The device lay in icy darkness for eight decades before Charles A. Haas spotted it while investigating the Titanic's grave two and a half miles down.
"Another Chadburn!" he said to pilots of a submersible. "We've found another Chadburn! It's in pretty nice shape, too."The two mechanical arms of the submersible reached out and gingerly picked up the four-foot telegraph that 84 years ago relayed commands between the captain and crew of the doomed ship, becoming one more in a wave of thousands of resurrections for commercial exhibition.
A turbulent era of deep-sea commerce is dawning globally, and its tensions are nowhere more evident than here in the North Atlantic, 380 miles off Newfoundland, where a monthlong expedition is working to merchandise the rusting hulk of the Titanic amid charges of desecration and tastelessness.
The recovery effort includes not only scholars like Haas, a historian of the Titanic, but also film crews, ale promoters, museum directors and even cruise-ship operators.
So great is the lure that a war has erupted between the sponsors of the Nadir expedition and rivals who also seek to cash in on the disaster. Wreckage from a submersible was found scattered on the Titanic deck and hauled up to serve as evidence in court proceedings meant to block the rivals.
Critics call the wave a deplorable mix of greed, hucksterism and grave robbing. But Haas, once a critic of such endeavors, said that over the years he had come to view the sales and showmanship as prerequisites to rescuing the liner. "If those items are left down there, eventually they'll disappear," he said aboard the Nadir, a French ship, as she pitched and heaved above the Titanic.
Haas cited the Chadburn device. When taken up to the surface, it was found to be generally well preserved by the icy deep, except where it lay in the frigid ooze. Those areas were corroded.
"Government funding of deep-sea archaeology is zero," Haas said. "It's essential that corporate funding of one form or another be found" to save the remains, which, by some estimates, might disappear in the next century.
The story began on a cold night in 1912, when the Titanic, the largest and most luxurious ship afloat, an icon of the Edwardian era with pearls and mahogany, socialites and industrialists, hit an iceberg and sank on her inaugural voyage from Southampton, England, to New York. She plunged beneath the waves in a little more than two hours, despite having been hailed as unsinkable. It was the worst maritime disaster of its day, killing more than 1,500 men, women and children.
In 1985, the rusting hulk was found on the seabed, with the bow and stern a half-mile apart. Strewn between them was a large debris field containing items like shoes and coal, wine bottles and fine china. The discoverers found no bodies or bones.
Robert D. Ballard, part of a French-American team that found the wreck, first called for the recovery of some items. But he later argued that the site should be left untouched as a memorial. In 1986, he led a photographic expedition that documented the wreckage.
RMS Titanic Inc. of New York City obtained ownership of the hulk by being the first to recover artifacts. The company sponsored salvage expeditions in 1987, 1993, 1994 and again this year. Its main contractor is the French state oceanographic group, Ifremer, for Institut Francais de Recherche pour L'Exploitation de la Mer, which in 1985 worked with the U.S. team to find the liner.
Each morning the group's bright yellow 26-foot submersible Nau-tile carries three people to the wreck and each evening it returns to the mother ship, the 183-foot-long Nadir.
With budgets that are shrinking in Paris, Ifremer officials are clearly eager for commercial work. "We must work harder because of the budget cuts," said the head of the business arm of Ifre-mer, Federico Munagorri. "Everybody is working more on commercial projects. They have no choice."
RMS Titanic has pledged to leave the main wreckage undisturbed, to gather artifacts like the Chadburn from the debris field and to display them publicly in collections, rather than selling them.
The company has recovered 4,000 artifacts and, with the aid of French experts, has painstakingly restored many of them. About 150 were displayed last year at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, England, where 700,000 people paid to see the exhibition. In April, a new exhibition of 300 items is to open in Memphis.
Eva Hart, the last Titanic survivor who clearly remembered the disaster and who died in February at 91, denounced the salvage efforts, as have many Titanic societies around the world.
The president of RMS Titanic, George Tulloch, said the critics were generally ignorant of the effort's rules and accomplishments. "Grave robbing," he sighed. "That's what's been sold to people. But it's not."
Rather, he said, the company is providing the public with "emotional closure" on a traumatic period.
RMS Titanic has spent $20 million on the project and is working hard to turn a profit. Although it is not selling artifacts, it has a host of merchandising angles.
It sells Titanic coal at $25 a lump.
And it made recoveries for Bass Ale, which lost 12,000 bottles and paid $250,000 for expedition access.
Ten winners of a sweepstakes sailed here on a separate ship this month to watch as old ale bottles were recovered. In all, nine Basses were found and lifted.
Over all, the recovery has been a relatively small part of the agenda of 28 dives for the current expedition.
"We have a good collection," Tulloch said. "So unless it's a brilliant piece of glass or an object that somehow epitomizes the ship, we don't need to pick it up."
Instead, most of the current effort is devoted to deep cinematography, by RMS Titanic for a movie to be shown at exhibitions, as well as by the Discovery Channel, which paid nearly $3 million for access. The cable channel plans a one-hour special in October on the recovery work and a two-hour spe-cial in April on science inquiries.
The expedition has lowered into the depths four light towers, each the size of small truck and each having five 1,200-watt floodlights powered by heavy batteries.
A star of the science dives is David Livingstone, head of naval services for Harland & Wolff Technical Services Ltd. of Belfast, Northern Ireland. Harland & Wolff built the Titanic. Ever since, the company has kept its distance. Livingstone is the first person from the company to visit the site.
"The stern is a terrible mess," he said over an undersea microphone while exploring the wreck. But the bow, Livingstone added, "is still a very beautiful structure."
A climax is scheduled for Wednesday, as huge bags raise from the debris field a section of the hull 20 feet wide and 24 feet long that bears four portholes and the remnants of four others. The event is to be witnessed by two cruise ships, the Island Breeze, out of New York, and the Royal Majesty, from Boston.
The cabins cost $1,800 to $6,000 a person, with entertainment including casinos with slot machines that are to be closed while the ships circle over the grave.
The hull is to be taken to New York next Sunday, symbolically ending the voyage that began 84 years ago.