4.6 • 3K Ratings
🗓️ 24 June 2014
⏱️ 14 minutes
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From the evidence we have, it seems clear there's no way Mallory could have beaten Hillary to the summit of Everest.
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0:00.0 | Questioning and re-examining our own history is often fraught with peril, as most important |
0:08.9 | history is pretty well established. But some of the tidbits are known only from much |
0:13.7 | thinner evidence. One favorite is the question of who was first to summit Mount Everest. |
0:20.2 | History tells us it was Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norge in 1953. But there is a |
0:26.0 | faction who claimed the honor should go instead to George Mallory and Andrew Irvine, who |
0:31.2 | disappeared on their 1921 attempt. Who is the first to summit Everest is coming up today |
0:38.4 | on Skeptoid. |
0:41.6 | You're listening to Skeptoid. I'm Brian Dunning from Skeptoid.com. Hillary versus Mallory, |
0:51.7 | the first to Everest. Today we're going to go up an altitude back into history and down |
0:58.6 | in temperature to the days when the most daring adventurers wore wool, cotton and leather |
1:04.2 | instead of advanced light weights and thetic materials. They had heavy wood handled ice |
1:09.2 | axes instead of aluminum. Their canvas and nylon sleeping bags and tents weighed at |
1:15.0 | least three times what today's climbers use. They packed calories with heavy metal tins |
1:20.6 | of fish and fruit instead of dense energy bars and electrolyte shots. Their only support |
1:26.9 | was sparsely manned expeditions rather than today's crowds of competing porters and contractors |
1:33.4 | and rope layers. Their chances of survival were far slimmer, yet even in the punishing days |
1:39.8 | of the mid-twentieth century, men managed to compete to be the first to summit the world's |
1:45.8 | tallest point, Mount Everest. |
1:50.5 | Sir Edmund Hillary and Tinsing Norge were the first to summit the mountain and lived |
1:54.5 | to tell the tale, which they did in 1953, but they certainly weren't the first to try. |
2:01.3 | Tinsing had in fact made it the previous year to a point only 240 meters short of the summit |
2:06.7 | with a Swiss expedition. A competing claim exists from about 30 years earlier when climbers |
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