Salvagers can now open the Titanic to take its ‘voice’
Afederal judge has given a salvage company permission to cut open the hull of the RMS Titanic in order to retrieve the ship’s famed Marconi wireless telegraph machine. The telegraph machine, sometimes called ‘the voice of the Titanic’, is notorious for sending out the ship’s final distress messages on 14 and 15 April 1912 after the ship hit an iceberg in the North Atlantic and started to sink, ultimately killing some 1,500 people. The equipment sits within three adjoining rooms known as the Marconi suite, located on the ship’s topmost deck, and has long intrigued salvagers at RMS Titanic, Inc., a for-profit company that won the rights to salvage the Titanic and exhibit its artefacts in 1994. Retrieving the telegraph might require cutting open the ship’s hull with a remotely operated vehicle (ROV), the company said, but a court ruling in 2000 prohibited them from doing so. That ruling also prohibited the company from removing anything directly from the wreck – on later expeditions the company removed thousands of artefacts from a debris field near the ship. Now, 20 years later, the company has successfully challenged that ruling, citing concerns that the room and its contents could be destroyed by deterioration if not recovered soon. “The boat is sort of degrading… right at the Marconi suite,” Bretton Hunchak, president of RMS Titanic, Inc., said. “Our main concern is that it is going to be lost very soon.” Rebecca Beach Smith, a federal judge in Virginia, ruled that “the Marconi device has significant historical, educational, scientific and cultural value as the device used to make distress calls while the Titanic was sinking”. That, coupled with the deterioration, is enough to justify its removal, even if that requires “limited cutting” of the ship’s hull, Smith ruled.
Some organisations, including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) oppose this sort of invasive shipwreck surgery. In February NOAA lawyers expressed concerns that RMS Titanic, Inc. will use this ruling as a ‘placeholder’ to gain greater access to the ship and its artefacts on future expeditions. The
shipwreck is protected as an archaeological site according to an international agreement between the US, the UK, Canada and France, an agreement that the company’s proposed expedition flatly violates, the lawyers said. For now the court ruling only grants permission for ‘minimal’ cutting with the express purpose of recovering the Marconi telegraph. If possible the RMS Titanic, Inc. team will enter and exit the Marconi suite through existing holes in the ceiling, Hunchak said, but this may not be possible. The company’s expedition to remove the telegraph could begin as early as August or September 2020 if the state of the coronavirus pandemic allows them to operate safely, Hunchak said.