he participated in a Swedish scientific expedition to Spitsbergen led by Nils Ekholm, where Andrée was responsible for the observations regarding air electricity. From 1884 to his death, he was employed by the Swedish patent office. From 1891–1894 he was also a liberal member of the Stockholm city council. As a scientist, Andrée published scientific journals about air electricity, conduction of heat, and inventions. His view of life was that of the natural sciences, and he entirely lacked interest in art or literature. He was a firm believer in industrial and technical development, and claimed also that emancipation of women would come as a consequence of technical progress.

North Pole

Supported by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and funded by people like King Oscar II and Alfred Nobel, his polar exploration project was the subject of enormous interest and was seen as a brave and patriotic scheme. The North Pole expedition made a first try to launch the balloon "Örnen" (The Eagle) in the summer of 1896 from Danskøn, an island in the west of the Svalbard Archipelago, but the winds did not permit the expedition to start. When Andrée next tried, on July 11, 1897, together with his companions engineer Knut Frænkel and photographer Nils Strindberg (a second cousin of novelist August Strindberg), the balloon did set off and sailed for little more than two days. However, due to leakage of hydrogen it could not stay in the air any longer. They had covered 295 miles (475 km) and floundered on the pack ice. The expedition was badly equipped for travelling on the ice and never reached land until October when the three men set foot on the island Kvitøya, where they eventually perished.

Aftermath

Until Andrée's last camp was found in 1930, what could have happened to the expedition was the subject of myth and rumours. In 1908 it was briefly supposed that Andrée's body had been found buried on the coast of northern Labrador. In the end, the remains of the three men were found by the Norwegian Bratvaag Expedition. Several diaries, photographic negatives, the boat and many utensils and other objects were also recovered. The homebringing of the bodies of Andrée and his colleagues Strindberg and Frænkel was a grand event. King Gustaf V held an oration, and the explorers received a funeral with great honors. The three explorers were cremated and their ashes interred together at the cemetery Norra begravningsplatsen in Stockholm.

Modern opinion

Starting in the 1960s, Andrée's status as a national hero has become questioned and turned to almost the opposite. Focus has been put on the fact that the expedition was bound to fail, and that Andrée obviously refused to take in information that questioned the expedition's feasibility. Andrée has been seen as a manipulator of the national emotions of his time, bringing a meaningless death on himself and his two companions. [This assessment is discussed in several contexts in "Vår position är ej synnerligen god..." by Andrée specialist Sven Lundström, curator of the [http://andree.grm.se/saa/ Andreexpedition Polarcenter] in Gränna, Sweden (see for example p. 131).] Several modern writers, following Sundman's Andrée portrait in the semidocumentary novel "The Flight of the Eagle" (1967), have speculated that Andrée had by the time of the expedition become the prisoner of his own successful funding campaign, and been incapable of backing out or admitting weaknesses in the plans in front of the press. [See Kjellström, p. 45, and Lundström, pp. 69–73.] In 1982 a movie was based on Sundman's book, "Flight of the Eagle".

Trivia

Andrée's writings were adapted into the song cycle "The Andrée Expedition" by the American composer Dominick Argento, written for the Swedish baritone Håkan Hagegård.

Notes and references

*sv icon Kjellström, Rolf (1999). "Andrée-expeditionen och dess undergång: tolkning nu och då", in "The Centennial of S.A. Andrée's North Pole Expedition: Proceedings of a Conference on S.A. Andrée and the Agenda for Social Science research of the Polar Regions", ed. Urban Wråkberg. Stockholm: Center for History of Science, Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
*sv icon Lundström, Sven (1997). "Vår position är ej synnerligen god..." Andréexpeditionen i svart och vitt." Borås: Carlssons förlag. Lundström is the curator of the [http://andree.grm.se/saa/ Andreexpedition Polarcenter] in Gränna, Sweden. This museum has been mainly dedicated to Andrées polar expedition.
* Sörlin, Sverker. Entries "Andrée, Salomon August" and "Andrée-expeditionen" in the web version of the encyclopedia "Nationalencyklopedin", accessed April 27, 2006 (Swedish)
* "Nordisk familjebok", 2nd edition, the entry " [http://runeberg.org/nfba/0558.html Andrée, Salomon August] " (Swedish)

upplementary Reading

Sollinger, Guenther (2005), "S.A. Andree: The Beginning of Polar Aviation 1895-1897." Moscow. Russian Academy of Sciences.

Sollinger, Guenther (2005), "S.A. Andree and Aeronautics: An Annotated Bibliography." Moscow. Russian Academy of Sciences.

External links

* [http://www.zwoje-scrolls.com/zwoje41/text08p.htm Article in Polish by Andrzej M. Kobos with many haunting pictures of the balloon expedition]
* [http://www.grennamuseum.se/andreexpeditionen Grenna Museum] - The Andreexpedition Polarcenter (in Swedish)
* [http://imdb.com/title/tt0084136/ IMDB] - Swedish Movie about Andrée's ill-fated balloon expedition, with Max von Sydow as Andrée