Scott,
I've been wanting to mention your role in this before now, but didn't know if that was something that you would have wanted me to do. The closest I came to letting the cat out of the bag was my comment about "Georgia" above.
Matt Hickey at Actuality Productions selected the interviewees and I think he put together a good cross-section of expertise, given the subject matter. I wish more could have been gotten, especially from this crowd, but I wasn't the one trying to take the concept and turn it into reality in the face of a variety of hurdles.
I especially appreciated your depth of knowledge in the subjects you addressed. The steam flow animation was put together and included in the programme as a direct result of your talk on the subject. Otherwise, I don't know if anyone would have thought to include it.
I am more proud of the animation of the Marconi disc discharger than anything else I contributed (I am certainly much more proud of the animation than having my mug on camera). When I first started to look at Titanic's Marconi apparatus, no one, including the Marconi Corporation archivist and historian, knew the exact configuration of Titanic's discharger. There is one picture of an apparatus that was identified in a 1912 Daily Sketch article as being of the same type as installed aboard Titanic, but even that picture did not reveal much detail about the discharger (this picture was shown during the show). It wasn't until Jim Cameron filmed the actual discharger assembly in the remains of Titanic's Silent Room that the Daily Sketch photo could be corroborated and the reconstruction of the disc discharger could seriously proceed. At this point, a happy accident occurred. Ken Marschall had sent me a Xerox copy of an old "Voyage" article a year or two ago that included a picture of a wireless set in a yacht. I was flipping through my files one day when I ran across that forgotten article. Before, I didn't recognise the discharger...now, after having become familiar with Titanic's discharger through intense study of the wreck video, I immediately recognised the yacht's discharger as a clone of Titanic's. You can imagine my excitement. I contacted Marconi, who sent me a better copy of the picture. This all happened while I was advising the animators at CLU on the construction of the Marconi/Silent Room CG models for GotA. We were able to "reconstruct" the discharger virtually, just in time to make the deadline for the film and companion book.
As you know, the History Channel project was a completely separate project. Ken and I were pulled in the very week after the GotA deadlines had passed. Because of the potential for copyright infringement, we could not use the CG model created for GotA in the TV show. However, during the GotA work, I had learned the basics of 3-D modelling. I built my own simplistic CG model of the discharger assembly, breaking it down into sections in order to show how the thing worked. I then turned that model over to the animator working for Actuality, and he did a marvelous job of photo-realistically rendering and animating the telegraph key (which is a virtual model of my own telegraph key), disc and spark to demonstrate how it worked. I was really pleased to see the final animation in the show last night (before that, all I had seen were selected screen grabs).
There is a downside to this, however. I am bleeding information away from the book I'm supposed to be writing about Titanic's Marconi apparatus. I also haven't been working on the book during the time that I've been involved with GotA and the History Channel (and E-T, for that matter). The delay and premature revelation of portions of my research is putting my book in serious jeopardy. I have no choice, though...work on the virtual reconstruction of the Marconi apparatus continues to yield new information. If I wasn't so heavily involved in the reconstructive effort, my book would have been seriously flawed. And, all the 3-D modelling I'm doing will eventually serve as illustration for the book, if it ever gets published.
Thank you for your mention of it. You are right...the Marconi apparatus has never been adequately explained to date. This is through no fault of anyone who has attempted it in the past, it's just that hard evidence has been lacking all these years. It wasn't until Cameron discovered and filmed the Marconi spaces in the Titanic wreck that bits and pieces of extant information could be recognised and drawn together into an adequate explanation. I'm still working the issue, believe me, every single day. I have no intention of letting this fabulous opportunity pass by without giving it my best effort.
At the risk of sounding self-congratulatory, I think you and the rest of the participants did an outstanding job on this show. Not perfect, but as good as we could manage. And something that I think people should know...we didn't get paid for our contributions; at least, I didn't. I didn't even get gas money for my trips up to L.A. People gave their time, the results of their research, some quality source material, and even paid their own expenses, all in the interest of producing a quality program. It's nice to know that people like Don, Michael, Pat, James, Erik, Dave and Lee and others seem to appreciate the result.
Parks
