A Boy’s Dream
Titanic sank to the ocean floor and stayed there for 71 years. Then Robert Ballard set out to find it. As a kid, Ballard had loved reading about Titanic. “My dream,” he says, “was to find this great ship.”
Ballard became an ocean explorer and studied the ocean floor. Although he made many discoveries, he never forgot his dream: he still wanted to find Titanic. People said it was impossible. They said that the shipwreck was too deep, but Ballard did not agree.
Hunting for Titanic
In 1985, Ballard teamed up with a French scientist and began his search for Titanic. The two men sailed to where Titanic had sunk. They used high-tech tools to search the ocean floor. For weeks, they found nothing. Then they sent down Argo, an underwater machine that took pictures and sent them back to the crew.
Argo searched the ocean for a few days without finding anything. Then a big metal object came into view. It was a ship’s engine. The team began to cheer. They knew that they had discovered Titanic!
Robert Ballard and a crew member look at images of Titanic from their ship’s control room.