An expedition will recover the Titanic’s telegraph — the radio it used to call for help as it sank. Here’s how it’ll work.
by Holly Secon, Business Insider US
- A recent court ruling allows a company called RMS Titanic, Inc. to move forward with a plan to recover the radio transmitter from the Titanic shipwreck that broadcast its distress calls.
- The radio, known as the Marconi telegraph, is in a part of the ship that’s degrading.
- But the company has designed a remote operating vehicle with a specialized tool that it says can carefully retrieve the radio with minimal disturbance to the shipwreck.
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A federal judge ruled this week that a salvage company can go forward with a plan to recover the telegraph that the Titanic used to send out distress calls as it sank.
RMS Titanic Inc., the court-designated salvage company for the Titanic, plans to send a remove operated vehicle (ROV) into the Marconi suite, the room from which operators sent Morse-code calls for help after the ship crashed into an iceberg 108 years ago.
The judge ruled that the radio has enough “historical, educational, scientific and cultural value” to justify the expedition.
“If it wasn’t for this radio, no distress signals would have been able to be sent, no one would have survived, and we may not have ever found the Titanic,” Bretton Hunchak, president of RMS Titanic, Inc., told Business Insider.
The court ruling overturned a 2000 order prohibiting the company from cutting into the ship’s hull. But now, 20 years later, there’s a worry that if the expedition doesn’t take place soon, it may never be able to happen.
“The ironic thing is where the boat is sort of degrading is right at the Marconi suite,” Hunchak said. “Our main concern is that it is going to be lost very soon.”
A team is already preparing for the mission, which is set to take place in late August or September, as long as it’s safe to do so amid the coronavirus pandemic at that point.
How to recover a radio 12,500 feet underwater
RMS Titanic, Inc.’s ROV will be controlled by operators on a boat sailing above the wreck site.
They will send the vehicle down to the ship, locate and enter the Marconi suite, then take images and use a specialized tool attached to the ROV to retrieve the Marconi telegraph.
The robot might have to cut open part of the Marconi suite to do so. The recent court ruling allows for the removal of a piece of the ship for the first time.
But Hunchak said the company is nonetheless designing the mission to disturb as little of the Titanic as possible.
“There’s a lot of holes in the roof and it’s very possible that we may be able to reach in if we were to create a tool small enough,” he said. “So what we designed is a tool that actually stays very skinny on its own, slides down through those holes in the roof, and sort of opens up, and is able to operate then inside the context of a larger room.”
A similar tool that the company used in past salvage expeditions is shown below, retrieving a piece of luggage debris from the wreck.
“We do know the exact dimensions and we’ve sort of mapped this out and prior to doing any extraction, we’re actually running 3D simulations all the time with the guys who created the tool,” Hunchak added. “It’s not going to be the first time we’re there. It’s not going to be a surprise. We kind of know what to expect and sort of the confines that we’re operating in.”
Before the expedition, the team will take the boat and the ROV out near the site of the wreck and run practice drills in shallower water.
The Marconi telegraph and other Titanic artifacts
This isn’t RMS Titanic Inc.’s first deep-sea dive. The company has had salvage rights for the shipwreck since the 1980s, and it previously collected over 5,000 plates, sheet music, hat pins, ship decorations, and other artifacts from the wreck via ROV expeditions.
But the Marconi telegraph could provide new insight into the messages that the “unsinkable” Titanic sent and received before it struck the infamous iceberg, as well as the distress calls it sent out as it sank. The wreck killed about 1,500 people.
“It’s been something that a lot of the historians have always wanted to recover,” Hunchak said.
Other groups, however – including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration – have opposed this commercial salvage mission, instead calling for the preservation of the wreck.