A closer look
The secret to beating the British to the South Pole wasn't just bringing better dogs; it was completely ignoring modern metallurgy. Roald Amundsen utilized heavily modified wooden Nansen sledges, realizing that standard steel runners would stick to the brutal minus-40-degree Antarctic snow like Velcro. His team obsessively planed the ash and hickory wood to strip weight, completely ditching the metal runners for smooth wooden ones coated in a crude, slick mixture of pine tar and stearin, practically gliding over the glacial death trap while his rivals dragged literal tons of dead weight.
