We didn’t know if it was humanly possible to reach the top of Mt. Everest. And even using oxygen as we were, if we did get to the top, we weren’t at all sure whether we wouldn’t drop dead or something of that nature.

Explorer Sir Edmund Hillary—who in 1953, along with Tenzing Norgay, was the first to reach the summit of Mount Everest, the highest mountain in the world—was born this day in 1919 in Auckland, New Zealand.