Robert Ballard Interview (page: 4 / 7) Discoverer of the Titanic	Print Interview

What other equipment did you invent that helped you do that?

Robert Ballard: Because I'm a visual creature, ANGUS has the capability to give me massive images. Initially, it was sort of a wind-up toy. You wound up this camera so to speak, and it could take 16,000 photographs at one lowering. I would drop it down, and then for 12 to 14 hours, I would tow it through the valley, bring it up, process all the film, and then look at all the pictures. All those images were my windows into the deep sea. But it was frustrating because the vehicle didn't have any intelligence, it just took pictures. If I came across something that was really important, I didn't know about it until 14 hours later, so the vehicle just kept on going, and took awful pictures that weren't much value. That's why I developed Argo. Which was "give it to me now." I want it in real-time. I want to make decisions now.

Science is very much like the game of Clue. Remember that? "The butler did it in the library with the candlestick." The game of Clue was to get the answer with the minimum amount of clues. Clues are expensive in science, and scientists have finite resources. Can you figure it out with the minimum amount of time and money, and get the answer? We want to optimize our clue gathering. So when we put our robot down we want to be thinking "No, stop. Turn left. No, turn right." We want to be in charge., because we don't want to just take a massive look. We want to do a surgical look and get the treasure. It's sort of like Dungeons and Dragons. Get in there, and find the treasure box, and open it before anyone else can. That's the game.

How does Argo do that? I mean, do you give the instruction?

Robert Ballard: With Argo, I have two advantages over ALVIN and ANGUS. ALVIN, I had to get inside of, and make this journey to work for three hours, with no friends along to say, well, what do you think? No person knows everything. No person can solve a problem alone. If it's worth solving, you need help. You want that help all around you, but they wouldn't fit inside the submarine. So you had to go back and explain things. It was very time consuming, very inefficient. So I built a window up on the surface where I could bring all my friends, and we could look through the window and say, "What do you think?" Not only could I have a lot of people looking through the window with me, I could look through the window 24 hours a day. It was cheaper and it was more comfortable. I had the computers, charts, all sorts of things at my disposal. I had a library behind me, to go and look for facts real quick if I was stumped. I had a video archive. I could call up images and say, "Yeah, that's it." You can't cram that inside a little submarine.

ANGUS couldn't react in real time, there was a big lag. Argo has the staying power of ANGUS, but it has the human presence of the submarine, so you can sit there and, as you are going along and you are just about to lose it, you go "Turn". You can control the robot and get it back on track, so its very efficient. The problem is, it's a data monster. It works 24 hours a day, and you have to go sleep. You have to devise a team that can work together so there is a corporate memory and you don't repeat one another. That's the excitement we are in now. How do you handle a machine that's like HAL in 2001,. How do you handle something that is almost smarter than you are? That's where we are right now.

Is that a real possibility?

Robert Ballard: We're there. Our machines are working harder than we are. They don't have the element of human frailty. They don't sleep -- I do. They are impatient machines. They say "Get up! Wake up, I've got all sorts of things I want to talk to you about."

Up to the 1980s, your expeditions were all about searching for scientific data. You made discoveries that were helpful in solving certain scientific problems. But in the 1980s, you went after some sunken ships, very famous ones. Those expeditions weren't intended to yield particular scientific data, were they?

Robert Ballard: No. I used ALVIN until I was convinced that there was a better mouse trap. We were starting to reach diminishing returns with our technology. I was up for tenure; it was a cross-roads in my life. I wanted to get out and stand back and look at it and think about it. Otherwise, I'd just keep going on without any thought. So I said, I'm going to get out of the submarine and decompress. I'm going to not dive for a year, I'm going to go to Stanford and sit on a mountain and think about it.

So in 1980, I was teaching geophysics at Stanford as a sabbatical. That's when I dreamed up the Argo-Jason system. Then I had to come back and convince someone to fund it, which is a story unto itself. It did not occur the way it was supposed to occur, because things never occur the way they're supposed to occur.

But I finally convinced a person, the Secretary of the Navy, John Lehman, that he ought to bet on me, and he did. The Navy funded the Argo-Jason system. He was that type of person I described, who knew enough, just looking me in the eye. I sent the right message to him, and he said, "Do it."

What do you think the message was that he received, as the representative of the Navy?

Robert Ballard: I had paid my dues, and I had succeeded. I knew what I was talking about. I was sincerely committed to it. I really wanted to do it, it was important, and I could do it. So he said, "You can't ask for much more, go do it." He authorized the program, and I went and did it.

So how did the Titanic come to be a part of this?

Robert Ballard: Well, all right, to explain the Titanic. In 1982 the Navy said go ahead and do it.

I began the development of the Argo-Jason system, which was a seven-year development, to go from my dream to reality. Along the way I was building systems and testing them. From 1982 to 1989, I was developing a new mousetrap. I wasn't ready to do what I had designed it for: a full-fledged scientific expedition. August of 1991 is my first chance to do what I dreamed of doing ten years ago. For that ten years, I was building my equipment and testing it. The Titanic and the Bismarck were a part of my engineering test program. They weren't designed to do science, it was designed to prove I could do science.
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I did not do all this to find the Titanic and the Bismarck. They were just a by-product, but that turned out to be what most people got interested in. My reason for developing the Argo-Jason system was to improve my ability to explore the mountains of the sea, which I have been doing all of my life. I wasn't ready to take that tool down and do that scientific thing. But I could do other things. So I said, here we are at Woods Hole, we are building Argo, we've got to go and test it, and we will probably go out in the deepest water that we can get to. Well guess what's out there? The Titanic is out there. Now if the Titanic had been in the Indian Ocean, I probably would have never found it. But it was in my back yard, so I said, "Let's go find the Titanic."

Of course the Titanic couldn't be more famous, right?

Robert Ballard: I didn't know that at the time. I knew it was a neat ship, but I didn't know that it could hit this magic chord. I was completely surprised by the world's response to our discovery of the Titanic. I thought they would say "Hey, that's sort of neat. Next." But I still can't get away from finding the Titanic. It's going to track me to the grave.

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