Mountaineer, Explorer, Illustrator and Author. He is best known for being the first man to climb the Matterhorn. He also made important first ascents on the Mont Blanc massif and in the Pennine Alps, South America, and the Canadian Rockies. His exploration of Greenland contributed an important advance to Arctic exploration. After being privately educated he entered his father’s wood engraving business and ultimately succeeded as head of it. In 1860 he went to Switzerland to make sketches for a book on the Alps and became a mountaineer. In 1861 he successfully completed the ascent of Mont Pelvoux, the first of a series of expeditions that threw much light on the topography of an area at that time very imperfectly mapped. The next four years were filled with a number of new expeditions in the Mont Blanc massif and the Pennine Alps, among them the first ascents of the Aiguille d'Argentière and Mont Dolent in 1864, and the Aiguille Verte, the Grand Cornier and Pointe Whymper on the Grandes Jorasses. For nearly three he was engaged in a race with the physicist John Tyndall to reach the top of the Matterhorn by way of the Italian side. On the 14th July 1865, after several failed attempts, he finally succeeded, having made the ascent by the Swiss ridge, a steep and menacing passage that had previously been thought too perilous to attempt to climb. On the descent, one member of his party slipped and pulled down three more, killing all four men. As a result of the rope breaking he survived, along with two guides. The incident haunted him so much that although he continued to climb elsewhere, he abandoned mountaineering in the Alps. In 1867 and 1872 he visited Greenland with the intention of crossing its ice cap, but he became convinced that the undertaking would prove too costly for him. In Ecuador (1880) he twice ascended Chimborazo, and he spent a night on the summit of Cotopaxi, the world’s highest continuously active volcano. In the early 1900s he visited the Canadian Rockies several times and made arrangements with the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) to promote the Canadian Rockies and the railway in his talks in Europe and Asia. In exchange, the CPR agreed to pay transportation costs for himself and his four guides. In 1901 they made the first ascents of Mount Whymper and Stanley Peak in the Vermilion Pass area of the Canadian Rockies. He wrote several books on mountaineering, including ‘Scrambles Amongst the Alps’, in which the illustrations are engraved by him, and ‘Travels Amongst the Great Andes of Ecuador’, which contained much valuable information for geographers, geologists, and mountaineers. He also compiled two handbooks on the climbing of Chamonix and Zermatt. Shortly after returning to Chamonix he became ill, locked himself in his room at the Grand Hotel Couttet, and refused all medical treatment. He died alone on 16 September 1911.