Yet for every case of salvage motivated by money, power, or wartime strategy, there are ones driven purely by emotional catharsis.

  Most Americans had never heard of the armored cruiser the USS Maine before it sank in a dramatic explosion in Havana Harbor in February 1898. The incident, thought to have been caused by a Spanish torpedo (though historians have more recently blamed a munitions accident aboard the ship), made the Maine an instant hagiographic symbol of American imperial outrage. The offense sparked a summer-long battle against Spain, and after America prevailed and signed a treaty that awarded them Spain’s colonies in the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Cuba, Congress started to wonder if it was worth getting the Maine back.

  Pulling it from its underwater grave wasn’t just an exercise to salvage some wood and steel or even old weapons. The two hundred sixty sailors who died on the Maine couldn’t be saved, nor could a once-functional ship that had been damaged by an explosion be returned to operation. But by salvaging the wreckage, the story of a ship could be extended. Like a soldier who dies on the battlefield, the corpse of the Maine could be collected by its comrades, carried somewhere honorable, and laid to rest in peace.

  Removal proved possible, but revival was not. In a major but largely forgotten engineering triumph of the twentieth century, the U.S. and Cuban governments combined forces in 1910 to refloat the Maine.

  Had the ship been in better condition, the easiest approach would have been to sink large water-filled structures called caissons, attach them to the ship with cables, and slowly pump the water out of the caissons to make them—and the ship—float to the surface. But this would happen too fast and pull the wreck apart. Preserving the wreck required it to be lifted far slower. This called for a so-called cofferdam, an ancient Roman technology of building a barrier in a body of water and draining it from the inside. For the Maine, sunk in thirty-five feet of water, this entailed building forty-foot walls around the perimeter of the ship in a rounded shape to share the weight of the water pushing it from the outside. Once the dam was built, the inside of the walls would be drained to expose the ship sitting on the mud. And once it was dry, investigators could inspect the wreck, bodies and equipment could be recovered, and the hull could be repaired and prepared to be refloated.

  This would be one of the largest engineering projects the U.S. ever embarked on in a foreign country, let alone underwater. Naval engineers brought five thousand tons of steel to Cuba from Buffalo, New York, via the Saint Lawrence Seaway, a journey of more than four thousand miles. The parts included seventy-five-foot steel piles that were fashioned into large cylinders and, upon their arrival in Cuba, were filled with clay from a nearby dredging barge. Next to the wreck of the Maine, the seventy-five-foot piles were planted so deep in the mud that they poked out of the ocean surface only eighteen inches. Then they were braced by extra rocks at their base and wood beams. Cofferdams had been built before, but never this big and never in such soft mud and clay. Even on June 3, 1911, the day the pumps started “dewatering” the inside, engineers were only partially confident it would hold.

  It held. After weeks of slow pumping and adding wooden planks to brace, on August 5, when the cofferdam was nearly dry, investigators bravely descended to inspect the ship. They recovered weapons and the remains of several dozen crewmen, virtually all of them trapped as the ship sank. The Maine was effectively embalmed and laid to view in an open casket as Americans gawked at photos in their newspapers of the Maine’s autopsy. For officers inside the cofferdam, it was easy to notice the corrosive effects of the ocean, even just a few feet deep. All wood and steel lodged in the mud was in the same condition as the day it sank. But the portions above the mud were visibly eroded by wood-boring shipworms, rust, salt, and sun.

  After months of investigating the ship and taking photos and notes that would be scrutinized by munitions experts and a century of historians, the Maine was prepared for its final voyage. Engineers repaired damaged sections of the hull with steel plates and removed other sections too broken to fix. Finally, on February 3, 1912, after all valuables were removed and bodies recovered, water was slowly added to the cofferdam to refloat the Maine.

  To avoid any sudden jerky motion, engineers refilled the cofferdam at the same trickle as filling a bathtub. It took a full month as the ship inched upward, until eventually the Maine sat on the water in exactly the same spot where it had exploded more than a decade prior. A navy tugboat called Osceola started pulling the rebirthed wreck. Two other tugs attached cables to the sides to keep the old boat steady. As it left the harbor adorned with an American flag and bouquets of flowers, American crewmen stationed in Cuba lined the rails and saluted. A band played the national anthem.

  Two hours later, the Maine was three miles offshore, a sufficient distance to ensure that, once sunk again, it wouldn’t bother anyone. A wrecking crew boarded the ship and began opening the valves and sluice doors to flood the ship. They departed quickly on waiting skiffs and then there was nothing left to do but watch the wayward structure bob and wallow. Several other warships joined the scene, and their entire crews watched the last send-off of an American symbol. It was silent except for the roll of the sea.

  In the same year in the same season, separated by barely four weeks, the Maine sank for the second time, on March 16, 1912, in almost the exact same way as the Titanic, one ship beginning its cultural voyage and the other one ending. The Maine tilted as water filled its bow. The stern rose in the air until it was almost vertical, showing its propellers and then its keel. The American flag flying from its mast dipped into the water. Moments later, the stern disappeared, and the ship began its 3,770-foot fall to the floor of the Atlantic. There was nothing more to be said and nothing more to see, except for the blanket of flowers where it had once been, floating on the surface of the water.

  Chapter 5

  LUNGS THE SIZE OF ACORNS

  Judging from the letters and telegrams that appeared in his office each morning, Charles Smith felt satisfied that news of his calculations had reached far and wide, appearing in papers as far flung as Europe and Asia. Even more impressive, people had lined up to give him money. Smith assured investors that after the ship was raised, towed, and revived, the White Star Line or whoever took over operation of the unsunken liner would owe credit and perhaps a handsome reward to the person who rescued it.

  This made Smith a popular horse to bet on. Wagering had grown into an American industry in itself at a time when the gilded wealth of America in reconstruction had evolved into a booming economy with risk-takers and groundbreakers. American aviation had grown from a backyard hobby in 1906 to a flourishing industry in less than a decade based on heavy investment and fast advances to formerly unthinkable problems. American companies were rising at a pace never before seen, with venerable names—Hallmark, Black & Decker, Kellogg, Neiman Marcus—that would dominate for a century, all underscoring that boldness, however brazen, was rewarded.

  Of the $1.5 million Smith needed, he raised a little over $10,000 in the span of six months. The sum seemed large at a time when the average American salary was barely $700 a year, except for two wrinkles. One, almost a third came from Smith himself, who offered to finance $300,000 of the project. Much of the rest came from Smith’s mining partners and neighbors. People sent letters along with a quarter or two, asking him to add their names to the list of investors, hoping to double or triple their money—or better, to own a piece of the famous Titanic. Smith at first accepted these missives, but after a few dozen, he found it to be an inefficient way to raise a million dollars and a poor use of time. He marked the donations return to sender.

  In all of Smith’s technical papers from the time, one detail that seems to be missing is exactly what role Smith saw for himself. He was the ringleader, goal-setter, and fundraiser. He was a timeless character of a hype man whose success was the result of braggadocio and blame-shifting. But even his swollen confidence couldn’t obscure the fact that he had no ocean experience, had never gone underwater in a submarine, had never directed an armada of boats bobbing on the surface, and had never salvaged even a canoe. He was, by all appearances, out of his depth, and even though he had decades of experience leading large projects and making vast sums of money, he was self-aware enough to know he wasn’t a workhorse. He saw himself as a theorist and ideas man, and when it was time to get to work, he would just as well give the details to someone else to get it done.

  This would become common among fans of the Titanic, who in the 1910s weren’t so much enthusiasts about ocean science and marine dynamics as they were deeply drawn to the disaster and its ripples of sorrow and destruction. They were pulled in by the human elements of wealth and loss, which passengers died and which lived, which men disgraced themselves by joining lifeboats, and how others behaved with valor in their final moments.

  One group entirely unmentioned in the public requiem for the Titanic was professional salvage companies. By 1915, there had not been a serious industry effort to rescue the ship and bring it to the surface. People who knew anything about marine physics knew that it wasn’t even worth trying. What’s more, the most casual student of ocean science might have pointed out the string of Smith’s fantastical assumptions, including that the Titanic was still in one piece and could be found quickly, or that a yet-to-be-built submarine could descend to crushing depths, or that electromagnets could lift the forty-six-thousand-ton wreck, or that towing would be easy and smooth, or that caissons with the amassed buoyancy of 215 Titanics could be made and transported to the site, or, most of all, that the money and man power for the operation would come easy and fast.

  Contrary to his expectations, Smith’s critics did not center their mockery on his credentials or the awkward geography that a man claiming omniscience over the ocean lived in a landlocked state. They took the idea at face value and dismantled it piece by piece. The editors of Scientific American called it a “ridiculous proposal” and pointed out that electromagnets were known to emit force over a few hundred feet, not miles. Finding a ship the way Smith envisioned would be like someone holding a magnet in the middle of a public park hoping it would stick to the nearest refrigerator.

  Simon Lake, a mechanical engineer and maritime architect who built the first wooden submarines for the U.S. Navy, questioned whether the Titanic was findable at all, and if it was, he thought it would take Smith significantly longer than a month. “It’s possible that the Gulf Stream and the Labrador current have in the past two years substantially buried the wreck of the Titanic,” Lake wrote. “If such be the case, the hulk may never be located.” Lake had once tried to find a wrecked cargo ship that had sunk in 1909 in Long Island Sound. Other hunters spent two years diving in fifty-foot water to find the craft and salvage its rumored cargo of copper and iron ore. When they turned up nothing, Lake deployed two wreck-finding submarines he had designed out of pinewood. Wielding such advanced machines, he figured the process would take him hours, not days. Several months later, he expanded the search area and finally found the wreck fifteen miles away and more than twice as deep as the site where it was said to have sunk. He salvaged the cargo, but raising the hull was impossible. Lake published his findings in 1914, the same year Smith was shopping his plan, and declared that water currents carry wrecked ships along the ocean floor. Lake thought the Titanic’s search area was likely hundreds of miles wider than Smith had figured.

  If it could be located, there was the question of the hardness of the seafloor. If the ocean bottom was covered in mud, the ship may have landed softly, like a bowl on a pillow. If it was sandy, the ship falling bow first may have pierced itself into the seabed, like a stake in the ground. If it was rocky, the hull may have broken in a million pieces on impact, leaving no structure for magnets to grab on to.

  The topography of the seafloor was a long-standing mystery. The common assumption was that it was flat, a uniform bathtub with no mountains, valleys, or other geographic features. In The Origin of Species, Charles Darwin’s theory that diversity comes from reproductive isolation applied to terrestrial species only. By comparison, Darwin seemed to believe that the oceans were homogenous, like a giant fish tank with no discernible boundaries. If a fish wanted, it could reasonably swim from Japan to Portugal, which implied similar ecosystems and species in both places. If every marine environment was similar, then no environment was unique, and thus, the composition of the seafloor could be dismissed as irrelevant.

  Lake and other researchers also questioned the scale of Smith’s calculations. The most advanced engineering firm in England had demonstrated that lifting magnets could be used to recover scrap steel and iron lost overboard in harbors, but the magnets were enormous—more than five feet in diameter and weighing twelve tons apiece. To lift something as large as the Titanic would conservatively require 3,250 magnets that collectively weighed ten thousand tons, weight that once dispatched to the seafloor would have to be hauled back up.

  Try to find enough boats to do that, Lake taunted Smith in a lengthy take-down in the March 15, 1914, edition of the Buffalo Sunday Morning News. He’d have to employ every single boat in New York, Boston, and Annapolis combined. Then he’d need to coordinate them into the largest flotilla in history to the middle of the Atlantic. Others piled on in the Nashville Journal: “If you are at all familiar with the practical difficulties of towing you will realize what it would mean to convoy these squadrons to the site of the wreck, and when you have crowded them over the Titanic’s hulk, imagine what would happen if a storm arose?”

  The challenges were abundant but they weren’t insurmountable, the papers concluded. It was possible that enough boats existed, enough magnets could be found, enough crewmen could be recruited, and enough money could be raised. But there was one factor that could not be quelled by the most thoughtful plans of the most advanced scientific minds. The monster that dwelled at the bottom of the sea would threaten to diminish the effort from ambitious to preposterous, from expensive to priceless, and from difficult to impossible, and the monster was pressure.

  * * *

  Anyone could calculate the force of pressure underwater in 1914, or even in 1814. Pressure works on an arithmetic scale, increasing incrementally with depth. At sea level, the weight of all the air, clouds, and moisture in the atmosphere presses down to exert 14.7 pounds per square inch (psi) on every person, dinosaur, and woolly mammoth that has ever lived on earth. Below water the pressure grows by another 14.7 psi every ten meters. Add, divide, multiply, and the Titanic, twelve thousand five hundred feet deep, sits under the combined weight of nearly six thousand pounds per square inch, or roughly the weight of a fully loaded SUV balancing on your pinky finger.

  That quantity of force is enough to kill a person, but not by pancaking them flat as you’d think. Globular pressure underwater applies equal pressure on all sides, which wouldn’t hurt the aforementioned pinky finger were it not for the tiny pockets of air inside. Without the inconvenience of gaseous oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon dioxide filling our lungs and coursing through our veins, people could reasonably descend miles underwater. But these gases compress forcefully. On the surface, an adult pair of lungs are the size of two footballs. A hundred feet down they shrink to the size of two baseballs. Two hundred feet lower they’re barely the size of acorns. Descend twelve thousand more feet and the lungs would be airless masses of congealed tissue. The cause of death wouldn’t be a collapsed lung but a failure to breathe. At the same time, your stomach, intestines, sinuses, eardrums, and every other air-filled organ would be squeezed unworkably shut.

  In 1914, this was an inconceivable quantity of force. One could feel six thousand pounds per square inch in only a few ways, like being trampled by a herd of elephants or getting struck by a locomotive. Few who experienced such trauma lived to recall it, and if they did, the moment of impact was shrouded in blackout. The notion of sending a person down in even the most rigid steel suit was as far-fetched as sending a man to an asteroid. Theoretically it was possible, but no one had the capacity to do it.

  In the following century, mankind would make considerable strides on both creating higher-pressure environments and insulating the human body from their crush. In the 1920s, pistol makers began advertising guns with chambers exploding under an incredible twenty thousand pounds per square inch. Not long after, a Wisconsin company introduced a high-pressure water saw capable of cutting through metal and granite with the force of sixty-five thousand pounds per square inch. Around the Second World War, an air force doctor named Harry Armstrong accidentally discovered the profoundly strange ways pressure is influenced by altitude. When Armstrong got suddenly hot, passed out, and almost died in a high-flying airplane, he realized that at sixty-three thousand feet—a number subsequently known as the “Armstrong Limit”—the low atmospheric pressure effectively reduced the boiling point of water to the temperature of the human body, putting a pilot at risk of his blood boiling. His discovery that low pressure can badly damage a human body led to airlines pressurizing their cabins, future astronauts wearing pressurized suits, and climbers of Mount Everest requiring advanced breathing systems to summit the peak.

  But even these are small numbers. Scientists have since figured out how to make artificial pressures as high as one hundred million psi by pressing together the tips of diamonds. Their field, known as “extreme state matter,” searches for ways to craft better solar panels, building materials, and the perennial holy grail of nuclear fusion. Astoundingly, even higher pressures exist naturally in the universe: Jupiter’s core is around a billion pounds per square inch, which is small compared to a neutron star, the collapsed matter of a burned-out sun, whose center holds a billion trillion times more pressure than Jupiter’s core. These numbers are impossible to fathom and entirely irrelevant. The most colorful way to appreciate pressure is to observe, as General Electric demonstrated in the 1950s, that under high enough compression, peanut butter turns to diamonds.