Tuxedo on Ice

Salomon August Andrée packed a tuxedo, and that detail may tell you more about his expedition than almost anything else. In the summer of 1897, Andrée, a Swedish engineer and balloon enthusiast, was preparing to do something no one had ever done: fly over the North Pole in a hydrogen balloon. For decades, explorers had tried to reach the pole by ship, sled, and sheer endurance. Many never came back. Andrée believed he had found a better way. He would simply fly over it.

His balloon, the Örnen—Swedish for The Eagle—was enormous. Hanging beneath it were long ropes designed to drag across the ice and create enough resistance that Andrée could partially steer the balloon with sails. At least, that was the theory. There were plenty of reasons to be skeptical. The balloon leaked hydrogen, the steering system was largely unproven, and an earlier attempt in 1896 had been abandoned because the winds would not cooperate.

By the following summer, though, Andrée’s expedition had become much bigger than a scientific experiment. The Swedish public was following it, newspapers were covering it, wealthy patrons had financed it, and even the king of Sweden had contributed. Andrée had spent years explaining why the idea could work, and now a great many people were waiting for him to prove it. On July 11, 1897, he climbed into the basket with two companions, Knut Frænkel and Nils Strindberg, a young physicist and photographer.

They brought scientific instruments, guns, sledges, food, and photographic equipment. They also brought delicacies. At one point during the flight, they ate chateaubriand, chocolate biscuits, and raspberry syrup. Andrée had even packed a tuxedo, reportedly intending to wear it at the celebration he imagined might await him if the balloon carried them across the Arctic and back toward civilization.

Almost immediately after launch, things began to go wrong. The guide ropes dragged heavily across the water, the balloon flew dangerously low, and the men dumped ballast to gain altitude. Then much of the rope system—the very system that was supposed to provide some control over their direction—came loose. The expedition had barely begun, and Andrée had already lost a crucial part of the technology on which the entire plan depended.

The Eagle drifted north anyway. For nearly three days, the men were carried over the Arctic pack ice as moisture froze onto the balloon, hydrogen escaped, and the balloon repeatedly sank toward the surface. On July 14, it finally came down for good. They had not reached the North Pole. They were nowhere near it. Now three men who had planned to fly across the Arctic had to figure out how to walk out of it.

They loaded hundreds of pounds of supplies onto sledges and began dragging them across the ice, only to discover that the ground beneath them was moving. They could spend hours hauling their equipment toward safety and then realize that the drifting ice had carried them in another direction. At times, their progress was effectively erased by the movement beneath their feet.

They changed destinations and then changed them again. They hunted seals and polar bears, crossed broken ice and open water, and hauled their supplies for week after exhausting week. Eventually, after 88 days following the balloon landing, they reached a bleak, ice-covered island called Kvitøya, or White Island. Then the records stopped.

Andrée, Frænkel, and Strindberg disappeared, and for the next 33 years no one knew what had happened to them. In 1930, a group visiting White Island discovered the remains of their final camp. There were bodies, equipment, journals, and, remarkably, Strindberg’s exposed and unexposed photographic film. The Arctic cold had preserved enough of it that photographs could be developed more than three decades later.

Suddenly, the world could see the doomed expedition through the eyes of the men who had lived it: the collapsed balloon on the ice, the endless white landscape, and the makeshift camps. Even today, historians cannot say with certainty exactly what killed the three men. Hypothermia, illness, exhaustion, and other explanations have all been proposed.

But the more interesting question may be what got them there in the first place. It is tempting to look at Andrée’s expedition and simply see recklessness, but there is something more familiar going on. By the time Andrée stood beneath that balloon in July 1897, he had spent years preparing for this moment. He had raised money, built the balloon, attracted national attention, defended his ideas, traveled to the Arctic once already, and returned without launching.

That creates an enormous amount of psychological weight. At some point, the question may no longer have felt like, “Is this still a good idea?” It may have become, “How can I possibly turn back now?”

We encounter quieter versions of that question all the time. We stay with projects because of how much time we have already put into them. We defend decisions because we once defended them publicly. We keep pouring energy into plans because abandoning them would force us to admit that the earlier effort did not produce what we expected.

Money adds another layer. Once dollars have been committed to something—a house renovation, a business idea, a purchase, a financial strategy—the amount already spent can begin to feel like an argument for spending more. Economists call this the sunk-cost fallacy. The past feels like it should get a vote in the next decision, even though it cannot be changed.

The only question that remains is whether the next step still makes sense given what we know now. That is what makes Andrée’s tuxedo such an extraordinary object. Before the balloon ever left the ground, he could already picture the ending: the applause, the celebration, and the story he would tell afterward.

Sometimes the most dangerous part of a plan is not failing to imagine what could go wrong. It is becoming so attached to the ending we imagined that we stop noticing when the facts underneath us have begun to move.