The Titanic | The Obsession | 4
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Imagine it's a warm spring day in 1914, and you're standing in the lobby of a bank in Manhattan. You're an architect and amateur inventor, and ever since the Titanic sank two years ago, you've been obsessed with finding a way to raise the wreck from the ocean floor. Now you're convinced you've figured it all out. All you need is a fleet of ships, a few hundred men, and about one and a half million dollars. You turn to see your banker approaching, and he escorts you to his office, and you're

where he takes a seat behind a large desk as you begin to roll out your plans. Well, thank you so much for agreeing to meet with me today. I think once you've seen my proposal, you'll agree that this is a worthy endeavor. The banker nods, but you can sense his skepticism. In these drawings, you'll see I propose using electromagnets connected to a submarine to determine the location of the Titanic wreckage. I imagine that it should take approximately one month. One month? That's...

"'I see. But a submarine? At that depth, wouldn't it be crushed by the weight of the ocean?' "'No, no. My submarine will be built to withstand a pressure of forty tons a square foot. That's more than enough to account for the maximum depth I calculated it would need to dive to. And once the exact location of the wreck is determined, a fleet of ships will anchor above the site, and then using winches mounted on the ships, we'll slowly raise the Titanic to the surface.'

And then what? I'm sorry, I just, I'm not sure I understand what the purpose is. Well, we'll tow her to New York so she can be repaired and put back into service. And what do the ship's owners at White Star have to say about this?

This is a question you decide to dodge, because White Star has repeatedly ignored your attempts to contact them. My objective is to return the Titanic to its rifle owners so that this great vessel may be rebuilt. I believe they're waiting to see if I can raise the necessary funds, and that's where you come in. I don't know. I mean...

So many people lost their lives on that ship. Aren't you concerned about disrupting a gravesite? On the contrary, I've spoken to more than a few families who would be pleased to see their loved ones receive a proper burial. You see, the seawater will have embalmed them all. They'll still be identifiable, and hundreds of bodies can be returned to their families. Have you asked some of these families to help pay for this expedition of yours? I mean, more than a few men of wealth went down with the ship that night.

That's true, and it is my hope that a few families will contribute. I just need to raise some initial funding to prove to them that my plan has merit. You notice that the banker's skeptical demeanor hasn't softened. He stands and shakes your hand. Well, let me discuss it with my team, and we'll get back to you.

You decide to make one last attempt to sway him. "That will be fine, but first let me show you a few newspaper articles that have been written about my plans. You will see that the press, including well-respected engineering journals, agree. It's time to raise the Titanic, and this is the best plan we've got." "Ah, yes, I see. I will give them my attention. Now..." As the banker walks you to the door, you try to hide your desperation.

You're determined to prove your scheme can work, but there's no hope of success without financing. You're also secretly hopeful that by recovering sunken cargo, artwork, and currency on the ship, you might just earn a few dollars yourself.

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From Wondery, I'm Lindsey Graham, and this is American History Tellers. Our history, your story. American History Tellers

Within two years of the Titanic disaster, enterprising individuals across the globe were proposing schemes to find and raise the sunken ship. Denver architect Charles Smith devised an elaborate plan to use submarines equipped with powerful magnets to locate the wreckage, then use magnets and cables to wrench the massive ship up from the ocean floor. But employing this new technology in the vast North Atlantic was an expensive proposition.

Smith ultimately failed to secure the funds necessary to implement his scheme, and the Titanic's exact location remained a mystery until 1985, when the discovery of the wreckage reignited the public's fascination with the doomed vessel.

Here with me today to discuss the obsession with the wreck of the Titanic and why it gained such traction in our collective memory is Daniel Stone, author of the book Sinkable, Obsession, the Deep Sea, and the Shipwreck of the Titanic. Our conversation is next. Daniel Stone, thanks for speaking with me today on American History Tellers. Thank you for having me.

Now, I have a small personal obsession with the Titanic that goes all the way back to childhood. I've been trying to figure out where it came from. I think it might be the 1980 film Raise the Titanic. But when you decided to write your book, Syncable, about the shipwreck of the Titanic, what did you want to do with it? Where did your obsession with the Titanic come from?

You are not the first young person to be obsessed and fascinated by the Titanic, nor am I. It's a long generation history. And mine came from great storytelling. I saw the film in the 90s, 1997, Titanic by James Cameron, which launched me on a quest to read every book, grab every bit of information.

And when I became a journalist, I realized that the whole world knew every detail about the Titanic and who was on it, how it sank, what happened while it was sinking. But very little was known about what came next, about after the ship sank and how the world reacted and how the world tried to find it and piece it back together and tell and retell its story for more than a century.

Now, plenty of ships have sunk over time, including in the early 20th century when the Titanic sank. But not all ships are remembered like the Titanic. What makes it different?

The Titanic has a lot of theories about what makes it so famous. There were a lot of rich people on board. It was its maiden voyage. It hit an iceberg. But all of these characteristics were actually not that unique. Ships were the dominant way to travel still in that era. A lot of ships hit icebergs, especially in the 1890s, to the point that by the Titanic comes shipwreck collisions with icebergs had actually gone down.

But what made the Titanic different, and this took me a long time to figure out, was really its timing. The Titanic hit an iceberg and sank at a very lucky time for a ship that wanted to be famous. If the Titanic had sank 20 years earlier, a lot of the world would have noticed and then would have moved on. And this is the case for shipwrecks in the 1870s and 1880s, many that hit icebergs also.

But what happened in 1912 when it sank was the advent of radio and television that was starting to heat up and storytelling in other industries like book publishing that allowed this story to be told so many times.

What was also different about the Titanic was the share of people who died versus people who lived. In a lot of shipwrecks, everybody dies or everybody lives. It's very rare that you have, like the Titanic, 1,500 people died and about 700 people lived.

And what that did was it created 700 survivors that had memories of this incident. And that they survived, they could tell and retell their memories, sometimes for decades, because they were young women and children who mostly survived. So this created a bank of memory for

of content that can be used and reused by storytellers in their books, in their films, that could kind of give life and continue to give life to this ship and the story of that night for decades and even more than a century.

So let's go back to the beginning, I guess, when this story first began to be told. How did the press cover the sinking of the Titanic? With great confusion at first. I mean, the advanced way to communicate in those days, the most advanced way to communicate was the telegraph, which was a marvel. But

it really only worked over short distances and often stopped at the curvature of the Earth. So a ship can only communicate by telegraph to other ships in its relatively close proximity. And so after the Titanic hits the iceberg,

It sends its SOS messages to other ships and they send that message to other ships in their vicinity eventually and it gets to New York. But this creates kind of a big game of telephone and details are lost. Other details are made up. There's great confusion when news is received in New York and

of whether the ship survived the iceberg strike and was still on its way, or whether it was damaged a little bit but would finish its journey, or if it had sunk entirely and everybody was dead. I mean, none of these were true, but nobody knew what to believe in those early hours and days.

And it wasn't until the survivors who were picked up by the Carpathia and brought to New York and reporters could really get a count and everyone's name. Could anyone figure out exactly how many people died and who? Well, let's speak about exactly how many people died and who, because the order was made, the famous order of women and children first. It's so famous that we take it for granted. But where did this sort of priority come from?

Women and Children First was an order that came from Captain Smith of the Titanic because it was this long-standing custom of the sea. It's kind of this great Victorian idea that in moments of distress, men will act courageously and give priority to women and children. In practice, it was very rarely used because usually when a ship is going down, it's mayhem.

It's pandemonium, and there's really no time for this kind of great act of chivalry. It's kind of every person for themselves. In 2012, two Swedish researchers studied more than a dozen maritime disasters involving thousands of victims in more than 30 countries over three centuries, and they found that almost exclusively, men's survival rates are way higher than women's, and children fare worst of all. Maybe about 15% of them make it off a ship alive.

So really, this was a custom that was almost like a rumor. It didn't actually happen in practice. What was different about the Titanic is how long it took to sink. After the iceberg strike, this ship was still floating for about two and a half hours, and that created all of this time for...

this kind of social reckoning of men to kind of be forced to give up their spot or to be seen as cowards. And so that created a scenario where women and children were given priority, and many of them ended up being the survivors. Of course, we all know why the Titanic sank. It hit an iceberg.

But how it sank, as you point out in your book, is also important. There's a term shipfall. What is it and why does it matter? Shipfall refers to the way a ship breaks apart and falls to the seabed. And this might be kind of a trivial thing to think about. You know, a ship sinks. It just falls.

But watching and studying how it falls really informs better shipmaking. You know, not knowing where the stresses are in a ship can really leave it vulnerable to stressors like ocean waves or rocky outcrops or coral. So it informs how future ships might be better built and how to fortify them from the sort of destruction that befell the most famous one. In the case of the Titanic, it

You know, the ship fall was really a mystery for about 70 years. A lot of survivors said the ship broke apart into two pieces. Other survivors said, no, it didn't break apart. It sank in one piece. And that debate really influenced another debate about where the Titanic was and in what condition it was. Because if it broke apart, that really would transform the structure of the ship as it sank and as it

crashed into the seabed. If it had sunk in one piece, it might have been in much better structural condition. So how did the Titanic fall to the bottom?

The Titanic sank in two pieces famously, and we know this now, but people didn't know this really until it was found in 1985. The iceberg strike was on the kind of front right side, the starboard side. It punched a bunch of holes in the hull, and those holes allowed in water that pulled the front of the ship downward. This is for more than two hours.

And all the way to the point where the front is so waterlogged that the back, the stern, is raised up in the air and the stress of holding that stern up is too much at the very end and the stern bounces back and breaks off into these two pieces. We know this now because of the forensics on the seafloor. There is not one Titanic wreck site. There are two major wreck sites that sank reasonably far apart, a few hundred feet.

And there's five debris fields of debris that fell off the ship as it's falling and broken open. And that forensic scene has allowed archaeologists and forensic analysts to reverse engineer and piece back exactly how the ship sank, how it rotated, how it crashed into the seafloor, which again informs how ships could be built better to withstand more stress in different ways.

We can imagine a sinking as a pretty straightforward event. It goes to the bottom, even if it breaks in two before it starts. But you've described the sinking of the Titanic in especially violent terms.

Give us a sense of the forces involved. Yeah, the biggest force is gravity. I mean, the Titanic sank in a part of the Atlantic Ocean that's very, very deep, a part that's about two and a half miles from the surface to the seabed. And that allows for a lot of physical forces to come into play. The bow of the ship, the front half,

breaks off first, and it sinks first, and it sinks almost like a missile. If you imagine the sharpened edge of the ship cutting through the water and striking the seafloor at about 30 miles an hour. And that doesn't seem too fast, but at that rate, you know, a pile of steel and wood and everything on board...

really has this crash and this boom to the point that it breaks apart much of its structure. The same thing happened to the stern, the back half, but it falls relatively flat. So it strikes the seafloor a little bit slower, maybe about 20, 22 miles an hour. And that has a different effect on its structure. It broke its back in the way archaeologists talk about it when

When it hits kind of flat, the way you would fall if you fell directly on your back, it would knock the wind out of you and maybe break some ribs in the same way that it did the stern. So these two different pieces of the same ship have a different ship fall and a different outcome when they hit the seabed.

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Give us an idea of what the shipwreck-seeking community is like. Shipwreck enthusiasts are a very diverse group of people, but they fall into a few major buckets. The vast majority are men, people who love history, a sense of mystery, and big machines.

People look for ships also for three major reasons. One is scientific or archaeological. The second is valuable, such as finding, you know, gold, silver, diamonds on these old shipwrecks. And the third is cultural, looking for famous ships that aren't really carrying anything valuable, but they're so famous that they can inspire cultural news coverage, book deals, film rights, or museum exhibits. The Titanic falls into this category, the cultural artifact category.

In every case, looking for these wrecks requires enormous amounts of time, big amounts of money, advanced underwater equipment. And it also requires a pretty big ego to think that you can do something so complicated, so hard underwater. So it sounds like the main appeal is really one of adventure and adventure.

following a dream, but also there is the treasure, right? Certainly there's the Spanish galleons of old, but the Titanic has its own treasure too. What might have been found on the Titanic?

Well, the Titanic's most valuable artifact was itself. I mean, this was a ship that everyone in the world had heard its name. Any piece of the Titanic, even in the days and weeks after it sank, would have been enormously valuable. A door handle, a light fixture, a plate from the dining room would have been valuable. But there were some...

objectively valuable things on board. There was a 1912 Renault-type CB Coupe de Ville, a very famous car in those days. It would be very famous today, too. There were cases of opium that were traveling in the hull of the ship that were also very valuable. Five Steinway Grand Pianos that today would be worth tens of thousands of dollars. And a painting that became even more famous because it sank on the Titanic.

called La Circassienne Aubin by the artist Mary Joseph Blondel and painted in 1814. All of these are valuable, but none really had the value of the Spanish galleons that sank with hundreds of millions of dollars of gold on board. I guess it's the fame of the Titanic itself, the value of the ship itself, the story that led many people almost as soon as the Titanic had sunk to want to raise it.

Tell us the story of Charles Smith and his plan to raise the Titanic. Charles Smith was an engineer in Colorado in 1914, two years after the Titanic sank, who had come from a family of gold mining engineers. And he believed that the Titanic wreck had been underwater a relatively short time, just two years.

And that suggested to him that it was still in really good shape. His plan called for dozens of surface scows, these surface boats that would all have electromagnets on board. And they would unfurl these electromagnets, which would instantly be activated and attracted to the hull of the Titanic.

Now, again, this is two and a half miles deep. So this is some kind of gratuitous back of the napkin math that he's doing to assume that the electromagnets would find the Titanic and not anything else, any other wrecks underwater.

Once they found it, they would be so attracted to the hole that they would stick onto it really tight. And then a series of winches powered by steam on the surface boats would all turn in unison and lift thousands of tons of hole to the surface, at which point the Titanic would be on the surface and can be dragged to the closest port in Halifax, dried out, left in the sun and restored.

Now, Charles Smith gave an interview at the time about what he wanted to do and how he wanted to do it. Also, why he wanted to do it. Could you read an excerpt for us? Sure. In this interview, which he gave in 1913, he explains exactly what he wants to do. And he says, my object, first of all, is to deliver the Titanic to its owners without further injury so that the great vessel may be rebuilt. Much of the cargo or all of it would be recovered.

All the bodies which sank with the doomed ship have long since been embalmed by the action of the seawater, and when they are at last brought back to the surface, they will be easily identifiable and prepared for reverential burial. So it sounds like a pretty easy job in Charles Smith's estimation. How was his idea to raise the Titanic received?

with great enthusiasm. People loved this. First of all, it was very easy to understand. It seemed really simple to the point where a lot of people said, well, if that's all it takes, of course he will do it. And in the years after it sank, the news had advanced that an American engineer had a really smart plan

He was going to do it. He knew how to do it. And he knew what he was talking about. And that was enough for many people to get caught in the hype that the plan would work. So in the initial days of this coverage, Charles Smith became very famous in newspapers across the country as the man who had not yet raised the Titanic, but was practically already there. And it was only a matter of time before he did it.

I guess we're still waiting on him to do it. So what happened to his plot? It turned out to be far more complicated than he thought, which is rather obvious now. But, you know, electromagnets don't really work underwater, certainly not to the degree that he thought that they would just kind of zip through the water and find the hull of the Titanic. The ocean floor, even in those days, was littered with hundreds, if not thousands of other wrecks in just that small area. And

And so even if you could attach a magnet to the hull of a ship, there was no guarantee it would be the Titanic. Also, this is happening two and a half miles underwater. And all of those dimensions make it impossible. First of all, two and a half miles of cable going underwater. Second, the pressure and the physics of the deep sea. So this means that even if these magnets can find the Titanic, raising it up would be enormously difficult and expensive too.

And then once it got to the surface, towing it, all of these ships in unison, was just this kind of great math problem of how it would possibly work. And so it's not that he actually tried it and failed. It's that as he got closer, he found it very difficult to assemble an army of surface boats to acquire the requisite number of electromagnets.

to get to the part of the Atlantic where the Titanic sank. All of these were not just speed bumps, but real barriers. And the plan very quickly fell apart. Now, to be fair to Charles Smith and his idea, this is not so far-fetched because just the year prior to the Titanic sinking,

a ship was raised, the USS Maine, which sank in Havana Harbor. Yeah, the Maine was a great example that fueled Charles Smith in the sense of possibility that he could do it. And the Maine was this great symbol of America, right? It sank in Havana Harbor in 1898. It was a symbol of the Spanish-American War, and it was thought to be hit by a Spanish torpedo. It rallied the American public to go to war with Spain,

a war that the U.S. won, and the Maine became this rally cry, remember the Maine, right? And after it sank, there was a forensic analysis, the Maine only sank in about 100 feet of water. And so about 10 years after the Maine sank, there's this great plan in the U.S. Congress to go rescue the Maine, to move it, to give it a burial befitting kind of a fallen soldier.

And so there's this great plan to circle the main with these great steel columns and drain the middle of the circle. It's called a cofferdam. It's like a bathtub. Drain the middle. And that allowed the main to be seen, to be repaired. And eventually, when the middle was refilled, the main was refloated and dragged off the coast of Cuba into deeper water and sunk again.

And so this whole big story proved that shipwreck salvage was possible. The difference was that the main had sunk in very shallow water, less than 100 feet, whereas the Titanic sank in more than 12,000 feet.

The Titanic obviously inspires obsession. Many people, I guess myself as a six-year-old, became infatuated. But there was also a man named Doug Woolley who became very obsessed with the Titanic. You interviewed him. Who was he and...

What were the limits of his obsession? Doug Woolley was an obsessive to the max. Even in a world full of people obsessed with the Titanic, Doug Woolley was next level. And he grew up in England in the 1930s and 40s, fascinated by the Titanic. He was one of these young men who just saw part of themselves in this story. And he decides that he wants to own the Titanic.

And this quest really is a lifelong quest for him to be near the Titanic and to claim it as his. And so I found him to be a very colorful character. I thought he had long ago died. And I learned while writing my book, he was still alive. And I went to visit him and really got a sense of his journey with the Titanic, his sense of obsession, and everything he did to try to claim the Titanic as his and eventually his bigger goal to raise it out of the water.

So owning the Titanic, that seems like an extraordinary thing to do, certainly if it's on the bottom of the seafloor. How did he try to pursue this claim? And can anyone own the Titanic?

Doug Woolley really wanted to own the Titanic, and he noticed something rather peculiar about the world's most famous shipwreck. This is in the 1950s and 60s. He notices that nobody really owns it, that the company that sailed it, the White Star Line, wanted nothing to do with it. The shipmakers who built it in Northern Ireland, they wanted to wash their hands of it. The insurance company that paid out all of the claims to the victims and for the ship

They also didn't really want to own it. And nobody really knew where it even was. So it was sort of a moot question. So Doug Woolley sees this vacuum of ownership and he says, well, I wonder if I could claim it. And he goes to a lawyer and the lawyer tells him, oh, sure, here's what you need to do. Put an ad in a newspaper, maybe a couple newspapers, make it a classified ad and say, I, Doug Woolley of Baldock, England, claim the Titanic as mine.

And now give people about two weeks to object. And if nobody does, then you can functionally claim that the Titanic is yours. And we know now this is not how the law works. This is not how the law worked then either. But Doug Woolley puts these ads in newspapers.

He waits a couple weeks, he hears from nobody, and so he starts to tell people that he owns the Titanic. People believe him. Newspaper reporters start to catch wind of this story, and they print his claim of ownership in the newspaper. And he would cut out those newspaper articles and send them to other reporters.

and create almost a chain of publicity over this thing that he really just kind of made up. And thousands of newspapers over the 1960s and 70s end up referring to him as the owner of the Titanic based just on his efforts to claim it.

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Let's stick with Titanic obsessive Doug Woolley because he had a plan not unlike Charles Smith's to raise the Titanic. What did this scheme entail?

Doug Woolley's plan was a little bit more advanced than Charles Smith, but it was still rather outlandish. He would go to the site of the Titanic's last coordinates. This is where it gave its SOS signal. And he would unfurl magnets that would locate the wreck's precise location.

From there, once he located it, he realized that it had been sitting underwater for about half a century. So it was waterlogged in the mud. So he would use a powerful ultrasonic boom to separate the wreck from the seafloor mud. After it was separated, a submarine would go down and attach deflated pontoons that he would fill with a process he called electrolysis.

And then that electrolysis process would fill up the pontoons with hydrogen from the seawater and they would inflate the pontoons. And that would be enough to kind of raise it almost like a blimp, just slowly through the water column. And he thought, of course, that will work. Every stage of that is easy to understand. The physics will work. We just need a little bit of attention to get us a lot of money and we'll be the ones to do it.

Now, this plan is not so crazy because only a few years after Woolley presented it in 1970, someone actually did raise another ship using a similar process. What was that ship?

So the ship was called the SS Great Britain. This was a very old ship. When it set sail in 1848, it was the largest passenger steamer ever built. It sailed for 89 years, which was extraordinarily long for any passenger ship. And it later became kind of a storage warehouse until it was so old and so difficult to maintain, it was scuttled in 1937 near Argentina. So

So in 1970, a British millionaire reads about the SS Great Britain and wanted to go bring it back. This was a symbol of England at its peak, right, in the 19th century. So he used a similar system as Woolley's idea. He used pontoons to refloat the ship.

and drag it about 8,000 miles from Argentina to England. And it worked. It worked because it was in relatively shallow water. There was a lot of money behind it. And there were a lot of people enthused about this idea, including the government of Great Britain, of the UK, that wanted to get this ship back.

So when the Great Britain arrives back in the UK, it's showered with rose petals when it's pulled through the harbor. And it's deemed to be the symbol of a great old England. And that alone is proof to Doug Woolley that with enough will and enough money, there is a way. But this shipwreck, the SS Great Britain, was sunk in much shallower water.

Two years after that ship was raised, though, another attempt was made, but in much deeper water. Tell us about the Glomar Explorer.

It was a U.S. operation run by the CIA to salvage a sunken Russian submarine. This is in the Pacific, about maybe a thousand miles north of Hawaii. A Russian submarine had sank. This is during the Cold War. And there's this great effort to go find it and raise it up before the Russians can know that the U.S. has their war secrets. And

And so there's this great plan. It involves the CIA, a big ship that was built, and it bears the name of Howard Hughes, who has co-opted into the plan to give a cover story to this operation. And the Glomar Explorer is the ship, and it goes to the wreck site of this Russian submarine, and it basically sends down a giant claw almost three miles deep to grab the Russian submarine. It grabs it, and it pulls it back up

And maybe two thirds of the way up, half of the Russian submarine falls back to the seafloor, but they do recover the front half of the submarine. And that had some strategic secrets in the Cold War. Not really enough to rationalize the operation, but engineering wise, it did prove that there is a way to salvage something that deep and raise at least part of it back to the surface.

Now, you mentioned that Woolley's plan, and in fact, all plans to find, locate, raise the Titanic require knowing where it is on the seafloor. And most of the time, like Woolley did, he wanted to go to the last known coordinates. But there's a problem there, and it has to do with time zones and keeping the ship's clock. Can you explain what this problem is?

Sure, this is the problem of traveling through time zones. And all of us today who travel on an airplane are very used to it. You take off in one time zone, you land in another, and reset your watch. But a ship crossing from England to America had to account for losing time very slowly. So losing five hours...

in time zone change, over the course of a six-day journey. And so it was crucial this be done precisely since time was a crucial variable when determining speed and, of course, the ship's accurate position. The best that most ships traveling west could do at the turn of the 20th century was to manually move the clock back 20 minutes every four hours. And that would amount to five hours over six days.

And the process proceeded very smoothly for the Titanic's first few days at sea. There was an officer assigned to do this. But after the iceberg strike, and as the ship is in this state of pandemonium, nobody knew if anyone had bothered to change the time. Did someone forget? Did they actually do it?

If they didn't, then when the navigator went to pinpoint the precise coordinates to ask for help over the telegraph, he may have miscalculated the position by as many as 10 miles. And that sounds like a fairly small number, but 10 miles in the middle of the North Atlantic becomes a rather large search area. So this is the reason why, even though the world knew

the SOS coordinates of the Titanic, it still took over 70 years to find the exact wreck site on the seafloor. And of course, the person who did find the exact wreck site was Bob Ballard. He found the Titanic in 1985.

But finding the wreck of the Titanic on the seafloor probably scuttled any hope of raising the ship. Why is that? Yeah, when Bob Ballard found the Titanic in 1985, what became immediately clear was that it was in terrible shape. Even Ballard, who had revered the Titanic since he was a kid, was really surprised at how bad it looked.

For one thing, its discovery confirmed that the ship broke in half, which meant there wasn't one Titanic, there were two. And that implied it had much less structural integrity when it hit the seafloor. It was easy to assume or understand that the structure of the Titanic was functionally gone. So this really extinguished any hope the Titanic really could be salvaged in full.

But nonetheless, 11 years after the discovery of the Titanic, an expedition was sent down to the bottom to retrieve a portion of it. Tell us this story and what happened.

Yeah, there were efforts to find pieces or bring up pieces of the wreck that people could be near or maybe could go on display in an exhibit. The biggest piece of the Titanic is actually called the Big Piece. It was discovered and eventually salvaged in 1998 in a very elaborate operation that involved, you know, long cables, not unlike Doug Woolley's, but in a very deliberate way attached to this major piece that is in the dozens of tons. And it was

raised up and brought to the surface with a winch, just like Charles Smith had talked about, and beginning to be towed back to Halifax, the piece fell down again on its journey to Canada and had to be found and re-raised again. But it eventually made it there. And it's now on display in a great longstanding Titanic exhibit in the Luxor Hotel in Las Vegas.

Now, between Ballard's 1985 discovery and James Cameron's 1997 film, interest in the Titanic just soared. And because of that, probably, there are at least three land-based replicas of the ship, either full or partial replicas, not all of them to scale. Where are these? The two half-scale replicas of half of the ship are in Branson, Missouri.

and Pigeon Forge, Tennessee. And these are not places that have any particular claim to the Titanic or its victims, but they are great tourism magnets. And they found that the Titanic was a reliable tourist draw, and so people would want to be near it. These are half of the ship in a half-scale replica, but that's really enough that tourists can walk on board, get a sense of what it felt like, and of course, get their photo taken in front. At least one of them has a great

iceberg sculpture in front. It's a little bit tacky, but it also looks very real to get your selfie in front of the Titanic hitting an iceberg. The only full-scale replica is currently being built in Sichuan province in China, where the Titanic story is also especially big and attractive. This has to do with James Cameron's 1997 film, which was very well received in China. People wanted to be near it, and so a small town had the idea to build a

a full-scale replica that looks just like the Titanic in every way. It sits in a pool of water, but it will never sail on the open seas. And this allows people to get a sense of the ship as a form of cultural resort. It's called the Romandizia Titanic, and it was still under construction when I wrote my book, and likely still is.

What is it about this ship that endures generation after generation so that you, me, even my daughter are captivated by this story? This is a story of great cultural significance. It's one we've all heard. It's a fascinating story that contains all of these great human elements of tragedy, of triumph, of cowardice.

and bravery, of hubris, and failure, right? All of these great elements of storytelling that have made it famous. And the fact that it's famous makes people want to be near it. It makes all of us feel like we want to touch it or get our photo taken with it. The same way when you meet a celebrity,

The Titanic is just as famous today as it was a century ago, if not more so. It is still extremely popular all over the world. It is one of the top 100 Google search terms every day worldwide because it's an accessible story that seems to hold something for everyone.

There's a Titanic economy that is too large to measure. Of things you can buy, of artifacts, replicas of artifacts. Someone sent me a small piece of mud that was taken from the seafloor from an expedition that went within 100 miles of the Titanic, and that alone had cultural value. Try

Trying to measure the economy of the Titanic is like trying to measure the economy of the color blue. It's just everywhere. It extends so far out and probably always will. Well, Daniel Stone, thank you so much for joining me on American History Tellers. Thank you for having me. That was my conversation with journalist Daniel Stone. To learn more, check out his book, Syncable, Obsession, the Deep Sea, and the Shipwreck of the Titanic.

From Wondery, this is the fourth and final episode of our series, The Titanic for American History Tellers. In our next season, in early 1607, English colonists landed on the shores of present-day Virginia, determined to establish the first permanent English settlement in North America, calling it Jamestown after the English king.

But soon, disease, starvation, and conflict with the powerful Powhatan people would claim the lives of two-thirds of the English settlers, leaving the colony on the brink of annihilation. If you like American History Tellers, you can binge all episodes early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Prime members can listen ad-free on Amazon Music. And before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey at wondery.com slash survey.

American History Tellers is hosted, edited, and executive produced by me, Lindsey Graham for Airship. Sound design by Molly Bach. Music by Lindsey Graham. Additional writing by Neil Thompson. This episode was produced by Polly Stryker and Alita Rozanski.

Our senior interview producer is Peter Arcuni. Managing producers, Desi Blaylock and Matt Gant. Senior managing producer, Ryan Lohr. Senior producer, Andy Herman. Executive producers are Jenny Lauer-Beckman, Marsha Louis, and Erin O'Flaherty for Wondery.

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