Explorers in the 20th and 21st Centuries: From Auguste Piccard to James Cameron (The Britannica Guide to Explorers and Adventurers)

The 20th century produced a dizzying number of extraordinary explorers and, increasingly, adventurers who penetrated virtually every remaining corner of Earth yet to be visited. Much of their focus was thus on the most remote and environmentally extreme locales. The polar regions were the major emphasis during the first half of the century, with both poles being definitively reached by the mid-1920s. Although the polar regions remained of great interest to scientists and adventurers well into the 21st century, many after World War II also set their sights on conquering the tallest mountains, the greatest heights of the atmosphere, and the farthest depths of the oceans. Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay climbed to the top of Mount Everest—Earth’s highest point—in 1953, and members of the remarkable Piccard family managed to reach the upper limit of the atmosphere and the deepest part of the ocean in crafts that they had helped to design and build. The great remaining quest for the century was space, the “final” frontier. Aerospace technology advanced rapidly after World War II with the development of first jet
and then rocket propulsion. In the 1950s experimental aircraft reached for the upper limits of the atmosphere and even ventured into space before rocketry was perfected enough to actually allow people to travel there. The first humans reached space in the early 1960s, and by the end of the decade the United States had put men on the Moon...