Whymper, Edward

Whymper, Edward (1840-1911), mountaineer, b. London.

Edward Whymper was one of the most famous of the early mountaineers.

By trade he was an artist and he first went to the Alps to draw pictures for a book. It was this that started him climbing. Only one of the high peaks of the Alps had still to be climbed. This was the Matterhorn, 14,764 feet (4500 meters) high, on the border between Switzerland and Italy.

After eight attempts, Whymper reached the summit on 14 July, 1865. But triumph turned to disaster. Four of his companions were killed in a fall on the way down. This caused people in England to say that mountain climbing should be stopped.

But later Whymper made two expeditions to Greenland and in 1879-80 visited the Andes in Ecuador. There he climbed Chimborazo 20,702 feet (6,310 meters) and Cotapaxi 19,488 (5,940 meters).

At this time, no one had ever climbed so high and people feared the effects of'mountain sickness' in the thin air above 19685 feet (6,000 meters).

Whymper proved you could not only climb at this height but also sleep there.

Whymper wrote and illustrated a number of books. The most famous is Scrambles Amongst the Alps (1871).