Peary or Cook? The bending of sunlight has helped to reveal who bent the truth in a century-old debate about which explorer was the first to the North Pole
WHEN Robert Scott reached the South Pole in January 1912, he found an actual pole. It was holding up a tent left behind by Roald Amundsen five weeks earlier. Inside was a note for Scott. There could be no dispute about who had got there first.
On the other side of the world at the North Pole, any marker left behind soon drifts away with the sea ice, so it was harder for early explorers to prove they had reached it. Frederick Cook was the first to claim he had got there, in April 1908. The feat was briefly celebrated on his return to the US in 1909, but then ...
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