The Titanic fell in the category of a luxury ocean liner, and it sank to the bottom of the North Atlantic Ocean after colliding with an iceberg. It happened more than a century back, on April 15, 1912, to be precise. There were 2200 persons on board, and 1500 of them met a watery grave.

The wreckage lay on the seabed until a team led by Robert Ballard found it in 1985. He was a man from the Navy and was interested in locating the wreckage. He was developing his own remote-control underwater vehicle to undertake the exercise but ran out of funds.

He approached the Navy, and they agreed to finance him if he located two missing submarines.

Daily Mail UK reports the submarines were USS Thresher that sank in 1963 with a crew of 129 and USS Scorpion that followed five years later with 99 men on board. The former sank 200 miles off the coast of Boston and the latter near the Azores. Robert Ballard struck the deal and succeeded in his mission of locating all the three wreckages.

It was a top-secret mission

Robert Ballard had approached US Navy’s Deputy Chief of Operations Ronald Thunman to finance the project of finding The Titanic.

Thunman showed his willingness but made it conditional. He wanted Ballard to find two nuclear submarines that had sunk, in addition to the luxury ship. He wanted to camouflage the search for the submarines and hoodwink the Russians into thinking that the search was for the Titanic.

Once Ballard got the go-ahead, he and his team assigned priority to locate USS Thresher and USS Scorpion.

He had used the concept of looking for the trail of debris to find USS Scorpion. That same logic helped him to find the Titanic. After finding it, he captured the details of the wreckage on film. Incidentally, the ship had left Southampton, and its destination was New York City.

The search began in 1982

The New Zealand Herald adds Robert Ballard wanted to search for the Titanic in 1982.

He was from the US Navy and an oceanographer. In order to conduct the search, he needed suitable equipment, and one of these was a remote-control underwater vehicle. However, he ran short of funds, and the US Navy agreed to finance him provided he locate two of their nuclear submarines that went missing in the Atlantic in the 1960s.

The USS Thresher sank in April 1963 during deep-diving tests while USS Scorpion went missing mysteriously after five years. The loss of the Titanic has captivated the imagination of the people and a London based tour operator plans to organize a historical tour to the final resting place of the Titanic.

Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet starred in the movie of the same name, and it hit the screens 20 years back. The film relived the last moments of the ship and its passengers.
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