Timeline of United States discoveries four days into the ship's maiden voyage, "Titanic" struck an iceberg and sank two hours and forty minutes later, early on April 15, 1912. The sinking resulted in the deaths of 1,517 of the 2,223 people on board, making it one of the deadliest peacetime maritime disasters in history. After nearly 74 years of being lost at sea on the bottom of the ocean floor, a joint Franco-American expedition led by American oceanographer Dr. Robert D. Ballard, discovered the wreckage of the RMS "Titanic" two miles (3 km) beneath the waves of the North Atlantic on September 1, 1985. Ballard
Saved from the Titanic in front of a map of the North Atlantic pointing to the location of the "Titanic". Frank Thompson highlights the film as one of a number of "important movies that disappeared", noting that it was unique for having "an actual survivor of the "Titanic" playing herself in a film" while wearing "the very clothes . . . in which she abandoned ship": It was also Dorothy Gibson's last film, as the effort of making it appears to have brought on an existential crisis for her. According to a report in the "Harrisburg Leader", "she had practically lost her reason, by