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
Wreck of the RMS Titanic the ship with the aid of the Alcoa Corporation's deep sea salvage vessel "Seaprobe". This was essentially a drillship with sonar equipment and cameras attached to the end of the drilling pipe. It could lift objects from the seabed using a remote-controlled mechanical claw. The expedition ended in failure when the drilling pipe broke, sending of pipe and $600,000 worth of electronics plunging to the sea bed. In 1978, The Walt Disney Company and "National Geographic" magazine considered mounting a joint expedition to find "Titanic", using the aluminium submersible Aluminaut. "Titanic" would have been well within the submersible's depth limits,