Robert D. Ballard > Quotes

“From "The Book That Changed My Life":

-"But your journey is never over until you return from it to share with society what you have learned." ~ Robert Ballard

-"We never anticipate being changed by what we read. Such an experience cannot be planned for." ~ Brother Christopher


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― Robert Ballard

“The president wants to really play with the Soviets’ minds, I said, to make them think we can do far more than we’re capable of—and we’re capable of a lot. So let me find Titanic. I can find that ship with this gear. Give me two weeks, and I’ll find it, and then we’ll go public. Show videos from the robots roaming through the ballrooms. It will drive the Soviets crazy. They’ll think that if we’re willing to publicize this capability, imagine what our Navy is doing in secret. Lehman had to agree, of course, that the logic was compelling. When he could no longer stand my buzzing in his ears, he said, “OK, I’ll recommend it to the president that we approve it, but just for two weeks.”
― Robert D. Ballard, Into the Deep: A Memoir from the Man Who Found the Titanic

“Now I understood what had happened. The heavier objects go straight down. The lighter objects sink at a slower rate, and prevailing currents carry them farther away. In Thresher’s case, the debris field stretched for roughly a mile. It seems like common sense, but it’s not the kind of thing you think about until you see it. The key to finding sunken ships was to search for the long debris trail and follow it back to the vessel. This was the great lesson Thresher taught me—and one that would soon help me immensely.”
― Robert D. Ballard, Into the Deep: A Memoir from the Man Who Found the Titanic

“Finally, two heads popped up, then two hands with “thumbs-up” signals. We had stolen success out of the jaws of failure. My people, and my gear, were safe after all. We also had determined that the coal dust could have helped trigger the second explosion on Lusitania—and now had compelling evidence for historians to analyze.”
― Robert D. Ballard, Into the Deep: A Memoir from the Man Who Found the Titanic

“I wanted to get a look at the area near that forward magazine, but I wasn’t sure if that would be possible, because Lusitania was resting on her starboard side. The wreckage also had become a favorite place for local fishermen to set their nets, and some of the nets had broken off and gotten caught on the ship’s superstructure, forming a giant spider’s web that could endanger our manned mini-sub Delta, our newly developed Jason robot, and a smaller remote-controlled vehicle called Homer. The first step was to use Jason and its sophisticated sonars to make a 3-D model of the wreck. We could then superimpose the ship’s original engineering drawings onto that map to locate the forward magazine precisely. Fortunately, the angle of Lusitania’s hull made it possible for Homer to slip under the bow and determine that the forward magazine was completely intact. Whatever had caused the second explosion had not been stored there.”
― Robert D. Ballard, Into the Deep: A Memoir from the Man Who Found the Titanic

“I look at the nature versus nurture question this way: Your genes are the nouns and the verbs, and your nurturing is the adjectives and the adverbs. Together they make a sentence, with your genes, like all nouns and verbs, having the strongest impact.”
― Robert D. Ballard, Into the Deep: A Memoir from the Man Who Found the Titanic

“As far as many of the crew members knew, we were just heading out to resume the search for Titanic. Given the highly classified nature of the mission, the Navy would only let me tell those with a need-to-know status what was really happening. How could I conceal our first stop over Scorpion’s wreckage? It was south of the Azores. Titanic was west. I was waiting for someone to say, “Bob, why is the sun rising on our port instead of our stern?” We told everyone we were testing equipment for the Navy.”
― Robert D. Ballard, Into the Deep: A Memoir from the Man Who Found the Titanic

“Then, one day in March 2015, I was driving home from my office, and I heard a segment on the radio about a book called The Dyslexic Advantage. What I heard felt familiar. Could I have had dyslexia without even realizing it? I ordered the book that night, and when I began reading it, I couldn’t put it down. Tears were streaming down my face. Here I was, 72 years old, and this book, finally, was explaining me to me. Even now I think of it as my first autobiography.”
― Robert D. Ballard, Into the Deep: A Memoir from the Man Who Found the Titanic

“That nine-foot-tall clock was a fitting place to meet. Bronze and mahogany, topped with a gold statue of Lady Liberty, it had been a gift from Queen Victoria to the United States, first displayed at the World’s Fair in Chicago in 1893. Then John Jacob Astor IV acquired it for his opulent hotel. Nineteen years later, Astor died in the Titanic tragedy.”
― Robert D. Ballard, Into the Deep: A Memoir from the Man Who Found the Titanic

“That same year I started talking to Alcoa about using a ship, Seaprobe, that had been built for another explorer, Willard Bascom, to search the Black Sea for ancient shipwrecks.”
― Robert D. Ballard, Into the Deep: A Memoir from the Man Who Found the Titanic

“I did not know that the institute was providing dolphin trainers to a highly classified Navy research project until I was approached one day about training dolphins to kill enemy divers in Vietnam. Turns out the Vietcong were sending swimmers into Cam Ranh Bay at night to place explosives on American supply ships. The bay was full of floating debris that made it hard to pick out the swimmers from other sonar targets. The idea was that the dolphins could detect the divers and let their trainers know. The trainers would attach a spear with a gas canister on the dolphin’s nose. The creature would swim back and shove the spear into the diver’s chest, inflating his dead body so it floated. It didn’t feel right to put the animals in that position, so I politely declined to get involved.”
― Robert D. Ballard, Into the Deep: A Memoir from the Man Who Found the Titanic

“Finally, up to Boston and our first taste of New England: a chaotic March snowstorm. I woke up the next morning, put on my crisp dress blues, ready for my first day at work—and immediately had to change back into jeans to dig the VW out of the snow. It was a difficult introduction to the Northeast for a beachcomber from Southern California, and my first days at the Office of Naval Research weren’t much better. I had been training to be a warrior in the Army, then I got a great job designing submersibles and working on my Ph.D. Being activated by the Navy had meant a sharp detour with a huge pay cut. But here I was. I figured I’d do my duty and then head back to California.”
― Robert D. Ballard, Into the Deep: A Memoir from the Man Who Found the Titanic

“The third thing Arthur Brooks said you need to do as you speed past 75 toward 80 and beyond is to “just say no.” When new ideas enter your mind or new opportunities come along, resist the urge to jump in.”
― Robert D. Ballard, Into the Deep: A Memoir from the Man Who Found the Titanic

“Second, Brooks said, it’s important to focus less on yourself and more on mentoring others.”
― Robert D. Ballard, Into the Deep: A Memoir from the Man Who Found the Titanic

“One day, my secretary got a phone call from someone who said the White House was calling. President Reagan wished to invite me to a dinner in honor of Prince Charles and Princess Diana. Thinking it was a prank, my secretary asked them to send the invitation. Sure enough, a huge, embossed envelope soon arrived. It looked like I’d just won an Academy Award. The dinner was to be held not in the grand salons where state occasions normally occur, but upstairs in the private family quarters. I had never been to the White House. I had no idea what was expected of me.”
― Robert D. Ballard, Into the Deep: A Memoir from the Man Who Found the Titanic

“Why do the deaths of more than 1,500 people retain such a hold on us, more than a century later? Walter Lord, who did more than anyone to chronicle the disaster in his book A Night to Remember, put it so well, saying that we can see ourselves going through the same emotional stages with Titanic passengers and crew members, from disbelief that anything is wrong, through gradual recognition of the danger, and finally to realization that there is no escape. Watching them go through this, Lord wrote, “We wonder what we would do.”
― Robert D. Ballard, Into the Deep: A Memoir from the Man Who Found the Titanic

“this point in life, he said, there are three things you need to do. The first is to develop deeper friendships, and he had the perfect analogy for it. He urged us to look at the giant redwoods. They can grow to more than 300 feet tall, even though their roots sink less than six feet deep. How do they keep from falling over as they grow older? They reach out to the other trees around. Like the redwoods, Brooks suggested, we must develop a deeper network of friends and family, intertwining our roots so we stand tall together.”
― Robert D. Ballard, Into the Deep: A Memoir from the Man Who Found the Titanic

“As I realized when I got rejected from Scripps when I was all of 20-something, every failure is a learning lesson. Since then, I’ve grown to love failure. It’s not something you should try to avoid, but rather embrace and learn from—and then beat. You don’t go around it—you go through it. You get knocked down, and you lie there, and you go, Wow, that was a hell of a shot. And then you dive back in. I’ve failed lots of times, but I don’t quit, so I always win.”
― Robert D. Ballard, Into the Deep: A Memoir from the Man Who Found the Titanic

“From late afternoon into the evening on September 4, we tugged Angus over Titanic’s bow five times, cameras snapping away. I was still being cautious, keeping Angus 20 to 30 feet above Titanic’s decks. I knew that the pictures were likely to be fuzzy. After midnight on September 5, word came from our onboard lab that the photos weren’t clear enough.”
― Robert D. Ballard, Into the Deep: A Memoir from the Man Who Found the Titanic

“Around 2 a.m., someone remarked that we were approaching the time of night when Titanic had sunk into a sea as calm as the one we had now. It wasn’t until this point that the emotion of the tragedy fully hit me.”
― Robert D. Ballard, Into the Deep: A Memoir from the Man Who Found the Titanic

“It was such a beautiful and meticulous re-creation of the ship, too, from the Grand Staircase to the crow’s nest. I knew what the old lady looked like in her grave, and Jim showed me what she’d looked like as a young lady when she’d sailed from England. Cameron’s movie also captured the random nature of who lived and who died. I must say, that’s a question that has stuck with me ever since my summer in Army boot camp.”
― Robert D. Ballard, Into the Deep: A Memoir from the Man Who Found the Titanic

“As I realized when I got rejected from Scripps when I was all of 20-something, every failure is a learning lesson. Since then, I’ve grown to love failure. It’s not something you should try to avoid, but rather embrace and learn from—and then beat. You don’t go around it—you go through it.”
― Robert D. Ballard, Into the Deep: A Memoir from the Man Who Found the Titanic

“When Eroni took us to Nauru Island, I had picked up two coconuts at the base of the tree where he had found Kennedy. Back in Mystic, I hired a wood carver to make replicas of Kennedy’s hand-carved message on them. One I still have. The other I presented to Fritz Hollings, whom I invited to our private screening of National Geographic’s television special, The Search for Kennedy’s PT-109. I wanted to help him make up for what he had lost in the fire, and he was moved by the gesture.”
― Robert D. Ballard, Into the Deep: A Memoir from the Man Who Found the Titanic

“By 2000, RMS Titanic Inc. had returned to the site four more times, using French or Russian submersibles. In a game of Finders Keepers, they pocketed more than 6,000 artifacts and displayed them in a museum, charging people to see them. The company even broadcast a documentary showing how it took the objects. All told, the items included eyeglasses, shoes, handbags, luggage, and even a bronze cherub statue from the Grand Staircase. A bell and a light from the foremast were removed, and the salvagers even raised a chunk of the hull weighing 18 tons. They sold pieces of coal from the engine room for $25 a block. They created a website, so you could peruse the collections online. Documentary filmmakers and wealthy sightseers visited the site in mini-subs. And, perhaps most grotesque of all, a couple were married in a submersible perched on Titanic’s bow. I wouldn’t think of a mass grave as romantic, but I guess some couples are into that.”
― Robert D. Ballard, Into the Deep: A Memoir from the Man Who Found the Titanic

“It seemed solid confirmation of the theory that the Black Sea changed from a freshwater lake to a saltwater interior sea about 7,500 years ago, just as suspected. The salt water brought in by the flood was heavier than the freshwater it replaced. It fell to the bottom and stagnated over time, losing its oxygen below about 330 feet. Although we couldn’t confirm that this event was the same as Noah’s Flood, our findings did support Ryan and Pitman’s theory that a catastrophic event had created the odd mix of water in the Black Sea.”
― Robert D. Ballard, Into the Deep: A Memoir from the Man Who Found the Titanic

“I was moving away from manned submersibles, which were dangerous and could stay underwater only a few hours at a time, to underwater vehicles that could be operated from on board a mother vessel and that could remain submerged for as long as needed. I even gave names to the robots I was envisioning. I planned to call them Jason and Argo, in honor of the mythical explorer and the vessel in which he had brought home the Golden Fleece. Compared to Alvin, they would be cheaper to operate and could survey much larger areas—a critical factor given the strict time limits on most ocean expeditions.”
― Robert D. Ballard, Into the Deep: A Memoir from the Man Who Found the Titanic

“I must have wanted to up the ante, because Joe Hohmann remembers that even back then, in the late 1960s, I talked about wanting to find Titanic. Gee, I don’t know what this guy is smoking or drinking, Joe remembers thinking. He viewed my riffs on searching for Titanic, he says today, as just “a pipe dream.”
― Robert D. Ballard, Into the Deep: A Memoir from the Man Who Found the Titanic

“Seventy-three years before, the waters around us were teeming with people crying for help and frantically trying to reach lifeboats. Jack Thayer, the teenager who was in the water with them, described the scene in words I’ll never forget: “Then an individual call for help, from here, from there; gradually swelling into a composite volume of one long continuous wailing chant, from the 1,500 in the water all around us. It sounded like locusts on a midsummer night, in the woods in Pennsylvania.” As Thayer recalled, “This terrible continuing crying lasted for 20 or 30 minutes, gradually dying away…”
― Robert D. Ballard, Into the Deep: A Memoir from the Man Who Found the Titanic

“took a short break for a different underwater quest that probably drove my more traditional colleagues crazy: I helped National Geographic on an article about the Loch Ness monster. Emory Kristof said I should apply my scientific know-how to the hunt for this mythical beast, and I thought, Why not? There were good reasons to take up the challenge. I had never seen the Scottish Highlands, and this was a chance for Margie and me to do it on someone else’s nickel. We also needed the money that the Geographic project would provide. And, honestly, sometimes it helps not to take yourself too seriously—or so I told myself.”
― Robert D. Ballard, Into the Deep: A Memoir from the Man Who Found the Titanic

“trained one of my favorites—Keiki, an Atlantic bottlenose dolphin—to place swimming pool floats in his “piggy bank,” a bicycle basket suspended just underwater. I also trained him to bring floats to me. I would give him one fish for a white float, five for a red float, and 10 for a blue float. He quickly figured that out and brought me his blue floats first. He earned floats during the show, and he would store them in his piggy bank until he could trade them for fish. We did four shows a day, and I learned how to read an audience and improvise to keep them entertained.”
― Robert D. Ballard, Into the Deep: A Memoir from the Man Who Found the Titanic