[2] His parents were Eva Frances (née Butler) and James Ellsworth, a wealthy coal mine owner and financier.

[3] His academic performance was poor, and he subsequently enrolled at Columbia University School of Mines and studied civil engineering.

[1][6] Elsworth led the trans-Andean topographic survey from the Amazon River basin to the Pacific Ocean in Peru for Johns Hopkins University in 1924.

[2] His father spent US$100,000 ($1.74 million in 2023) to fund Roald Amundsen's 1925 attempt to fly from Svalbard to the North Pole.

Amundsen, accompanied by Lincoln Ellsworth, pilot Hjalmar Riiser-Larsen, flight mechanic Karl Feucht, and two other team members, set out in two Dornier Wal flying boats, the N24 and N25, in an attempted to reach the North Pole on May 21.

[7] A long article in the same edition (by Fitzhugh Green, one of Byrd's navy colleagues) was headed "Massed Attack On Polar Region Begins Soon.

"[7] Ellsworth accompanied Amundsen on his second effort to fly over the Pole in the airship Norge, designed and piloted by the Italian engineer Umberto Nobile, in a flight from Svalbard to Alaska.

Ellsworth made four expeditions to Antarctica between 1933 and 1939 using as his aircraft transporter and base, a former Norwegian herring boat that he named Wyatt Earp after his hero.

[10] They returned to New York City on April 6, and their support ship, the MS Wyatt Earp, arrived separately two weeks later.

This distinction was given to "American citizens whose achievements in outdoor activity, exploration, and worthwhile adventure are of such an exceptional character as to capture the imagination of boys..."[12] The Boy Scout's Book of True Adventure, Fourteen Honorary Scouts, includes an essay "The First Crossing of the Polar Sea" by Lincoln Ellsworth.

[15][6] The American Museum of Natural History created the Lincoln Ellsworth exhibit about his Arctic and Antarctic voyages in 1933; it remains open to the public as of 2024.

[5] They lived at 35 East 76th Street in New York City and in the Schloss Lenzburg castle in Switzerland, bequeathed to Ellsworth by his father.