page_title: Andrée's Arctic balloon expedition
section_title: Andrée's scheme
hierarchical_section_title: Andrée's Arctic balloon expedition / Background / Andrée's scheme
caption_attribution_description: Salomon August Andrée (1857–1897), Swedish polar explorer.
context_page_description: Andrée's Arctic balloon expedition of 1897 was an effort to reach the North Pole in which all three Swedish expedition members – S. A. Andrée, Knut Frænkel, and Nils Strindberg – perished. Andrée, the first Swedish balloonist, proposed a voyage by hydrogen balloon from Svalbard to either Russia or Canada, which was to pass, with luck, straight over the North Pole on the way. The scheme was received with patriotic enthusiasm in Sweden, a northern nation that had fallen behind in the race for the North Pole.
  Andrée ignored many early signs of the dangers associated with his balloon plan. Being able to steer the balloon to some extent was essential for a safe journey. But there was much evidence that the drag-rope steering technique he had invented was ineffective. Yet Andrée staked the fate of the expedition on drag ropes. Worse, the polar balloon Örnen was delivered directly to Svalbard from its manufacturer in Paris without being tested. When measurements showed it to be leaking more than expected, Andrée refused to acknowledge the alarming implications.
context_section_description: The second half of the 19th century has often been called the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration. The inhospitable and dangerous Arctic and Antarctic regions appealed powerfully to the imagination of the age, not as lands with their own ecologies and cultures, but as challenges to be conquered by technological ingenuity and manly daring. Salomon August Andrée, an engineer at the patent office in Stockholm, shared these enthusiasms. A keen balloonist, Andrée proposed a plan for letting the wind propel a hydrogen balloon across the Arctic Sea to the Bering Strait, to fetch up in Alaska, Canada, or Russia, and passing near or even right over the North Pole on the way. 
  In 1893, Andrée purchased his own balloon, the Svea, and subsequently made nine journeys with it, starting from either Stockholm or Gothenburg and traveling a combined distance of 1,500 kilometres (930 mi). In the prevailing westerly winds, the Svea flights had a strong tendency to carry him uncontrollably out to the Baltic Sea and drag his basket perilously along the surface of the water or slam it into one of the many rocky islets in the Stockholm archipelago. On one occasion, Andrée was blown clear across the Baltic to Finland. His longest trip was due east from Gothenburg, across the breadth of Sweden and out over the Baltic to Gotland. Even though Andrée saw a lighthouse and heard breakers off Öland, he remained convinced that he was traveling over land and seeing lakes.
  During a couple of Svea flights, Andrée tested and tried out the drag-rope steering technique which he had developed and wanted to use on his projected North Pole expedition. Drag ropes, which hang from the balloon basket and drag part of their length on the ground, are designed to counteract the tendency of lighter-than-air craft to travel at the same speed as the wind, a situation that makes steering by sails impossible. The friction of the ropes was intended to slow the balloon to the point where the sails would have an effect (beyond that of making the balloon rotate on its axis). Andrée reported, and presumably believed, that with drag-rope steering he had succeeded in deviating about ten degrees either way from the wind direction.
  This notion is rejected by modern balloonists; the Swedish Ballooning Association maintains that Andrée's belief that he had deviated from the wind was mistaken, being misled by inexpertise and a surfeit of enthusiasm in an environment of variable winds and poor visibility. Use of drag ropes—prone to snapping, falling off, or becoming entangled with each other or the ground, in addition to being ineffective—is not considered by any modern expert to be a useful steering technique.
caption: Salomon August Andrée
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