[BYRD, Richard Evelyn (1888-1957)]. The original christening bottle for the airplane “William Horlick” on the second Byrd Antarctic Expedition, 1933-35.

A broken champagne bottle wrapped in gold cord and tied with a red, white and blue ribbon; housed in a wooden presentation box with an engraved plaque (12 ½ x 4 ½ x 4 ½”). The “William Horlick” was a Curtiss Condor T-32 with specially designed fuel tanks giving the plane a range of approximately 1300 miles with a full load of 19,000 pounds. The plane was named after one of the sponsors who was a wealthy food manufacturer that not only supported the expeditions financially but also malted milk which provided non-perishable nutrition for the explorers. Because of his generosity, Byrd named the Horlick Mountains in Antarctica after the philanthropist. After Byrd's inaugural 1928-30 expedition to the South Pole, Byrd conceived a second expedition to Antarctica to be made for scientific research, geological surveys, and to discover new territory. The crew mapped over 1,000 miles of coastline using the four planes and would make significant advances to geology in the region after uncovering tree fossils in the mountains only 210 miles from the South Pole proving that Antarctica had once been a much warmer place.