Charting New Territory

Image from Library of Congress

When it comes to technology and exploration, the week of December 12-18 has been an exciting one in history. In just over one hundred years the world’s views on the boundaries of human exploration and achievement were shattered. Ingenious risk takers have pushed the borders of what is achievable in science.

On December 17, 1903 the Wright brothers achieved the first successful heavier-than-air powered flight at Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina. Wilbur and Orville Wright had been working since the late 1890s to achieve flight on both gliders and engine-powered airplanes. Although neither of them obtained high school diplomas, the bicycle manufacturers by trade were finally able to reach their goal aboard the Flyer early in the twentieth century. The library has a few books about both the lives of these extraordinary men; there are many more on the early days of flight as well as more recent flight history.

Just eleven years later, on December 14, 1911, a Norwegian team of explorers led by Roald Amundsen was the first to successfully reach the South Pole. The group was able to survive the expedition through Amundsen's Arctic and Antarctic experience; they beat a rival British expedition by over a month. While the Norwegian team returned safely—Amundsen was later among the first group that was arguably the first to reach the North Pole—the British team's attempt ended in disaster. We have a few items here at the library on the South Pole explorations as well as polar exploration in general.

The most recent moonwalk occurred this week in 1972. Between December 11 and 15, Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt trekked across the moon's surface in the Lunar Rover, collected over one hundred pounds of lunar samples, and safely returned to Earth. Although the library has limited resources on NASA and the space race, Google does offer Google Moon so that anybody can see where the Apollo moon landings occurred.

Science is not a static area of study, the stuff of rote memorization of elements, taxa, and planets. It is an active and flourishing area of study. Even now scientists are breaking barriers of what is known. Researchers at CERN in Switzerland have recently captured antimatter atoms for the first time. A bacteria was discovered this year that may have successfully used normally toxic arsenic to build its most basic parts. Exploration is hardly dead just because humans have found the ends of the earth and counted the stars. Our view of the world may be changed yet again through new technology and a pioneering spirit.