July 11

Salomon August Andrée was an ambitious sort of guy. He was a Swiss engineer who briefly had a promising career as an aeronaut. Or what passed for aeronautics at the end of the 19th century. He also was wrapped up in the mania for polar exploration that seems to have been rampant then. Combining these two interests, on the 11th in 1897, Andree and two younger, less-experienced adventurers, climbed into a hydrogen-filled balloon at Svalbard, Sweden and gently rose into the sky hoping to pass over the North Pole on their way to either Russia or Canada. It appears that either location would have been just fine, Andree apparently wasn't picky. The balloon didn’t make it nearly that far, and the bodies of Andree and his two friends were not recovered until 1930.

The image is from film recovered at the site of the crash.