Snow Crusher!
These are the things I get up to on the ship when I’ve got 30 minutes to kill.
I put together a short recap on a crazy machine built for an American expedition to the Ross Sea in 1939. The Antarctic Snow Cruiser was an epic multi-million dollar (adjusted for inflation) failure that always gets a laugh with our guests. As the builders of this colossal snow tank thought so much of it, they made sure to document its journey from the Pullman Yard in Chicago to Little America on the Ross Ice Shelf. You can check out a great photo essay here:
There is also a bit of film footage of the machine they eventually nicknamed “The Penguin”, in particular a bit of silent colour film of it being unloaded from the ship to the ice. No surprise that all thirty-seven tons of it immediately crashed through the ramp. Luckily no one was killed and the behemoth just barely made it onto the ice.
I thought it would be fun to add sound to this hilarious retro fail video using stock sounds from Soundsnap, an online sound effects library. Here are the results!