Walter Wellman

Walter E. Wellman (November 3, 1858 – January 31, 1934) was an American journalist, explorer, and aeronaut.

Biographical background Walter Wellman was born in Mentor, Ohio, in 1858. He was the sixth son of Alonzo Wellman and the fourth by his second wife Minerva Sibilla (Graves) Wellman. Walter's father, Alonzo, served three years in the American Civil War while Walter was young. He was initially with Company D of the 105th Ohio Infantry before becoming a ship-carpenter with the Mississippi River Squadron. When he returned from the war, he took his family west from Ohio to become pioneer settlers of York County, Nebraska.

At age 14 Walter established a weekly newspaper in Sutton, Nebraska. At age 21 Walter returned to Ohio to establish the Cincinnati Evening Post and married Laura McCann in Canton, Ohio on 24 December 1879. They had five daughters. In 1884 he became political and Washington DC correspondent for the Chicago Herald and Record-Herald.

The expedition was taken home on 27 July 1899 by the sealing ship Capella.

Airships

On December 31, 1905, Wellman announced he would make an attempt to reach the North Pole, but this time with an airship. His newspaper provided funds of US$250,000, Wellman rebuilt the airship in Paris that winter and attempted an aerial voyage to the North Pole in September, 1907. He made a second attempt without financial assistance in 1909, but mechanical failures forced him to turn back north of Svalbard. After 38 hours the engine failed and the airship drifted until the crew and cat were rescued by the Royal Mail steamship Trent not far from Bermuda. In July, 1912, Melvin Vaniman made another attempt at crossing the Atlantic in a second airship, the Akron, built by Goodyear. The Akron exploded a few minutes after departing Atlantic City on its trans-Atlantic flight, killing Vaniman and his crew of four. Nearly a century later, its submerged remains were located. These fragments and the airship's lifeboat, which Goodyear had stored since 1912, were then donated to the Smithsonian Institution.

Legacy In 1902, Wellman wrote A Tragedy of the Far North published in The White World. Wellman's book The Aerial Age: A Thousand Miles by Airship over the Atlantic Ocean was published in 1911. The German Republic was published in 1916. The Force Supreme was published in 1918.

He spent his final years in New York City, where he died of liver cancer in 1934. The Liberty ship Walter Wellman was launched 29 September 1944 from Todd Houston Shipbuilding Corporation of Houston, Texas.