—Dr. Robert D. Ballard, discoverer of the Titanic Bodies had yet to be recovered when someone proposed the first plan to find Titanic. John Jacob Astor’s son Vincent wanted to locate the wreckage and blow it up to free his father’s body, supposedly trapped inside. He abandoned that plan when the Mackay-Bennett found his father’s corpse. Instead, his family, along with those of other millionaire victims, considered raising the ship. They had the cash but not the technology, and soon gave up. Others imagined they could bring Titanic to the surface. Imaginative and impractical proposals included filling the ship with Ping-Pong balls, lifting it with magnets, and, apparently without irony, freezing it in a block of ice to force its ascent like a giant ice cube. None came anywhere near fruition, particularly because nobody knew where or how to find the ship. Popular opinion assumed Titanic had sunk intact. In a 1976 bestselling novel by Clive Cussler, Raise the Titanic!, the hero managed to patch holes in the ship’s hull and surface it with compressed air.
