The Andrée Arctic Balloon Expedition

I found this really cool archive of newspaper articles about S.A. Andrée's failed balloon expedition in 1897 (the second link is to the Wikipedia page, if you're into that kind of thing). To summarize, this Swedish balloonist named Andrée thought that it would be a great idea to travel to the North Pole, a relatively cold region, by hot air balloon. As you may imagine, this did not end well, and the crew crashed after two-and-a-half days, only having traveled roughly 500 miles. The crash was gentle enough that all three men survived (along with their homing pigeons and cameras) to endure three more months of ice and snow before perishing.

Their film survived and has been archived on this website. It's in Polish, and I unfortunately cannot read Polish, but the photos are still pretty cool:

To conclude, this is certainly an unfortunate little tale from the annals of history, and one which I mean to present in the most respectful manner. The tragedy in this story, however, doesn't detract from its fascination. It's tidbits like this that remind me how cool history can be.