Sinking of the RMS Titanic the hull plates. This suggests that the iron rivets along the plate seams snapped off or popped open to create narrow gaps through which water flooded. An engineer from "Titanic"s builders, Harland and Wolff, suggested this scenario at the British Wreck Commissioner's inquiry following the disaster but his view was discounted. "Titanic"s discoverer Robert Ballard has commented that the assumption that the ship had suffered a major breach was "a by-product of the mystique of the "Titanic". No one could believe that the great ship was sunk by a little sliver." Faults in the ship's hull may have been a
Wreck of the RMS Titanic The Titanic Salvage Company was established to manage the scheme and a group of businessmen from West Berlin set up an entity called Titanic-Tresor to support it financially. It fell apart when its proponents found they could not overcome the problem of how the balloons would be inflated in the first place. Calculations showed that it could take ten years to generate enough gas to overcome the water pressure. A variety of audacious but equally impractical schemes were put forward during the 1970s. One proposal called for 180,000 tons of molten wax (or alternatively, Vaseline) to be pumped into "Titanic",