“It’s a boiler!” With that bellow of triumph at 1 a.m. on Sept.
1, 1985, Bob Lange, a Research Specialist who had been spending
long hours in the control room of the research vessel Knorr,
became the first person to see the RMS Titanic since she had
vanished into the depths of the North Atlantic 74 years earlier.
His shout was the climax of what had been a three-week long
search for the wreck, a search that up until that moment seemed
doomed to failure. The Knorr was the platform for an extended
test of the deep-sea video search and survey system called Argo,
the brainchild of Dr. Robert Ballard, who led the search under
the auspices of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, of Woods
Hole, Mass. Argo was a sled-like device that mounted both video
and still cameras that could allow its operators to view the
bottom of the ocean in “real time,” a priceless asset in
exploring–and searching–the ocean floor. Ironically, finding the
Titanic was an unexpected bonus for the Woods Hole expedition.
In what was one of t