It’s hard to imagine how monumental Britain’s successful summit of Mount Everest was in 1953. Fourteen previous attempts — three major British ones alone between 1921 and 1924 — had failed to conquer the 29,035-foot-high peak. Expeditions were military in scale, requiring huge teams and tons of supplies. They were also intimately bound up with entrenched ideas of class. George Finch, one of the strongest mountaineers in the nation and a pioneer in the use of supplemental oxygen, who had made it to around 27,000 feet in 1922, was blocked from being part of the 1924 expedition because of his pedigree, or lack thereof. In 1924, two of the nation’s best climbers, Sandy Irvine and George Mallory, vanished on the mountain. The victorious effort in 1953 was led by a military officer born in the British Raj. When the news broke in London just in time for Queen Elizabeth’s coronation, it was broadcast over speakers along the queen’s parade route. This was a triumph of imperial ambition, the kind of feat that only a Western empire could produce.