Lord traveled on the RMS Olympic, Titanic's sister ship, when he was a boy and the experience gave him a lifelong fascination with the lost liner.[1] As he later put it, he spent his time on the Olympic "prowling around" and trying to imagine "such a huge thing" sinking. He started reading about and drawing Titanic at the age of ten and spent many years collecting Titanic memorabilia, causing people to "take note of this oddity."[2] He majored in history at Princeton University and graduated from Yale Law School before joining the New York-based advertising agency J. Walter Thompson.[2] Writing in his spare time, he interviewed 63 survivors of the disaster.[3]