How the wreck of the Titanic was first rediscovered

Compared to finding sunken ships in the cold abyss of the Ocean, finding a needle in a haystack is child’s play.

It took ingenuity, decades of ceaseless work, and a covert-partnership with the US navy before the ship was finally found.

The huge steamship Titanic sank in 15 April 1912, and families of the victims wanted the bodies of their relatives retrieved.

Other groups wanted to install the shipwreck in a museum in Liverpool, England.

But the early efforts were deeply flawed.

One group planned to trawl the ocean floor with a massive electromagnet, attracting the massive steel structure to the magnet, then reeling it in on a giant winch.

Another proposal involved raising the Titanic by attaching inflatable balloons to her hull, then gently floating it to the surface.

These plans were abandoned out of practical concerns, but also because nobody in the world knew where the wreck was.

For decades, the search was stymied by the fact that when the ship started to go down, its distress signal wrongly reported its location.

And for decades, most had assumed that the ship sank in a single piece, instead of breaking into two halves. 

Progress on locating the Titanic built up steam after the expedition of an eccentric Texas-Oil Tycoon, Jack Grimm.

While Grimm’s 1979 expedition failed to find the shipwreck, it succeeded in creating more accurate maps of the ocean floor near the likely site of wreck.

Hoping to turn his search into a documentary narrated by the famous Orson Welles, Grimm missed the site of the wreck by just 3km.

The breakthrough in the search would come in the mid 1980s.

Robert Ballard was an American Marine Geologist who had served in the US navy throughout his research career.

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His earlier attempts in 1977 at finding the titanic ended in disaster, after the cable he was using to survey the ocean’s floor shattered, losing millions of dollars of electrical equipment.

Where previous efforts had just used sonar to scan the ocean floor, his research group the Woods Hole oceanographic institute, developed a new system of remote controlled cameras and robots attached to a submersible vehicle.

The development of the robot system was paid for by the US navy, who agreed to help Ballard search for the Titanic, on the condition that Ballard and his team first help them locate two missing nuclear submarines in a top secret mission.

The US Navy sent Ballard and his team on a classified mission to the wrecks of two previously lost nuclear submarines, the USS Scorpion, and the USS Thresher.

Using his new system, Ballard tracked the “trail of debris” which fanned out away from the wrecks.

By manually watching the camera images, Ballard was able to determine what was man-made debris, and eventually traced the debris back to both of the missing submarines.

The Navy held up their end of the deal, and gave Ballard just twelve days remaining at the end of the Navy’s allocated mission time, to travel to the possible site of the Titanic’s wreck which had been narrowed down over the years.

Applying the same technique he used to locate the nuclear submarines, Ballard and his crew, set up around the clock surveillance of the cameras, as they traced the path of debris that may lead to the elusive Titanic.

Finally, at 12.48 am on Sunday 1 September, 1985, they spotted a tiny detail in a grainy image, beamed back to the ship from a depth of 3786 metres below the surface.

The discovery, which proved to be rust-covered steam boiler, was confirmed to be a part of the long-lost Titanic.

The next day, the main part of the wreck was found and the Titanic was seen for the first time since her sinking 73 years before.

The discovery made headlines around the world, and catapulted Ballard to overnight celebrity.

Ballard paved the way for future dives into the sunken ship, and he remains an advocate for underwater archaeology to this day.