-The Titanic is the world's most famous shipwreck.

-The iceberg was enormous.

-As it swept past Titanic, the lights of the bridge lit it up.

Absolutely brilliant white.

-This is the story of those who've tried to find it.

-First, you got to recognize we're taking a voyage into history.

-He had a call name called "Cadillac Jack."

He loved to gamble.

The Titanic was a big one.

-He occasionally joked that he was the biggest ship owner in the world, but most of the ships were on the seabed.

-It's a story of incredible scientific innovation... -I said, "Well, I don't have the equipment to do this."

And he said, "Build it."

-Nothing like that had ever been done, to my knowledge, in oceanography.

-...a story of Cold War intrigue... -The primary purpose of the expedition to find the Titanic was not to find the Titanic.

It was 100% completely classified.

-...and it led to one of the greatest discoveries in history.

-You had to stay focused.

We were looking for something that might be kind of small, and you want to see it when it shows up.

-For every generation, Titanic is reborn.

When Bob Ballard found the wreck in 1985, this was another whole new chapter.

♪♪ -At the time it was built, HMS Titanic was the biggest ship in the world, and, yet, four days into her maiden voyage, she collided with a giant iceberg.

-The sinking of the Titanic is the world's first global news story.

♪♪ On the night in question, which is the 14th of April, it was a Sunday night.

It was incredibly dark.

There was no moon in the sky.

-The iceberg was enormous.

They go hard to starboard to try to avoid it.

-As it swept past Titanic, the lights of the bridge lit it up.

Absolutely brilliant white.

[ Steam whistles ] -And it looks for a second as if the Titanic is turning enough in order to avoid this iceberg, but at the last second, it grazed the ship.

The iceberg opens up a significant section of the Titanic to the North Atlantic water.

-And as soon as this happens, it is mathematically certain that Titanic will founder, that the Titanic will sink.

♪♪ -In 1912, the sinking of the Titanic was considered the greatest maritime disaster in history, and in the weeks that followed, the quest for answers began.

♪♪ -From the first moment that the world realized with horror what had happened, they wanted to find the ship, and they wanted to find Titanic as fast as possible.

-There were all kinds of ideas at the time of trying to raise her, involving balloons that can sort of lift up the wreck.

-Sending a barge to the crash site.

Getting a crane with a hook and winding the Titanic up.

Other more sophisticated ones later on were using diesel bags, which is slightly lighter than water, to start to raise the Titanic.

-But the idea of raising the Titanic was soon abandoned.

-Submarine technology in the 1910's can't even really be described as being in its infancy.

It's at fetus stage at this point.

And it does become clear very quickly that any attempt to find the Titanic is beyond the remit of the technology available in the 1910's.

There's also really not as much of an interest in the Titanic for various reasons.

[ Gunfire ] -Two years after Titanic's sinking, a far greater tragedy took place.

-Titanic disaster is then more or less forgotten because of the First World War.

[ Explosions ] -That level of suffering on that scale dwarfs interest in the Titanic for a very long time, and that continues really through the Jazz Age and the Great Depression, and it's not until the 1940s, 1950s that you see a massive resurgence in interest in the Titanic.

-There's this remarkable book that comes out by a chap called Walter Lord, and it's called "A Night to Remember."

And this is made into, at the time, the most expensive movie in history.

Premieres to great acclaim.

That really re-introduces Titanic to a whole new audience, and it keeps the memory of Titanic alive.

-There is a feeling that the generation of the Titanic is starting to die out.

There is growing nostalgia in Britain for the Edwardian era and for stories of British bravery and Edwardian stiff upper lip.

There is a sense that that world is coming to an end, and the Titanic becomes the ark of that story, and as interest in the Titanic rejuvenates, the final piece of the puzzle, the end of the story, is what happened to the wreck.

-Titanic was known to be some 400 miles from land, so she's a very long way from anywhere, which would provide very difficult conditions to finding the wreck to begin with.

And the other issue is she's right down at the bottom of a bank, a sea plateau, very deep.

♪♪ -In the early '50s, rumors began to circulate of the first serious mission to find the Titanic.

-In 1953, a few newspaper articles start appearing about a salvage firm, Risdon Beazley, attempting to find the treasure of the Titanic, possessions that could have been owned by the very, very wealthy on board, and they're using explosives to try and find the ship.

There was an edition of a book that was encrusted in diamonds and gems.

So the newspapers are quick to pick this up as one of the things that Risdon Beazley are on the hunt for.

-The company was named after its founder, a man with close ties to the British Admiralty and a reputation for secrecy.

-Risdon Beazley is something of an enigma.

Not very much is known about his personal life or, indeed, his working life, because he famously hated publicity.

-The only photograph I've been able to produce, which I got from my former boss, was taken off his passport after he died.

He occasionally joked that he was the biggest ship owner in the world, but most of the ships were on the seabed.

[ Chuckles ] That was the way he was.

He was something of a gambler.

He was very willing to take a gamble on something to do with wrecks.

-He was quite a character, and obviously he knew a tremendous lot about the Titanic, about all these shipwrecks.

After World War Two, I mean, think of all the ships that had gone down and the money to be made for salvage if you went out there.

♪♪ -It seems Risdon Beazley went to Canada with a ship called the Help.

This started to interest people who wondered what this ship was doing with these explosive charges.

And they-- Fishermen and people in Canada could not really understand what this ship was doing.

And this is when the story started to circulate about Risdon Beazley and the Titanic.

-The British Admiralty reportedly imposed a security blackout on Risdon Beazley's activities in the area.

-People put two and two together.

There was this somewhat secretive company, there was this fantastic wreck that everyone knew about, and there was this treasure, the star-studded gems.

-It's an inviting idea: a company from Southampton, treasure hunters looking for the wreck of the Titanic.

There's enough possibility in the idea that allows us to speculate, indeed, that is what they were looking for, the Titanic.

-If the rumors were true, Beazley's mission was doomed to failure.

-His locating device, the Aztec, would not have worked at anything like that depth.

-Back in those days, the deepest was about 894 feet.

The Titanic was over 12,000 feet in depth.

It would have been the most complex, the most difficult salvage ever achieved.

♪♪ -Risdon Beazley neither confirmed nor denied that he was searching for the Titanic.

-And, of course, of the popular side, there is only one wreck on the Grand Bank, or near the Grand Bank, and that's the Titanic.

In fact, there are hundreds of wrecks on the Grand Bank, but they thought they must be after the Titanic.

It would be several decades before Risdon Beazley or anyone else could have had the technology available.

Remote-operated vehicles such as the ones that found the Titanic eventually just weren't developed.

-Throughout the 1960s and '70s, several plans were put forward to find the Titanic, but these were later abandoned, largely for financial reasons.

Then, in 1979, a man finally stepped forward with a serious proposal: a millionaire oil executive from Texas named Jack Grimm.

-He had a call name called "Cadillac Jack."

[ Laughs ] He always drove Cadillacs.

You know, he loved to gamble, and, of course, that's part of the predisposition of an adventurer.

-Jack was a successful oil and gas man, and he had lots of money.

I mean, he had 300 to 400 wells pumping oil, so his income was pretty great.

-He was fun-loving.

He loved history.

You know, anytime he felt like that there was an adventure coming, his eyes would just dance.

-He took that money and he spent it to continue to be an adventurer.

He spent everything he had on his searches.

One project, he was after Bigfoot, and the next time, he was after Noah's Ark.

Loch Ness Monster.

I mean, he loved that.

-Jack, how long did you dream about this expedition?

You've done many interesting things.

-Well, it had haunted me.

The story of the Titanic had haunted me from childhood.

My mother and father, who vividly recall the great accident.

And, uh, I just-- I was raised with the legend and the story about the Titanic.

-He and my brother would always go out to those mines, those abandoned mines, and search and look for treasures.

He went up into Nevada, and that was where he found the old newspaper article that told about the Titanic sinking.

-There was a newspaper that was found by he and his son in a mine in Nevada, and there was the report of the sinking of the Titanic.

He immediately-- immediately looked at that and said, "Well, I'm gonna go find it."

♪♪ [ Telegraph clicking ] -"We have struck an iceberg.

Sinking by the head.

[ Indistinct shouting ] Losing power.

Cannot last much longer."

[ Indistinct shouting ] -When the Titanic went down, nations around the world were stunned.

No other modern event has inspired such a steady and overwhelming flow of books and novels and poems and songs and movies.

Lost in the depths of a dark and frozen sea, it's captivated the public imagination for decades... and now has inspired a daring team of scientists and explorers to launch an unprecedented expedition of historical discovery.

-In early 1980, a millionaire from Texas began assembling an elite team to attempt to find the Titanic.

They would be the subject of a major documentary narrated by Orson Welles.

The lead scientist was William Ryan of Columbia University.

-I started at Columbia in 1962 as a graduate student and stayed on as staff, ending up going to sea on research ships.

Probably for two or three years at sea on ships in all the world's oceans except the Arctic.

I came back from an Alvin diving expedition on the Galápagos.

I was delayed at what was then Idlewild Airport here in New York.

To pass the time, I picked up this issue of The New York Times.

And reading through it, way in the back page was a tiny little article that a millionaire from Texas was going to search for the Titanic.

All I knew was his name was Grimm and he was from Abilene, Texas.

I bought a postcard and a stamp, and I wrote him a postcard.

He's a wildcat oil man, very successful, used to taking huge gambles, and he was also a world-class poker player.

I knew nothing of his previous famous interest that he was going to find Noah's Ark or he was going to look for Bigfoot or look for Atlantis.

I learned that all later.

-22 and a half... -The search is being financed by Texas oilman Jack Grimm, a daring investor well-known for backing adventurous and difficult expeditions.

-And those are-- That's one of the answers that we hope to find when we reach the Titanic.

-When I got back to my office here at Lamont... ...the phone had been ringing.

It was from Texas.

My postcard addressed to Mr.

Grimm, Abilene, Texas, had found him, and he wanted to talk to me.

I made it clear to him that I was going to bring to him the most qualified professionals in the United States with this near-bottom, deep-tow technology that would be required to find a very small ship on the bottom of a very deep ocean.

-News of Jack Grimm's search for the Titanic was soon captivating the world's media.

-It's a big, dark ocean.

The uncertainty of... -Technological and scientific activities will be coordinated by Dr.

William Ryan from Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory.

-...that radius and the difference of those positions, you have a piece of real estate the size of Rhode Island.

-But behind the scenes, Jack Grimm's team faced a huge challenge: getting hold of the technology needed to search the depths where the Titanic was believed to be.

-He wanted to find the Titanic that summer.

♪♪ I said, "Well, I don't have the equipment to do this."

And he said, "Build it."

-I think history should remember Jack Grimm for his spirit of adventure, being willing to take a risk.

And he did that over and over again in his life, to be able to say, "Just do it.

We can do it.

Let's try."

And the Titanic search took two unique men getting together and having a can-do attitude and going forward with it.

-Well, the big problem was, first, it's in 12,000 to 13,000 feet of water, and that's-- We don't have many kinds of surveying equipments that can work in water that deep.

-And we built the device in a few months.

I called up Mr.

Grimm.

He was interested, and he said, "But I want to do video photography of the wreck."

I said, "We've never done deep-sea video."

He said, "Do it."

-We followed up with a camera system that could also withstand pressures of 4,000 to 5,000 pounds per square inch.

Both of these vehicles, both the sonar for mapping the ocean floor and the camera for photographing the ocean floor, had to be tied on the end of a cable 18,000 feet long, towed behind a ship.

-The camera that Jack used, they built that camera and put it together on the ship going to search for the Titanic.

It was just amazing.

-Nothing like that had ever been done, to my knowledge, in oceanography, until that little camera system with the little handheld flashes put in heavy-duty housing that could take the bottom of the sea floor pressure.

And they did it.

It was amazing.

-Jack Grimm was confident that his team of experts and their brand-new technology would finally solve the mystery of the lost Titanic.

-Well, men, first, you got to recognize the fact that we're taking a voyage into history, and that's just what it is.

Hopefully we can find the wreck and gain access... [ Man speaking indistinctly ] and gain access to the purser's office.

It's my film.

If I want to talk on and on and on, I think I will.

-Jack Grimm's missions received a wealth of public attention, but this was nothing compared with the attention the Titanic received on its maiden voyage nearly 70 years earlier.

[ Ship horn blows ] -On Titanic's sailing day, which was Wednesday, the 10th of April 1912, she was due to sail at noon.

-As she gets ready to sail, crowds begin flocking on the quayside to wave her off as she heads off into the Great Sea.

She is a vast ship.

She's sparkling white.

-The press are interested in the sailing of the Titanic because of how many members of the upper classes will be traveling.

-So you have the wealthiest people in the world, like John Jacob Astor.

You have film stars like Dorothy Gibson.

You have tennis players.

You have adviser to the President of the United States of America.

But you also have some people that are leaving Britain to start a new life in the United States, where they think that life will be better for them.

So in a sense, the Titanic is almost like a microcosm of the whole of society in 1912.

-At the time the Titanic actually is steaming down what we call Southampton Water, the passengers were sitting down to lunch.

It was the widest dining room afloat.

It was 92 feet wide.

It had these white tablecloths.

The whole of Titanic is a kind of bespoke, handmade, beautiful craft.

And she really gave people the impression of a country house on land.

There was a swimming pool.

There was a gymnasium.

There was a squash court.

Miles and miles of electrical cables and lots and lots of hot-water pipes and things that people didn't even have in their homes in 1912.

-There are concerts in the afternoon and in the evening for first- and second-class passengers.

Everything is going smoothly.

-Many people were actually sitting on the deck in the sunshine, reading a book, chatting, drinking tea, coffee, that sort of thing.

So it was very relaxed, and, really, what they were doing was killing time until their next meal.

It was really a sort of eating and chatting fest.

-The first two days, Wednesday, the 10th of April, and Thursday, the 11th, there's really no cause for alarm.

No one ever thought that there would be panicked messages going out at 2:00 a.m., 1:00 a.m.

in the middle of the Atlantic for "Come quickly.

Danger."

[ Telegraph clicking ] -"Come at once.

We have struck a berg.

It's a CQD, old man.

We have struck iceberg.

Sinking fast.

Come to our assistance."

-Titanic's first distress message is not sent until nearly midnight, about 47 minutes after the collision.

The message itself says, "We are the Titanic.

Sinking.

Have your boats ready."

This is a shock to all of the shipping that hears it on the North Atlantic that night.

-"We are sinking fast.

Passengers being put into boats.

Women and children in boats cannot last much longer.

This is Titanic.

CQD.

Engine room flooded."

-They would then send out the coordinates that they thought that Titanic was at.

The trouble was, those coordinates were wrong.

-The fact that searches for the Titanic will be starting where the Titanic said it was that night in 1912 means that they are starting in the wrong place.

It will unintentionally leave a red herring for decades for people trying to find the Titanic.

♪♪ -In the summer of 1980, when Jack Grimm and his team set off to find the Titanic, they were unaware that an error made by her wireless operators 68 years earlier would make their search that much more difficult.

-On July 7, 1980, a 39-member crew assembles at the Tracor Marine Shipyard in Port Everglades, Florida, in preparation for an historic voyage.

Using the most advanced oceanographic equipment available, they will scour the ocean floor in an area 300 miles southeast of Cape Race, Newfoundland, somewhere 13,000 feet below in the dark, icy waters.

-The work of the scientific team would be captured by a documentary film crew headed by explorer and producer Mike Harris, but the filmmakers and the scientists didn't always see eye to eye.

-Mike Harris and his film crew videoed all the activity we did in the lab, launching the instruments and so on.

When we arrived in Florida to find that Mike Harris had brought up this monkey that was to come to sea with us... And I guess this was for their documentary film, to entertain.

It was supposed to hold its nose as if it was going underwater whenever somebody said to the monkey, "Titanic."

I said, "If the monkey comes, we don't.

This is not a circus.

We're going out into high seas.

Very dangerous environment."

The Titanic was a graveyard, an enormous loss of life.

And it was to be respected.

We have to take this with the uttermost professionalism.

And that was agreed upon.

-With all gear and personnel loaded on board and the technical equipment fully operational, HJW Fay makes preparations to sail.

-Have a good trip!

Relax!

Don't hit any icebergs!

-Thanks.

-Steady!

-Steady!

-Let's go get her.

-Very good, sir.

-♪ We're gonna find the Titanic ♪ ♪ In her cold and lonely grave ♪ ♪ Yes, we'll find the Titanic ♪ ♪ With her cowards and her brave ♪ ♪ We've all been told the story ♪ ♪ Of the tragedy and glory ♪ ♪ Of that great ship Titanic ♪ ♪ At the bottom of the sea ♪ -Approaching the site historically considered to be the location of the Titanic's last coordinates, the researchers launch a series of three transponders.

They are dropped into the ocean at five-mile intervals in a triangular pattern around the site.

Once in position on the ocean floor, the transponders will serve as constant reference points for the search operation, as signals are sent out from the ship at regular intervals and then bounce back.

This will allow the scientists to pinpoint precise locations of objects thought to be the Titanic.

-Gonna lower this slowly.

Lower this slowly.

-There she goes!

-Let's hope this is not another disaster at sea.

[ Laughter ] -While the team were aware that the Titanic's last coordinates were most probably not accurate, they did not know the extent of the error.

-Because of the uncertainties of where the Titanic distress position was or the lifeboats were, we would have to search an area 30 by 20 miles, 600 square miles.

We started the survey of the bottom.

The sea mark was towed 100 to 200 meters above the seabed on a 25,000-foot-long cable.

-In this animation, a signal is sent out by the ship's echo sounder and then bounced back by the transponders.

-And then the echoes came back.

If the Titanic was sitting on the seabed and the sound was broadcast to it, its hull would create an acoustic shadow behind it.

So we were looking for some high-standing bright target that would cast an acoustic shadow.

We went up past the coordinates that had been telegraphed from the Titanic by Harold Bride that fateful night, drove for 10, 20 nautical miles.

We encountered an enormous canyon that cut diagonally through the survey area.

So we made some passes down the canyon, but no big shadows.

There had to be some navigation issue.

The Titanic was to change its clocks to local noon at midnight.

Maybe there had been some screw-up on the map of the nautical chart.

-William Ryan was right.

There was an error on the nautical chart dating back to the 15th of April 1912, when Titanic sent out a distress signal on her state-of-the-art Marconi machine.

[ Telegraph clicking ] -The Marconi machine communicated in dots and dashes, which we call Morse code.

It was operated by young men at the time who were-- They would kind of be the "geeks" of today, if that makes sense, and the interesting thing is, they all knew each other because they were all trained in this place they nicknamed the "Tin Tabernacle" in Ireland.

-All of these young operators have a similar sense of humor.

There are industry in-jokes.

So one of the things they do is that they make fun of the upper classes and the way that they speak to each other.

So they use kind of posho, R.P, "public boarding school" lingo to each other.

So that's why when you see some of the transcripts of the Titanic's messages, it will be one of the Titanic operators saying, "All well here, old boy.

How are you, old chap?"

"Yes, chap.

Thank you."

-They jokingly called each other "old man," and that actually plays out rather interestingly when we come to discuss the actual sinking.

-"CQD, old man.

We have struck iceberg.

Sinking fast.

Come to our assistance.

Position latitude 41.46 north.

Longitude 50.14 west.

Cannot last much longer."

-Titanic's distress position is actually wrong.

The reason for this is that when the officers on Titanic took the star sights at about 7:30 on the evening before the collision, they all matched, so they knew they were correct.

However, Pitman, who is quite a young officer, he makes a mistake of one minute in transferring the star-sight time to Titanic time, and that one minute equated to an error in longitude.

This caused enormous problems for the future because what it did is it effectively gave the wrong map position for where Titanic's wreck would eventually be found.

-In spite of the error in the nautical chart, by late July, Jack Grimm's sonar had detected several possible locations for the Titanic.

-The canyon had, in areas, relief of 600, 800 feet of vertical relief into which the Titanic could be hidden.

In those first five or six days... only blotches occurred.

No shadows.

-The amplitudes of the feature look to be quite reasonable... -It's our little banana.

-...for a possible target, right.

Chiquita banana.

[ Laughs ] -We would label them Target 1, Target 2, Target 4, Target 4.

-But the team were unable to confirm if any of these targets were, in fact, the Titanic, and they soon faced challenges of a different kind.

-I don't know... We got some small problems.

Got a hurricane heading this way and a gale heading this way.

I don't know what's gonna hit us first.

-Doesn't sound good.

-Doesn't it?

Charming.

Just charming.

-I think that it's hard for people to appreciate how challenging it is to tow a heavy piece of equipment several miles down on the end of a cable in high winds and high waves.

It's dangerous for the ship.

It's very difficult for navigation.

-The weather got atrocious.

We recovered the vehicle, weathered out a gale for two or three days, put the vehicle back down, continued the search, and eventually we had covered not only the whole SOS-CQD location, but we covered much of the canyon.

And as no real big target with acoustic shadow appeared, there was a bit of a... "It'll be on the next watch.

"It'll be on the next watch.

It'll be on the next watch."

-The search goes on while the exhausted crew maintains a desperate night vigil.

-William Ryan and his colleague, Fred Spiess, began to wonder if the Titanic was further away from the distress position than they'd anticipated when planning the expedition.

-The place at which Titanic thought it was at the time it sent out its SOS signal is right here at this spot we've labeled Site 1.

Let's put a marker on there.

The next-nearest ship was the Californian.

Titanic could conceivably have been up as far north as here if the Californian's position was right.

-I finally encouraged Dr.

Spiess... let's go further east.

Why were the lifeboats found so far east of the CQD position?

Totally hypothetical.

So we went and put one track way out on the eastern edge of our survey box, going from north to south and off on the starboard transducer, and suddenly there was a very loud, crisp reflector.

Bang, bang, bang, bang.

[ Sonar beeping ] And then we were past it.

When we examined the sonar record, it was a linear object, but only 600 feet long.

Titanic was over 800 feet long.

It was widely assumed that the Titanic had sunk intact.

This object was not the full length of the Titanic.

That was a big concern, whatever this object was.

I think most pressing, both the Dr.

Spiess and to Mr.

Grimm, was the distance from the distress position.

To Dr.

Spiess, who had been a submariner in World War II, widely awarded for his duties, who had surveyed for the Navy other sunken ships, a navigation error that large could not have occurred.

And to Mr.

Grimm, 600 feet was not long enough, and so it was written off as perhaps a pile of rocks, scattered debris and rocks.

And that was the description of Target number 9.

So at the end of the expedition, we had 14 targets and none verified.

This crisp, 600-foot-long object is the bow section of the Titanic.

We did not know that.

♪♪ -On Jack Grimm's first mission, his sonar passed right over the bow of the Titanic.

But this target was written off because at the time, no one knew the extent of the error in Titanic's distress position... and it was widely accepted that the ship had sunk intact.

♪♪ -If you watch any movie about the sinking of the Titanic before the 1980s, they will show it sinking intact.

And that was really the established narrative that came out of the inquiries into the Titanic's sinking.

-At the time it was built, it seemed inconceivable that a ship the size of the Titanic would sink, let alone split in two.

-As the Titanic rises progressively over the skyline of East Belfast throughout 1909, 1910, and 1911, the men who are working on it are creating what they know will be the largest man-made moving object thus far in human history.

-The ship was utterly enormous.

She's 800 feet long.

She's 10 decks high.

She's got enormous funnels big enough for a train to pass through.

They never believed the Titanic would sink.

There was a big inquiry into the sinking of the Titanic soon afterwards.

During the inquiry, the officers are all asked, "Did Titanic break in two?"

Now, possibly in order to protect the reputation of the White Star Line or possibly because they actually believed it, they say, no, the Titanic did not break in two, and their testimony was believed.

-That becomes the narrative that is established for years between the sinking and the discovery of the ship.

This leads to confusion, however, when it comes to attempts to find the Titanic because those searching for it are under the impression they are going to find one intact 882-foot object, when, in fact, that is not how it will look when they find it at all.

-In June 1981, 69 years after the Titanic sank, Jack Grimm's team embarked on a second mission to find the wreck.

If they found it, everyone assumed it would be in one piece.

-We sailed June 28th from Massachusetts aboard the Texas A&M research vessel the Gyre.

-She's gallant, and she serves us well.

Like a faithful Labrador Retriever.

She wants so much to please.

-It's an unprecedented second trip.

We've been given a reprieve.

Uh, we're going back to find it this time.

Uh, hopefully we can find, uh, the hull basically intact, sitting on the-- on its keel on the bottom of the ocean in some 12,000 or 13,000 feet of water.

The area we're interested in is this area where we found the 14 targets last year.

-Yeah.

-Of which there are six high-priority.

There are two or three that are outstanding targets.

And, uh, we will go back to those targets and map them in detail.

-We had the right equipment.

We had the side-scan sonar system.

We had the camera system.

We had everything we needed.

All we needed was good weather and being able to cover all the bases.

-Fred Spiess had submitted a proposal to Mr.

Grimm that he would use his deep-tow instrument.

It had cameras and a TV snapshot camera in it, and it had a magnetometer.

So if he could get his vehicle to within 200 or 300 meters of one of our targets, he could decide from video and the magnetometer that it was a metal hull, a metal wreckage, or not.

-Launching the deep tow takes all hands and the cook.

The device is out of harm's way once it is in the water, but each launch and recovery is done much like two porcupines making love: slowly and carefully.

-But number 13, that's the one we're looking at next.

-Number 13 is coming up next in a couple of hours.

-Yeah.

-This is really one of our number-one priority targets.

Well, this is roughly 900 feet long, and the Titanic was 882, so it's pretty close.

And it shows a relief, I think, of 100 and some feet.

And within the next 5 or 10 minutes, we're gonna be by this with the magnetometer, and it should show up over there on a scale if that's, uh-- if there's any metal associated with this particular target.

-And one by one, he visited these targets, and one by one, no magnetic signature... no magnetic signature, no magnetic signature.

We ran up and down the canyon floor.

No magnetic signature.

They're knocking off 13 of the targets.

He said to Mr.

Grimm, "It doesn't exist here."

-We have just passed target 13, one of our top priority targets, and there has been no change in the Earth's magnetic field.

13 is a dry hole, so we're heading up the line.

[ Chatter ] -Almost even there.

-Everyone aboard relaxes and passes the time on the long stretches between targets in different ways.

Jack and some of the men play poker.

The days race by, and it feels like sitting in traffic in a New York taxi with the meter running.

-Having eliminated all the other targets, the only remaining target was number 9, and there was about 6 or 7 hours remaining before we absolutely had to head back to port.

So I said, "Could we use my camera vehicle and tow the video to the target number 9 way out to the east beyond your transponder net?"

♪♪ -We are launching the video-camera sled for its first, last, and only run of the trip.

This particular configuration has never been used before, and Dr.

Bill Ryan looks on as anxiously as any expectant father in a hospital waiting room.

This is a last-ditch attempt to recover some physical evidence of the Titanic, at least for this trip, and everyone knows it and says a silent prayer.

-We had live black-and-white video showing us the bottom so we could put the tow wire up and down to keep the camera just 10 feet or 12 feet off the bottom.

And we towed eastward.

And about three hours into the tow... ...this object suddenly appears.

The camera hits something, and it tilts something.

And the reaction was, "What is this?

What happened?"

Had we hit some big glacial boulder that dropped out of one of the icebergs?

-The crunch and scrape of hitting something hard.

It really couldn't be anything but a man-made object.

-We opened the glass sphere, this huge, big glass sphere in which held the video cassette recorder, and we inserted that into the videotape player.

-Everyone who could gathered in the lounge to watch the video like a bunch of kids around a Christmas tree when the magic moment comes to open presents.

-And we had set up a monitor watching the bottom go by.

Starfish and brittle stars and little octocorals.

And an occasional rattail fish would swim through the picture.

-Really impressed with the way, Bill, this... [ Indistinct shouting ] -Something moved out.

Yeah.

-What was that?

-It hit the bottom.

-It was dust.

-No, it didn't hit the bottom.

-Something stirred up and split.

-Something stirred up and split, yeah.

-Alright!

-Yeah, that's what it was.

-Nope.

There's another fish.

Upper right.

See it?

-And suddenly, into view comes this object that we've hit.

Somebody shouts, "Play it back!"

-Nope.

There's something there!

Look!

-[ Woman shouts ] -And there it was, a few frames of videotape we would look at again and again.

Its immediate impression caught the eye and froze the mind.

-Somebody in the room shouted out, "That's a propeller blade!

That's a propeller blade!"

And we played it back and called the captain, Armand, in to take a look at it, and he said, "Oh, yeah.

That's the propeller blade of a very large ship."

-The scientists are saying, "Could be.

Okay.

It looks like a propeller, but we need proof."

-Anita took the film, developed it shipboard in our color-film processing system, and then made prints and put together a mosaic of the flash, flash, flash, flash, flash, flash, flash.

-The camera system was, um, basically dangled like a yo-yo from the ship, and so every single image had a different scale to it.

We just had to find portions of the image that matched the portions of the next image and overlay it and get the scale, adjust it for that enlargement, and then the next one, the next one.

-And that had the shape of the blade of a large propeller.

Mr.

Grimm was very pleased.

He took that mosaic with him upon departure from the cruise.

♪♪ -And it was thrilling to be able to have something for Jack to take home with him, that, you know, hey, looks like we probably found it.

Let's hope.

-All the way back to Boston, the debate continued whether the blade we see in this still picture taken from the videotape is the right size and shape to belong to the Titanic.

We could not know and did not know until we got home to Texas, that on Jack Grimm's desk was this picture of two commercial divers from Scotland, Mr.

Simon Martin and Mr.

Alec Crawford, with a propeller blade from the Oceanic.

This ship, of similar vintage and size in relation to the Titanic, was wrecked off the coast of Scotland 60 years ago, and the similarities between the two pictures speak for themselves.

-When Jack Grimm returned, he exclaimed he believed that that was the Titanic's propeller.

He was convinced it was a propeller.

I think the reaction of the public was interesting, but it was oh-hum.

-And your camera that you were pulling just went right over this, bumped over it.

-Yes, and we didn't know any of this until hours later.

So I went back in the summer of '83 to try to confirm that discovery, and we'd lost all of our camera systems in the storm there and was unable to confirm it.

-I stayed neutral because I had no really firm navigation to know where that propeller had been photographed.

I knew it was on the transect towards target number 9.

-And I think that that was very frustrating to Jack.

He really wanted to find it.

He thought we were so close.

Yeah, he had a hard time with that.

-While Jack Grimm did not find the Titanic, his missions uncovered some vital clues.

-He didn't find the ship intact in one piece right next to the propeller, but it was his information that was used for further exploration by others.

-This is my own opinion, but I think it gave the spot where the Titanic was.

And why in the world would adventurers not seek to reveal more of it?

-Jack, of course, everybody knows about your wonderful expedition last summer to find the Titanic.

-Jack Grimm did not undertake any further missions.

He planned instead to dive on target 9, hoping to find the propeller once again and prove this was where the wreck was located.

But before he got the chance, there would be another team who would finally solve the riddle of the lost Titanic.

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