As I was finishing a book about polar explorer, Roald Amundsen, I re-watched the Martin Scorsese film, The Aviator, about Howard Hughes. I pieced together this timeline to learn more about polar and aviation history. So many spectacular accomplishments and advancements for humanity all occurred in a very compacted amount of time. And many of the feats and individuals overlap. Amundsen was a ship captain, but he was also a pioneer of aviation.
REVIEW | The Last Viking: The Life of Roald Amundsen
This era of exploration and discovery fascinates and inspires me. These individuals were willing to lay it all out of the line. Names like Roald Amundsen, Howard Hughes, Ernest Shackleton, George Mallory, Wiley Post, Charles Lindbergh, Neil Armstrong, Amelia Earhart, Chuck Yeager, Edmund Hillary, and Henry Worsley.
This timeline connects these amazing stories of courage from an exciting period in world history.
Jake Norton enjoyed the timeline. He’s an eight-time Everest climber, UN Ambassador for their Mountain Partnership program and award-winning filmmaker and photographer. And just a cool dude.
Thanks for putting this together, Charlie! Very cool, informative, thorough, and an honor to be a part of the list. Thanks, and best regards, Jake
I also strongly recommend listening to the Explorers’ Podcast, which tells many of the tales found in the timeline. I’ve enjoyed listening to a ton of these stories.
The Age of Exploration Timeline
1888–1889
Norway’s Fridjof Nansen becomes the first person to cross Greenland, becoming a national hero an inspiration — and later a mentor — for a young Roald Amundsen.
1893–1895
Nansen builds his ship, the Fram (Norwegian for “forward”), and explores near the North Pole; he survives a winter in the Antarctic in a wooden hut, killing bears and walrus.
1898
A young Roald Amundsen serves as first mate and American Frederick Cook is the surgeon on a Belgian expedition; when the ship gets trapped, the crew becomes the first to survive an Arctic winter.
1901–1904
Pablo Picasso‘s Blue Period
1902
Great Britain’s Robert Scott with crew mate Ernest Shackleton fail in their attempt to reach the South Pole.
1903
On the 17th attempt, with American Orville Wright at the helm, the Wright Brothers conquer flight. The Flyer covered 120 feet in 12 seconds. Later Wilbur Wright takes a 59-second flight that covers 852 feet.
1903–1905
Roald Amundsen becomes the first person to navigate the Northwest Passage.
1905
Norway becomes an independent country on May 17. Amundsen is the new nation’s first hero.
1906
My grandfather, Andreas Haave, at 17, boards a ship in Trondheim, Norway, for America.
Radio broadcasting begins.
1908
Shackleton comes within 97 nautical miles of the South Pole, but is forced to turn around because he and his men are ill and starving.
Henry Ford‘s automobile, the Model T, debuts.
1909
Americans Fredrick Cook and Robert Peary separately claim to have reached the North Pole, but both claims are disputed and later disproved.
1911
Amundsen successfully reaches the South Pole on Dec. 11 on cross country skis and dog sleds, spends four days at the pole taking measurements and observations to make a valid claim. He wins the “Race to the Pole” with Scott by over a month.
American archeologist Hiram Bingham discovers Machu Picchu in Peru on July 24.
1912
Scott reaches the South Pole on Jan 18, but his team perishes on the return. Scott is revered as a romantic tragic figure.
1912
The Titanic sinks on April 15.
1912–1915
Shackleton’s ship, the Endurance, drifts in ice for nine months during the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition. Eventually, the ship is crushed by the ice, beginning a long and arduous survivalist adventure, perhaps the greatest story ever told. In Shackleton’s quarters, the great explorer kept a number of books, including’s Amundsen’s “The North-West Passage.”
1914–1918
World War I
1915
Albert Einstein publishs his general theory of relativity.
1916
Roald Dahl is born in Wales to Norwegian parents, who named their son after Amundsen.
1918–1925
Amundsen makes an attempt at the North Pole, following Nansen’s strategy of lodging the ship in ice to drift, hoping that the natural flow would take the ship to the pole via the Northeast Passage. The trip fails to reach the North Pole, but they navigate the Northeast Passage. Amundsen breaks his arm in a fall and is badly injured in an polar bear attack.
1922
Shackleton dies on his ship of a heart attack.

This gelatin-silver print taken by photographer Harry Burton in January, 1923 shows an unbroken seal featuring the jackal god Anubis on the doors of the third shrine within Tutankhamun’s tomb, untouched for over 3,245 years. — piqueshow.com
British archaeologist Howard Carter and his workmen discover the entrance to King Tut’s tomb in Egypt on Nov. 4.
1924
Brits George Mallory and Sandy Irvine are last seen at 28,400 feet on Mount Everest before disappearing; they were attempting to become the first to ascent the 29,000-foot summit. Some believe the pair ‘could’ have made it to the top, but no one will ever know for sure.
1925
Amundsen and American partner and expedition funder Lincoln Ellsworth make an unsuccessful attempt to reach the North Pole via airplanes. One of the two planes is damaged on landing south of the Pole. Their goal then changes from reaching the Pole to surviving. For a month, they build a runway, removing ice and snow, in frigid conditions with minimal food and no snow removal tools. The world assumes they are dead. With all six men in one plane, they escape death.
1926
Amundsen reaches the North Pole on May 12, the first undisputed claim, in the airship called the Norge, designed and piloted by Italian Umberto Nobile, who is backed by Benito Mussolini. Amundsen, Ellsworth and Nobile drop Norwegian, American and Italian flags on spiked poles into the geographic North Pole ice. Amundsen and crew member Oscar Wisting become the first men to reach both the South and North Pole.
Robert Goddard invents the first liquid-fueled rocket in 1926, which lays the groundwork for space travel. He also invented the multistage rocket, discussed the possibility of sending a rocket to the moon, and is credited with ushering in the Space Age.
Television is invented.
“The Sun Also Rises” by Ernest Hemingway, is published.
1927
American Charles Lindbergh makes the first solo transatlantic flight from New York to Paris in 33 hours.
1928
Roald Amundsen dies during a rescue mission to save Umberto Nobile, who had crashed his own plane near the North Pole. Amundsen, 55, had joined a French rescue efforts and was aboard a French Latham 47 flying boat in the Barents Sea when the craft disappeared on June 18.
Howard Hughes gets his pilot’s license.
Penicillin is discovered.
1929
Black Friday, the stock market crashes in the U.S. triggering the Great Depression.
Lindbergh and Buzz Aldrin’s father, Edwin, help Goddard get more funding for research from the Guggenheim family following the 1929 stock market crash. Prior to World War II, Goddard, Lindbergh, Aldrin and Harry Guggenheim convince the U.S. Navy of the military value of rockets.
1930
Goddard moves to Roswell, New Mexico, where he tests his rockets.
1931
American Wiley Post and his navigator Harold Gatty fly around the world in eight days. He flies at a higher altitude in the jet stream (something he discovered), which allows faster flight, and he develops one of the first pressure suits. Charles Lindbergh called Gatty the “Prince of Navigators.”
1933
Post completes the trip solo in seven days. He becomes a worldwide hero.
1935
Post perishes, along with his friend, humorist and fellow Oklahoman Will Rogers, in a failed plane takeoff in Alaska. Rogers’ funeral is the biggest funeral in America since Abraham Lincoln’s in 1865. The Will Rogers’ monument in Colorado Springs was under construction at the time of the fatal crash.
Hughes flies his plane, H1, a record 352 mph.
1936
A five-year-old Neil Armstrong takes his first airplane ride with his dad in a Ford Trimotor, also known as the Tin Goose.
1937
Hughes breaks the transcontinental record from Burbank to Newark in 7 hours, 28 minutes
Amelia Earhart disappears attempting to circumnavigate the globe.
The German dirigible, Hindenburg, circles a New Jersey airfield for three hours, dropping fuel, but eventually catches fire and crashes. This new mode of air travel sported a swastika and the Olympic Rings, having flown over the 1936 Olympic Games’ Opening Ceremony in Berlin.
1938
Hughes and a crew of four fly around the world in four days in the Spruce Goose. Hughes was promoting air travel and the 1939 New York World’s Fair, which my dad attended. Flying from New York to Paris, Hughes cut Lindbergh’s time in half, crossing the Atlantic in 16 hours, 38 minutes. The plane was loaded with innovative gadgets and new instrumentation, many of which are still employed in planes today. His crew included two navigators, a mechanic and a radio engineer. Millions of ham radio operators followed the progress on the ground.
Hughes told the New York Daily News: “There’s no use trying to compare this with Wiley Post’s flight. His feat never will be duplicated. His flight must still remain the most remarkable in history. He did it alone. To make a trip of that kind alone is beyond comprehension.”
The computer is invented.
1939–1945
World War II
1940
Roald Dahl, as fighter pilot in the Royal Air Force, crashes his plane in the Libyan desert, fracturing his skull, smashing his nose and temporarily blinding him. He went on to earn five aerial victories, qualifying him as a ‘flying ace.’
1945
The first atom bomb was successfully detonated in New Mexico on July 16 as part of the “Manhattan Project,” directed by J. Robert Oppenheimer.
1947
American Chuck Yeager exceeds the speed of sound in flight on Oct. 14. Two days earlier he fell off a horse and broke two ribs.
1953
Great Britain’s Edmund Hillary and Nepal’s Tenzing Norgay are credited as the first to summit Mount Everest on May 29, nearly 30 years after Mallory and Irvine’s 1924 attempt. Hillary says, hey, maybe Mallory and Irvine got to the top, but a successful summit requires a successful descent, where you end up not dead. I’m paraphrasing.
1958
Hillary becomes the first person in 46 years, since Amundsen and Scott, to reach the South Pole. But his expedition was aided by motorized vehicles and planes that provided reconnaissance and dropped supplies. You can’t compare this effort with Amundsen, who cross country skied 2,100 miles over three months. And in the middle of all that, ascended a glacier, climbing 5,000 feet, after traveling 17 miles on one day. That’s a workout.
1964
Roald Dahl’s book, “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” is published.
1969
American Neil Armstrong becomes the first person to walk on the moon on July 21. Buzz Aldrin joined Armstrong minutes later and described the view as “magnificent desolation,” which could easily describe the polar landscapes.
1974
Discovery of the Terracotta Army in China, over 8,000 life-sized sculptures warriors, horses and more, to protect the First Emperor of China in the afterlife, created over 2,200 years ago.
1976
Howard Hughes dies of kidney failure at 70 on a plane in flight. Someone else was piloting.
1985
On April 6, Edmund Hillary, along with Neil Armstrong, first man to walk on the moon; Steve Fossett, first man to fly a balloon around the world; and Patrick Morrow, the first person to climb the highest peaks of all seven continents; fly to the North Pole. They land, get out and … “They popped a bottle of champagne, which froze solid before even two glasses were poured.” — Atlas Obscura. The trip was set up by Mike Dunn, who wanted to take the day’s greatest explorers to the North Pole.
2002
Jake Norton, an eight-time Everest climber and award-winning photographer, gives a keynote presentation, “Lost on Everest,” at Colorado College’s Shove Chapel, which I attended. His presentation details his experience on the 1999 Mount Everest expedition that found the frozen body of George Mallory, who disappeared on the mountain in 1924.
2009
A former longtime British Army officer Henry Worsley leads an expedition to retrace Ernest Shackleton’s 1909 route to the South Pole. Worsley is a descendant of Frank Worsley, the captain of Shackleton’s ship, the Endurance. In fact, the team was comprised of descendants of the original Shackleton party. They reached Shackleton’s Furthest South — 97 miles away from the pole — exactly 100 years to the day.
2011
Worsley leads a team that retraces both Amundsen and Scott’s 1911 South Pole routes to commemorate the 100th anniversary. Worsley follows the Amundsen route, skiing 900 miles unsupported.
2016
At 55, Worsley seeks to complete Ernest Shackleton’s Antarctic crossing attempt from 1916, to become the first person to complete the crossing, solo and unsupported in any way. Worsley skiied over 900 miles in 69 days, pulling his equipment and food. He was just 30 miles from completion when he called for help.
“When my hero, Ernest Shackleton, was 97 miles from the South Pole on the morning of January the 9th, 1909, he said he’d shot his bolt. Well, today, I have to inform you with some sadness that I too have shot my bolt.”
He was airlifted off the ice and flown to a hospital in Chile. He died on Jan. 24 of peritonitis.
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