HIGH RISK MOON RACE, 1928: 3/4: N-4 Down: The Hunt for the Arctic Airship Italia, by Mark Piesing @PorterSqBooks
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 24 December 2023
⏱️ 13 minutes
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Summary
https://www.amazon.com/N-4-Down-Arctic-Airship-Italia/dp/0062851527
Triumphantly returning from the North Pole on May 24, 1928, the world-famous exploring airship Italia—code-named N-4—was struck by a terrible storm and crashed somewhere over the Arctic ice, triggering the largest polar rescue mission in history. Helping lead the search was the famed Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen, the poles’ greatest explorer, who himself soon went missing in the frozen wastes. Amundsen’s body has never been found, the last victim of one of the Arctic’s most enduring mysteries . . .
During the Roaring Twenties, zeppelin travel embodied the exuberant spirit of the age. Germany’s luxurious Graf Zeppelin would run passenger service from Germany to Brazil; Britain’s Imperial Airship was launched to connect an empire; in America, the iconic spire of the rising Empire State Building was designed as a docking tower for airships.
1870 PARIS
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi everyone this is James Harkin and Anna Tashinsky two writers of the TV show |
| 0:05.2 | QI and two-fourths of the hit podcast no such thing as a fish. |
| 0:09.2 | We'd like to let you know that we've written a book it is called everything to play for the most |
| 0:14.4 | interesting things there are to know about the world of sports it's for you |
| 0:18.2 | whether you like sports or not did you know that legendary cricketer Gary Sobers scored his final century while drunk? |
| 0:25.7 | Or that games of lacrosse used to involve 100,000 players. |
| 0:31.7 | Learn that and so much more by getting everything to play for, the QI Book of Sports, available |
| 0:36.2 | in all bookshops and online right now. This is |
| 0:51.0 | CBS I on the world. I'm John Baps for with Mark Pizing. His new book is N4 Down, the hunt for the Arctic airship It is now 1928. Our hero, our protagonist |
| 0:58.2 | from Italy, Umberto Nobile, has put together another expedition to the North Pole, this one to top everything, to land |
| 1:07.1 | at the North Pole, perhaps to circumnavigate the Arctic. |
| 1:10.7 | He's got a new airship this time which he's dubbed the Italia. It's no longer sharing with Norway |
| 1:17.1 | Mark what what is important about the design of the Italian for the Arctic? |
| 1:30.0 | Well, I suppose it's almost exactly the same as the N-1, I guess, and I suppose everyone is a proven design, and the N-4 is almost exactly the same I suppose it's a bit more design for the Arctic |
| 1:38.7 | outright so it's so again names is light weight, making sure everything's still protected, |
| 1:46.2 | trying to learn the lessons from the earlier flight. |
| 1:49.2 | So it's a very similar aircraft. |
| 1:50.8 | And that's part of the problem because when nobody decided to go, he |
| 1:55.4 | wanted to go to the North Pole, which is almost that moment when he landed in Alaska, |
| 2:00.6 | he decided to go back, which is not surprising in the way because the North Pole exerts this |
| 2:06.2 | amazing effect on people and I went up to Selbard to research my book and I just want to go back. |
| 2:11.3 | I mean it borrows into your soul in some strange way. So he had this |
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