"ICY WASTES WHOSE EDGES GLEAMED LIKE GOLD IN THE PALE SUNLIGHT BREAKING THROUGH FOG WHICH SURROUNDED US STOP."...
In mid-June 1926, after the news of Amundsen's expedition had been featured on Excélsior’s front page almost every day for weeks, El Buen Tono seized the occasion to promote its cigarettes. The company launched a new ad for Radio cigarettes showing Amundsen at the North Pole and announcing "Amudsen [sic] has said it: the true conquerors of the North Pole are El Buen Tono's 'Radio' cigarettes. El Buen Tono, the company of world-wide fame." These were the days before truth in advertising, and a week later the cigar manufacturer launched an even more daring ad featuring the same image of Amundsen smoking on the North Pole: "The first thing Amundsen did as he flew over the North Pole was to smoke a 'Radio' cigarette: the cigarettes famous throughout the globe." The ever-cautious and safety-obsessed Norwegian explorer would have certainly been horrified at this scene of recklessness: a lit cigarette could have blown the Norge to a million pieces!
It appears that years later, when browsing through archival clippings, El Buen Tono's managers took the ad copy literally, and spread the word that the explorer had indeed said what the spreads claim him to have said. There was a curious slippage from smoking to listening, from cigarette consumption to radio tuning, and thus the image of Amundsen smoking Radio was read as proof that the explorer had listened to El Buen Tono's radio station. This misreading of Amundsen's polar reception eventually found its way into Mejía Prieto's Historia de la radio y la televisión en México, and his account was later repeated verbatim by other historians.
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