Tom Barron
Member
Project Dance Band On Titanic -part III-
I realize that I have hit you with a lot of information all at one time here, and that some of what our ideas were may not have come through with sufficient clarity without pictures or drawings to give you a better mental image of what we were trying to do. If people are interested in the idea of tourist robots on the wreck of the Titanic, I do believe that it would be possible for this system to be put together in nine months. This obviously is way beyond ʻtwo guys in a garageʼ being able to pull off. With the patent on the communications link, we would have had the lock on this project because we’d have kept the rights to use it on Titanic. As it sits right now, this is just a lot
of work that went up in smoke and a bunch of boxes of junk in the basement. There is no way
that any of us will ever be able to make a dime after I disclosed all that technology to Woods
Hole. The fact that it was never taken seriously there (“We’re not into exploiting the Titanic”)
does not make any difference at all; it still constitutes disclosure and nullified the other patents.
My somewhat cynical attitude toward WHOI about their hypocrisy with regards to the Titanic
knows no bounds. Roy’s model of the wreck is on display there. They made out like bandits with
endowments and grants, and the PR generated by the Titanic being found has paid them pretty
good dividends over the years. Google ‘who discovered the Titanicʼ and whose name pops up?
Right: What was the other guy’s name? Oh yeah, Freedom Fries, and their ʻaccidentallyʼ holding
a press conference all by their little lonesome is the worst kind of academic backstabbing. Its
more like a shiv in a prison shower, and nobody said one damn thing when ol’ Frenchy got
shivved, did they? I do not hold Bob Ballard responsible for that rather nasty piece of work, it’s not the guy’s style. But Bob wasn’t there when that press conference was called, and as far as ʻstrained working relationshipsʼ between IMFREMR and WHOI goes, you can bet your bottom
dollar that every French member of the team knew that they had been backstabbed by their
American buddies so that they could obtain more research grants for finding the Titanic all by
themselves. Jean Michel who? What? Bob did it all by himself. I just Goggled it and who are you
talking about? What ʻco-discovererʼ? This is something that happened within living memory, but
has been rewritten over the years. I have a bone to pick with pious sounding hypocrites, and
those Frenchmen know how the academic games are played and they knew they’d been screwed over royally by the same folks that say ʻWeʼre not into exploiting the Titanicʼ so piously
today. They’d already made their bones and made out like bandits as far as the grants and
endowments went from that ʻaccidentʼ of WHOI totally ignoring that ʻweʼll hold a joint press
conferenceʼ written into the agreement the expedition was operating under.
It may sound like I am using this platform here to slam WHOI. I am. Bob Ballard has been very
vocal over the years about the salvage operation conducted on the ship and has felt all right
about using his books for a bully pulpit from which to preach. I do not feel that he is one of the bad guys who screwed the French; I think that was done by others at WHOI. Institutions can do good things and still be petty and greedy. Wilbur Wright hated the Smithsonian Institute for what it tried to do to him and his brother. The Institute wanted Professor Langley to get the credit for inventing the airplane and got together with Glenn Curtiss when he was trying to break the Wrights patent on their control system. He rebuilt Langley’s failed machine and got it to fly, with a little bit of ʻrestoration workʼ that changed the camber of the wings, braced the structure far past where Langley had it originally, and quietly modified it so that it would actually fly, thus ʻprovingʼ that Langley should be credited with building the first airplane capable of flight. This
kind of stuff that the well respected Smithsonian Institute tried to pull on the Wrights upset Orville so much that he sent the original Kitty Hawk Flier to London to be displayed. WHOI got away with the shivving in the shower bit, and everyone looked the other way, but I really do disrespect that institute’s personnel laying off that absolutely holier than thou attitude toward anyone who wants to do anything with that shipwreck besides leave it alone in the dark forever.
Next April 15th, we will be treated to another display of self congratulations at WHOIʼs finding the wreck, and more money will go to them. My personal opinion on this is my personal opinion. I am not trying to make it seem that money was not what motivated us, but it was not the primary motivation. What happened with the disclosure of our proprietary information to them was our fault; well, more specifically my fault. I really messed up when I sent that
report to Dr. Ballard. From there it was sent over to WHOI and a VP there came back with the
BS about we’re not into exploiting the Titanic.ʼ That was the entire reply from the WHOI guy to
my first email. I wrote back and explained that the support system would lower the costs of
doing business in deep water and he came back with ʻthere is no such thing as a pressure
tolerant electronic partʼ and I hadn’t known that. I wrote everyone involved in this and asked if that was a silver bullet for us or not? Reinhold sent me a list of which parts are pressure tolerant and which are not. Roy wrote and said that the guy was full of it, because he’d been through their shops and seen electronic parts in oil baths. Danny checked it out and discovered that items which have air gaps in them (like resistors), crunch under pressure and fail. I realize that the WHOI rep? was a busy guy who thought he was dealing with a bunch of totally ignorant amateurs who did not know anything and he just wanted to blow us off and not be bothered having to deal with us. But my respect for what WHOI went through the floor with the attitude I was being shown by, as Reinhold put it, that ʻsecond rate loser who doesn’t even know his own job.ʼ Now do you understand a bit about my emphasis on the putting the economics of this project right out in front first? If I had not, sooner or later someone would be saying how we were ʻjust trying to exploit the poor drowned women and children of the ship to make a few underhanded dollars through our exploitation of the tragedy.ʼ That sneak up and stab them in the back trick works well in academia, but I am more of a right in your face kind of guy, and I am not about to put up with that from people who screw other people over ʻaccidentallyʼ and reap major bucks laying that holier than thou attitude, presuming they are way above any low life money grabbing people like us. They deserve to be called on their attitudes and their hypocrisy, and since this seems to be the only time I will be publishing anything at all about the Titanic, I have just as much right to use my own writings to preach what I believe as Bob Ballard has that same right to preach in his writings.
The simple fact of this project is that it is politically undoable. The Titanic is a politician’s wet dream. If this project of ours had gotten further along than it did, there would be tons of hearings on this, and guess whose opinion would be solicited by politicians looking for a photo op? Not mine. My name would be Mud. Iʼd be the poster boy for exploiting those poor, dead, drowned pregnant women and children who perished so tragically that .. pardon me while I hurl here, folks, but I think you know the tune. I wanted to go sight see the wreck, I did not expect that kind of rude treatment, and I sure as hell have nothing at all good to say about the way they pulled the old ʻup yours, baby, weʼre getting it all!ʼ trick on IMFREMER and good old Jean Michel who? Fame is a commodity here; it is worth money, and not theoretical money, but hard money in hand. The more famous the institute you work for, the easier it is to go out and get bucks. That isn’t made up, who makes more money, the kid that graduated from Harvard or the kid that graduated from University of Arkansas? The Harvard kid got in because ‘mah daddy knows peopleʼ and drank and drugged his way through and perhaps graduated by hiring someone to take his finals, while the other kid graduated 4.0 and did original work in a half a dozen fields: ʻUniversity of .. you gotta be kidding! We don’t hire hillbillies here!ʼ Fame is a commodity and I’m personally glad that Bob Ballard got famous out of this and raised money to go to Bismarck, Yorktown and Iron Bottom Sound. I think he has inspired a lot of kids to take an interest in oceanography. Yeah, he does make some mistakes in his criticizing of the sub drivers wrecking the ship, but he’s a geologist and had not thought that one through. Sometimes it’s difficult being famous, and I have no use for fame personally, but it also makes it harder for
people to tell you honestly that you’re barking up the wrong tree.
Rust is iron oxide. It is caused by oxidation. The shipwreck has a very limited number of years
left before the upper decks just fall into the ship. Then it will be a boat shaped steel wall for a while and then the walls will collapse, too. Dr. Ballard is a geologist and geologists know how an eighth of an inch a year can open up an ocean or close it over long periods of time. What he is not really familiar with is what is going on in front of his eyes, as it’s not something he recognizes. Take a piece of steel wool, pull it apart a bit and then set fire to it. It will burn, because there is a lot of area exposed. Titanic is actually burning up in the sea and the rust is the ash left over from her combustion. What he thought was damage caused by the sub pilots was actually just the crow’s nest burning up and blowing away. The boilers in the bow section used to be covered over by smashed down upper decks covering them, but that deck overhanging those boilers has now gone away. It has burned up. The idea of painting the ship to prevent it from deteriorating further is impractical. What is your medium going to be for the paint? Paint is laid down and the medium evaporates leaving behind pigments that have bonded together. Oil, water based, the oil will float away and you cannot evaporate water in water. Next time you are by the shore, check out an old abandoned steel boat. Pretty crunchy, isn’t it? I think of it as ʻpotato chip steelʼ, and this is what has been happening to the wreck of the Titanic.
As far as the ʻleave her alone in the darkʼ sentiments go, Iʼd go through the entire wreck with robots that would walk like spiders and have ultrasound receptors and transmitters on their legs so they can find things under the layers of silt while they still can be recovered and displayed. Of what possible use is leaving those things there? So some archeologist in the year 2700 can go scoop the things that didnʼt corrode in eight hundred years? What would that be, I wonder? Flattened wedding rings, flattened when the decks finally collapse into the hulls maybe five years from now?
There are about ten thousand people who make their living in the deep water field worldwide.
What prevents this community from growing is the expense of operating in that environment.
How many manned machines can reach Titanic today? Seven, and two of them were in the
Cameron movie. Mir 1 & 2. Alvin, the NR-1 has been decommissioned, sorry to say. The
Aluminaut, I believe, is still in service, and I think that the French operate a submersible, but I am not sure of its name. Natille? I donʼt believe that the Trieste was counted among those
seven machines, but I am not sure. That was off the top of my head without Googling the
answers, but my point being here is that most of these machines were built back in the sixties
and early seventies, with the Russian machines built in the late eighties or early nineties.
There is fabulous wealth in the deep oceans, but the tools to unlock it have not yet been
developed. Bobʼs idea of telepresensing is inherent in the DBOT support system. The search for the black boxes of an Airbus that went down in the Atlantic a few years ago cost more than the entire system we were proposing for Titanic. That gives you an idea of just how expensive deep
water work is, and if it werenʼt for lawsuits being filed, that black box search would never have been conducted.
In the sixties, a manganese nodule mining scheme was discovered and considerable work was
done on the machines needed to do it. However, a large manganese discovery was made while
that project was being worked on which was so big that it dropped the price of manganese to
the point where that operation would no longer be economically feasible to do. Currently, the
price of manganese has risen almost to a level where that scheme will be profitable to restart.
That scheme is a surface support ship operation, and it maybe that this DBOT system would put
the idea into the black right now. I am guessing here, because I have not looked into the details
of what is really required to mine manganese ʻpotatoesʼ lying on the sea floor. What are all the valuable materials on the floors of all of the worldʼs oceans of the world worth? I have no idea, but I do believe that will be something worth investigating. All new frontiers have something in them we didnʼt expect. We didnʼt expect the moon to be made out of green cheese when Apollo 1 landed there, but I think it was a surprise to find out that the moon was actually made from the Earth.
I have no idea of how long it will take before the stuff we came up with to do Titanic is picked up by someone else, but I do know that until there is a system which lowers the costs of deep ocean work, that the deep water community wonʼt be able to grow. Will our system change the economics enough so that children born today will have the option of making a living in the deep oceans of this world? I canʼt say; I donʼt know, but I think that until the methodology used changes, there will never be room for many people to make a living doing work in deep water.
The economics of it will always be straight jacketed by the million plus dollars per month
operating costs. The Keldysh can be used for better purposes than Titanic. I think that running over with a purpose built robot and picking up one tea cup every other year and retrieving it would keep the RMS Titanic Inc salvage claim alive. There is no real hard and fast rule that you have to pick it up by a specific method in any of the rules Iʼve read, but I have not read them all; nor have I read all of the court cases.
If anyone is interested in the technology we were working on, they will have to realize that this all was a shoe string operation and if they want to see the blueprints for the recharging racks, there are none. There are no blueprints anymore; drafting has given way to CAD CAM. The Kite and String scheme consists of some anchor designs and sketches of the rest of the system. The further downstream, the less detailed it is, but the idea of what those pieces are for is not that difficult to understand.
This would require a serious effort, and why should anyone bother to build such a system in the present economic climate? A twenty five dollar ticket price a few years ago would not be
something most of you would thought twice about, but the world has changed since we started
this project. There is only one single place I can see to get the money for this project and that is from a major corporation that would be doing it basically for the bragging rights. Mitsubishi Heavy Industries built a coeoleth fish that swims around in a tank in an aquarium in Japan. The CIA has built Charlie the RoboCatfish. Now MIT has a RoboPike and frankly, there isnʼt one venture capitalist whoʼd be interested in building fish if he found out that his competition is Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, the Nippon Marine Research Institute, MIT and the CIA. Nekton LLC got absorbed by iRobot, who are more into building bomb disposal robots than fish these days: Which leaves us with Corporate Bragging Rights as the sole reason to build this system.
If the 100th Anniversary of the sinking does not create a lot of hullabaloo, well, James Cameron
is re-releasing Titanic in three D. I imagine WHOI will not let the occasion pass without putting the squeeze on a few of their contributors who they know are Titanic buffs, and I am fairly certain that IMFREMR will be holding a few small get-togethers featuring a few effigies being burned, and a lot of finely honed insulting remarks will be made about working with Americans ever again. It will be hype city for one or two days or a week or a month, depending on how the movie does at the box office. As far as ʻhypeʼ goes, ʻyou ainʼt seen nothinʼ yetʼ, compared to what kind of hype there would be if a major corporation got involved in putting together the system we came up with. This just doesnʼt modestly say, ʻour tech is way better than yoursʼ, it just comes right out and screams it in your face. You think not? Name another new form of entertainment invented in this century? Bingo, you think that just doesnʼt sock other high tech companies right square between the eyes?
Like I said, any professionally trained deep water engineer will pee their pants laughing at the idea of a ten dollar an hour rental robot on the Titanic. It just cannot be done with todayʼs
technology and they are the experts in the field and screw that trying to show them anything
which falls into Not Invented Here territory. If you know anyone who is a professional deep water engineer and you want to try that theory, expect to get some laughs out of them; and if you press the issue, theyʼll explain to you why youʼre such a sweet naí¯ve child, but you just wonʼt understand until you get to be a grown up, too! There can be an amazing amount of arrogance descend upon you from the technically sophisticated, so be prepared for that too. Also donʼt ever expect any kind of respect from a venture capitalist. They have money, you donʼt. You donʼt deserve to be given respect, you deserve to be taken to the cleaners for not being wealthy.
Operating on the levels of reality this job of mine required has not made me a better human
being. Itʼs made me a very cynical human being, but I can no longer give you a definition of the
difference between cynicism and being realistic. As far as the laughing of the professional deep
water community goes, if you had collected together all of the leading aviation experts in the world and asked them how to set up an airline, youʼd have gotten that same condescending laughter from them in the year 1900. Less than two decades later, it was a reality. How long would this stuff take to light off? I have no idea. It simply does not matter to me at all anymore.
I am sorry that the tone of what I have written here will tick some of you off. I can afford my
sarcastic outlook on life and I have most definitely? paid my dues here. I feel that I can express my own opinions just as well as anyone at WHOI looking down their nose at me can. I would much rather give money to IMFREMR than to WHOI. Yeah, the French have attitude, they also
have style, grace, and an appreciation of food and an acceptance of life as being enjoyable and
a lack of hypocrisy about morality and politicians. It seems to me that there isnʼt a corporation left in America that has the brains to go for something like this. Do you remember those GE ads about how innovative they are? That Kitty Hawk Flyer with the honking great jet engine mounted on it? I wrote to them and they said they were not open for discussion on any new technologies. One of Mitsubishi salarymen told me to go away and stop trying to contact the company. Presentation is everything, and all that now matters is form without content. Dannyʼs employer tried to rip us off for his invention as they were laying him off, and if I had not screamed at him to have our patent lawyer look over the ʻreleaseʼ form, heʼd have signed it unread. Gee, a free, non-revolkable, world wide license to manufacture! Yeah, that is a rip off, and I had to ask my lead attorney if it was okay to say something like that? She said, ʻas long as itʼs true, they canʼt
win a lawsuit against you.ʼ Anyone want to see the ʻreleaseʼ form? They might not be able to win
in court, but they sure as hell can sue and sue and sue.
You cannot go through some of the stuff this project put me through and not change. I do not
feel that these have been positive changes for me. After all, dropping the ball so badly you
destroy all of that work is not something which makes you a better person; it just makes you a
loser. I have been into the Titanic since I found a copy of Reader Digest Condensed book on my aunt and uncleʼs bookshelf when I was about eight years old. The sight of the ship up-ending caught my mind. I think that Walterʼs book might actually be the first adult book I ever read. I was in the library scoping out the National Geographic Iʼd missed on the discovery of the Titanic when a friend of mine walked in and said, “Hey, did you hear the Shuttle blew up?” and I said, ʻNo,whatʼs the punch line?ʼ The day the Twin Towers came down, I went to buy a book at Nolo Press about something I had to learn in order to do this project. I have learned and read and talked to experts about her sinking, and when I look at the odds on her sinking like she did, I am dumbfounded at the calculable odds. No officer on the ship looking at the sea conditions that night had ever seen any ocean that calm before. The very first berg they came to they hit and it had just rolled over and was presenting a dark surface against the sea until it finally rose above the horizon where the look outs could see it. Then the turn to avoid it just grazed the side of the hull all the way along her side until the rudder was thrown over so the stern missed. Head on collision at full speed: Survivable. Ship runs into side at forty five degree angle: Survivable. You do not build ocean liner to survive surfing a thousand foot tall tsunami, because that is just an impossible scenario. Itʼs way outside the range of possibilities. Much is made of ʻbrittle steelʼ
causing her doom, but that same steel was used on Olympia and she survived up until Cunard
sent her to the breakers in 1932. He engine pedestals needed work; she was kind of an odd duck in their schedule, sharing her round trip schedule with two other liners which were not in her class. But what really laid her low was a few trips where the crew outnumbered the passengers. The changing of the emigration laws that had been the reason she was born in the first place and the reason for her profitability made her obsolete. The Titanic was the victim of a million to one long shot. A million? There were man-centuries of experience in her officers and none of them had ever seen an ocean as flat as it was that night. The very first ice berg they chance upon they hit? What are the odds? A billion to one? What kind of timing does it take to just graze the side of an iceberg like that? How many feet are we talking about there? Too heavy an impact on the bow would have buckled and caved in the hull, but how many compartments being rammed would it take to either deflect the ship to one side or stop its forward motion as surely as if it had hit land. The Titanic is some kind of jackpot winner, all right, just in the collision alone. Radio operator turns in a few miles away and doesnʼt find out about her sinking until the next day. Bridge officers hove to on another ship watched her sink just a little too far away to read her signal lamp. She should not have sunk, but that scenario of
ʻLetʼs say we rip open one third of her hullʼ is just way too farfetched to be believable. There are just no believable cases that can be presented to justify that kind of engineering on a passenger ship. You want it to be able to surf tsunamis too?
The fact is, ʻworst than worst case scenariosʼ happen all the time. I am a flat out pessimist about things going wrong with technology. The worst case scenario you design for gets outmoded by real life. The guys at Fukishima had no way to get in touch with anyone after that forty foot high wall of water went through and everyone was so shook up after the earthquake nobody gave a single thought to that plant. Then there is just plain dumb, and the crew at Chernobyl fall into that category. The Hindenburg went up like a torch because her fabric was coated with a chemical compound that would be used decades down the line as solid rocket fuel and nobody knew. Three Mile Island, a sticky valve; Challenger, a blown gasket. There will always going to be disasters caused by things we didnʼt plan on, didnʼt know about, or that were way outside the lines of what is theoretically possible until it becomes entirely too real. The Unthinkable becomes reality and having faith in technology is just a matter of playing the odds. What I find amusing is how ʻsafeʼ nuclear power is. Oh, that canʼt happen here; we use much better type of reactors. The only accident we ever had didnʼt hurt anyone in Pennsylvania, did it? Now, the Russians, well, what can I say? Sloppy workmanship and sheer stupidity: Our type of reactors canʼt explode.ʼ Kapowie! And there goes another! When it gets to guys with fire hoses trying to put atomic fires, itʼs gone a little past where that claim about how unbreakable and safe nuclear power is and right into the Twilight Zone. Things break, things you did not plan on happen, and the odds catch up with you. You didnʼt believe it was dangerous, and so how it all works out so that in the end is we all die.
The present day tone of political discussion seems to be to block the other guy from doing
anything if you canʼt win. You wonʼt be able to win, but the other guy wonʼt be able to either.
Thwarting what someone else wants to do seems to be the way to go these days. It does not
matter how much credibility you have, nor how bright you are, you canʼt know everything and
thatʼs just the way life is. You have to make dumb mistakes before you can move up to the next
level and make slightly less dumb mistakes. Ideas evolve; ideas are now where our species
evolution is happening. Divine right of kings, serfdom, owning human beings, all of these ideas
have landed on the scrap heap of history. What is sad about this world we live in today is just
how quickly and effectively you can discredit someone just by hurling a charge. Iʼve written
about our work with a pugnacious attitude ringing loud and clear throughout this essay about our work, because I know exactly how this game works. Weʼre ʻExploitersʼ are we not? There is no sound bite quick reply to that charge, is there? Dr. Ballardʼs opinion on this would be solicited and congressmen would listen gravely to his opinion and weʼd be grubby little hustlers scheming to make a buck off of the dead.
A suggestion came my way during this project that we might be able to gain some world wide
publicity from sending some of our robots deep into the interior of the Estonia to gather
evidence about the mass murder that took place there. Google M.V Estonia AND ʻThe German
Group of Experts.ʼ Do you believe the government of Sweden would try to cover up a mass
murder? The shipyard that built Estonia took serious exception to the idea that ʻthe bow door
just fell offʼ as that cost them contracts. Do not make charges like that when you are dealing
with the resources of a company that can hire the level of expertise as represented by the
German Group of Experts. The implied slur is that they are such idiots that their total
incompetence killed eight hundred people one dark and stormy night and that was the
government of Sweden slurring their good name and reputation. What caused that sinking was
was the CIA rolling semi truck loads of top secret Russian gear onto the ship and taking it to Sweden. The Cold War might have been over, but the warriors who fought it thought they were getting away scot free, with helping themselves to everything they could buy in Russia. They figured there was nothing anyone could do about it. Unfortunately, the Russian covert community did not see things quite the same way . A movie has been made about that sinking, yet many people have never heard that story and probably are reacting in the same as I did when I first heard it. The government of Sweden conspiring to cover up a mass murder and slander a ship builderʼs good reputation? That is just not possible. Go look at the forensic reports the German group of experts wrote. Check out their credentials. Yes, there are a lot of things to find in the deep ocean, and yes, what kind of a horrible human being can ever think of using a mass murder for publicity? Iʼm one who doesnʼt like cover ups of mass murderers. Iʼm not saying that the government of Sweden didnʼt have some good reasons for taking that stance. Itʼs just that I do not agree with the covert services of the world being licensed to kill civilians.
Being so closely involved with this project caused my entire way of thinking to change: Solving the technical problems is fairly easy, compared to solving the politics of Titanic. I am quite cynical, (or realistic, same deal there to me nowadays). I have developed ʻoperational paranoiaʼand learned to think as a business person. I do think that our project was a doable thing, at least technically. This is a lot of stuff to dump on you all at once. There are nine months before the one hundredth anniversary, and itʼs a matter of finding out if the communications link works or not. If it does, this system can be built. If it does not, then this system cannot be built. If it works,it entails throwing money at a problem, and the only result for the people who invented this stuff is having their reputations slurred by mealy mouth hypocrites bent on making sure they get more grant money and endowments.
I wrote earlier on that I canʼt think of a single thing Iʼd buy with a half a billion dollars. Yes, I can think of one thing, and that would be this old wreck. Then Iʼd give it away. Seriously.
The fact of the matter is that as a tourist draw, what youʼd be looking at would be some piles of rusty steel and odds and ends of broken metal lying on the muddy sea floor. There are no
bodies lying around, just those ghastly pairs of shoes toes pointing out from each other. A
marker that says a human being was wearing them, they died, and this is where their now
evaporated body has come to rest.
The idea of tourism on the Titanic disturbs some people. They believe that this is a place where
the dead should quietly be left alone in the dark to lie in peace. The death of over a thousand people in one spot is not a unique feature of that ill fated liner; there are many places where Titanicʼs list of dead would not be a footnote. World War One battles would run through those thousand dead in minutes. Even the thought of a couple of kids using our machines for a dog fight on the Grand Stairway sends shudders through some of you, but kids are dragged to battle fields on family vacations every year and climb on the cannons at Gettysburg, wander around and get lost at Verdun, want to go play on Omaha beach. Kids are kids, and keeping them from hurting the wreck is our job; their job is to go see what they can do and see for fun. A pile of transforming rusty scrap metal their parents are all hot and bothered about. Titanic does not touch everyone. I know people who would not spend a cent to go see her. A friend was remarking about how he had thought it touching, about how his daughter was discovering thestory for herself and had seen the movie three times. Then he overheard her and a friend mooning how sexy Di Caprio was, then had to laugh at himself for thinking the wreck was the main attraction.
The Titanic has become a cultural icon. A two hour long slowly unfolding story that has
reverberated down almost a century now: When Walter Lord wrote the book, she had been
almost forgotten. Men who were aboard her that night didnʼt discuss it: ʻAll those women and
children dying that night, and how is it you survived, sir?ʼ But enough time had passed, they had lived their lives and had reached an age where that kind of implication of cowardness from
others no longer had the sort of impact it did when those men were younger. They could talk
about their experiences that night and not feel as though someone was impinging their honor
just by a Look.
Cultural Icons are larger than life. Titanic shocked everyone in her day. My mother remembered
hearing about her sinking and she was six years old when she sank. The Wright Brotherʼs father
wrote about it in his diary. It was one of those shocks that you remember where you were when
you heard the news. JFK, Pearl Harbor, the Hindenburg, Challenger. Some stories are like that, and some drift right on past. I canʼt recall where I was or what I was doing during Apollo 13. It just was not a story for me until the movie came out. Everyone has memories of great events and I can recall exactly where I was when Apollo 11 touched down. I guess that Lindberghʼs flight might have been the say type of story. Titanic might be the first ʻgrand failure of technologyʼ story. I cannot think of anything similar before her. Now we have been through enough of these stories we know all too well that our technology fails. People will say things so they can make money. Iʼve slammed a few of you with my generally sour and cynical attitude here, but making money was not why my group got into this originally. We wanted to go cruising around the Titanic and look over the wreckage for ourselves and enjoy the experience of wandering around and actually seeing firsthand what the neighborhood looks like. She is, to me, the very Temple of Murphyʼs Law. A trillion to one or greater long shot, a piece of our culture, a metaphor for things screwing up, a complex and deep and intertwined story of close calls that were almost missed, but ultimately connected with deadly accuracy. A worst case scenario that was much worse than what any of what her designers could think of. The forces that built her and sent her to sea are a combination of financial and political and business forces, and Bruce Ismay was a good businessman. There was no way that White Star could compete with the government subsidized liners of Cunard in speed, but the narrow beam that those fast hulls required for speed made them roll. Let Cunard have the iron stomached greyhound trade in a rush. Those whose stomachs felt a bit queasy at sea would much prefer the better ride of the Olympic Class liners. The immigrants below in third class would write back to the folks left behind in the old world about their crossing and Iʼm sure that most of their letters made at least a passing mention of how well they were fed. White Star would attract its clients not by flashy speed, but by comfort, good food, an elegant décor and impeccable service.
The liners are gone now. People do not depend upon them to get across the oceans of the
world any more. The idea of taking a ship to actually get somewhere has become obsolete. I
have no idea if this story and our own fascination with this particular ship will last. In another hundred years she maybe a research project for some graduate history student talking about our obsessions with cultural icons. I doubt if the two hundredth anniversary will be more than a very small news item. I do know that there will not be much left of her, a short steel wall shaped like a ship, buried in the mud and filled with rust. The upper decks will have collapsed over a half century before, and there will be no sight seers using this system by then. If you want to go take a look at her, it wonʼt involve costs of a million dollars a month.
Weʼre now on the other side of World War One: the ʻWar to End Warʼ. The horror of that
butchery puts up a mental block in our minds. Everything before that time is not part of our
ʻmodernʼ world somehow. Wil and Orv and their flying machine made out of linen and wood, so
oddly shaped, so far away. Yet Titanic seems a bit closer than that, she has a class and
elegance and just looks exactly how a fast luxurious ocean liner should look. Cunardʼs boats
somehow do not get it quite right. To my eyes they have a dowdy appearance, and the Germans, well, no, not quite right there either. United States is the epitome of the mid century liner to me. The Queen Mary was the queen of the thirties. Normadie is just too intent on being
the height of Art Deco, and her rooms seem a bit forbidding and intimidating to anyone who is
not a movie star. The era of the ocean liners has come and gone. Now it is cruise ships
wandering into ports and a thousand passengers all trying to find the best bargain in the towns
they have descended on. Big liners have grown to be super sized ships that would have dropped Thomas Andrews jaw to the floor and bugged his eyes out at their Neo-Las Vegas discos, multiple pools, rock climbing walls and shops and huge open interiors. Today shipyards do not rivet their ships together, they do not build it right from the ground up. They build the hull, and prefabricated staterooms are lifted onto the hull and hooked up to the ships systems. The
very art of shipbuilding has changed, the very steel they are made of has changed. Up until they
started welding hulls in WWII, the steel used in Queen Mary isnʼt so different than that which
was used in every other ship in the world including Titanic. It was all ʻbrittle steelʼ until they found out it didnʼt weld worth a damn.
Thomas Andrews seeing a cruise liner today would not know quite what to think about it. The
ship isnʼt going back and forth across the ocean carrying passengers and immigrants? What is
its purpose then? It is made for fun, is that it? I donʼt think Bruce Ismay would be able to wrap his mind around a business plan like that all at once, it would take some creeping up on before heʼd be able to accept that paradigm. One thing for sure, no way would Captain Smith or any of his crew could ever have hit that berg today. Our technology has made that impossible, hasnʼt it? Two words: Andrea Doria: No, our technology has not made that impossible, itʼs just made it very unlikely.
I ask questions, I look at stuff in strange ways, I puzzle my way through things and I sometimes come up with answers. Will this system we worked on actually work? My guess is yes, it
certainly will. My realistic opinion is that there is no way on godʼs green earth that it will ever be built or allowed to be installed. Perhaps I am wrong about this system never being built; it just wonʼt be built by us. It irks me to have wasted a half a decade of my life and more money that I can afford on the fruitless pursuit of this dream, but it was certainly an ʻinterestingʼ dream in the true sense of the curse. In World War II, North American Aviation built the first P 51 Mustang in about three months. Designed and built it in those ninety one days. We are now nine months from Titanicʼs anniversary, and about all I can imagine happening in that nine months with this idea is a lot of childish squabbling over who gets to be in the photo with Bob Ballard in Washington.
Oh well. We sometimes roll the dice and they come up snake eyes and R&D is most definitely a
gamble. We lost. That is the way the cookie crumbles and all that. I still think that this is a great idea, but I do know that it is also an impossible idea. But still…
“Wouldnʼt it be cool if …?”
Thomas M. Barron
Former Program Director
January Products
Mill Valley California.
PS If any electronics engineers would like the Gerber files for the circuit board, please contact me at [email protected] . Please put in the subject line ‘Stage Light’ and I’ll send you the patent description, Mark Chancey’s MS thesis on short range optical communications systems, and the schematics for the ‘Laser Tracker’ aiming device. If it works, we can do Titanic. If it doesn’t, then it’s impossible.
I’m sorry about the ‘technologist air of arrogance’ and apologize for it.
I realize that I have hit you with a lot of information all at one time here, and that some of what our ideas were may not have come through with sufficient clarity without pictures or drawings to give you a better mental image of what we were trying to do. If people are interested in the idea of tourist robots on the wreck of the Titanic, I do believe that it would be possible for this system to be put together in nine months. This obviously is way beyond ʻtwo guys in a garageʼ being able to pull off. With the patent on the communications link, we would have had the lock on this project because we’d have kept the rights to use it on Titanic. As it sits right now, this is just a lot
of work that went up in smoke and a bunch of boxes of junk in the basement. There is no way
that any of us will ever be able to make a dime after I disclosed all that technology to Woods
Hole. The fact that it was never taken seriously there (“We’re not into exploiting the Titanic”)
does not make any difference at all; it still constitutes disclosure and nullified the other patents.
My somewhat cynical attitude toward WHOI about their hypocrisy with regards to the Titanic
knows no bounds. Roy’s model of the wreck is on display there. They made out like bandits with
endowments and grants, and the PR generated by the Titanic being found has paid them pretty
good dividends over the years. Google ‘who discovered the Titanicʼ and whose name pops up?
Right: What was the other guy’s name? Oh yeah, Freedom Fries, and their ʻaccidentallyʼ holding
a press conference all by their little lonesome is the worst kind of academic backstabbing. Its
more like a shiv in a prison shower, and nobody said one damn thing when ol’ Frenchy got
shivved, did they? I do not hold Bob Ballard responsible for that rather nasty piece of work, it’s not the guy’s style. But Bob wasn’t there when that press conference was called, and as far as ʻstrained working relationshipsʼ between IMFREMR and WHOI goes, you can bet your bottom
dollar that every French member of the team knew that they had been backstabbed by their
American buddies so that they could obtain more research grants for finding the Titanic all by
themselves. Jean Michel who? What? Bob did it all by himself. I just Goggled it and who are you
talking about? What ʻco-discovererʼ? This is something that happened within living memory, but
has been rewritten over the years. I have a bone to pick with pious sounding hypocrites, and
those Frenchmen know how the academic games are played and they knew they’d been screwed over royally by the same folks that say ʻWeʼre not into exploiting the Titanicʼ so piously
today. They’d already made their bones and made out like bandits as far as the grants and
endowments went from that ʻaccidentʼ of WHOI totally ignoring that ʻweʼll hold a joint press
conferenceʼ written into the agreement the expedition was operating under.
It may sound like I am using this platform here to slam WHOI. I am. Bob Ballard has been very
vocal over the years about the salvage operation conducted on the ship and has felt all right
about using his books for a bully pulpit from which to preach. I do not feel that he is one of the bad guys who screwed the French; I think that was done by others at WHOI. Institutions can do good things and still be petty and greedy. Wilbur Wright hated the Smithsonian Institute for what it tried to do to him and his brother. The Institute wanted Professor Langley to get the credit for inventing the airplane and got together with Glenn Curtiss when he was trying to break the Wrights patent on their control system. He rebuilt Langley’s failed machine and got it to fly, with a little bit of ʻrestoration workʼ that changed the camber of the wings, braced the structure far past where Langley had it originally, and quietly modified it so that it would actually fly, thus ʻprovingʼ that Langley should be credited with building the first airplane capable of flight. This
kind of stuff that the well respected Smithsonian Institute tried to pull on the Wrights upset Orville so much that he sent the original Kitty Hawk Flier to London to be displayed. WHOI got away with the shivving in the shower bit, and everyone looked the other way, but I really do disrespect that institute’s personnel laying off that absolutely holier than thou attitude toward anyone who wants to do anything with that shipwreck besides leave it alone in the dark forever.
Next April 15th, we will be treated to another display of self congratulations at WHOIʼs finding the wreck, and more money will go to them. My personal opinion on this is my personal opinion. I am not trying to make it seem that money was not what motivated us, but it was not the primary motivation. What happened with the disclosure of our proprietary information to them was our fault; well, more specifically my fault. I really messed up when I sent that
report to Dr. Ballard. From there it was sent over to WHOI and a VP there came back with the
BS about we’re not into exploiting the Titanic.ʼ That was the entire reply from the WHOI guy to
my first email. I wrote back and explained that the support system would lower the costs of
doing business in deep water and he came back with ʻthere is no such thing as a pressure
tolerant electronic partʼ and I hadn’t known that. I wrote everyone involved in this and asked if that was a silver bullet for us or not? Reinhold sent me a list of which parts are pressure tolerant and which are not. Roy wrote and said that the guy was full of it, because he’d been through their shops and seen electronic parts in oil baths. Danny checked it out and discovered that items which have air gaps in them (like resistors), crunch under pressure and fail. I realize that the WHOI rep? was a busy guy who thought he was dealing with a bunch of totally ignorant amateurs who did not know anything and he just wanted to blow us off and not be bothered having to deal with us. But my respect for what WHOI went through the floor with the attitude I was being shown by, as Reinhold put it, that ʻsecond rate loser who doesn’t even know his own job.ʼ Now do you understand a bit about my emphasis on the putting the economics of this project right out in front first? If I had not, sooner or later someone would be saying how we were ʻjust trying to exploit the poor drowned women and children of the ship to make a few underhanded dollars through our exploitation of the tragedy.ʼ That sneak up and stab them in the back trick works well in academia, but I am more of a right in your face kind of guy, and I am not about to put up with that from people who screw other people over ʻaccidentallyʼ and reap major bucks laying that holier than thou attitude, presuming they are way above any low life money grabbing people like us. They deserve to be called on their attitudes and their hypocrisy, and since this seems to be the only time I will be publishing anything at all about the Titanic, I have just as much right to use my own writings to preach what I believe as Bob Ballard has that same right to preach in his writings.
The simple fact of this project is that it is politically undoable. The Titanic is a politician’s wet dream. If this project of ours had gotten further along than it did, there would be tons of hearings on this, and guess whose opinion would be solicited by politicians looking for a photo op? Not mine. My name would be Mud. Iʼd be the poster boy for exploiting those poor, dead, drowned pregnant women and children who perished so tragically that .. pardon me while I hurl here, folks, but I think you know the tune. I wanted to go sight see the wreck, I did not expect that kind of rude treatment, and I sure as hell have nothing at all good to say about the way they pulled the old ʻup yours, baby, weʼre getting it all!ʼ trick on IMFREMER and good old Jean Michel who? Fame is a commodity here; it is worth money, and not theoretical money, but hard money in hand. The more famous the institute you work for, the easier it is to go out and get bucks. That isn’t made up, who makes more money, the kid that graduated from Harvard or the kid that graduated from University of Arkansas? The Harvard kid got in because ‘mah daddy knows peopleʼ and drank and drugged his way through and perhaps graduated by hiring someone to take his finals, while the other kid graduated 4.0 and did original work in a half a dozen fields: ʻUniversity of .. you gotta be kidding! We don’t hire hillbillies here!ʼ Fame is a commodity and I’m personally glad that Bob Ballard got famous out of this and raised money to go to Bismarck, Yorktown and Iron Bottom Sound. I think he has inspired a lot of kids to take an interest in oceanography. Yeah, he does make some mistakes in his criticizing of the sub drivers wrecking the ship, but he’s a geologist and had not thought that one through. Sometimes it’s difficult being famous, and I have no use for fame personally, but it also makes it harder for
people to tell you honestly that you’re barking up the wrong tree.
Rust is iron oxide. It is caused by oxidation. The shipwreck has a very limited number of years
left before the upper decks just fall into the ship. Then it will be a boat shaped steel wall for a while and then the walls will collapse, too. Dr. Ballard is a geologist and geologists know how an eighth of an inch a year can open up an ocean or close it over long periods of time. What he is not really familiar with is what is going on in front of his eyes, as it’s not something he recognizes. Take a piece of steel wool, pull it apart a bit and then set fire to it. It will burn, because there is a lot of area exposed. Titanic is actually burning up in the sea and the rust is the ash left over from her combustion. What he thought was damage caused by the sub pilots was actually just the crow’s nest burning up and blowing away. The boilers in the bow section used to be covered over by smashed down upper decks covering them, but that deck overhanging those boilers has now gone away. It has burned up. The idea of painting the ship to prevent it from deteriorating further is impractical. What is your medium going to be for the paint? Paint is laid down and the medium evaporates leaving behind pigments that have bonded together. Oil, water based, the oil will float away and you cannot evaporate water in water. Next time you are by the shore, check out an old abandoned steel boat. Pretty crunchy, isn’t it? I think of it as ʻpotato chip steelʼ, and this is what has been happening to the wreck of the Titanic.
As far as the ʻleave her alone in the darkʼ sentiments go, Iʼd go through the entire wreck with robots that would walk like spiders and have ultrasound receptors and transmitters on their legs so they can find things under the layers of silt while they still can be recovered and displayed. Of what possible use is leaving those things there? So some archeologist in the year 2700 can go scoop the things that didnʼt corrode in eight hundred years? What would that be, I wonder? Flattened wedding rings, flattened when the decks finally collapse into the hulls maybe five years from now?
There are about ten thousand people who make their living in the deep water field worldwide.
What prevents this community from growing is the expense of operating in that environment.
How many manned machines can reach Titanic today? Seven, and two of them were in the
Cameron movie. Mir 1 & 2. Alvin, the NR-1 has been decommissioned, sorry to say. The
Aluminaut, I believe, is still in service, and I think that the French operate a submersible, but I am not sure of its name. Natille? I donʼt believe that the Trieste was counted among those
seven machines, but I am not sure. That was off the top of my head without Googling the
answers, but my point being here is that most of these machines were built back in the sixties
and early seventies, with the Russian machines built in the late eighties or early nineties.
There is fabulous wealth in the deep oceans, but the tools to unlock it have not yet been
developed. Bobʼs idea of telepresensing is inherent in the DBOT support system. The search for the black boxes of an Airbus that went down in the Atlantic a few years ago cost more than the entire system we were proposing for Titanic. That gives you an idea of just how expensive deep
water work is, and if it werenʼt for lawsuits being filed, that black box search would never have been conducted.
In the sixties, a manganese nodule mining scheme was discovered and considerable work was
done on the machines needed to do it. However, a large manganese discovery was made while
that project was being worked on which was so big that it dropped the price of manganese to
the point where that operation would no longer be economically feasible to do. Currently, the
price of manganese has risen almost to a level where that scheme will be profitable to restart.
That scheme is a surface support ship operation, and it maybe that this DBOT system would put
the idea into the black right now. I am guessing here, because I have not looked into the details
of what is really required to mine manganese ʻpotatoesʼ lying on the sea floor. What are all the valuable materials on the floors of all of the worldʼs oceans of the world worth? I have no idea, but I do believe that will be something worth investigating. All new frontiers have something in them we didnʼt expect. We didnʼt expect the moon to be made out of green cheese when Apollo 1 landed there, but I think it was a surprise to find out that the moon was actually made from the Earth.
I have no idea of how long it will take before the stuff we came up with to do Titanic is picked up by someone else, but I do know that until there is a system which lowers the costs of deep ocean work, that the deep water community wonʼt be able to grow. Will our system change the economics enough so that children born today will have the option of making a living in the deep oceans of this world? I canʼt say; I donʼt know, but I think that until the methodology used changes, there will never be room for many people to make a living doing work in deep water.
The economics of it will always be straight jacketed by the million plus dollars per month
operating costs. The Keldysh can be used for better purposes than Titanic. I think that running over with a purpose built robot and picking up one tea cup every other year and retrieving it would keep the RMS Titanic Inc salvage claim alive. There is no real hard and fast rule that you have to pick it up by a specific method in any of the rules Iʼve read, but I have not read them all; nor have I read all of the court cases.
If anyone is interested in the technology we were working on, they will have to realize that this all was a shoe string operation and if they want to see the blueprints for the recharging racks, there are none. There are no blueprints anymore; drafting has given way to CAD CAM. The Kite and String scheme consists of some anchor designs and sketches of the rest of the system. The further downstream, the less detailed it is, but the idea of what those pieces are for is not that difficult to understand.
This would require a serious effort, and why should anyone bother to build such a system in the present economic climate? A twenty five dollar ticket price a few years ago would not be
something most of you would thought twice about, but the world has changed since we started
this project. There is only one single place I can see to get the money for this project and that is from a major corporation that would be doing it basically for the bragging rights. Mitsubishi Heavy Industries built a coeoleth fish that swims around in a tank in an aquarium in Japan. The CIA has built Charlie the RoboCatfish. Now MIT has a RoboPike and frankly, there isnʼt one venture capitalist whoʼd be interested in building fish if he found out that his competition is Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, the Nippon Marine Research Institute, MIT and the CIA. Nekton LLC got absorbed by iRobot, who are more into building bomb disposal robots than fish these days: Which leaves us with Corporate Bragging Rights as the sole reason to build this system.
If the 100th Anniversary of the sinking does not create a lot of hullabaloo, well, James Cameron
is re-releasing Titanic in three D. I imagine WHOI will not let the occasion pass without putting the squeeze on a few of their contributors who they know are Titanic buffs, and I am fairly certain that IMFREMR will be holding a few small get-togethers featuring a few effigies being burned, and a lot of finely honed insulting remarks will be made about working with Americans ever again. It will be hype city for one or two days or a week or a month, depending on how the movie does at the box office. As far as ʻhypeʼ goes, ʻyou ainʼt seen nothinʼ yetʼ, compared to what kind of hype there would be if a major corporation got involved in putting together the system we came up with. This just doesnʼt modestly say, ʻour tech is way better than yoursʼ, it just comes right out and screams it in your face. You think not? Name another new form of entertainment invented in this century? Bingo, you think that just doesnʼt sock other high tech companies right square between the eyes?
Like I said, any professionally trained deep water engineer will pee their pants laughing at the idea of a ten dollar an hour rental robot on the Titanic. It just cannot be done with todayʼs
technology and they are the experts in the field and screw that trying to show them anything
which falls into Not Invented Here territory. If you know anyone who is a professional deep water engineer and you want to try that theory, expect to get some laughs out of them; and if you press the issue, theyʼll explain to you why youʼre such a sweet naí¯ve child, but you just wonʼt understand until you get to be a grown up, too! There can be an amazing amount of arrogance descend upon you from the technically sophisticated, so be prepared for that too. Also donʼt ever expect any kind of respect from a venture capitalist. They have money, you donʼt. You donʼt deserve to be given respect, you deserve to be taken to the cleaners for not being wealthy.
Operating on the levels of reality this job of mine required has not made me a better human
being. Itʼs made me a very cynical human being, but I can no longer give you a definition of the
difference between cynicism and being realistic. As far as the laughing of the professional deep
water community goes, if you had collected together all of the leading aviation experts in the world and asked them how to set up an airline, youʼd have gotten that same condescending laughter from them in the year 1900. Less than two decades later, it was a reality. How long would this stuff take to light off? I have no idea. It simply does not matter to me at all anymore.
I am sorry that the tone of what I have written here will tick some of you off. I can afford my
sarcastic outlook on life and I have most definitely? paid my dues here. I feel that I can express my own opinions just as well as anyone at WHOI looking down their nose at me can. I would much rather give money to IMFREMR than to WHOI. Yeah, the French have attitude, they also
have style, grace, and an appreciation of food and an acceptance of life as being enjoyable and
a lack of hypocrisy about morality and politicians. It seems to me that there isnʼt a corporation left in America that has the brains to go for something like this. Do you remember those GE ads about how innovative they are? That Kitty Hawk Flyer with the honking great jet engine mounted on it? I wrote to them and they said they were not open for discussion on any new technologies. One of Mitsubishi salarymen told me to go away and stop trying to contact the company. Presentation is everything, and all that now matters is form without content. Dannyʼs employer tried to rip us off for his invention as they were laying him off, and if I had not screamed at him to have our patent lawyer look over the ʻreleaseʼ form, heʼd have signed it unread. Gee, a free, non-revolkable, world wide license to manufacture! Yeah, that is a rip off, and I had to ask my lead attorney if it was okay to say something like that? She said, ʻas long as itʼs true, they canʼt
win a lawsuit against you.ʼ Anyone want to see the ʻreleaseʼ form? They might not be able to win
in court, but they sure as hell can sue and sue and sue.
You cannot go through some of the stuff this project put me through and not change. I do not
feel that these have been positive changes for me. After all, dropping the ball so badly you
destroy all of that work is not something which makes you a better person; it just makes you a
loser. I have been into the Titanic since I found a copy of Reader Digest Condensed book on my aunt and uncleʼs bookshelf when I was about eight years old. The sight of the ship up-ending caught my mind. I think that Walterʼs book might actually be the first adult book I ever read. I was in the library scoping out the National Geographic Iʼd missed on the discovery of the Titanic when a friend of mine walked in and said, “Hey, did you hear the Shuttle blew up?” and I said, ʻNo,whatʼs the punch line?ʼ The day the Twin Towers came down, I went to buy a book at Nolo Press about something I had to learn in order to do this project. I have learned and read and talked to experts about her sinking, and when I look at the odds on her sinking like she did, I am dumbfounded at the calculable odds. No officer on the ship looking at the sea conditions that night had ever seen any ocean that calm before. The very first berg they came to they hit and it had just rolled over and was presenting a dark surface against the sea until it finally rose above the horizon where the look outs could see it. Then the turn to avoid it just grazed the side of the hull all the way along her side until the rudder was thrown over so the stern missed. Head on collision at full speed: Survivable. Ship runs into side at forty five degree angle: Survivable. You do not build ocean liner to survive surfing a thousand foot tall tsunami, because that is just an impossible scenario. Itʼs way outside the range of possibilities. Much is made of ʻbrittle steelʼ
causing her doom, but that same steel was used on Olympia and she survived up until Cunard
sent her to the breakers in 1932. He engine pedestals needed work; she was kind of an odd duck in their schedule, sharing her round trip schedule with two other liners which were not in her class. But what really laid her low was a few trips where the crew outnumbered the passengers. The changing of the emigration laws that had been the reason she was born in the first place and the reason for her profitability made her obsolete. The Titanic was the victim of a million to one long shot. A million? There were man-centuries of experience in her officers and none of them had ever seen an ocean as flat as it was that night. The very first ice berg they chance upon they hit? What are the odds? A billion to one? What kind of timing does it take to just graze the side of an iceberg like that? How many feet are we talking about there? Too heavy an impact on the bow would have buckled and caved in the hull, but how many compartments being rammed would it take to either deflect the ship to one side or stop its forward motion as surely as if it had hit land. The Titanic is some kind of jackpot winner, all right, just in the collision alone. Radio operator turns in a few miles away and doesnʼt find out about her sinking until the next day. Bridge officers hove to on another ship watched her sink just a little too far away to read her signal lamp. She should not have sunk, but that scenario of
ʻLetʼs say we rip open one third of her hullʼ is just way too farfetched to be believable. There are just no believable cases that can be presented to justify that kind of engineering on a passenger ship. You want it to be able to surf tsunamis too?
The fact is, ʻworst than worst case scenariosʼ happen all the time. I am a flat out pessimist about things going wrong with technology. The worst case scenario you design for gets outmoded by real life. The guys at Fukishima had no way to get in touch with anyone after that forty foot high wall of water went through and everyone was so shook up after the earthquake nobody gave a single thought to that plant. Then there is just plain dumb, and the crew at Chernobyl fall into that category. The Hindenburg went up like a torch because her fabric was coated with a chemical compound that would be used decades down the line as solid rocket fuel and nobody knew. Three Mile Island, a sticky valve; Challenger, a blown gasket. There will always going to be disasters caused by things we didnʼt plan on, didnʼt know about, or that were way outside the lines of what is theoretically possible until it becomes entirely too real. The Unthinkable becomes reality and having faith in technology is just a matter of playing the odds. What I find amusing is how ʻsafeʼ nuclear power is. Oh, that canʼt happen here; we use much better type of reactors. The only accident we ever had didnʼt hurt anyone in Pennsylvania, did it? Now, the Russians, well, what can I say? Sloppy workmanship and sheer stupidity: Our type of reactors canʼt explode.ʼ Kapowie! And there goes another! When it gets to guys with fire hoses trying to put atomic fires, itʼs gone a little past where that claim about how unbreakable and safe nuclear power is and right into the Twilight Zone. Things break, things you did not plan on happen, and the odds catch up with you. You didnʼt believe it was dangerous, and so how it all works out so that in the end is we all die.
The present day tone of political discussion seems to be to block the other guy from doing
anything if you canʼt win. You wonʼt be able to win, but the other guy wonʼt be able to either.
Thwarting what someone else wants to do seems to be the way to go these days. It does not
matter how much credibility you have, nor how bright you are, you canʼt know everything and
thatʼs just the way life is. You have to make dumb mistakes before you can move up to the next
level and make slightly less dumb mistakes. Ideas evolve; ideas are now where our species
evolution is happening. Divine right of kings, serfdom, owning human beings, all of these ideas
have landed on the scrap heap of history. What is sad about this world we live in today is just
how quickly and effectively you can discredit someone just by hurling a charge. Iʼve written
about our work with a pugnacious attitude ringing loud and clear throughout this essay about our work, because I know exactly how this game works. Weʼre ʻExploitersʼ are we not? There is no sound bite quick reply to that charge, is there? Dr. Ballardʼs opinion on this would be solicited and congressmen would listen gravely to his opinion and weʼd be grubby little hustlers scheming to make a buck off of the dead.
A suggestion came my way during this project that we might be able to gain some world wide
publicity from sending some of our robots deep into the interior of the Estonia to gather
evidence about the mass murder that took place there. Google M.V Estonia AND ʻThe German
Group of Experts.ʼ Do you believe the government of Sweden would try to cover up a mass
murder? The shipyard that built Estonia took serious exception to the idea that ʻthe bow door
just fell offʼ as that cost them contracts. Do not make charges like that when you are dealing
with the resources of a company that can hire the level of expertise as represented by the
German Group of Experts. The implied slur is that they are such idiots that their total
incompetence killed eight hundred people one dark and stormy night and that was the
government of Sweden slurring their good name and reputation. What caused that sinking was
was the CIA rolling semi truck loads of top secret Russian gear onto the ship and taking it to Sweden. The Cold War might have been over, but the warriors who fought it thought they were getting away scot free, with helping themselves to everything they could buy in Russia. They figured there was nothing anyone could do about it. Unfortunately, the Russian covert community did not see things quite the same way . A movie has been made about that sinking, yet many people have never heard that story and probably are reacting in the same as I did when I first heard it. The government of Sweden conspiring to cover up a mass murder and slander a ship builderʼs good reputation? That is just not possible. Go look at the forensic reports the German group of experts wrote. Check out their credentials. Yes, there are a lot of things to find in the deep ocean, and yes, what kind of a horrible human being can ever think of using a mass murder for publicity? Iʼm one who doesnʼt like cover ups of mass murderers. Iʼm not saying that the government of Sweden didnʼt have some good reasons for taking that stance. Itʼs just that I do not agree with the covert services of the world being licensed to kill civilians.
Being so closely involved with this project caused my entire way of thinking to change: Solving the technical problems is fairly easy, compared to solving the politics of Titanic. I am quite cynical, (or realistic, same deal there to me nowadays). I have developed ʻoperational paranoiaʼand learned to think as a business person. I do think that our project was a doable thing, at least technically. This is a lot of stuff to dump on you all at once. There are nine months before the one hundredth anniversary, and itʼs a matter of finding out if the communications link works or not. If it does, this system can be built. If it does not, then this system cannot be built. If it works,it entails throwing money at a problem, and the only result for the people who invented this stuff is having their reputations slurred by mealy mouth hypocrites bent on making sure they get more grant money and endowments.
I wrote earlier on that I canʼt think of a single thing Iʼd buy with a half a billion dollars. Yes, I can think of one thing, and that would be this old wreck. Then Iʼd give it away. Seriously.
The fact of the matter is that as a tourist draw, what youʼd be looking at would be some piles of rusty steel and odds and ends of broken metal lying on the muddy sea floor. There are no
bodies lying around, just those ghastly pairs of shoes toes pointing out from each other. A
marker that says a human being was wearing them, they died, and this is where their now
evaporated body has come to rest.
The idea of tourism on the Titanic disturbs some people. They believe that this is a place where
the dead should quietly be left alone in the dark to lie in peace. The death of over a thousand people in one spot is not a unique feature of that ill fated liner; there are many places where Titanicʼs list of dead would not be a footnote. World War One battles would run through those thousand dead in minutes. Even the thought of a couple of kids using our machines for a dog fight on the Grand Stairway sends shudders through some of you, but kids are dragged to battle fields on family vacations every year and climb on the cannons at Gettysburg, wander around and get lost at Verdun, want to go play on Omaha beach. Kids are kids, and keeping them from hurting the wreck is our job; their job is to go see what they can do and see for fun. A pile of transforming rusty scrap metal their parents are all hot and bothered about. Titanic does not touch everyone. I know people who would not spend a cent to go see her. A friend was remarking about how he had thought it touching, about how his daughter was discovering thestory for herself and had seen the movie three times. Then he overheard her and a friend mooning how sexy Di Caprio was, then had to laugh at himself for thinking the wreck was the main attraction.
The Titanic has become a cultural icon. A two hour long slowly unfolding story that has
reverberated down almost a century now: When Walter Lord wrote the book, she had been
almost forgotten. Men who were aboard her that night didnʼt discuss it: ʻAll those women and
children dying that night, and how is it you survived, sir?ʼ But enough time had passed, they had lived their lives and had reached an age where that kind of implication of cowardness from
others no longer had the sort of impact it did when those men were younger. They could talk
about their experiences that night and not feel as though someone was impinging their honor
just by a Look.
Cultural Icons are larger than life. Titanic shocked everyone in her day. My mother remembered
hearing about her sinking and she was six years old when she sank. The Wright Brotherʼs father
wrote about it in his diary. It was one of those shocks that you remember where you were when
you heard the news. JFK, Pearl Harbor, the Hindenburg, Challenger. Some stories are like that, and some drift right on past. I canʼt recall where I was or what I was doing during Apollo 13. It just was not a story for me until the movie came out. Everyone has memories of great events and I can recall exactly where I was when Apollo 11 touched down. I guess that Lindberghʼs flight might have been the say type of story. Titanic might be the first ʻgrand failure of technologyʼ story. I cannot think of anything similar before her. Now we have been through enough of these stories we know all too well that our technology fails. People will say things so they can make money. Iʼve slammed a few of you with my generally sour and cynical attitude here, but making money was not why my group got into this originally. We wanted to go cruising around the Titanic and look over the wreckage for ourselves and enjoy the experience of wandering around and actually seeing firsthand what the neighborhood looks like. She is, to me, the very Temple of Murphyʼs Law. A trillion to one or greater long shot, a piece of our culture, a metaphor for things screwing up, a complex and deep and intertwined story of close calls that were almost missed, but ultimately connected with deadly accuracy. A worst case scenario that was much worse than what any of what her designers could think of. The forces that built her and sent her to sea are a combination of financial and political and business forces, and Bruce Ismay was a good businessman. There was no way that White Star could compete with the government subsidized liners of Cunard in speed, but the narrow beam that those fast hulls required for speed made them roll. Let Cunard have the iron stomached greyhound trade in a rush. Those whose stomachs felt a bit queasy at sea would much prefer the better ride of the Olympic Class liners. The immigrants below in third class would write back to the folks left behind in the old world about their crossing and Iʼm sure that most of their letters made at least a passing mention of how well they were fed. White Star would attract its clients not by flashy speed, but by comfort, good food, an elegant décor and impeccable service.
The liners are gone now. People do not depend upon them to get across the oceans of the
world any more. The idea of taking a ship to actually get somewhere has become obsolete. I
have no idea if this story and our own fascination with this particular ship will last. In another hundred years she maybe a research project for some graduate history student talking about our obsessions with cultural icons. I doubt if the two hundredth anniversary will be more than a very small news item. I do know that there will not be much left of her, a short steel wall shaped like a ship, buried in the mud and filled with rust. The upper decks will have collapsed over a half century before, and there will be no sight seers using this system by then. If you want to go take a look at her, it wonʼt involve costs of a million dollars a month.
Weʼre now on the other side of World War One: the ʻWar to End Warʼ. The horror of that
butchery puts up a mental block in our minds. Everything before that time is not part of our
ʻmodernʼ world somehow. Wil and Orv and their flying machine made out of linen and wood, so
oddly shaped, so far away. Yet Titanic seems a bit closer than that, she has a class and
elegance and just looks exactly how a fast luxurious ocean liner should look. Cunardʼs boats
somehow do not get it quite right. To my eyes they have a dowdy appearance, and the Germans, well, no, not quite right there either. United States is the epitome of the mid century liner to me. The Queen Mary was the queen of the thirties. Normadie is just too intent on being
the height of Art Deco, and her rooms seem a bit forbidding and intimidating to anyone who is
not a movie star. The era of the ocean liners has come and gone. Now it is cruise ships
wandering into ports and a thousand passengers all trying to find the best bargain in the towns
they have descended on. Big liners have grown to be super sized ships that would have dropped Thomas Andrews jaw to the floor and bugged his eyes out at their Neo-Las Vegas discos, multiple pools, rock climbing walls and shops and huge open interiors. Today shipyards do not rivet their ships together, they do not build it right from the ground up. They build the hull, and prefabricated staterooms are lifted onto the hull and hooked up to the ships systems. The
very art of shipbuilding has changed, the very steel they are made of has changed. Up until they
started welding hulls in WWII, the steel used in Queen Mary isnʼt so different than that which
was used in every other ship in the world including Titanic. It was all ʻbrittle steelʼ until they found out it didnʼt weld worth a damn.
Thomas Andrews seeing a cruise liner today would not know quite what to think about it. The
ship isnʼt going back and forth across the ocean carrying passengers and immigrants? What is
its purpose then? It is made for fun, is that it? I donʼt think Bruce Ismay would be able to wrap his mind around a business plan like that all at once, it would take some creeping up on before heʼd be able to accept that paradigm. One thing for sure, no way would Captain Smith or any of his crew could ever have hit that berg today. Our technology has made that impossible, hasnʼt it? Two words: Andrea Doria: No, our technology has not made that impossible, itʼs just made it very unlikely.
I ask questions, I look at stuff in strange ways, I puzzle my way through things and I sometimes come up with answers. Will this system we worked on actually work? My guess is yes, it
certainly will. My realistic opinion is that there is no way on godʼs green earth that it will ever be built or allowed to be installed. Perhaps I am wrong about this system never being built; it just wonʼt be built by us. It irks me to have wasted a half a decade of my life and more money that I can afford on the fruitless pursuit of this dream, but it was certainly an ʻinterestingʼ dream in the true sense of the curse. In World War II, North American Aviation built the first P 51 Mustang in about three months. Designed and built it in those ninety one days. We are now nine months from Titanicʼs anniversary, and about all I can imagine happening in that nine months with this idea is a lot of childish squabbling over who gets to be in the photo with Bob Ballard in Washington.
Oh well. We sometimes roll the dice and they come up snake eyes and R&D is most definitely a
gamble. We lost. That is the way the cookie crumbles and all that. I still think that this is a great idea, but I do know that it is also an impossible idea. But still…
“Wouldnʼt it be cool if …?”
Thomas M. Barron
Former Program Director
January Products
Mill Valley California.
PS If any electronics engineers would like the Gerber files for the circuit board, please contact me at [email protected] . Please put in the subject line ‘Stage Light’ and I’ll send you the patent description, Mark Chancey’s MS thesis on short range optical communications systems, and the schematics for the ‘Laser Tracker’ aiming device. If it works, we can do Titanic. If it doesn’t, then it’s impossible.
I’m sorry about the ‘technologist air of arrogance’ and apologize for it.
