In May 1904, a group of the America's leading explorers met at the request of Henry Collins Walsh, to form an organization with the announced objective to unite explorers in the bonds of good fellowship and to promote the work of exploration by every means in its power. Among these men were Adolphus Greely, Donaldson Smith, Henry Collins Walsh, Carl Lumholtz, Marshall Saville, Frederick Dellenbaugh, W. Furness, and David Brainard. On May 28, 1904, a dinner was held at the Aldine Association, 111 Fifth Avenue in New York, with fifty men well known in exploration attending. At this dinner, The Explorers Club was organized.
Being travelers, we TTers and mountaineers are to some extent "amateur explorers". Today, May 27, as part of our Centennial Year festivities, The Explorers Club will host a celebratory barbeque to honor that first historic dinner meeting. (more inside...)
The Explorers Club is international in scope and our nearly 3,000 members represent every continent and more than 60 countries. Over the years, membership has included polar explorers Robert Peary, Matthew Henson, Roald Amundsen, Frederick Cook, Sir Ernest Shackleton, Richard Byrd, William Anderson, and Norman Vaughan; aviators James Doolittle, Charles Lindbergh, and Chuck Yeager; underwater pioneers William Beebe, Jacques Piccard, Don Walsh, Sylvia Earle, and Robert Ballard; astronauts Buzz Aldrin, Neil Armstrong, John Glenn, Sally Ride, Kathryn Sullivan, and cosmonaut Viktor Savinykh; anthropologists Donald Johanson, Louis Leakey, Richard Leakey; primatologists Dian Fossey and Jane Goodall; mountaineers Sir Edmund Hillary, Tenzing Norgay, and Bradford Washburn; former U.S. Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Herbert Hoover; and other notables including explorer Thor Heyerdahl, and journalists Lowell Thomas and George Plimpton.
The Explorers Club is a multidisciplinary, professional society dedicated to the advancement of field research, scientific exploration, and the ideal that it is vital to preserve the instinct to explore. The encouragement of scientific exploration of land, sea, air, and space, with particular emphasis on the physical and biological sciences, is its mission.
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