Mission to raise Titanic’s radio from Atlantic seabed

A company that holds the right to salvage artefacts from the wreck plans to send a remotely operated vehicle into the ship’s interior in the hope of recovering objects from the radio room.

The bow of the Titanic’s wreckage.

Shortly before midnight on April 14, 1912, the captain of RMS Titanic stuck his head into the radio room to tell the operators that the ship had struck an iceberg and they should transmit a call for assistance.

“Send SOS,” Harold Bride, one of the operators said to his colleague Jack Phillips. “It’s the new call and it may be your last chance to send it.”

Bride, who survived, would later tell of how Phillips remained at his post, messaging the nearest ship, the Carpathia, even after Captain Edward Smith told them it was every man for himself. “Come quick,” his last communication said. “Engine room nearly full.”

Now the US company that holds the right to salvage artefacts from the wreck plans to send a remotely operated vehicle into the ship’s interior in the hope of recovering objects from the Marconi radio room that helped save the lives of more than 700 people when Titanic sank.

However, RMS Titanic Inc faces stern opposition from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, a US government agency.

Titanic: The Artefact Exhibition, Southampton.

The company, which was granted the sole right to salvage in 1994, said it would seek to bring up items from the seabed and “may recover freestanding objects inside the wreck, including objects from the Marconi room, but only if such objects are not affixed to the wreck itself”.

However, the agency has argued in newly filed court papers that RMS Titanic Inc must obtain authorisation from the government before conducting “any research, exploration, salvage or other activity that would physically alter or disturb the wreck”. The filing is the latest salvo in a long-running legal fight between the NOAA and the company, which brought up 5,500 artefacts from the wreck between 1997 and 2004.

RMS Titanic Inc is owned by Experiential Media Group and maintains permanent exhibitions in Las Vegas and in Orlando, Florida, and has also put on shows in Paris and Sweden.

It first sought permission to recover the ship’s Marconi radio in 2020, asking a judge to modify a ruling that forbade it from cutting into the wreck.

Paul Henri-Nargeolet, the marine explorer and Titanic expert, who died aboard the Titan submersible in June, had told the court that the area around the Marconi Suite had deteriorated and it might be possible to enter via an open skylight.

THE TIMES