In the early morning hours of September 1, 1985, after eight years of research and preparation, oceanographer Robert Ballard and National Geographic staff photographer Emory Kristof found and photographed the shipwreck of the century.
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The discovery of the Titanic marked a milestone in underwater photography.
The discovery of the Titanic began weeks earlier, aboard the Knorr and Le Suroit, two research ships that scanned a 150-square-mile (388-square-kilometer) target zone in the North Atlantic with deep-search sonar for debris from the Titanic.
After weeks of scanning, the ships' sonar detected matter, and the crew sent down Argo, an unmanned submersible search vehicle, for a closer look. Argo was equipped with two sonar systems and five video cameras, towed above the ocean floor with fiber-optic cable. When video cameras aboard Argo picked up footage of one of Titanic's boilers more than 12,000 feet (3,657 meters) down, the world got its first glimpse of the luxury liner since it set sail in 1912.
Together with Argo and ANGUS, a towed sled with a still camera, Kristof and his crew worked feverishly over four days to shoot more than 20,000 frames of film covering some 8,000 scenes. In December 1985, National Geographic was the first to publish photos of the ill-fated ocean liner.
Exploring Unseen Worlds
The Titanic photography is one in a long history of National Geographic underwater firsts. In 1926, staff photographer Charles Martin and Dr. William Longley took the first underwater color photographs in the Dry Tortugas, off the Florida Keys.
In the 1950s, underwater photography pioneer and inventor of the high-speed strobe flash Harold Edgerton designed some of the first remotely operated cameras that could capture marine life at 200 feet (60 meters) below sea level.
Luis Marden employed Edgerton's technology to create some of the most heralded underwater pictures of fish and coral reefs ever published. In 1956, Marden accompanied legendary ocean explorer Jacques Cousteau on a voyage from Toulon, France, to the Suez Canal aboard Cousteau's research ship, Calypso. By journey's end, Marden had 1,200 photographs, the largest collection of underwater color photographs ever taken. When they were published in the February 1956 issue of National Geographic, the photographs were admired around the world for their artistry and technique.
Encouraged by Marden's stunning photographs, the National Geographic Society continued to push for improvements in underwater photography. In the 1960s, photographer Bates Littlehales, with the help of marine biologist Walter Starck, designed OceanEye, a Plexiglas bubble-encased camera housing that allowed photographers to use the entire Nikon system underwater.
In 1988 photographer Kristof typed a memo to the National Geographic Society: "There is only one great area of exploration left to man on Earth, and that is under water. The Geographic has been in the forefront of, and a catalyst in, this area during all of this century." In that spirit of exploring new frontiers, National Geographic continues to advance underwater photography and share with the planet previously unseen worlds.
