The sudden sinking of the unsinkable ship, with a who’s who of high society on board, no less, made a sensation in the U.S. Less than a month after, Senate committees formed up to investigate it, and the Eclair American Company released a ten-minute Saved From the Titanic  — starring an actual survivor from the titanic, Dorothy Gibson, magazine cover girl extraordinaire. Many expeditions set out to find the wreck, with none successful — and the one that did was not looking for it at all.

On this day, September 1, in 1985, Robert Ballard, on a top-secret navy mission to find two lost U.S. nuclear submarines instead stumbled on to the corpse of the Titanic instead.

Ballard approached the U.S. navy to develop a submersible that could find the Titanic, but the navy funded the project in hopes of finding the USS Thresher and USS Scorpion submarines that went down in the North Atlantic. Near the end of his mission Ballard spotted a debris trail that he tracked to his enormous find.