And this is where we get the first forays into – unmanned mono planes that are going to be controlled from from the ground akin to a drone and i guess that the question is he's he's not just sort of arriving on the scene in 1914 and going all right so i've got this idea we're gonna we're gonna we're gonna remote control the plane and there's a there's a history that predates him right unmanned aerial vehicles

Yeah, absolutely.

I'm glad you said that because we have a tendency, I think, to scratch the idea that a man or woman can come up with this amazing idea no one's ever thought of before.

And that's the father of the drone.

But unbelievably, it dates back to the Victorian age.

Before, all the rights had flow.

And I suppose Marconi's invention of the radio, I think kickstarted it.

difference is those chaps today they make money and lotus it seems to actually make much we know and as such i mean evidence that this is armchair science it scarcely makes a bean until it eventually folds in 1940 amidst the second world war And I guess the question is, whilst all this is going on with Lowe and he's kind of jumping around trying to do all these things, that legacy that you mentioned, the fact that it's not just him working on what he was doing in the First World War vis-a-vis drones, what's happening in the interwar period? What's going on that he probably should have been front and center of, but wasn't? I

What, what do they think? What do they do, Mark?

Well, uh, the, the, the official narrative, I, I guess, i-is that they're having dinner, uh, uh, in Oslo with a whole bunch of other explorers, uh, b-to, uh, to celebrate Hubert Wilkins' achievement of flying from, uh, Alaska to Svalbard, almost the wrong way from where everyone else is trying to fly, uh, in April, and they're having a dinner to celebrate this amazing achievement.

Uh, and, and, and, and the kind of-- it's like a, you know, Hollywood movie.

The me-messenger arrives, the door swings open, and the news is that Italia has disappeared.

No one's heard from, uh, you know, heard from her.

Uh, and, and when they realize there's a crisis, Amundsen-- the whole room apparently turned to Amundsen to see what he would do 'cause he-- they knew of his animosity to Nobile, and Amundsen stood up and went, "I will go." Uh, s-so you have this great moment of kind of, of, uh, of, you know, of, I suppose, of the explorer's code, isn't he? You know, even though he hates this guy, he's gonna go, and he's gonna rescue him.

Uh, but things turn out to be slightly more complicated than that.

What happens, Mark?

Eckener had, had inherited Zeppelin's fleet, yes.

Yeah, absolutely.

So he wanted to have a much bigger airship, and so it'd be more stable.

You'd be able to carry out more scientific research.

And these things always have science as the, uh, as a kind of fig leaf or, or the, or the dis-- and you could argue how valuable any of the science was.

Uh, but he made...

A-and the, and the, and essentially it was gonna originally fly from Rome to, uh, Buenos Aires or Rio, uh, to pro-- to kind of do a similar trip just to build up Italian propaganda for Mussolini.

What do we need to know about Romagna? He's a s-he's a suspicious character, but who's he working for?

Mm-hmm.

Uh, so that was stripped out, made a lot lighter.

I mean, uh, although, although the throne was kept, [laughs] pe-per-perhaps.

I don't-- I, I imagine Nobile has some idea of coming back to Italy and the king riding i-in, in, in his airship again.

Uh, and it was, and it was things like the, the, the, the valve inlets to, to the envelope, trying to protect things from the ice.

You know, because you know everyone warned him that if you're gonna take an airship up, up into the North Pole, one of the biggest dangers is ice forming on top of the great envelope.

'Cause this airship was about the size of a, a three-eighty.

And does Amundsen get the attention in the same tr-

-present at the meeting, and why is this important for Arctic exploration? Good evening, Mark.

Good evening, John, and thank you very much for having me on your show.

Uh, yeah.

Present at the meeting with-- you've got some of the main characters of the story.

You've got Roald Amundsen, who is obviously the, the famous Arctic explorer, first man to the, uh, South Pole, uh, led the first expedition through the Northwest Passage.

You, you had Umberto Nobile, who's probably less well-known, uh, who was a, a kind of a genius Italian airship designer, uh, pilot, and had aspirations, I guess you could say, to be a polar explorer.

Uh, and you had Lincoln Ellsworth, who's-- who some of the audience may know, kind of, uh, heir to the Ellsworth fortunes.

What do we need to know about Umberto Nobile? Why does he wanna go to the North Pole?

So what do you think of the strategy of warning people off?

So, so the Americans were perhaps the first people to deal with this with a, uh, with a WIPP kind of waste depository and, uh, and I, and I guess they came up with f-fanta-fantastic ideas that feel very, in a sense of very natural, I suppose because it's kind of our parents telling us off.

So you had this kind of crown of thorns sh- you know, k- you know, huge kind of thorns over the site.

That was one idea.

Others are kind of this kind of atomic Stonehenge with gigantic pillars and earth barriers, uh, with a kind of secret archives in the middle.

-we'll dig down.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, I think that's, that's the...