National Geographic: The Explorers - A Century of Discovery (1988) Movie Script
In Washington, D.C.
the Trustees of
the National Geographic Society
gather to have a formal portrait taken.
The picture will help commemorate
the Society's Centennial.
In 1988 Geographic completes
one hundred years of exploration,
research, and education.
Everybody looking right at the lens.
Ready?
All right. Okay. Fine. Right here.
Nice big smile now. Come on.
Here, in 1913,
a similar photograph was taken.
Back then, the highest mountain
had yet to be climbed,
and no one knew the ocean deep,
or what fire illuminates the stars.
All this lay in the future
the greatest adventure mankind
has ever known.
The explorers have left monuments
all over the world.
One of the most meaningful,
and at the same time little-known,
is to be found high on a hilltop
in Nova Scotia.
Here, alone with the sigh of the wind,
are the graves of Alexander Graham Bell
and his wife, Mabel.
Bell called their estate here
Beinn Bhreagh,
or "beautiful mountain"
In the late 1800s Bell spent much of
his time promoting
the National Geographic Society.
It was the favorite preoccupations
of a man
whose boundless creativity
changed everyone's life forever.
Inventing the telephone made
Bell's fortune.
It also freed him to pursue
his many interests
and enjoy his growing family.
Enthusiastic, generous, and warmhearted,
Bell became a grandfather figure
to the world.
When young Gilbert Hovey Grosvenor
caught the eye
of Bell's elder daughter, Elsie,
Bell offered him a job in Washington.
The couple was married in 1900.
They set up housekeeping not far
from Grosvenor's office
at 15th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue
It was an exciting time to be alive.
Americans were thrilled
by modern innovations
and their growing political power.
Grosvenor became the first full-time
employee of National Geographic,
Which was kept going mainly
/be Bell's contributions.
In a tiny office sometimes piled high
with unsold Magazines,
Grosvenor worked to realize Bell's hope
that Geographic's journal could
somehow pay the Society's way.
From its first issue the Magazine
had been a liability.
It had been called "suitable for
diffusing geographic knowledge among
those who already had it,
/and scaring off the rest".
It often featured day,
scholarly articles not meant
for the general public.
But there were also pictures
photographs of far-away people
and places that stirred the imagination.
When be became Managing Editor in 1900
Grosvenor started publishing
more photographs,
selected according to one of
his favorite maxims:
"The mind must see
before it can believe".
A famous Geographic tradition
began in 1896 with this picture.
Grosvenor stoutly defended the policy
of showing people dressed,
or undressed,
according to the customs in their land
At the turn of the century
the eye of the camera
was capable of wondrous revelations.
In 1906 an entire issue of
National Geographic was devoted
to portraits of animals taken
in the wild.
Photographer George Shiras sneaked up
on his subjects at night
with a camera and
explosive flash powder.
His pictures astonished the world.
With a later technique Shiras
startled animals
with a blank gun shot
and then captured them
an instant later in ghostly flight.
Geographic and its Magazine
soon prospered
and more innovations followed
Even before true color photography
was practical,
colored pictures were published
by hand tinting black-and-white prints
according to notes the photographer
had made in the field.
Purists found these pictures artificial
but readers loved them just the same.
From the beginning the most popular
Geographic authors were explorers.
The Magazine made history in 1909
when it published Robert Peary's
account of discovering the North Pole.
Peary once wrote: I shall not be
satisfied that I have done my best
until name is known from one end of
the world to the other.
Peary's closest associate
was the pioneering black explorer
Mattew Henson.
In 1908 he and Peary set out together
on their fourth polar expedition.
On March 1, 1909.
Peary set off for the pole.
According to plan,
the rest of the party turned back
as supplies ran down.
After a month only Peary, Henson,
and four Eskimos were left to press on
with the dogs.
Peary's account of the next few days
remains controversial.
He reported good weather
and excellent progress.
Later, some thought his story too
good to be true.
In any event,
Peary reported he reached the pole
on April 6, 1909.
Peary wrote in his diary:
"The Pole at last!
Linking hands with Roald Amundsen
who reached the South Pole
two years later,
Robert Peary found the fame
he had sought so long.
In 1913 he and Amundsen met
for the first time
when being honored
by the National Geographic.
Hardly less pleased were Dr. Bell
and his son-in-law Gilbert Grosvenor.
National Geographic was a going concern
and Bell was delighted to have it
all in the family.
Grosvenor's decorum veiled his daring
and ambition.
He took quite literally Bell's
expansive admonition that
"the world and all that is
in it is our theme".
Some four years after
the sensation over Peary,
another explorer became
a household name.
Hiram Bingham was a professor
of Latin American history at Yale.
In search of a fabled lost city,
he traveled to Peru.
So he found Machu Picchu,
Abandoned by the Incas 450 years ago,
The first National Geographic
archeological grant
was made to help clear
and map the colossal ruins.
It took more than $20,000 and months
of labor to reveal them all.
In 1917 one of the first
National Geographic expeditions
to be documented in motion pictures
explored a rare freak of nature
the Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes
in Alaska.
This bizarre landscape was
the aftermath
of a gigantic volcanic explosion
several years before.
In this nightmare world,
superheated steam hissed
from millions of vents
and often, it seemed,
the ground itself was alive
Scientists attempted to explore
the larger fissures,
but barely escaped being boiled alive.
More than half a million members
now shared in the exploration
of such natural wonders.
And the home of Alexander Graham Bell
had become the unofficial summer
headquarter of the National Geographic
On holidays the hard-pressed Grosvenor
set up his office in a tent
on the lawn of Beinn Bhreagh.
On these visits the
Grosvenor children enchanted
their legendary Grandfather Bell.
The great inventor was over 60,
but still a bold explorer.
He astonished and sometimes alarmed
his Nova Scotia neighbors
with his odd inventions.
Giant kites made up of tetrahedral
cells were Bell's obsession.
They taught him much about aeronautics
and some were large enough
to life a man.
Bell's avid interest in aviation
culminated in 1909
with the first flight in Canada
by a powered airplane.
One of Bell's last experiments was
a hydrofoil speedboat called the HD-4.
It worked perfectly.
It went 71 miles an hour for years
the fastest thing on water.
World War I was over.
And people who had fought to save the
world for democracy were more curious
about the world than ever.
Six-hundred-and-fifty-six thousand
of them had joined National Geographic
and received its Magazine,
the pride of 400 employees.
Society headquarters was Hubbard Hall,
named for Gardiner Greene Hubbard,
Bell's father-in-law and
the Society's first president.
Geographic's Magazine combined
education and adventure
in the form of first-person reports
from explorers in the field.
Some of the most colorful accounts
came from a botanist, Joseph Rock.
Daring, arrogant, and difficult,
Rock had a talent for getting into
trouble and living to tell the tale.
On his travels in China and Tibet.
He was often menaced by bandits
and warlords.
Roch always escaped them
and sometimes even got their pictures
for the Magazine.
One of Rock's classic articles told of
his visit to the tiny kingdom of Muli.
Deep in the mountains of Szechuan,
Muli was ruled by a king
who had the power of life
or death over his 22,000 subjects.
Like Shangri-la,
Muli knew little of the outside world.
Rock was told he was
the first American ever to come here.
Summoning Rock to his place,
the King of Muli politely
asked the explorer
if the could ride horseback
to Washington.
He treated Rock kindly,
offering him delicacies
like ancient yak cheese
and mutton crawling with maggots.
By the 1920s the unexplored parts
of the world were rapidly shrinking.
But man's past was like
a hidden continent.
And in 1922 the entrance to
a royal Egyptian tomb was found.
Archeologist Howard Carter and
his sponsor, Lord Carnarvon,
Announced they would open the burial
chamber officially on February 18, 1923
"Can you see anything?"
Lord Carnarvon had asked Carter
when he first looked inside
the tomb three months earlier.
"Yes", Carter had replied.
"I see wonderful things".
It was the tomb of Tutahkhamun.
Nothing like it had been found before
or since a time capsule 3300 years old.
By the end of the 1920s,
National Geographic was prepared
to sponsor major expeditions.
It subscribed $50,000 toward
Richard Byrd's attempt
to fly to the South Pole.
Byrd's ship left New Zealand
in December 1928,
still summer in the Antarctic.
According to Byrd's elaborate plan,
the party would land in Antarctica
and dig in for the winter.
When weather improved in the spring,
he'd attempt the 800mile flight to the
pole over largely unknown territory.
An advance party prepared to travel
overland more than halfway to the pole
They would make geological studies
and stand by to rescue Byrd
if his plane was forced down.
The expedition not only survived
the winter, it prospered.
There were nearly 100 dogs
when the sun set in April.
By August there were many more.
The six men in
the Geological Party departed.
They would be gone almost three months
Byrd planned to drop an American flag
to mark the spot
when he reached the pole.
On November 28, 1929,
a full year after leaving New Zealand,
Byrd decided to go.
A film camera went along and
months later audiences in Washington
would see this movie
of Byrd's adventure.
There they are at the South Pole.
The observations click.
It is 1:25 in the morning
of November 29th, 1929.
Dick takes out the flag,
weighted with a stone
from Floyd Bennett's grave.
It is the symbol and the monument
of a supreme accomplishment.
Through the trap door the flag
and stone drop together.
There they go down, down forever
at the very bottom of the world.
A nation plunging into
the Great Depression
still gave Richard Byrd
a glorious welcome home.
He received his second
National Geographic modal
at the White house
from President Herbert Hoover.
Your contribution to exploration
and scientific research has done honor
to this country.
Your daring and courage have
thrilled each one of us individually
because they have proved anew the
worth and the glory of the qualities
which we believe are latent
in the American people.
Africa long regarded as
the Dark Continent
and the natural habitat
of the great explorer.
Leading huge safaris deep
into the bush,
Martin Johnson typified a new breed
of showman-explorer.
His wife, Osa, was equally famous
and equally skilled with guns
and their many cameras.
Together the Johnson made a series of
films that brought both the realities
and the clichs of African adventure
vividly to life on the screen.
Scenes of African wildlife thrilled
standing-room-only audiences
at the Johnson's early films
and lectures.
Technology, it seemed,
made anything possible.
Pioneering scientists like
William Beebe were going
where no one had ever been before.
Off Bermuda Beebe tried out
his so-called bathysphere,
lowering the two-ton steel ball-to
a depth of 3,000 feet.
On one test dive the unoccupied
sphere sprang a leak.
Water was trapped inside
at deep-sea pressure.
Releasing it showed what could happen
to a person trapped inside.
Unperturbed, Beebe and his companion,
Otis Barton,
made repairs and then committed
themselves to fate.
Bolted in, dangling on the end
of a steel cable less
than an inch in diameter,
they would be helpless
if anything went wrong.
Descending past 2,000 feet,
Beebe peered out into
the eternal darkness
and glimpsed creatures no one had
ever seen before.
Painted by an artist working from
Beebe's descriptions,
these were like creatures from
another planet,
alien and bizarre.
Another ocean lay above.
Earth's great canopy of air challenged
the explorers.
In 1934, with a hydrogen-filled balloon
National Geographic
and the U.S. Army Air Corps
joined forces to probe
the stratosphere.
A launch site was readied near
Rapid City, South Dakota.
The balloon was launched
on July 28, 1934.
It carried three Air Corps officers
and was called Explorer.
All went well as Explorer soared
above 60,000 feet.
Then, the three men in the gondola
heard ominous sounds and,
seconds later,
realized that the balloon
was tearing open.
Fearing the thin air and
cold at high altitude,
the balloonists dared not use their
parachutes until the last moment.
They escaped just in time.
Explorer shattered on impact.
Almost immediately it was decided
to try again.
A second balloon, Explorer II,
was constructed.
The largest balloon in the world,
it would stand more than 300 feet high
when fully inflated.
In November 1935 Explorer II soared
into the stratosphere,
reaching nearly 14 miles,
a new world record.
After eight hours aloft,
the balloon touched down
in a farmer's pasture.
Casual heroes, wearing helmets borrowed
from a local high-school football team
The crew basked in the admiration
of a crowd that appeared out of
nowhere on the plains of South Dakota.
When World War II began,
Washington changed forever as it
became a wartime boom town.
But the National Geographic
remained much the same.
The Magazine had become a fixture in
school libraries and doctor's offices.
Society members wrote to editors as
if they were old friends.
And almost all collected the Magazine
because they couldn't bear
to throw it away.
Techniques of color reproduction were
by now far advanced.
And no one published more
or finer color photographs
than National Geographic.
There could only be one subject
for the first color cover,
published the war.
But not until 1959 did a picture on
the cover become a regular feature.
Wherever war did not reach,
explorers carried on.
A number of expeditions to Mexico,
led by Dr. Matthew Stirling,
revealed a mysterious pre-Columbian
culture called the Olmec.
A series of dramatic discoveries
included the excavation
of a gigantic stone head
weighing 25 tons.
The work pushed the existence of
pre-Columbian civilization in America
further into antiquity and carried on
a Geographic tradition of leadership
in New World archeology.
The war had barely ended when,
on the coast of France,
a new species of man appeared.
Led by Jacques-Yves Cousteau,
these creatures, awkward on land,
were originally called "fish men".
Co-inventor of the Aqua-Lung Cousteau
revolutionized undersea exploration.
National Geographic photographer
Luis Marden eagerly followed Cousteau
into a dazzling new world.
Cousteau once remarked:
when we are invited to
live on this earth.
There is no reason we should not
visit the basement.
But unlike some explorers before him,
Cousteau sought not to conquer
but to cherish the creatures of the sea.
By the 1950s there were
few places on earth
that did not bear the mark of man.
One of them was the summit
of Mount Everest, 29,028 feet high,
the last great prize of
the classic explorer.
An era came to an end with
this National Geographic article
and when President Dwight Eisenhower
gave the Society's Hubbard Medal
to the British Everest
Expedition leader,
Sir John Hunt,
and climber Sir Edmund Hillary.
But there would be new adventures
and new ways to share them.
The first National Geographic
TV Special documented the
American expedition to Everest,
led by Norman Dyhrenfurth.
The climbing team of 19 Americans
and 32 Nepaless Sherpas
made the attempt.
And, on television, tens of millions
would later share the adventure.
And on the morning of May 1st,
the peak is boiling in
its plume of snow.
Those below were sure that there
would be no summit attempt that day.
But they were wrong.
Big Jim and Gombu decide to
make their try,
and for hour after hour inch up the
battlements of the Southeast Ridge.
For a while Norman Dyhrenfurth and
Ang Dawa climb after them.
But the cold is too bitter,
the wind too fierce.
Filmmaking is all but impossible.
At last Norman and Ang Dawa turn back.
Jim and Gombu go on alone.
At last...
They are there
on top of the world.
Jim Whittaker and Nawang Gombu.
At one o'clock on the afternoon
of May first,
Whittaker planted the American
flag on the summit,
and with it the flag of
the National Geographic Society.
These are the first moving pictures
ever taken from the summit of Everest.
Some one-and-a-half
million photographs more than
forty thousand rolls of film are
turned in here in Washington each year.
It's a staggering task merely to
catalog and store them.
All the elements are there.
Nice lady with her family.
The world, and all that is in it that
was Alexander Graham Bell's modest
description of the Society's mission.
So editors, writers,
and researchers try valiantly
to do the impossible in books
and other publications, maps and films
as well as the 12 annual
issues of the Magazine.
A typical mind-boggling
Geographic statistic:
the press run of one Magazine issue
would make a stack 53 miles high.
The original vision of Gilbert
Grosvenor had been far exceeded
by the time of his death in 1966.
Leadership has passed to his son,
Melville Bell Grosvenor,
Editor of the Magazine for
ten brilliant years.
Now Gilbert M. Grosvenor is
President of the Society,
continuing family traditions that
have taken him all over the world,
and even to the North Pole.
I think it all started when my
grandfather flew over the North Pole.
And this was, I guess, in about maybe
the 50s early 50s
because I was still in college.
And he sent us a little postcard.
It had the North Pole
and it had the lines of
longitude and latitude
and where they all met.
And he signed it and said,
I flew over the footsteps of Robert E.
And then my father he
flew over the North Pole,
and he did the same thing.
He sent me a postcard.
And I was kind of getting tired of this.
Gilbert Grosvenor's visit the
pole had a new twist.
Accompanied by underwater
photographer Al Giddings
and Canadian explorer Joe MacInnis,
he would join the select few
who have ventured under
the ice at 90 North.
Under six feet of ice, in 29 water,
human life hangs by
the slenderest of threads.
As fragile as the flame
of a single candle,
the human spirit trembles here,
Even as it did in the time of Peary.
Have you ever?
Have you ever?
Seventy years ago this flag came to
the North Pole with Robert E. Peary.
Terrific.
And it's a great pleasure
to bring it back.
We say we have explored the earth.
But there are still regions almost as
remote as the surface of the moon.
Most dramatically,
seven-tenths of the earth's surface
is covered with water,
and we have only a hazy idea of what
is hidden beneath the waves.
You ready for me?
This is "Project Beebe",
a pioneering study of
life in the deep ocean.
The remarkable Dr. Eugenie Clark,
University of Maryland zoologist
and shark expert,
is the principal scientist.
I don't know about that laser the
laser-sighted Canon on the front.
The project is the brainchild
of Emory Kristof,
A National Geographic photographer
who is an expert on deep-sea
exploration and photography.
Aboard the research submersible
Pisces VI,
Dr. Clark will descend several thousand
feet to the ocean floor
and remain there up to 12 hours.
She'll use the submersible as a
deep-sea observation post,
attracting marine animals with bait.
Here off Bermuda, William Beebe made
his epic dives 50 years ago.
And the curiosity that drove him
now inspires Dr. Clark.
Never though I'd be doing this.
You know, as a child, I worshipped
Beebe and read all his books
and wanted to go down in the
bathysphere the way he did.
Never really though I'd do it,
but I wanted to.
This one is huge. This one is big.
Oh, my gosh!
Within minutes deep-sea sharks appear.
Up to 20 feet long,
these six gill sharks have only rarely
been seen alive.
Yeah, it really is exciting.
Wow! You ought to see the
size of this one.
We've got the biggest one so far.
He's right outside the window now.
It will take generations to fully
explore this mysterious deep frontier.
And no one can say what strange
creatures we may someday discover here.
Off the Mediterranean coast of Turkey,
National Geographic has helped
explore an ancient ship
that was wrecked here 3,400 years ago.
Now a word about
what we're doing today.
We're working in the upper part of the
wreck and finding it
just thick with amphoras and
ingots and so forth.
And so I want you to
just to hand-fan down...
George Bass is from
Texas A & M University.
One of the world's leading
nautical archeologists,
He has been completely absorbed
by a small plot of seabed
some 150 feet down.
Slowly, the evidence mounts up.
Bass and his team have
gained unprecedented knowledge
of such an ancient ship.
It was about 50 feet long
and carried goods of at
least seven different cultures,
including pottery, ivory, tin,
and the oldest glass ingots ever found.
But the principal cargo was copper
some 200 ingots,
each weighing about 60 pounds.
When combined with tin,
such ingots make bronze,
and the wreck did prove to be of
the Late Bronze Age
the oldest shipwreck known.
In 1986 an expedition from Woods Hole,
Massachusetts,
sought to explore the most celebrated
shipwreck of modern times
A luxury liner that sank in 1912
with a loss of more than 1,500 lives.
For years the grave of the Titanic has
fascinated Dr. Robert Ballard.
Now he has pinpointed the wreck
and hear echoes of tragedy.
Here lies Titanic, seen again by human
eyes after 74 dark and silent years.
Ballard leached Titanic with Alvin,
a manned submersible
designed for deep-sea research.
Knowing that Titanic could be
desecrated by salvagers,
Dr. Ballard felt it necessary
to leave a plaque here asking
that she be left intact.
But only a year passed before a rival
expedition reached the wreck
and took objects from Titanic.
Someday we may see beneath the waves
with godlike ease
and penetrate countless mysteries.
There is a great void
in the story of early man.
And this tantalized a scientist named
Louis Leakey
are lured him to a place in Africa
called Olduvai Gorge.
And now I'm down
at the bottom of the gorge.
My feet are resting on the black
lava which formed
the old land surface on
which these lake beds formed.
And here behind me are the earliest
part of the Olduvai series,
deposits that were formed just
nearly two million years ago.
It was here that, in 1931,
we first found examples of
simple tools like this,
Just a water-worn pebble with a jagged
cutting edge stone tools
that go back to a very,
very remote past in time,
nearly three times as old as
anything previously found.
Who were the men who made these tools?
Where did they live
and how did they live?
And that was the problem
that Mary and I went out to look for.
We wanted the answer: Who these men?
In 1959 Leakey and his wife, Mary,
found the fossil jaw of Zinjanthropus,
a primitive form of ape-man
who lived one-and-three-quarter
million years ago.
The find stunned the scientific world.
For 30 years the Leakeys had
faced skepticism and ridicule.
Now at last they found support
as National Geographic
underwrote their research.
Melville Bell Grosvenor made a
commitment to the Leakey's work
that would endure for a
quarter of a century.
Leakey's son Richard
also became a leading scientist.
In 1984 a team led by Richard Leakey
found the nearly complete skeleton
of an early human
one-and-a-half
million years old.
The Leakey legacy endures
the now accepted ideas
that man evolved in Africa,
That he is far older
than we once thought,
and that more than one kind
of man-like creature
lived at the same time.
Louis Leakey's interest in human
origins took fascinating turns.
As his urging
Jane Goodall began her epic study
of chimpanzee behavior in the wild.
Goodall's study led to a
new appreciation of the
similarities between
chimpanzees and man.
The chimps form distinct family groups
They use tools and
sometimes even wage war.
And over the years Jane Goodall came
to regard many of them as friends.
Another of Leakey's disciples
sought to study
the mountain gorilla in Rwanda.
With extraordinary patience,
Dian Fossey at last succeeded
in winning the trust of these powerful
but extremely shy creatures.
At such moments of contact
Dian was deeply moved
by the gorillas gentleness and trust.
One of her favorites was "Digit",
so-called because of his twisted,
broken finger.
In December 1977 Digit was
killed by poachers,
probably to sell his hands as souvenirs.
Later, other mountain gorillas in Dian's
study group were also slaughtered.
Finally, Dian herself was murdered by
persons unknown,
quite possibly poachers.
As much as any recent event,
her death foreshadowed a desperate
new era in the age of ecology.
We are led to ask:
If we cannot protect wild creatures,
can we save ourselves?
In the remote highlands of
Papua New Guinea
there lives a group
of endangered people.
They call themselves the "Hagahai".
Until a few years ago no outsiders
knew of their existence.
And they have been so isolated
they have not developed antibodies
to protect them against
common diseases.
Dr. Carol Jenkins is a
medical anthropologist.
She first came here to document
the Hagahais decline.
She returned to try to save them.
As part of a medical team,
Jenkins is fighting a desperate
battle against her own grim statistics
This baby is special because it's
the only one that's lived this year.
There have been eight babies born
since '87 began.
There have been eight babies is about
two months old
and it's the only living baby.
The Hagahai are so vulnerable,
only the most wrenching
changes can help them.
Trained to observe such cultures,
Carol Jenkins finds herself helping
to profoundly alter this one.
As tropical rain forests give way
to human demands,
there is danger on every hand.
This is the richest,
most complex ecosystem on earth.
From it have come many of our drugs,
our food plants, our useful chemicals.
Can we survive without this
blessing of diversity?
As the century of
discovery comes to an end,
a century of destruction
could be beginning.
And of all living creatures
only man has the power to decide
what the future holds
for the planet Earth.
Often quietly and in
unspectacular ways,
the task of discovery goes on.
And technology can make
explorers of us all.
A few years ago Jean Mueller
was a librarian.
Seeking a new challenge,
she went to work for
Palomar Observatory in California.
Jean works on the
Second Palomar Sky Survey,
a project partially sponsored by
National Geographic.
Its goal is to make a photographic
map of the heavens
that shows more detail
than we have ever seen before.
On a mountaintop in the dead of night,
Jean often sees what no one
has ever seen before
an image on a newly developed
glass plate 14 inches square.
Each pinpoint on the plate is a star,
possibly a galaxy
worlds upon worlds so numerous that
we cannot comprehend them.
The scale of this vision is staggering
Every plate contains
millions of pinpoints,
And it will take 894 separate plates
to scan the skies over Palomar.
And this represents the
Northern Hemisphere alone.
To explore this, much less
understand it, seems incredible.
But what wonders have we seen
in these last hundred years.
And in the next hundred, what more?
the Trustees of
the National Geographic Society
gather to have a formal portrait taken.
The picture will help commemorate
the Society's Centennial.
In 1988 Geographic completes
one hundred years of exploration,
research, and education.
Everybody looking right at the lens.
Ready?
All right. Okay. Fine. Right here.
Nice big smile now. Come on.
Here, in 1913,
a similar photograph was taken.
Back then, the highest mountain
had yet to be climbed,
and no one knew the ocean deep,
or what fire illuminates the stars.
All this lay in the future
the greatest adventure mankind
has ever known.
The explorers have left monuments
all over the world.
One of the most meaningful,
and at the same time little-known,
is to be found high on a hilltop
in Nova Scotia.
Here, alone with the sigh of the wind,
are the graves of Alexander Graham Bell
and his wife, Mabel.
Bell called their estate here
Beinn Bhreagh,
or "beautiful mountain"
In the late 1800s Bell spent much of
his time promoting
the National Geographic Society.
It was the favorite preoccupations
of a man
whose boundless creativity
changed everyone's life forever.
Inventing the telephone made
Bell's fortune.
It also freed him to pursue
his many interests
and enjoy his growing family.
Enthusiastic, generous, and warmhearted,
Bell became a grandfather figure
to the world.
When young Gilbert Hovey Grosvenor
caught the eye
of Bell's elder daughter, Elsie,
Bell offered him a job in Washington.
The couple was married in 1900.
They set up housekeeping not far
from Grosvenor's office
at 15th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue
It was an exciting time to be alive.
Americans were thrilled
by modern innovations
and their growing political power.
Grosvenor became the first full-time
employee of National Geographic,
Which was kept going mainly
/be Bell's contributions.
In a tiny office sometimes piled high
with unsold Magazines,
Grosvenor worked to realize Bell's hope
that Geographic's journal could
somehow pay the Society's way.
From its first issue the Magazine
had been a liability.
It had been called "suitable for
diffusing geographic knowledge among
those who already had it,
/and scaring off the rest".
It often featured day,
scholarly articles not meant
for the general public.
But there were also pictures
photographs of far-away people
and places that stirred the imagination.
When be became Managing Editor in 1900
Grosvenor started publishing
more photographs,
selected according to one of
his favorite maxims:
"The mind must see
before it can believe".
A famous Geographic tradition
began in 1896 with this picture.
Grosvenor stoutly defended the policy
of showing people dressed,
or undressed,
according to the customs in their land
At the turn of the century
the eye of the camera
was capable of wondrous revelations.
In 1906 an entire issue of
National Geographic was devoted
to portraits of animals taken
in the wild.
Photographer George Shiras sneaked up
on his subjects at night
with a camera and
explosive flash powder.
His pictures astonished the world.
With a later technique Shiras
startled animals
with a blank gun shot
and then captured them
an instant later in ghostly flight.
Geographic and its Magazine
soon prospered
and more innovations followed
Even before true color photography
was practical,
colored pictures were published
by hand tinting black-and-white prints
according to notes the photographer
had made in the field.
Purists found these pictures artificial
but readers loved them just the same.
From the beginning the most popular
Geographic authors were explorers.
The Magazine made history in 1909
when it published Robert Peary's
account of discovering the North Pole.
Peary once wrote: I shall not be
satisfied that I have done my best
until name is known from one end of
the world to the other.
Peary's closest associate
was the pioneering black explorer
Mattew Henson.
In 1908 he and Peary set out together
on their fourth polar expedition.
On March 1, 1909.
Peary set off for the pole.
According to plan,
the rest of the party turned back
as supplies ran down.
After a month only Peary, Henson,
and four Eskimos were left to press on
with the dogs.
Peary's account of the next few days
remains controversial.
He reported good weather
and excellent progress.
Later, some thought his story too
good to be true.
In any event,
Peary reported he reached the pole
on April 6, 1909.
Peary wrote in his diary:
"The Pole at last!
Linking hands with Roald Amundsen
who reached the South Pole
two years later,
Robert Peary found the fame
he had sought so long.
In 1913 he and Amundsen met
for the first time
when being honored
by the National Geographic.
Hardly less pleased were Dr. Bell
and his son-in-law Gilbert Grosvenor.
National Geographic was a going concern
and Bell was delighted to have it
all in the family.
Grosvenor's decorum veiled his daring
and ambition.
He took quite literally Bell's
expansive admonition that
"the world and all that is
in it is our theme".
Some four years after
the sensation over Peary,
another explorer became
a household name.
Hiram Bingham was a professor
of Latin American history at Yale.
In search of a fabled lost city,
he traveled to Peru.
So he found Machu Picchu,
Abandoned by the Incas 450 years ago,
The first National Geographic
archeological grant
was made to help clear
and map the colossal ruins.
It took more than $20,000 and months
of labor to reveal them all.
In 1917 one of the first
National Geographic expeditions
to be documented in motion pictures
explored a rare freak of nature
the Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes
in Alaska.
This bizarre landscape was
the aftermath
of a gigantic volcanic explosion
several years before.
In this nightmare world,
superheated steam hissed
from millions of vents
and often, it seemed,
the ground itself was alive
Scientists attempted to explore
the larger fissures,
but barely escaped being boiled alive.
More than half a million members
now shared in the exploration
of such natural wonders.
And the home of Alexander Graham Bell
had become the unofficial summer
headquarter of the National Geographic
On holidays the hard-pressed Grosvenor
set up his office in a tent
on the lawn of Beinn Bhreagh.
On these visits the
Grosvenor children enchanted
their legendary Grandfather Bell.
The great inventor was over 60,
but still a bold explorer.
He astonished and sometimes alarmed
his Nova Scotia neighbors
with his odd inventions.
Giant kites made up of tetrahedral
cells were Bell's obsession.
They taught him much about aeronautics
and some were large enough
to life a man.
Bell's avid interest in aviation
culminated in 1909
with the first flight in Canada
by a powered airplane.
One of Bell's last experiments was
a hydrofoil speedboat called the HD-4.
It worked perfectly.
It went 71 miles an hour for years
the fastest thing on water.
World War I was over.
And people who had fought to save the
world for democracy were more curious
about the world than ever.
Six-hundred-and-fifty-six thousand
of them had joined National Geographic
and received its Magazine,
the pride of 400 employees.
Society headquarters was Hubbard Hall,
named for Gardiner Greene Hubbard,
Bell's father-in-law and
the Society's first president.
Geographic's Magazine combined
education and adventure
in the form of first-person reports
from explorers in the field.
Some of the most colorful accounts
came from a botanist, Joseph Rock.
Daring, arrogant, and difficult,
Rock had a talent for getting into
trouble and living to tell the tale.
On his travels in China and Tibet.
He was often menaced by bandits
and warlords.
Roch always escaped them
and sometimes even got their pictures
for the Magazine.
One of Rock's classic articles told of
his visit to the tiny kingdom of Muli.
Deep in the mountains of Szechuan,
Muli was ruled by a king
who had the power of life
or death over his 22,000 subjects.
Like Shangri-la,
Muli knew little of the outside world.
Rock was told he was
the first American ever to come here.
Summoning Rock to his place,
the King of Muli politely
asked the explorer
if the could ride horseback
to Washington.
He treated Rock kindly,
offering him delicacies
like ancient yak cheese
and mutton crawling with maggots.
By the 1920s the unexplored parts
of the world were rapidly shrinking.
But man's past was like
a hidden continent.
And in 1922 the entrance to
a royal Egyptian tomb was found.
Archeologist Howard Carter and
his sponsor, Lord Carnarvon,
Announced they would open the burial
chamber officially on February 18, 1923
"Can you see anything?"
Lord Carnarvon had asked Carter
when he first looked inside
the tomb three months earlier.
"Yes", Carter had replied.
"I see wonderful things".
It was the tomb of Tutahkhamun.
Nothing like it had been found before
or since a time capsule 3300 years old.
By the end of the 1920s,
National Geographic was prepared
to sponsor major expeditions.
It subscribed $50,000 toward
Richard Byrd's attempt
to fly to the South Pole.
Byrd's ship left New Zealand
in December 1928,
still summer in the Antarctic.
According to Byrd's elaborate plan,
the party would land in Antarctica
and dig in for the winter.
When weather improved in the spring,
he'd attempt the 800mile flight to the
pole over largely unknown territory.
An advance party prepared to travel
overland more than halfway to the pole
They would make geological studies
and stand by to rescue Byrd
if his plane was forced down.
The expedition not only survived
the winter, it prospered.
There were nearly 100 dogs
when the sun set in April.
By August there were many more.
The six men in
the Geological Party departed.
They would be gone almost three months
Byrd planned to drop an American flag
to mark the spot
when he reached the pole.
On November 28, 1929,
a full year after leaving New Zealand,
Byrd decided to go.
A film camera went along and
months later audiences in Washington
would see this movie
of Byrd's adventure.
There they are at the South Pole.
The observations click.
It is 1:25 in the morning
of November 29th, 1929.
Dick takes out the flag,
weighted with a stone
from Floyd Bennett's grave.
It is the symbol and the monument
of a supreme accomplishment.
Through the trap door the flag
and stone drop together.
There they go down, down forever
at the very bottom of the world.
A nation plunging into
the Great Depression
still gave Richard Byrd
a glorious welcome home.
He received his second
National Geographic modal
at the White house
from President Herbert Hoover.
Your contribution to exploration
and scientific research has done honor
to this country.
Your daring and courage have
thrilled each one of us individually
because they have proved anew the
worth and the glory of the qualities
which we believe are latent
in the American people.
Africa long regarded as
the Dark Continent
and the natural habitat
of the great explorer.
Leading huge safaris deep
into the bush,
Martin Johnson typified a new breed
of showman-explorer.
His wife, Osa, was equally famous
and equally skilled with guns
and their many cameras.
Together the Johnson made a series of
films that brought both the realities
and the clichs of African adventure
vividly to life on the screen.
Scenes of African wildlife thrilled
standing-room-only audiences
at the Johnson's early films
and lectures.
Technology, it seemed,
made anything possible.
Pioneering scientists like
William Beebe were going
where no one had ever been before.
Off Bermuda Beebe tried out
his so-called bathysphere,
lowering the two-ton steel ball-to
a depth of 3,000 feet.
On one test dive the unoccupied
sphere sprang a leak.
Water was trapped inside
at deep-sea pressure.
Releasing it showed what could happen
to a person trapped inside.
Unperturbed, Beebe and his companion,
Otis Barton,
made repairs and then committed
themselves to fate.
Bolted in, dangling on the end
of a steel cable less
than an inch in diameter,
they would be helpless
if anything went wrong.
Descending past 2,000 feet,
Beebe peered out into
the eternal darkness
and glimpsed creatures no one had
ever seen before.
Painted by an artist working from
Beebe's descriptions,
these were like creatures from
another planet,
alien and bizarre.
Another ocean lay above.
Earth's great canopy of air challenged
the explorers.
In 1934, with a hydrogen-filled balloon
National Geographic
and the U.S. Army Air Corps
joined forces to probe
the stratosphere.
A launch site was readied near
Rapid City, South Dakota.
The balloon was launched
on July 28, 1934.
It carried three Air Corps officers
and was called Explorer.
All went well as Explorer soared
above 60,000 feet.
Then, the three men in the gondola
heard ominous sounds and,
seconds later,
realized that the balloon
was tearing open.
Fearing the thin air and
cold at high altitude,
the balloonists dared not use their
parachutes until the last moment.
They escaped just in time.
Explorer shattered on impact.
Almost immediately it was decided
to try again.
A second balloon, Explorer II,
was constructed.
The largest balloon in the world,
it would stand more than 300 feet high
when fully inflated.
In November 1935 Explorer II soared
into the stratosphere,
reaching nearly 14 miles,
a new world record.
After eight hours aloft,
the balloon touched down
in a farmer's pasture.
Casual heroes, wearing helmets borrowed
from a local high-school football team
The crew basked in the admiration
of a crowd that appeared out of
nowhere on the plains of South Dakota.
When World War II began,
Washington changed forever as it
became a wartime boom town.
But the National Geographic
remained much the same.
The Magazine had become a fixture in
school libraries and doctor's offices.
Society members wrote to editors as
if they were old friends.
And almost all collected the Magazine
because they couldn't bear
to throw it away.
Techniques of color reproduction were
by now far advanced.
And no one published more
or finer color photographs
than National Geographic.
There could only be one subject
for the first color cover,
published the war.
But not until 1959 did a picture on
the cover become a regular feature.
Wherever war did not reach,
explorers carried on.
A number of expeditions to Mexico,
led by Dr. Matthew Stirling,
revealed a mysterious pre-Columbian
culture called the Olmec.
A series of dramatic discoveries
included the excavation
of a gigantic stone head
weighing 25 tons.
The work pushed the existence of
pre-Columbian civilization in America
further into antiquity and carried on
a Geographic tradition of leadership
in New World archeology.
The war had barely ended when,
on the coast of France,
a new species of man appeared.
Led by Jacques-Yves Cousteau,
these creatures, awkward on land,
were originally called "fish men".
Co-inventor of the Aqua-Lung Cousteau
revolutionized undersea exploration.
National Geographic photographer
Luis Marden eagerly followed Cousteau
into a dazzling new world.
Cousteau once remarked:
when we are invited to
live on this earth.
There is no reason we should not
visit the basement.
But unlike some explorers before him,
Cousteau sought not to conquer
but to cherish the creatures of the sea.
By the 1950s there were
few places on earth
that did not bear the mark of man.
One of them was the summit
of Mount Everest, 29,028 feet high,
the last great prize of
the classic explorer.
An era came to an end with
this National Geographic article
and when President Dwight Eisenhower
gave the Society's Hubbard Medal
to the British Everest
Expedition leader,
Sir John Hunt,
and climber Sir Edmund Hillary.
But there would be new adventures
and new ways to share them.
The first National Geographic
TV Special documented the
American expedition to Everest,
led by Norman Dyhrenfurth.
The climbing team of 19 Americans
and 32 Nepaless Sherpas
made the attempt.
And, on television, tens of millions
would later share the adventure.
And on the morning of May 1st,
the peak is boiling in
its plume of snow.
Those below were sure that there
would be no summit attempt that day.
But they were wrong.
Big Jim and Gombu decide to
make their try,
and for hour after hour inch up the
battlements of the Southeast Ridge.
For a while Norman Dyhrenfurth and
Ang Dawa climb after them.
But the cold is too bitter,
the wind too fierce.
Filmmaking is all but impossible.
At last Norman and Ang Dawa turn back.
Jim and Gombu go on alone.
At last...
They are there
on top of the world.
Jim Whittaker and Nawang Gombu.
At one o'clock on the afternoon
of May first,
Whittaker planted the American
flag on the summit,
and with it the flag of
the National Geographic Society.
These are the first moving pictures
ever taken from the summit of Everest.
Some one-and-a-half
million photographs more than
forty thousand rolls of film are
turned in here in Washington each year.
It's a staggering task merely to
catalog and store them.
All the elements are there.
Nice lady with her family.
The world, and all that is in it that
was Alexander Graham Bell's modest
description of the Society's mission.
So editors, writers,
and researchers try valiantly
to do the impossible in books
and other publications, maps and films
as well as the 12 annual
issues of the Magazine.
A typical mind-boggling
Geographic statistic:
the press run of one Magazine issue
would make a stack 53 miles high.
The original vision of Gilbert
Grosvenor had been far exceeded
by the time of his death in 1966.
Leadership has passed to his son,
Melville Bell Grosvenor,
Editor of the Magazine for
ten brilliant years.
Now Gilbert M. Grosvenor is
President of the Society,
continuing family traditions that
have taken him all over the world,
and even to the North Pole.
I think it all started when my
grandfather flew over the North Pole.
And this was, I guess, in about maybe
the 50s early 50s
because I was still in college.
And he sent us a little postcard.
It had the North Pole
and it had the lines of
longitude and latitude
and where they all met.
And he signed it and said,
I flew over the footsteps of Robert E.
And then my father he
flew over the North Pole,
and he did the same thing.
He sent me a postcard.
And I was kind of getting tired of this.
Gilbert Grosvenor's visit the
pole had a new twist.
Accompanied by underwater
photographer Al Giddings
and Canadian explorer Joe MacInnis,
he would join the select few
who have ventured under
the ice at 90 North.
Under six feet of ice, in 29 water,
human life hangs by
the slenderest of threads.
As fragile as the flame
of a single candle,
the human spirit trembles here,
Even as it did in the time of Peary.
Have you ever?
Have you ever?
Seventy years ago this flag came to
the North Pole with Robert E. Peary.
Terrific.
And it's a great pleasure
to bring it back.
We say we have explored the earth.
But there are still regions almost as
remote as the surface of the moon.
Most dramatically,
seven-tenths of the earth's surface
is covered with water,
and we have only a hazy idea of what
is hidden beneath the waves.
You ready for me?
This is "Project Beebe",
a pioneering study of
life in the deep ocean.
The remarkable Dr. Eugenie Clark,
University of Maryland zoologist
and shark expert,
is the principal scientist.
I don't know about that laser the
laser-sighted Canon on the front.
The project is the brainchild
of Emory Kristof,
A National Geographic photographer
who is an expert on deep-sea
exploration and photography.
Aboard the research submersible
Pisces VI,
Dr. Clark will descend several thousand
feet to the ocean floor
and remain there up to 12 hours.
She'll use the submersible as a
deep-sea observation post,
attracting marine animals with bait.
Here off Bermuda, William Beebe made
his epic dives 50 years ago.
And the curiosity that drove him
now inspires Dr. Clark.
Never though I'd be doing this.
You know, as a child, I worshipped
Beebe and read all his books
and wanted to go down in the
bathysphere the way he did.
Never really though I'd do it,
but I wanted to.
This one is huge. This one is big.
Oh, my gosh!
Within minutes deep-sea sharks appear.
Up to 20 feet long,
these six gill sharks have only rarely
been seen alive.
Yeah, it really is exciting.
Wow! You ought to see the
size of this one.
We've got the biggest one so far.
He's right outside the window now.
It will take generations to fully
explore this mysterious deep frontier.
And no one can say what strange
creatures we may someday discover here.
Off the Mediterranean coast of Turkey,
National Geographic has helped
explore an ancient ship
that was wrecked here 3,400 years ago.
Now a word about
what we're doing today.
We're working in the upper part of the
wreck and finding it
just thick with amphoras and
ingots and so forth.
And so I want you to
just to hand-fan down...
George Bass is from
Texas A & M University.
One of the world's leading
nautical archeologists,
He has been completely absorbed
by a small plot of seabed
some 150 feet down.
Slowly, the evidence mounts up.
Bass and his team have
gained unprecedented knowledge
of such an ancient ship.
It was about 50 feet long
and carried goods of at
least seven different cultures,
including pottery, ivory, tin,
and the oldest glass ingots ever found.
But the principal cargo was copper
some 200 ingots,
each weighing about 60 pounds.
When combined with tin,
such ingots make bronze,
and the wreck did prove to be of
the Late Bronze Age
the oldest shipwreck known.
In 1986 an expedition from Woods Hole,
Massachusetts,
sought to explore the most celebrated
shipwreck of modern times
A luxury liner that sank in 1912
with a loss of more than 1,500 lives.
For years the grave of the Titanic has
fascinated Dr. Robert Ballard.
Now he has pinpointed the wreck
and hear echoes of tragedy.
Here lies Titanic, seen again by human
eyes after 74 dark and silent years.
Ballard leached Titanic with Alvin,
a manned submersible
designed for deep-sea research.
Knowing that Titanic could be
desecrated by salvagers,
Dr. Ballard felt it necessary
to leave a plaque here asking
that she be left intact.
But only a year passed before a rival
expedition reached the wreck
and took objects from Titanic.
Someday we may see beneath the waves
with godlike ease
and penetrate countless mysteries.
There is a great void
in the story of early man.
And this tantalized a scientist named
Louis Leakey
are lured him to a place in Africa
called Olduvai Gorge.
And now I'm down
at the bottom of the gorge.
My feet are resting on the black
lava which formed
the old land surface on
which these lake beds formed.
And here behind me are the earliest
part of the Olduvai series,
deposits that were formed just
nearly two million years ago.
It was here that, in 1931,
we first found examples of
simple tools like this,
Just a water-worn pebble with a jagged
cutting edge stone tools
that go back to a very,
very remote past in time,
nearly three times as old as
anything previously found.
Who were the men who made these tools?
Where did they live
and how did they live?
And that was the problem
that Mary and I went out to look for.
We wanted the answer: Who these men?
In 1959 Leakey and his wife, Mary,
found the fossil jaw of Zinjanthropus,
a primitive form of ape-man
who lived one-and-three-quarter
million years ago.
The find stunned the scientific world.
For 30 years the Leakeys had
faced skepticism and ridicule.
Now at last they found support
as National Geographic
underwrote their research.
Melville Bell Grosvenor made a
commitment to the Leakey's work
that would endure for a
quarter of a century.
Leakey's son Richard
also became a leading scientist.
In 1984 a team led by Richard Leakey
found the nearly complete skeleton
of an early human
one-and-a-half
million years old.
The Leakey legacy endures
the now accepted ideas
that man evolved in Africa,
That he is far older
than we once thought,
and that more than one kind
of man-like creature
lived at the same time.
Louis Leakey's interest in human
origins took fascinating turns.
As his urging
Jane Goodall began her epic study
of chimpanzee behavior in the wild.
Goodall's study led to a
new appreciation of the
similarities between
chimpanzees and man.
The chimps form distinct family groups
They use tools and
sometimes even wage war.
And over the years Jane Goodall came
to regard many of them as friends.
Another of Leakey's disciples
sought to study
the mountain gorilla in Rwanda.
With extraordinary patience,
Dian Fossey at last succeeded
in winning the trust of these powerful
but extremely shy creatures.
At such moments of contact
Dian was deeply moved
by the gorillas gentleness and trust.
One of her favorites was "Digit",
so-called because of his twisted,
broken finger.
In December 1977 Digit was
killed by poachers,
probably to sell his hands as souvenirs.
Later, other mountain gorillas in Dian's
study group were also slaughtered.
Finally, Dian herself was murdered by
persons unknown,
quite possibly poachers.
As much as any recent event,
her death foreshadowed a desperate
new era in the age of ecology.
We are led to ask:
If we cannot protect wild creatures,
can we save ourselves?
In the remote highlands of
Papua New Guinea
there lives a group
of endangered people.
They call themselves the "Hagahai".
Until a few years ago no outsiders
knew of their existence.
And they have been so isolated
they have not developed antibodies
to protect them against
common diseases.
Dr. Carol Jenkins is a
medical anthropologist.
She first came here to document
the Hagahais decline.
She returned to try to save them.
As part of a medical team,
Jenkins is fighting a desperate
battle against her own grim statistics
This baby is special because it's
the only one that's lived this year.
There have been eight babies born
since '87 began.
There have been eight babies is about
two months old
and it's the only living baby.
The Hagahai are so vulnerable,
only the most wrenching
changes can help them.
Trained to observe such cultures,
Carol Jenkins finds herself helping
to profoundly alter this one.
As tropical rain forests give way
to human demands,
there is danger on every hand.
This is the richest,
most complex ecosystem on earth.
From it have come many of our drugs,
our food plants, our useful chemicals.
Can we survive without this
blessing of diversity?
As the century of
discovery comes to an end,
a century of destruction
could be beginning.
And of all living creatures
only man has the power to decide
what the future holds
for the planet Earth.
Often quietly and in
unspectacular ways,
the task of discovery goes on.
And technology can make
explorers of us all.
A few years ago Jean Mueller
was a librarian.
Seeking a new challenge,
she went to work for
Palomar Observatory in California.
Jean works on the
Second Palomar Sky Survey,
a project partially sponsored by
National Geographic.
Its goal is to make a photographic
map of the heavens
that shows more detail
than we have ever seen before.
On a mountaintop in the dead of night,
Jean often sees what no one
has ever seen before
an image on a newly developed
glass plate 14 inches square.
Each pinpoint on the plate is a star,
possibly a galaxy
worlds upon worlds so numerous that
we cannot comprehend them.
The scale of this vision is staggering
Every plate contains
millions of pinpoints,
And it will take 894 separate plates
to scan the skies over Palomar.
And this represents the
Northern Hemisphere alone.
To explore this, much less
understand it, seems incredible.
But what wonders have we seen
in these last hundred years.
And in the next hundred, what more?