Robert Ballard Quotes

Later, as he sat on his balcony eating the dog, Dr Robert Laing reflected on the unusual events that had taken place within this huge apartment building during the previous three months.

From "The Book That Changed My Life": -"But your journey is never over until you return from it to share with society what you have learned." ~ Robert Ballard -"We never anticipate being changed by what we read. Such an experience cannot be planned for." ~ Brother Christopher

1) The Titanic hit the iceberg in the North Atlantic, approximately 400 miles off the coast of Newfoundland. 2) The Titanic was considered unsinkable because she was built with huge watertight doors to contain any possible leaks. However, when the ship hit the iceberg, six watertight compartments quickly filled up with water, dooming the ship. 3) The signal SOS was chosen as an international distress call because of the simplicity of the three letters in Morse code: three dots, three dashes, and three dots. 4) No one knows for certain exactly how long the musicians played on the Titanic, but legend says they played until the ship went down, and their last song was the hymn “Nearer My God to Thee.” 5) More than 1,500 people perished in the Titanic disaster, while 705 people escaped in lifeboats and were eventually rescued by a ship named the Carpathia. 6) After the sinking of the Titanic, laws were changed so that every ship was required to have enough lifeboats to carryall its passengers. Also, the International Ice Patrol was formed, so that ships would have warning about ice conditions. 7) In 1985, a scientist named Dr. Robert Ballard discovered the undersea wreck of the Titanic.

even finding a ship at such a depth (about 12,000 feet below the surface) was a formidable obstacle. It was not until the 1980s that technology to withstand the amount of water pressure that deep was available. Then, in 1985, more than seventy years since it had sunk, an explorer named Robert Ballard located and photographed the site of the wreckage. Part of the reason that it was so hard to find was that it was several miles away from where it was thought to have gone down.

Soon after three o'clock on the afternoon of April 22nd 1973, a 35-year-old architect named Robert Maitland was driving down the high-speed exit lane of the Westway interchange in central London. Six hundred yards from the junction with the newly built spur of the M4 motorway, when the Jaguar had already passed the 70 m.p.h. speed limit, a blow-out collapsed the front nearside tyre. The exploding air reflected from the concrete parapet seemed to detonate inside Robert Maitland's skull. During the few seconds before his crash he clutched at the whiplashing spokes of the steering wheel, dazed by the impact of the chromium window pillar against his head. The car veered from side to side across the empty traffic lanes, jerking his hands like a puppet's. The shredding tyre laid a black diagonal stroke across the white marker lines that followed the long curve of the motorway embankment. Out of control, the car burst through the palisade of pinewood trestles that formed a temporary barrier along the edge of the road. Leaving the hard shoulder, the car plunged down the grass slope of the embankment. Thirty yards ahead, it came to a halt against the rusting chassis of an overturned taxi. Barely injured by this violent tangent that had grazed his life, Robert Maitland lay across his steering wheel, his jacket and trousers studded with windshield fragments like a suit of lights.

Tracing ancient trade routes in the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, pulling up precious Roman, Greek, and Phoenician artifacts, and confirming hypotheses about a great flood in biblical times.

But it’s too bad,” she said. “Now they are only going to remember you for that rusty old boat.” That rusty old boat. The phrase rings in my ears to this day. And you know what? She was right; mothers know best. When people hear the name Bob Ballard, they instantly think “the guy who found Titanic.

On our way up, we landed on the poop deck and used Alvin’s mechanical arm to leave behind a plaque dedicated to Bill Tantum, who had died in 1980, and to all those who had perished there.

In fact, the first lecture I gave after I found Titanic was a benefit for the Falmouth Youth Hockey organization. Dougie said some of the girls were so impressed with what I’d done that he got a few dates out of the deal.

also found a new passion in genealogy. I’d received a rush of letters from Ballards all over the country who wondered if they were related to me. After giving a lecture in North Carolina, I dug into the archives at Guilford College in Greensboro. It turns out that eight generations of Ballards had been Quakers there—and most of them had signed their names with X’s—before my great-grandfather had moved to Wichita. I was amazed that someone like me, who had invested so much of his life in military service, had come from a family of Quakers. Indeed, although I was able to trace the whole, long Ballard family saga back to the sheriff of Nottingham in 1325, I could find only one ancestor who wore a military uniform, Col. Thomas Ballard, a member of the British colonial militia in Virginia.

When Eroni took us to Nauru Island, I had picked up two coconuts at the base of the tree where he had found Kennedy. Back in Mystic, I hired a wood carver to make replicas of Kennedy’s hand-carved message on them. One I still have. The other I presented to Fritz Hollings, whom I invited to our private screening of National Geographic’s television special, The Search for Kennedy’s PT-109. I wanted to help him make up for what he had lost in the fire, and he was moved by the gesture.

Hollings had played a major role in creating NOAA—the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration—when Richard Nixon was president. He loved Jacques Cousteau, and he kept calling me “the new Cousteau.” The fact is, I explored much deeper parts of the ocean than Cousteau—the parts that were less interesting to most people unless they contained an important piece of human history.

That nine-foot-tall clock was a fitting place to meet. Bronze and mahogany, topped with a gold statue of Lady Liberty, it had been a gift from Queen Victoria to the United States, first displayed at the World’s Fair in Chicago in 1893. Then John Jacob Astor IV acquired it for his opulent hotel. Nineteen years later, Astor died in the Titanic tragedy.

William Ryan and Walter Pitman, authors of Noah’s Flood: The New Scientific Discoveries About the Event That Changed History, had spent a half decade using core samples to try to prove that the Black Sea region had undergone a massive flood, which they believed to be the historical origin of the tale of Noah’s ark. The idea of a massive flood wasn’t unique to the Bible, they pointed out. The Epic of Gilgamesh, written in the 18th century B.C., also described a flood that wiped out nearly all living things. The Bible even suggested the location for the flood, stating that the ark ultimately rested on the slopes of Mount Ararat, in northern Turkey, less than 200 miles from the shores of the Black Sea.

When I give talks to kids, I’ll say at the beginning that I’m dyslexic and ask if any of them are. No one raises a hand. But by the time I finish my presentation, I ask them again, “How many of you are dyslexic?” And now they raise their hands. They have learned that someone just like them has followed his passion and gone on to have a successful life. That is what I want them to remember. Not that I found Titanic, but that I set goals and kept working to achieve them—and that my dyslexia actually helped me get to where I am today.

Cyril Spurr, a British munitions expert who was with us, had noted that if the German torpedo had hit behind the forward magazine, it would have struck a coal bunker. Because Lusitania was nearing the completion of her long voyage across the North Atlantic, the large bunker would have been nearly empty, filled with a thick layer of warm coal dust. If the torpedo had violently pushed that coal dust up into the well-oxygenated air inside the bunker, a spark could have ignited and set off the second explosion.

We positioned Northern Horizon, our command ship, 11 miles off Ireland’s southern coast. We knew where Lusitania lay—that wasn’t the issue. Our goal was to investigate the mystery of what had sent the grand ship to her watery grave, taking the lives of about 1,200 passengers and crew members in May 1915.

I wanted to get a look at the area near that forward magazine, but I wasn’t sure if that would be possible, because Lusitania was resting on her starboard side. The wreckage also had become a favorite place for local fishermen to set their nets, and some of the nets had broken off and gotten caught on the ship’s superstructure, forming a giant spider’s web that could endanger our manned mini-sub Delta, our newly developed Jason robot, and a smaller remote-controlled vehicle called Homer. The first step was to use Jason and its sophisticated sonars to make a 3-D model of the wreck. We could then superimpose the ship’s original engineering drawings onto that map to locate the forward magazine precisely. Fortunately, the angle of Lusitania’s hull made it possible for Homer to slip under the bow and determine that the forward magazine was completely intact. Whatever had caused the second explosion had not been stored there.

A light patter of rain began to fall, and Alexei put on the windshield wipers. We took the Alaskan Way Viaduct up past Elliot Bay into Ballard, then turned toward the water and bumped along an older part of the wharf to a warehouse at the edge of a pier. The warehouse, like the pier, was old and unkempt, with great rusted doors that slid along tracks and peeling paint and an air of poverty. Dmitri climbed out, pushed open the door, and we drove inside to park between a brand-new $100,000 Porsche Carrera and an $80,000 Mercedes SL convertible. Guess the air of poverty only went so far.

Finally, two heads popped up, then two hands with “thumbs-up” signals. We had stolen success out of the jaws of failure. My people, and my gear, were safe after all. We also had determined that the coal dust could have helped trigger the second explosion on Lusitania—and now had compelling evidence for historians to analyze.

I was talking a lot to James Cameron, too. He had already directed Terminator and Aliens, and now he was making Titanic. Not long after we’d found the ship, Cameron had visited me at Woods Hole. He wanted to learn all he could to dramatize the story accurately.

After I found Titanic in 1985, I could have obtained salvage rights if I’d wanted to, according to international maritime law. But I wasn’t interested in retrieving artifacts. I believed we should respect the passengers and crew who had died there and leave their grave site undisturbed. Survivors, like Eva Hart, agreed. She was seven when the ship sank. “I saw all the horror of its sinking,” she told me. “And I heard, even more dreadful, the cries of drowning people.

By 2000, RMS Titanic Inc. had returned to the site four more times, using French or Russian submersibles. In a game of Finders Keepers, they pocketed more than 6,000 artifacts and displayed them in a museum, charging people to see them. The company even broadcast a documentary showing how it took the objects. All told, the items included eyeglasses, shoes, handbags, luggage, and even a bronze cherub statue from the Grand Staircase. A bell and a light from the foremast were removed, and the salvagers even raised a chunk of the hull weighing 18 tons. They sold pieces of coal from the engine room for $25 a block. They created a website, so you could peruse the collections online. Documentary filmmakers and wealthy sightseers visited the site in mini-subs. And, perhaps most grotesque of all, a couple were married in a submersible perched on Titanic’s bow. I wouldn’t think of a mass grave as romantic, but I guess some couples are into that.

I spoke out against the grave robbing and called for international legal protections. An agency within the United Nations approved a convention in 2001, calling on nations to protect “all traces of human existence having a cultural, historical or archaeological character” that had been underwater for more than 100 years. But it had been just 92 years since Titanic had gone down, so those protections did not apply.

Critics complain that I don’t play by their rules, that I operate outside the box. That’s true. I only have one rule of my own: I don’t work with jerks. I find my own way, but I also love to have a guide, someone who knows the world I’m operating in and has the credentials to help open doors.

this point in life, he said, there are three things you need to do. The first is to develop deeper friendships, and he had the perfect analogy for it. He urged us to look at the giant redwoods. They can grow to more than 300 feet tall, even though their roots sink less than six feet deep. How do they keep from falling over as they grow older? They reach out to the other trees around. Like the redwoods, Brooks suggested, we must develop a deeper network of friends and family, intertwining our roots so we stand tall together.

The third thing Arthur Brooks said you need to do as you speed past 75 toward 80 and beyond is to “just say no.” When new ideas enter your mind or new opportunities come along, resist the urge to jump in.

Either we would find her plane, or we would rule out the Nikumaroro hypothesis. That is what science is all about: testing hypotheses and ruling out the ones that don’t stand up to scrutiny.

Second, Brooks said, it’s important to focus less on yourself and more on mentoring others.

I look at the nature versus nurture question this way: Your genes are the nouns and the verbs, and your nurturing is the adjectives and the adverbs. Together they make a sentence, with your genes, like all nouns and verbs, having the strongest impact.

As I realized when I got rejected from Scripps when I was all of 20-something, every failure is a learning lesson. Since then, I’ve grown to love failure. It’s not something you should try to avoid, but rather embrace and learn from—and then beat. You don’t go around it—you go through it.

Then, one day in March 2015, I was driving home from my office, and I heard a segment on the radio about a book called The Dyslexic Advantage. What I heard felt familiar. Could I have had dyslexia without even realizing it? I ordered the book that night, and when I began reading it, I couldn’t put it down. Tears were streaming down my face. Here I was, 72 years old, and this book, finally, was explaining me to me. Even now I think of it as my first autobiography.

So Jim found a cooperative theater 30 miles from our house and sent a limo to carry me, Barbara, and not-quite-three-week-old Emily to an 8 a.m. showing of Titanic. Barbara was so exhausted from lack of sleep that she had the limo stop at a Dunkin’ Donuts to buy some coffee. Then we settled down in the center seats of this giant theater, just the three of us. It’s a long movie. Halfway through, Barbara had to go to the bathroom. I stood up and said, “Stop the movie!” Can’t do that every day.

Jim was obsessed with getting all the details of the ship right, and sometimes he’d call late at night from the set in Ensenada, Mexico, or the editing room in Hollywood, and he’d be all excited and ask me a bunch of technical questions. When the movie was about to come out in December 1997, Jim invited me to attend a Hollywood screening.

It was such a beautiful and meticulous re-creation of the ship, too, from the Grand Staircase to the crow’s nest. I knew what the old lady looked like in her grave, and Jim showed me what she’d looked like as a young lady when she’d sailed from England. Cameron’s movie also captured the random nature of who lived and who died. I must say, that’s a question that has stuck with me ever since my summer in Army boot camp.

It seemed solid confirmation of the theory that the Black Sea changed from a freshwater lake to a saltwater interior sea about 7,500 years ago, just as suspected. The salt water brought in by the flood was heavier than the freshwater it replaced. It fell to the bottom and stagnated over time, losing its oxygen below about 330 feet. Although we couldn’t confirm that this event was the same as Noah’s Flood, our findings did support Ryan and Pitman’s theory that a catastrophic event had created the odd mix of water in the Black Sea.

Robert Ballard

As I realized when I got rejected from Scripps when I was all of 20-something, every failure is a learning lesson. Since then, I’ve grown to love failure. It’s not something you should try to avoid, but rather embrace and learn from—and then beat. You don’t go around it—you go through it. You get knocked down, and you lie there, and you go, Wow, that was a hell of a shot. And then you dive back in. I’ve failed lots of times, but I don’t quit, so I always win.

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But I preferred going to the movies over reading books. I vividly remember, when I was 12, crowding into the theater for Disney’s holiday blockbuster, a big-screen adaptation of Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. It blew my mind.

That June, in the summer before my senior year in high school, I reported to Scripps as a junior trainee for a series of three excursions. I celebrated my 17th birthday at sea. Our initial work was part of a study looking at why sardines—immortalized in John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row—had disappeared off the California coast.

So I decided to spend part of my sabbatical at Stanford refining my ideas on how to conduct deep-sea searches. The personal computer revolution was under way, and others at Stanford were working closely with people like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, testing robots in the quad right outside my office.

With his green light, I started borrowing the gear I’d need, including a sonar system from Westinghouse and underwater cameras from the Navy and a local company called Benthos. All in all, it meant we were going to be dangling a pod containing $600,000 of equipment on the end of a very long pipe.

Although Angus could snap thousands of color photos, we had to lift it back aboard the mother ship at the end of the day and process the film to see what it had found. Then the ship had to circle back and send scientists down on Alvin the next day to take a look. Argo, by contrast, would have two sonar systems and three video cameras that could work well in low light, and it would stream the video up to us as it was recording. That meant that if Argo spotted something—a hydrothermal vent, a piece of Thresher, or the first sign of Titanic perhaps—we’d see it instantly on our video screens. We could hover the ship over the spot and explore what we’d found from every angle, saving huge amounts of time. It could make the difference between success and failure on most expeditions.

Admiral Thunman wanted to test Argo at the Thresher site in 1984 and survey Scorpion’s wreckage in 1985. That was fine with me. I said I’d like to look for Titanic after finishing the Scorpion work, and Thunman agreed to fund me for a three-week voyage that included both.

Now I understood what had happened. The heavier objects go straight down. The lighter objects sink at a slower rate, and prevailing currents carry them farther away. In Thresher’s case, the debris field stretched for roughly a mile. It seems like common sense, but it’s not the kind of thing you think about until you see it. The key to finding sunken ships was to search for the long debris trail and follow it back to the vessel. This was the great lesson Thresher taught me—and one that would soon help me immensely.

When you place an item in memory, it’s as if you’re sending a message to your future self,” according to Robert Jacobs, a professor of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the University of Rochester. “This channel has limited capacity, however, and thus it can’t transmit all details of a message. Consequently, a message retrieved from memory at a later time may not be the same as the message placed into memory at the earlier time. That is why memory errors occur.” Jacobs conceives of memory as a kind of communication channel which, like all communication channels, may break down. For instance, the brain is designed to favor filling in details when only the gist of an experience can be recalled. Was the Shelby Mustang I considered buying last month outfitted with a manual or an automatic transmission? If I don’t remember, it’s natural to “mentally fill in the missing details with the most frequent or commonplace properties,” says Jacobs. The car must have been equipped with a manual transmission because I don’t think Shelby ever made a car with an automatic transmission, I conclude, although I’m not all that sure of my memory for this fact and this car could be an exception or a conversion. In J. G. Ballard’s dystopian novel Rushing to Paradise, he writes of the dangers of a “collective amnesia for the future. . . . a willed refusal to face the imminent.” Could this failure in future memory be part of the explanation for our response to the threat of Global Warming?

I figured Angus would need to get within 12 or 13 feet of Titanic’s deck for sharp images. Even that close, the reds would dissipate, and the photos would be a ghostly mix of shades of blue. But at least they would be clear. I hobbled over and pulled up a chair right behind Earl. Leaning over his shoulder, I gave the order to take Angus down to 13 feet.

in the photo lab. He came out smiling, announcing triumphantly that we had terrific pictures. Argo’s video cameras had also run for most of the first week, and we had shot more than 20,000 frames in 8,000 locations. We had all that to take home and study. It wasn’t until we got into the analysis that we realized we’d passed over Titanic’s stern. It lay 2,000 feet south of the bow, near where we’d spotted that first boiler.

I headed back to the North Atlantic for a second visit to Titanic aboard Woods Hole’s R/V Atlantis II, the mother ship for Alvin. Because we had discovered Titanic with only four days left in our 1985 expedition, we needed to go back and photograph the wreckage more thoroughly. Most important, I wanted to send a robot inside.

One day, my secretary got a phone call from someone who said the White House was calling. President Reagan wished to invite me to a dinner in honor of Prince Charles and Princess Diana. Thinking it was a prank, my secretary asked them to send the invitation. Sure enough, a huge, embossed envelope soon arrived. It looked like I’d just won an Academy Award. The dinner was to be held not in the grand salons where state occasions normally occur, but upstairs in the private family quarters. I had never been to the White House. I had no idea what was expected of me.

Jean-Louis and I had been partners in the search, and the French had come so close to finding Titanic that I wanted to make sure they shared the glory. On our way back to Woods Hole, we’d sent a small batch of photos to shore by helicopter, carried by one American and one French naval officer, to represent the partnership. I’d made a handshake deal that we’d wait to release our photos in the United States until theirs had arrived in Paris, so the announcement of our discovery could come in a simultaneous press release from both locations. Unfortunately, John Steele, my boss at Woods Hole, had buckled under pressure from U.S. news outlets and let them broadcast the images early. The French were outraged, and so was I.

As far as many of the crew members knew, we were just heading out to resume the search for Titanic. Given the highly classified nature of the mission, the Navy would only let me tell those with a need-to-know status what was really happening. How could I conceal our first stop over Scorpion’s wreckage? It was south of the Azores. Titanic was west. I was waiting for someone to say, “Bob, why is the sun rising on our port instead of our stern?” We told everyone we were testing equipment for the Navy.

But what if the sketches based on Jack Thayer’s account were right? What if Titanic had split open, the two halves plummeting, broken ends first? Then some of what was inside would have tumbled into the ocean like salt and pepper pouring out of shakers. I visualized the ship not just breaking in two but falling to the bottom, with the heaviest pieces heading straight down and lighter ones drifting in the current, just as I had seen with Scorpion and Thresher. It played out like a film in my head and, all of a sudden, it was as clear as a bell. I shouldn’t be searching for the ship. I should be searching for the debris trail. A mile-long trail would be easier for me to find than an 883-foot ship that was maybe in one piece, maybe not.

Around 2 a.m., someone remarked that we were approaching the time of night when Titanic had sunk into a sea as calm as the one we had now. It wasn’t until this point that the emotion of the tragedy fully hit me.

Seventy-three years before, the waters around us were teeming with people crying for help and frantically trying to reach lifeboats. Jack Thayer, the teenager who was in the water with them, described the scene in words I’ll never forget: “Then an individual call for help, from here, from there; gradually swelling into a composite volume of one long continuous wailing chant, from the 1,500 in the water all around us. It sounded like locusts on a midsummer night, in the woods in Pennsylvania.” As Thayer recalled, “This terrible continuing crying lasted for 20 or 30 minutes, gradually dying away…

As we repositioned our navigational transponders around the debris field for better tracking, Knorr’s bottom-sounding sonar made contact with a 100-foot-tall object to our north. It was 13.5 miles southeast of Titanic’s last reported position, but given its proximity to the other debris, it seemed likely to be a significant chunk of Titanic’s hull.

Jack Thayer was right. Titanic had broken in two at its weakest point, between the second and third funnels—a large area with little supporting structure—and the bow and stern had sunk separately. But where was the stern? We wanted to explore further, but bad weather was closing in on us, and we had to reel in Argo.

From late afternoon into the evening on September 4, we tugged Angus over Titanic’s bow five times, cameras snapping away. I was still being cautious, keeping Angus 20 to 30 feet above Titanic’s decks. I knew that the pictures were likely to be fuzzy. After midnight on September 5, word came from our onboard lab that the photos weren’t clear enough.

Woods Hole had arranged interviews for me with one reporter after another, using Knorr’s ship-to-shore hookup. Just as I started talking to Tom Brokaw, the NBC News anchor, I looked out and saw that we were actually sailing away from the Titanic site. Whoa, whoa, wait a minute, I thought. I didn’t get to say goodbye. I had started this quest for its own sake, focused mainly on the challenge. But now I had a deep emotional connection to Titanic. Its resting place is one of those places that speaks to you, like Gettysburg or Normandy.

On our voyage home, I jotted down some thoughts to say to those on land curious to hear the details of our discovery. Titanic lies “on a gently sloping alpine-like countryside overlooking a small canyon,” I wrote. “It is a quiet and peaceful and fitting place for the remains of this greatest of sea tragedies to rest. May it forever remain that way, and may God bless these found souls.

It was rapidly dawning on me by that point: Titanic was not just another trophy. It had given me sufficient status to be included in such company, and thus greater power to implement new projects I was dreaming about. I had been so moved by those letters from thousands of students that I wanted to set up an educational program in science and engineering.

Could Californian have rescued some of Titanic’s passengers and crew members from the icy waters if it had responded to the distress calls? I raised that question once again, to get the reporters’ attention. Now that we knew where Titanic went down, I said, we could see that Californian had indeed been close enough to rescue some of the passengers. The media always crave a controversy, so I gave them one that was 73 years old, and they seized it. By the end of the briefing, I was back in control.

So I called Shirley to get some advice on what to expect and how to behave. Her answer was succinct: Get a room across the street from the White House at the Hay-Adams Hotel. Arrive a few minutes early for dinner and stand to the side and listen as the guests are announced to the press corps.

Fortunately, I had someone I could call: Shirley Temple Black, the child superstar who had grown up to serve as an ambassador and chief of protocol for the United States. I had gotten to know Shirley because her husband, Charlie Black, was on Woods Hole’s board of trustees.

Not long after the White House dinner, I was asked to give lectures on Titanic aboard Queen Elizabeth 2 on a trip from England. They gave us two first-class cabins, and Margie, Dougie, and one of his friends came along. The odd thing was that we had to be diverted from New York to Baltimore. The reason? A warning about icebergs.

took a short break for a different underwater quest that probably drove my more traditional colleagues crazy: I helped National Geographic on an article about the Loch Ness monster. Emory Kristof said I should apply my scientific know-how to the hunt for this mythical beast, and I thought, Why not? There were good reasons to take up the challenge. I had never seen the Scottish Highlands, and this was a chance for Margie and me to do it on someone else’s nickel. We also needed the money that the Geographic project would provide. And, honestly, sometimes it helps not to take yourself too seriously—or so I told myself.

It was a fun trip, ending with a visit by a film crew for the television show In Search Of, hosted by Star Trek’s Leonard Nimoy. I’m sure that also went over well with my scientific colleagues.

No one had ever searched for the wreck, which lay in water up to 13,000 feet deep. A company called Big Events had contacted me in early 1977 about looking for it. Through them, I met William H. Tantum, the president of the Titanic Historical Society, an organization devoted to learning about the ship and its passengers. Bill was a sweet guy and a vivid storyteller, a Yankee version of Shelby Foote, the southern historian in Ken Burns’s epic Civil War documentary. When Bill was talking, it was like you were on Titanic with him. He let me look through all the books, maps, and drawings he’d collected, and his passion to find Titanic stirred my own. We backed away from Big Events when we learned that the company wanted to market paperweights from pieces of Titanic’s cables, but Bill and I stuck together and looked for other opportunities.

You might say that Seaprobe was the perfect ship for pursuing a pipe dream. It was essentially an oil drilling derrick mounted on a sturdy aluminum hull, and it had the machinery to lower lengths of drilling pipe holding either cameras or a giant claw to the seabed.

I was moving away from manned submersibles, which were dangerous and could stay underwater only a few hours at a time, to underwater vehicles that could be operated from on board a mother vessel and that could remain submerged for as long as needed. I even gave names to the robots I was envisioning. I planned to call them Jason and Argo, in honor of the mythical explorer and the vessel in which he had brought home the Golden Fleece. Compared to Alvin, they would be cheaper to operate and could survey much larger areas—a critical factor given the strict time limits on most ocean expeditions.

But I was feeling more urgency to find funding for my undersea robots, and I had a feeling that it was going to take all my sales skills and persistence—and a deeper entrée into the highly classified world of undersea warfare—to persuade Navy officials to help me with my Titanic dream.

The meeting was drawing to a close when Hayward asked a final question. “Dr. Ballard, in your presentation at the War College you mentioned a new underwater exploration technology you have under development. What is the status of that effort?” Before I could respond, Admiral Kollmorgen spoke up, “Admiral, that program is being funded by my office, sir.” At that moment, my Argo/Jason system was born. Kollmorgen approved grants of $500,000 a year for four years—two million dollars total to design the system. Funny how things really get done, isn’t it? But I knew I would need millions more to test it. After the meeting, Thunman arranged for the Navy’s Deep Submergence Systems group to sign me into the highly classified programs that Hayward had mentioned.

I kept pestering him over the next several months, though, and he finally tried to pacify me. “Look, Bob, you can do whatever you want, but you gotta do it within the time and within the money, and that’s it.” Only if I fulfilled the assignments on the two sub wrecks could I squeeze in Titanic. He also agreed to provide me with an additional three million dollars over five years, bringing the Navy total to five million dollars.

The president wants to really play with the Soviets’ minds, I said, to make them think we can do far more than we’re capable of—and we’re capable of a lot. So let me find Titanic. I can find that ship with this gear. Give me two weeks, and I’ll find it, and then we’ll go public. Show videos from the robots roaming through the ballrooms. It will drive the Soviets crazy. They’ll think that if we’re willing to publicize this capability, imagine what our Navy is doing in secret. Lehman had to agree, of course, that the logic was compelling. When he could no longer stand my buzzing in his ears, he said, “OK, I’ll recommend it to the president that we approve it, but just for two weeks.

The Navy knew where both wrecks were: Thresher was about 200 miles east of Massachusetts, but Scorpion was a good two-thirds of the way across the Atlantic, several hundred miles southwest of the Azores. The Navy had already examined them both from submersibles in 1969, but Thunman wanted to photograph the wrecks with the more sophisticated cameras we were developing. He was hoping that new images would help experts determine why Scorpion had sunk. He also wanted to know if either of the steel containment vessels enclosing the subs’ nuclear reactors or the nuclear-tipped torpedoes that Scorpion carried had leaked radiation and harmed the environment. I confirmed that we had the equipment to do a more thorough inspection of both vessels. At some point, I happened to mention that all my life, I’d wanted to search for Titanic, and maybe I could piggyback that search onto these expeditions.

One day, as we formed for breakfast, the drill sergeant checked our faces to see if we had what he called “a good Army shave.” We didn’t, and he sent us back until we had shaved so close we had razor nicks all over our faces. For the first drill, we assembled in a field of tents. We were told to put on gas masks and go into one of the tents, where a metal trash can was pumping out tear gas. We were ordered to remove our masks and give our name, rank, and serial number. As soon as you took off your mask, the razor cuts started to burn, like someone had thrown acid on your face. If you were lucky, you got your name and rank right. But everyone lost control and began to cough violently before spitting out our serial numbers.

of a school year didn’t help. I had lost my fiancée, I had lost my dream, and I wanted to go to a place where I didn’t know anyone. I discovered that the University of Hawaii at Manoa, in Honolulu, offered a master’s degree in oceanography with plans to expand to a Ph.D. program soon. It wasn’t Scripps, but it could get me going again. I had to rush to Honolulu so quickly, I missed graduation at Santa Barbara. I asked the Army for a delay in active duty and began looking for a part-time job. Dr. Norris may not have written the strongest letter of support for me, but he did tell me about his brother, Ken Norris, a UCLA professor who did summer research on whales and dolphins at the Oceanic Institute, east of Honolulu. The institute was connected to Sea Life Park, an aquarium that offered dolphin and whale shows. I zipped out there on a rented moped and soon had two jobs: training dolphins and whales for the tourist shows and helping Dr. Norris with his research when summer rolled around.

trained one of my favorites—Keiki, an Atlantic bottlenose dolphin—to place swimming pool floats in his “piggy bank,” a bicycle basket suspended just underwater. I also trained him to bring floats to me. I would give him one fish for a white float, five for a red float, and 10 for a blue float. He quickly figured that out and brought me his blue floats first. He earned floats during the show, and he would store them in his piggy bank until he could trade them for fish. We did four shows a day, and I learned how to read an audience and improvise to keep them entertained.

I did not know that the institute was providing dolphin trainers to a highly classified Navy research project until I was approached one day about training dolphins to kill enemy divers in Vietnam. Turns out the Vietcong were sending swimmers into Cam Ranh Bay at night to place explosives on American supply ships. The bay was full of floating debris that made it hard to pick out the swimmers from other sonar targets. The idea was that the dolphins could detect the divers and let their trainers know. The trainers would attach a spear with a gas canister on the dolphin’s nose. The creature would swim back and shove the spear into the diver’s chest, inflating his dead body so it floated. It didn’t feel right to put the animals in that position, so I politely declined to get involved.

We were still settling in, a few months later, when there came the proverbial knock on the door. It was a Navy detailer, telling me my transfer had been approved. I was soon assigned to the Office of Naval Research’s Boston location as the liaison officer with research scientists on several campuses, including Scripps’s biggest rival, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution on Cape Cod.

Finally, up to Boston and our first taste of New England: a chaotic March snowstorm. I woke up the next morning, put on my crisp dress blues, ready for my first day at work—and immediately had to change back into jeans to dig the VW out of the snow. It was a difficult introduction to the Northeast for a beachcomber from Southern California, and my first days at the Office of Naval Research weren’t much better. I had been training to be a warrior in the Army, then I got a great job designing submersibles and working on my Ph.D. Being activated by the Navy had meant a sharp detour with a huge pay cut. But here I was. I figured I’d do my duty and then head back to California.

And then, as I shivered on the bridge, I noticed something out on the pond. Trim, white, 21 feet long, there it was: Alvin, a submersible capable of carrying three people down to explore the ocean to a depth of 6,000 feet. Owned by the Navy but operated by Woods Hole, it was on the pond undergoing some sort of testing. I was mesmerized by the sight of it and my sense of what it could do. Alvin was the only submersible at any American oceanographic institution. Scripps didn’t even have one. Up until then, explorations of the deep-sea floor were conducted from the ocean surface, using sonar and other remote detection techniques. I could see that Alvin would make it possible for scientists to go underwater themselves and maneuver around to explore with their own eyes. That made it my kind of sea craft.

I also met Melville Bell Grosvenor, the Society’s president and editor of National Geographic magazine from 1957 to 1967. He was the grandson of Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone and first president of the National Geographic Society. And at Sea Rovers meetings,

I must have wanted to up the ante, because Joe Hohmann remembers that even back then, in the late 1960s, I talked about wanting to find Titanic. Gee, I don’t know what this guy is smoking or drinking, Joe remembers thinking. He viewed my riffs on searching for Titanic, he says today, as just “a pipe dream.

Emery bailed me out again, arranging for me to commute to the University of Rhode Island’s Graduate School of Oceanography to finish my doctorate. Meanwhile, Rainnie said not to worry about a job—I was such a great talker that he’d hire me to promote Alvin in the ocean science community. If only there was another sunken H-bomb to search for, we’d get all the attention we need, I remember Bill saying—and I told him that if only Alvin could find Titanic, everyone would want to use it.

All told, the French made seven dives in Archimède during the first part of Project FAMOUS. When I returned home, I hunkered down for a final 10-month push to finish writing my dissertation, “The Nature of Triassic Continental Rift Structures in the Gulf of Maine.” My oral defense was another tense moment, with several faculty members tossing their toughest questions at me. But all the sacrifice paid off. I passed. I had my Ph.D. degree, and for the rest of my life, nobody could tell me that I couldn’t do it.

That same year I started talking to Alcoa about using a ship, Seaprobe, that had been built for another explorer, Willard Bascom, to search the Black Sea for ancient shipwrecks.

Then, all of a sudden, at 2 a.m. we heard an ear-splitting crash above us, and the vessel trembled. Everyone rushed out to see what had happened. A connection between two pipe lengths had broken somewhere. A giant counterweight atop the drilling derrick had slammed down onto the upper deck above us while 30 tons of pipe smashed into the seabed below, obliterating the pod with all the equipment I had just borrowed. We quickly realized why the accident had happened. Just before we’d sailed, our drilling contractor had quit in a pay dispute, and his inexperienced replacements didn’t realize that the last section of pipe they added needed to be superthick to keep the whole assembly from bending and breaking as the ship moved through the water. For want of a few extra bucks on the front end, we’d lost the $600,000 of equipment I’d borrowed, along with any chance to use Seaprobe to find Titanic. My pipe dream had turned into a pipe nightmare.

NEAR CALAMITIES NOTWITHSTANDING, Project FAMOUS was a huge success. The Americans made 17 dives in Alvin. The French made 27 dives in Archimède and Cyana. The whole project represented an important affirmation of the role submersibles could play in the deep ocean.

Cronkite was a lovely guy, like a father to us. You could see why he’d become the most trusted man in America. He loved science and had covered most of America’s space launches. He’d also gone down in Alvin with me to see hydrothermal vents. He and Spike were as enthusiastic about my quest for Titanic as John was. Early on, we’d dubbed our little group—far too cavalierly—the “Top- Secret Committee to Re-Arrange the Deck Chairs on the Titanic.” I’d promised to give them progress reports.

Why do the deaths of more than 1,500 people retain such a hold on us, more than a century later? Walter Lord, who did more than anyone to chronicle the disaster in his book A Night to Remember, put it so well, saying that we can see ourselves going through the same emotional stages with Titanic passengers and crew members, from disbelief that anything is wrong, through gradual recognition of the danger, and finally to realization that there is no escape. Watching them go through this, Lord wrote, “We wonder what we would do.

I had sent copies of the drawings and most of Bill’s other Titanic materials to my friend, Jean-Louis Michel, the French engineer who was my co-leader on the expedition. Remember, under the deal I’d made with the French, they were going to find Titanic with their powerful new sonar, and I was supposed to come in behind them and photograph the wreckage with my robotic cameras. I’d willingly accepted a secondary role. As it turned out, the French team didn’t even want me there for the first couple weeks of the search. Jean-Louis’s colleagues wanted to find Titanic all by themselves.

Department administrators decided that it would be for the good of all involved to separate Ballard and Lieutenant Robert Olivas. He stayed put in RHD and Ballard was moved out, the message to her clear. Olivas got by unscathed, while she went from an elite unit to a posting no one ever applied or volunteered for, a slot normally reserved for the department’s freaks and fuckups.

So, you're one of the dreamers now, Robert. You've beheld the fata morgana of the terminal lagoon. You look tired. Was it a deep one ?