Original subtitles

[audio logo]

[music playing]

NARRATOR: The sinking on its first crossing

created the most extraordinary sense of loss and reversal

of fortune.

People did think Titanic was unsinkable,

and yet it would end up at the bottom of the sea.

It's very haunting.

And you think of that staircase lying fathoms

deep, when only a few hours before beautiful women

in their garments had been parading down it.

Guggenheim asked the people at the time

dreamt of leading their lives.

They were so glamorous and marvelous.

And suddenly there they were in the icy sea.

It sort of shakes you.

And I think that Titanic going down shook the Western world.

[theme music]

Hello.

And welcome to How it Really Happened.

I'm Jesse L. Martin.

The final calls for help from Titanic

revealed the distress of the ship's last moments afloat.

First, "cannot last much longer," then "losing power."

Finally, just before the ship went down, "come quick."

Who on the ship will survive the Titanic disaster?

And how will they be saved?

Tonight, Titanic Part 2, the dreadful last moments

of the ship and all its people.

This is how it really happened.

[music playing]

I was asked to write a version about

the Titanic for television for the 100th anniversary in 2012.

But I just got more and more curious about the drama

and the fates that engulfed them all.

The lookouts described it as a dark mass

that came through that haze.

And realized it was an iceberg and--

They started turning to the left.

It looked like it was going to miss

the iceberg entirely at first.

And that's when they heard a grinding noise.

At the time of the collision, they

were going the fastest they had ever gone during the voyage.

Titanic's top speed was 24 or 25 knots, which is about 28

or 29 miles an hour.

Now when she struck the iceberg, she was doing 22 knots, which

is about 25 miles an hour.

It's extremely fast for a ship weighing 72,000 tons.

They had sideswiped the iceberg too

where they flooded enough, fast enough, that they couldn't

keep up with the pumps.

It was a series of punctures in the hull of the ship.

Everyone really felt the collision in a different way.

If you were away in the stern, you didn't even feel it.

There were other passengers that actually slept through it.

If you were close to it, you felt a big jerk.

But to the people in the one boiler room,

they said it was like a whole side of the ship gave away.

The clock in the wheelhouse said

that it was 11:40 PM precisely.

One person that felt the collision

was Captain Smith himself.

Smith came forward onto the bridge and says,

"What was that?"

Dorothy Gibson and her mother were in first class

and was walking back to her cabin,

when she heard this scraping sound, as she described it.

And soon, she came across Thomas Andrews who

was the chief engineer in what she described

as a palish green complexion.

And she knew then something was terribly wrong.

Her survival instinct was incredibly strong.

So she pushed forward with her mother Pauline

to get on that very first lifeboat.

Titanic's officers thought the ship would only last one hour

or an hour and a half maximum.

The first distress call went out at 12:37 Titanic time,

which is about 40 minutes after the iceberg hit, saying,

"Please come, we need help."

Chaos starts to ensue.

It creeps up, and then slowly spreads to the rest of the ship.

[music playing]

Tragically, as the last lifeboat left the side

of Titanic, there were still 1,500

souls remaining on the ship.

As the Titanic sank, Guggenheim and his valet

were on the deck chairs of Titanic

sipping brandy and smoking a cigar, dressed, of course,

in their best.

Guggenheim and his valet did not even attempt to try

to get into the lifeboat.

And there was a code of honor that

existed within first class men, that they would not behave

in such a dastardly fashion.

John Jacob Astor, of course, would never see Madeleine again.

And he would never see their child too whom she was carrying.

Isidor and Ida Straus were still on board.

Ida Straus refused to leave her husband Isidor aside.

My great grandmother saw them sitting together holding hands.

--arm in arm on deck chairs on the deck

of Titanic as it went down.

Throughout the sinking, the band

was on board playing ragtime tunes

to try to keep the spirits up.

But things grew more dire.

And at about five minutes before the actual Titanic

fully went down, they played one final song.

[music playing]

There's a controversy as to what

the last song was that the band played on the ship.

If I had to give my own opinion, it

would be Nearer my God to Thee because that's

what Wallace Hartley said he would play if he

was ever on a sinking ship.

[music playing]

Not one single member of the band survived.

They all died.

[music playing]

The sinking really accelerated around 2:15

when water reached the bridge.

As the weight of water pulled the bow lower and lower,

you still had this very buoyant stern of the Titanic.

All of a sudden, a wave sort of came over them

and engulfed them.

They felt the ship really sinking.

People were trying to run up the decks to the stern

to stay out of the water.

People tried to cling onto anything they could.

And at a certain point, unless you're holding on to something,

you're just going to slip down the decks into the sea.

People were falling, dropping into the ocean.

There was screams.

There was panic.

There was hysteria.

Some of the lifeboats that were very close in

could see the ship rearing up over their heads, which must

have been very frightening.

And survivors were able at quite close range

to just observe Titanic as she slowly sank.

And they noticed the portholes blazing with light, one

after another dipping down under the water, one by one

disappearing under the North Atlantic.

And then the lights went out.

And suddenly, all they could see was the black hull of Titanic

silhouetted against the stars.

There was a mention of the stern

sticking straight up like a finger pointing at the sky.

When suddenly you've got all this weight out of the water,

it had to break.

This is a massive amount of pressure to the tune of like

2 million foot-tons of pressure.

The stress is concentrated on a specific area

right about where the third funnel is.

The bow and stern would separate and they pulling

apart like a party popper.

And a few moments after that, the ship broke in half.

Madeleine Astor was very upset in the lifeboat.

And I think she even stood up at one point

because with all the screaming going on when the ship went

down, she thought she heard her husband

John Jacob Astor calling her.

[music playing]

My great grandmother, she saw the ship sink

from these lifeboats.

[music playing]

It plummeted into the sea 2 hours

and 40 minutes after the collision.

Titanic slipped beneath the waves

for the last time at 2:20 AM.

[music playing]

As its sinking, the ship itself breaks apart

and begins to go down faster.

The RMS Titanic is lost.

As water fills in, the air rushes out.

The stern goes down slower, spinning as it falls

and scattering its debris over a larger area on the bottom.

As the two pieces fall, the bow and the stern

land an incredible distance apart

on the bottom of the ocean.

On the surface of the Atlantic, it would have been horrifying

a scene of absolute despair.

One of the more horrific details about the sinking

are the stories of the people in the lifeboats

and what they were hearing after the sinking.

Their loved ones are people they knew in the water,

and they could do nothing to save them.

People screaming at a pitch of hysteria

they could never imagine.

And many of the survivors were haunted by this sound

for the rest of their lives.

All the screams from 1,500 people saying, help, come now.

A team of scientists carried out what

they called the largest underwater scanning project

in history.

In order to do this, Magellan took over 700,000 images

of the entire wreck site--

the bow, the stern, and the debris field in between.

And then they used AI to stitch all of these images

together to create this digital twin of the Titanic wreck site.

When I first saw it, it literally blew me away.

These 3D scans that have been done.

They're getting better and better and more in depth.

It really shows the ship actually as it is.

We're now able to see things at the level of detail

within the wreck, almost as though the water

has been drained away.

They believe the large scale underwater scanning project may

solve the mystery of what exactly

caused the luxury passenger liner to sink in the Atlantic

in 1912.

Steel doesn't lie.

You can see where it broke.

It actually helps you explain this is what happened,

how it actually came apart.

--where the bow broke off.

[music playing]

When the Titanic went down, it was about 2:20.

And you had all these people in the water.

The temperature of the sea meant

that nobody was going to live more than a few minutes.

The conditions in the water were absolutely brutal.

The air temperature was 30 some degrees,

but the water temperature was 28 degrees.

But if you swam to one of these lifeboats,

you stood a chance because you could

get completely out of the water, and that

was critical to survival.

And there was one woman who swam to a lifeboat.

And she was the only woman to go down with the ship and survive.

But if you were in the water, it was just going

to suck the heat out of you.

You were going to freeze.

There were eyewitness reports at the time of working class

mothers in the water holding their babies

aloft trying to save them, to keep them out of the icy water.

There are boats that were virtually more than half empty.

They could have gone back and just chose not to and didn't.

It's very hard for a modern audience

to understand why the lifeboats didn't go

back to rescue more passengers.

A lot of them had rowed as far away from the ship as possible.

They would have seen people drowning around them

and had that awful pressure thinking, shall we go and help

these people, or shall we keep our lifeboat

safe, secure, emptier without more people, so we survive.

The other thing is they're in a lifeboat

in the North Atlantic.

You can hardly imagine how scary that would be in the dark

with thousands of people screaming for help.

And what they did believe is they

would be immediately swamped.

One lifeboat perhaps heroically rowed back towards the wreck

to see if there were any survivors.

The famous event is lifeboat number 14 commanded

by fifth officer Lowe, he went back to the scene of the sinking

after it quieted down.

They were amongst all kinds of bodies

by the time they got there.

One of the crewmen said he just couldn't look over

the side of the lifeboat because he just thought he'd break down.

Very sadly, about 1,500 people drowned

in the Titanic disaster.

All that remained of the majestic RMS Titanic

was a handful of lifeboats and some survivors clinging to life.

Even on board the lifeboats, there was still danger.

The sea started to pick up as they

were floating around for hours.

It wouldn't have taken a whole lot to swamp

the 16 wooden lifeboats.

It was very, very cold in the lifeboats.

They had no water.

They had no food.

They barely had any light.

And your mind goes to a dark place.

Am I going to float around until I freeze to death?

They have no idea that the Carpathia's steaming

towards them full steam ahead.

Some people perished in the lifeboats from hypothermia.

I can imagine Juliet trying to keep her daughters warm.

It's hard enough to keep yourself warm,

let alone trying to keep two little girls warm and calm

and not panic or freak out.

All of a sudden, they're seeing icebergs everywhere,

huge icebergs--

70 feet, 100 feet icebergs-- looming over them.

And they think, we're all dead.

Carpathia was captained by Captain Rostron.

Captain Rostron prepared for the worst.

He had extra lookouts.

He knew that Titanic had encountered ice.

And so he wanted to make sure that in his dash

to the disaster scene, he didn't fall victim to the same fate.

When the Carpathia got the message,

it was about 59 miles away.

So Captain Rostron knew it's going to take

me several hours to get there.

But he didn't know how quickly the Titanic was going to sink.

All he could do was just go and hope.

His first priority was to close the distance

and then followed it up with all those other decisions

that you had to make in a rescue situation.

Captain Rostron said, "Do not wake our passengers."

I want you to wake up all of the extra stokers we have.

Put them stoking the fires.

Captain Rostron actually cut the heating

on hot water for his own passengers

to make sure that all the steam power of his boilers

went into the propellers in order to get

there as fast as possible.

He raced through the night.

[music playing]

Happening right now, the extensive search in the North

Atlantic Ocean is growing even more urgent,

as experts believe the missing Titan submersible is nearly out

of oxygen. On board, OceanGate CEO and founder Stockton Rush,

British adventurer and businessman Hamish Harding,

one of Pakistan's richest men, British businessman Shahzada

Dawood and his 19-year-old son Suleman Dawood,

and French submariner and ex-navy

officer Paul-Henri Nargeolet.

With what could be less than 24 hours of oxygen left on board

Titan, hope at this point may rest on banging

noises detected by sonar.

There were reports of knocking sounds at regular intervals

coming from underwater.

Banging noises that makes people think,

well, human beings perhaps in that submersible

are making them, desperately trying to signal where they are.

It gave hope that they were trying to communicate.

If the missing sub is trapped at the bottom of the ocean,

it could be in water many times deeper than any rescue

ever successfully done before.

Underwater rescues are inherently

complicated, dangerous, and the deep sea makes it all harder.

They need another submersible with an artificial arm

that can tie the submarine to the other one.

And then they would surface together.

There's only a handful of machines

that are capable of reaching down to these enormous depths.

[music playing]

With the Titanic's distress call, a handful of ships

tried to get there as quickly as possible.

It was the Carpathia that saved the day.

[music playing]

Titanic passengers were just in the lifeboats,

hoping somebody was going to show up.

And at that point, they were just surrounded by icebergs.

And they're starting to be lit by the dawn's light.

People wrote afterwards, they were like coral-colored icebergs

as the sun rose, and pinks and faint blues,

just the most incredible sunrise if you lived to see it.

It was spectacular.

It took the Carpathia four hours to reach Titanic.

Captain Rostron aboard the Carpathia

sees a green flare fired up from one of the lifeboats.

The Carpathia was not in a safe position.

Because they were in the same ice field that sank the Titanic.

And then he can start to pick out the lifeboats on the water.

And they're all making their way to Carpathia.

Mrs. Ogden was traveling on the Carpathia with her husband,

and they're the ones that had the camera aboard.

They had just gotten it.

It was brand new and took the only pictures

of Titanic's lifeboats coming up to the Carpathia.

So those pictures exist today because Captain Rostron actually

asked Mr. Ogden personally, "Can you record this for history."

The first lifeboat that reached the Carpathia

had an officer in it.

And it was officer Boxhall.

Captain Rostron said, "Hello, young man.

Can you tell me what happened to the Titanic?"

He just bawled his eyes out, just started crying.

And all Boxhall could tell him is the ship's gone down.

All these people are dead.

And at that point, that's the first time anybody outside

of the people that were directly impacted realized

how significant the disaster really was.

Remarkably, for that time, there

was a second camera on board the Carpathia,

and that is part of what led us to see

the shellshocked survivors as they were pulled from the water.

They were given food, drink, found a place for them to stay.

Quite a few of the Carpathia passengers

started helping the Titanic people, taking them below decks.

And some are crying, some are screaming.

The things people saw that night would

have been absolutely horrific.

Welcome back to How it Really Happened.

The last section of the Titanic hull still floating before she

finally sank was the stern.

It was standing on end out of the water.

The last people still aboard Titanic were at the stern,

hanging on for life.

Titanic movie director James Cameron

meticulously researched the human drama

at the back of the ship.

And he made room in his film for several

of those miraculous survivor stories.

Many movie watchers wondered if they could possibly be true.

One of the most famous stories features

the Titanic's baker, who incredibly found

a way to survive the sinking.

Did that, could that have really happened?

We have to move.

When James Cameron's movie came out in 1997--

--suddenly you could see Titanic as it were in full

color brought back to life.

Give me your hand.

Will pull you over.

Come on.

Give me your hand.

Very few people that were on the stern

after it broke actually survived.

One I can think of who did survive

was baker Joughin.

You can actually see him in Cameron's movie.

He's right next to Rose and Jack on the stern,

wearing a white baker suit.

And according to his account, he was right on the end of the ship

when it went under.

He just stood up and he didn't even get his hair wet.

And he was pulled out of the water into a lifeboat.

There were a few other passengers in the water, who

miraculously made it to safety.

When the Titanic went down, you had

all these people in the water.

Some of them did swim.

And a few people got on some wreckage,

so that they were found.

There was one man who tied himself to a door.

He was a sailor.

And so he lashed himself to a door, and he was found that way

and rescued.

I'll never let go.

Fans of the movie have been going

on endlessly about the fact that Jack could have lived.

He could have gotten on that door.

What brought you to Titanic?

Did an interview with Bob, with Dr. Ballard when

I was doing The Abyss because I was fascinated

by deep submergence technology and ROVs and all the stuff

that he was doing.

I'm kind of a gearhead, so I get--

I got fascinated by that aspect of it.

And then I had to go back and do the history.

And the more you got into it, the more you got into it.

Right.

He's become an expert himself and is not

afraid to critically look back and see

if new information has changed the story that he

himself has so expertly crafted.

I've discovered surprising new things about the ship.

We'll look back to see what we got right and what we didn't.

We found that you can have the stern sink vertically,

and you can have the stern pull back with a big splash,

but you can't have both.

So the film is wrong on one point or the other.

I tend to think it's wrong on the fallback of the stern

because of what we see at the bow of the wreck.

He's actually joked, maybe I need

to remake the movie now because the scenario has changed a bit.

To me, the most lasting legacy is

that James Cameron was able to launch numerous expeditions.

I've made 33 dives to the wreck site.

James Cameron didn't stop his research with his film in 1997.

He wanted answers to many more of the mysteries of the ship.

He wanted to see the interior, and he

wanted to show that in his film Ghosts of the Abyss.

Inside Titanic, some things were perfectly frozen in time,

while others had fallen apart.

73 years after it sank, a team of French and American

scientists announced they'd found the Titanic

2 and 1/2 miles down.

It's not commonly known that the search for the Titanic

was part of a secret military mission.

The expedition that found Titanic was really

the product of a deal with the US government

that was searching for lost nuclear submarines.

In the 1960s, the US lost two nuclear submarines

in the North Atlantic--

USS Thresher and USS Scorpion.

The Navy wanted Ballard to document the submarines.

It was also going to see if they'd been tampered with.

The US had tried to lift a Soviet sub off the bottom

of the ocean, why shouldn't the Soviets

try to do the exact same thing.

There was obviously nuclear material on those subs,

and that was covered up during the Cold War.

And the cover story was that he was looking for the Titanic,

but the agreement was if you find them, take the extra time

to go looking for the Titanic.

And that's exactly what he did.

In 2000, I became the youngest female

to dive the wreck of the Titanic in a deep sea submersible.

And it was an incredible opportunity

because I was at the time, the curator

of exhibitions and expeditions for RMS Titanic, Incorporated.

It's RMST's stated purpose to educate the public about Titanic

and preserve these artifacts to maintain that physical link

to the story.

We felt that responsibility to make sure we

were recording the history.

Some of the artifacts that really do well down there

in terms of the elements are glass, porcelain, anything that

is textile or paper or writing.

Why?

Because you don't have light down there.

It's dark.

It's cool conditions.

They're perfectly preserved to an extent.

Jewelry conserves really well.

We would see shoes at the bottom of the ocean.

A lot of shoes were found in pairs on the ocean bed.

And they thought how extraordinary

these shoes sitting in pairs.

How could that be?

Well, of course, what it was was they were the shoes

of people who had gone down.

And the ocean life had destroyed the bodies that left the shoes.

So that's why they were together in pairs.

There was nothing else there.

The tannic acid in leather keeps the little organisms

from eating the shoes.

There are fish down there, tiny organisms.

And so where a body had landed, everything else would be gone,

but the shoes would still be there.

Titanic's iron and steel is actually

being eaten away by microbes.

When the ship was found, the gymnasium was a lot more intact.

And now it's completely opened up.

The roof over the Marconi room is now a big gaping hole.

These bacteria that are eating the steel, they poop out

essentially is what's been termed rusticles because they

look like icicles hanging off the wreck,

but they're actually made of rust byproducts.

And gradually these microbes will munch their way

through the wreck until there is nothing left

at all, apart from a rusting.

It will slowly deteriorate, like a house

crumbling down on itself.

While I don't believe that the wreck should be plundered

on a routine basis until there is nothing left,

it would be a shame if after 100 years,

the sea has consumed all of the relics worth having.

One of the shocking things about the Titanic

is that if you were in first class,

you were very, very much more likely to survive than if you

were in third class.

Which is a fact that is brought home

by the rate of survival for the children

who were passengers on the Titanic by their social class.

All but one of the children in the first class

survived, whereas all the children in second

class survived.

The number of children from third class took a real hit,

about 2/3 of them passed away.

50 children died in the Titanic disaster.

[music playing]

And as you can imagine, the mood on board the Carpathia

was somber and terrible.

People were in shock.

There were a number of widows on board the Carpathia.

Juliet does not speak English at all,

neither do her daughters.

And she has no idea how she is going

to navigate this new country without Joseph

Laroche, her husband.

There were children without parents.

There were parents without children,

husbands without wives, wives without husbands.

It was truly a ship of sorrow.

Leah Aks was praying that somebody had rescued her boy

and that somehow, somewhere she would be able to meet him again.

My great grandmother Leah, she was just walking around

in a kind of dissociative state, when

out of the corner of her eye, she sees

a baby reaching out for her.

And she goes, that's my baby.

But this woman was not going to just hand over this baby.

And they said, OK, take both women and the baby

up to Captain Rostron's cabin.

He's like, how can you tell me this is your child?

Well, he has a strawberry birthmark on his chest.

And he did indeed have those markings.

And so Leah Aks was able to reunite

with her baby on the Carpathia.

It took several days before a cable-laying ship called

the Mackay-Bennett stocked with ice and embalming fluid

went out to the wreck site and recovered

a number of the bodies.

The Mackay-Bennett was based in Halifax.

And it was the first ship that was

chartered by the White Star Line to recover

the bodies of Titanic's dead.

John Jacob Astor, the richest man in the world

died in the tragedy.

His body was recovered.

He had the modern day equivalent of $75,000

in US cash on him, plus British pounds, plus gold, plus francs.

--and a gold pocket watch with his initials on it.

Isidor Straus, his body was recovered.

It was picked up in Halifax and then brought back to New York

by special train.

There was no sign of his wife's body ever being found.

The Mackay-Bennett ultimately recovered 306 bodies.

When the bodies were picked up, they

tried to identify who the person was and even what class

they were.

The first class passengers, they would store

them on board in a coffin.

Lower class passengers were, if they had coffins available,

they would use them.

And after that, they put them in bags.

The decayed bodies, most of them were just put in a bag

and buried at sea.

So even in death, the class distinction existed.

For many of the victims of the Titanic

that were recovered from the wreck site,

their last resting place is Halifax

in Nova Scotia in Canada.

John Jacob Astor, his body was brought back to New York State,

where there was a funeral.

--in Trinity Church to much fanfare.

In his death, he became sort of a hero of the Titanic

because he died in what people considered

a very sort of gentlemanly way, the women in first tradition.

The world literally was eager for any morsel of news

about the Titanic coming from the Carpathia.

When it finally broke, the story

was about the scale of the disaster.

Immediately, it was a global phenomenon.

Dorothy Gibson, the silent film star

almost immediately went to work on a film about the sinking

of the Titanic.

She wrote and directed a film, where she relived

her experiences on Titanic.

It was called Saved From the Titanic,

starring none other than Dorothy Gibson herself,

wearing the very same dress that she wore

that night the ship went down.

It's the only Titanic movie to star an actual survivor.

The movie was a huge hit.

people queued around the block to see it.

And it made Dorothy Gibson, in effect, a superstar.

The bad part about her story is that the studio burned down

and the only known copy of her film was lost forever.

So all we have remaining are publicity shots from the film.

It's a great shame because she was on the Titanic,

and the way things were represented

in the film would probably have contained details

that are lost forever now.

[audio logo]

Descending into the very deepest points of the ocean

is extraordinary because within a thousand meters,

you basically lose all light.

It is like staring truly into the abyss.

What is fun to do is you can flash

the lights of the submarine at high intensity,

and when you turn them off, all the life that's

in the ocean that has bioluminescence,

they see the light of the submersible,

and it's like having creatures in a confused way

trying to talk back to you.

It's very cool to see that.

It's a totally alien way of trying to communicate.

So it's a very peaceful journey all the way down.

And it can take about 2.5 hours to go down to 4,000

meters where the Titanic lies.

The pressure at that depth is pretty extraordinary,

4,000 or more pounds per square inch,

which is almost like having two automobiles on your fingernail,

and that's on every portion of the submersible.

This morning, an ROV or remote operated vehicle from the vessel

Horizon Arctic discovered the tail comb of the Titan

submersible, approximately 1,600 feet from the bow

of the Titanic on the seafloor.

What we didn't know at the time was that all along when we

were praying that they may have survived,

that the US Navy due to an underwater acoustic program,

which was in secret, actually heard

what they believed to be an implosion soon after the Titan

went down on June 18.

The Navy picked up on an audio signature

similar to an implosion or an explosion

on Sunday, around the time that the Titan

submersible went missing and roughly the same location.

So an hour and 45 into a 9-hour dive, it implodes at that point,

bursts into pieces essentially and narrowly missing

the hull of the Titanic.

All five passengers on board the Titan were lost.

An implosion at that depth would

happen so quickly that the human mind cannot react to it.

And so one minute they were there, and then the next,

they were not.

The US Coast Guard announced that it had found what

it presumed to be human remains on the sea floor

that would be from the submersible Titan.

They did recover large pieces of that debris.

It is amazing to think in 1912, the Titanic sank and now

in 2023, you have more people, lives being claimed right

at the site of the Titanic.

And I think it simply is adding to the intrigue

of the Titanic that 100 years later, it's still

leading people to their death.

To see the Titanic with your own eyes

and go down to the depths of the wreck

requires an acceptance of some level of danger.

That doesn't change whether you're

an explorer, a scientist, or the curator of Titanic artifacts.

There are numerous artifacts that have come off the ship.

And I can ascribe very high values to any of them.

Relics recovered from the Titanic

aren't just in exhibits and museums,

many of them are sold at auction.

And I know certain things went for vast amounts of money.

Wallace Hartley's violin sold at auction one time,

and it went for $1.7 million, which

is the highest amount paid for any artifact

that came off of that ship.

The person who got this violin acquired it

because of the history and emotion that goes with it.

The artifacts that have been recovered

from the wreck of the Titanic are simply incredible,

and many generate a powerful emotional reaction.

There were 865 artifacts that we

cataloged in a six-week period.

This particular basket sort of came out.

And we noticed that it was a small leather satchel.

We transported it to the lab.

A perfume seller was coming to the US

to try to market vials of perfume.

And somehow those vials survived the wreck.

All of a sudden, the fragrance of heaven kind of

goes through the room.

So instead of being surrounded by all of these dead

things, of--

given that half of those few minutes,

the ship was alive again.

To be able to display the vials

and actually have a small holes drilled into the cases,

so people could smell Titanic at that point

82 years later was absolutely extraordinary.

And now, we have a new generation of people being

acquainted with Titanic, from CGI and computer games,

where you can have very realistic

3D experience of the ship.

The technology is so good now that we can

relive the Titanic experience.

What better way to tell a story

than to place the person within it.

We are creating this time machine to this incredible era

and to rebuild Titanic frame by frame, plate by plate,

rivet by rivet almost in a virtual setting, where people

can jump on a computer in a VR headset and explore the shipyard

and see Titanic built before their eyes,

and as she is finished, explore the ship herself.

We've put the VR headset on Titanic historians, who

have spent their whole life researching Titanic

and let them stand in the grand staircase for the first time,

and it brings them to tears.

It makes them emotional because they are in a place they

never thought they could be.

What we're doing, I'd like to think, preserves her story.

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I suppose with my modern brain,

I had expected to find out how badly they had behaved--

people scrabbling for survival and hurling women out of boats,

so they could jump in instead.

Really, it was the discovery of how well people had behaved.

I think they were less selfish than we are.

The bravery was quite extraordinary.

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Over a century after the wreck,

Titanic is still coming up with amazing stories

about her passengers and crew.

A nurse in the Titanic infirmary was ordered into a lifeboat

to show passengers the small craft was safe,

so she was picked up by the Carpathia

and became a lucky survivor.

Then undeterred by the ordeal, she signed on during the First

World War with the Britannica, an ocean liner converted

into a floating hospital.

And when it hit a German sea mine,

remarkably, the nurse survived the second time.

I'm Jesse L. Martin, thank you for watching.

Good night.

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