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The John Batchelor Show

VALOR AND TRAGEDY: 2/4: N-4 Down: The Hunt for the Arctic Airship Italia, by Mark Piesing @PorterSqBooks.

The John Batchelor Show

John Batchelor

Society & Culture, Arts, News, Books

4.5 • 2.8K Ratings

🗓️ 4 September 2023

⏱️ 11 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

VALOR AND TRAGEDY: 2/4: N-4 Down: The Hunt for the Arctic Airship Italia, by Mark Piesing @PorterSqBooks.

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

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Transcript

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0:00.0

Hello, I'm Matt Ford.

0:01.2

And I'm Alice Levine and we're the presenters of British Scandal.

0:04.8

People do strange things, don't they, Alice?

0:06.9

I don't like the tone of your voice, what do you mean?

0:10.0

On our dimming you, I'm at the entire British public,

0:12.4

who in 2022, followed a live stream of a lettuce with a wig on.

0:17.5

Entirely normal behaviour.

0:19.2

There's more normal than what was going on inside Downing Street.

0:21.5

For this series on British Scandal, we're taking you inside number 10,

0:24.6

covering the shocking and very short premiership of Liz Truss.

0:27.7

Listen to British Scandal wherever you get your podcasts.

0:35.2

This is CBS Island in the world, I'm John Batsworth, Mark Pysig,

0:38.6

the author of the new book, N4 Down,

0:41.2

the hunt for the Arctic airship Italia, but not yet.

0:45.4

All great failures expeditions have predicates that set up the failure.

0:51.1

And this is a success, sort of.

0:53.6

It is 1926, and in a place called Kings Bay, they've constructed a hangar by hand,

1:01.8

and it's weathered the winter.

1:03.8

And in March of 1926, approaching Norway, approaching the northern tip of Norway

1:10.8

for the launch to the North Pole, is N1, which has been specially rebuilt from a luxury

1:16.5

craft for cruising the Mediterranean, a lighter than aircraft, to an Arctic explorer,

1:22.5

and Nobel A's done it.

...

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