At 11.30 a.m. they became the first to step onto the summit of the highest mountain on earth. For years neither would say who stepped foot on the summit first, but after Tenzing's death in 1986, Hillary said it was him.
"Next moment I had moved on to a flattish exposed area of snow with nothing but space in every direction. Tenzing quickly joined me and we looked round in wonder," he wrote in his autobiography.
By late afternoon they were back at the South Col camp and on June 2 word of the conquest was broken by the London Times.
The news won huge media coverage, with the "British" triumph coinciding with the coronation day of Britain's Queen Elizabeth and Hillary was knighted even before he descended from Everest.
"It was ground-breaking stuff, trying to find out if the human body could even survive those altitudes in those days," said two-time Everest summit veteran Andrew Lock, Australia's top high altitude mountaineer.
After Everest, Hillary led a number of expeditions. In 1958, he and four companions travelled overland in three modified tractors to become the first to reach the South Pole by vehicle.
"Sir Edmund's name is synonymous with adventure, with achievement, with dreaming and then making those dreams come true," said acting Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard.
HALF-MAST
The New Zealand flag flew at half-mast at Scott Base in Antarctica on Friday and there is a "very subdued" atmosphere on the base that Hillary started 51 years ago, said Antarctica New Zealand chief executive Lou Sanson.
Sanson said Prime Minister Clark invited Hillary to return to the ice this summer to celebrate the 50th anniversary of his arrival at the South Pole.
"He said he just couldn't do it. He just didn't feel he had the energy to do it," Sanson said.
In the 1960s Hillary returned to the Himalayas in search of the elusive Yeti and in 1975 he led a jetboat expedition to the source of the Ganges.
But most of his energy was devoted to helping Nepal's Sherpa people who live in the shadow of Everest. His Himalaya Trust raised about US$250,000 a year and he personally helped build schools, hospitals, bridges, pipelines and even an airfield.
"He was a great humanitarian," said Australian Tim Macartney-Snape, who has twice summited Everest.
"The Solu Khumbu district in Nepal will be in mourning for a long time because many of the people who are there now, the younger people, went to Hillary's schools or their lives would have been saved by those clinics," he said.
