Hasta La Ideas

This is the strangest invention story I’ve ever heard.

In May 1930, a young couple from Carmel, California vanished during their honeymoon. William H. Albee, a 23-year-old geologist and his 20-year-old bride Ruth, had decided to hike from Vancouver, Canada, to Fairbanks, Alaska on foot. They each had a backpack full of provisions and a rifle, and brought a dog that also carried provisions. They were cautioned against the endeavor by both local police and trappers, but Albee, a capable outdoorsman, disregarded the warnings.

Image: UCLA Charles E. Young Research Library Department of Special Collections, CC. 4.0

By June there was no trace of them anywhere, and various newspapers began following the story. Headlines ranged from “Newlywed Carmel Pair Feared Lost in Canada” to the eventual “Honeymooners Perish.” Though no bodies were found, the Dawson Daily News reported the Albees “were believed to have perished in an isolated area from cold or starvation.”

Image: Dubuque Telegraph Herald And Times Journal, June 26, 1930, p 4

By October, it was revealed the Albees were alive–and still trekking. A letter from William reached his parents, explaining that they’d gotten lost and run out of provisions after five weeks, but had survived for the past month by eating meat from moose that they’d hunted. The adventure was still on.

By 1932 the Albees were living in Fairbanks, where they gave birth to a son. Before long, they resumed trekking.

Eventually they hiked all the way to an Inuit settlement on the Bering Strait. Settling down in the Inuit community, the Albees found employment as teachers, and had a second child.

While hanging with the Inuits, William witnessed some of their indigenous ingenuity:

He watched a fishing party reach shore with a boat loaded up with an estimated 4 tons of catch. Rather than unloading the fish, the Inuits broke out a number bladders made of sealskin—essentially giant blubbery balloons. They lashed these to the bottom of the boat, pulled it ashore, and were able to drag the heavy boat up a rocky slope, as it essentially floated across the terrain on the tough bladders.

By 1935, the Albees, now with two kids, returned to California. In 1937 the Albees co-wrote a book about their five-year adventure, titled “Alaska Challenge.” It was published in 1940.

William subsequently began working on an invention based on the sealskin bladders he’d seen. By the early 1950s, he’d produced what he called the Rolligon. It was a gigantic bag-like tire. The invention attracted military interest, and William had a fabricator in Stockton, California fit out a Dodge Power Wagon with Rolligon wheels. They were low-pressure, inflated with just 2 to 6 p.s.i., and were soft enough to run over a human being. Both William (and I assume Ruth, in the color photo) were happy to demonstrate this.

Running people over without crushing them aside, the real value of the invention was its ability to easily cross difficult terrain. Here’s the Army testing a Rolligon-equipped vehicle in 1953:

Same video but with narration:

The Army found the concept promising enough to try it on a jeep:

Image: Popular Science, June 1953

The vehicles were expensive to produce, and with the Korean War winding down, the Army didn’t have a huge need. Albee managed to keep his Rolligon company going until 1960, but eventually sold it.

Today the Rolligon trademark is owned by National Oilwell Varco, a Texas-based company that produces machinery for the oil and gas industry.

While the original Inuit sealskin invention was used to haul fish in a zero-emissions way, today the Rolligon tire is used to transport oil- and gas-harvesting vehicles across Arctic terrain.

Image: Nick Bonzey, CC BY-SA 2.0