Tryggve Gran

Jens Tryggve Herman Gran was a Norwegian aviator, polar explorer and author whose career spanned both early twentieth century polar exploration and pioneering aviation. He first became known as a skiing expert on Robert Falcon Scott's Antarctic expedition, but his lasting place in transport history rests on his 1914 flight across the North Sea, when he flew a Blériot XI monoplane from Scotland to Norway and became the first person to complete a heavier-than-air crossing of the North Sea. During the First World War he served with the Royal Flying Corps, flying bombing raids that earned him the Military Cross, before later working as a flying instructor and co-piloting one of the first flights between London and Stockholm in 1920. Gran's North Sea aircraft is preserved and displayed at the Norwegian Museum of Science and Technology in Oslo, a lasting physical record of a flight that, at the time, extended the practical range of heavier-than-air aviation across open water well beyond what had been demonstrated before, and his career overall bridges the era of polar exploration and the earliest period of long-distance aviation.