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Omaha Steve

(99,071 posts)
Tue May 19, 2020, 11:03 AM May 2020

Judge: Salvage firm can recover Titanic's telegraph machine

Source: AP

By BEN FINLEY

NORFOLK, Va. (AP) — A federal judge in Virginia has ruled that a salvage firm can retrieve the Marconi wireless telegraph machine that broadcast distress calls from the sinking Titanic ocean liner.

In an order released Monday, U.S. District Judge Rebecca Beach Smith agreed that the telegraph is historically and culturally important and could soon be lost within the rapidly decaying wreck site.

Smith wrote that recovering the telegraph “will contribute to the legacy left by the indelible loss of the Titanic, those who survived, and those who gave their lives in the sinking.”

Smith is the maritime jurist who presides over Titanic salvage matters from a federal court in Norfolk. Her ruling modifies a previous judge’s order from the year 2000 that forbids cutting into the shipwreck or detaching any part of it.



FILE - In this Feb. 18, 2020 file photo, artifacts recovered from the Titanic sit on shelves at a storage facility in Atlanta. A federal judge in Virginia has ruled that a salvage firm can retrieve the Marconi wireless telegraph machine that broadcast distress calls from the sinking Titanic ocean liner. In an order released Monday, May 18, U.S. District Judge Rebecca Beach Smith agreed that the telegraph is historically and culturally important and could soon be lost within the rapidly decaying wreck site. (AP Photo/Angie Wang, File)


Read more: https://apnews.com/879f8b7752bc005cab0eea2676780876

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machoneman

(3,952 posts)
1. A slippery slope for future cuttings.
Tue May 19, 2020, 11:15 AM
May 2020

Still think the builder's plate, likely on the bridge, showing the ship and builder's names, date of construction and more is far more valuable.

PoindexterOglethorpe

(25,746 posts)
3. To me one of the very most fascinating factoids about the
Tue May 19, 2020, 11:38 AM
May 2020

sinking of Titanic is that Marconi himself went down to the dock to meet the survivors when they arrived on the Carpathia.

Too bad that scene wasn't included in the movie.

csziggy

(34,120 posts)
6. Cemeteries are dug up all the time
Tue May 19, 2020, 04:57 PM
May 2020

For archeological purposes. Just watch Time Team where they dig up Celtic, Roman, Anglo Saxon, and other cemeteries. In the Us, indigenous people's burial sites are seldom respected, and Early American sites are dug up regularly for development. Look at the recent burials of slaves in New York City which were destroyed for development, then rediscovered and is now a designated historical area:

Under British rule, slaves were subjected to nighttime curfews and were not allowed to congregate in large groups.6 In the late 17th and early 18th centuries, Africans began to use the area two blocks north of where City Hall is located today as a cemetery. The geography consisted of a ravine that ran east to northeast from Broadway to Collect Pond and was considered outside the city limits.7 It is in this location that African slaves were allowed to congregate and practice their cultural traditions of nighttime burials. Archaeologists estimate that over 20,000 burials exist in this seven-acre plot.8

As the population grew in the late 18th and 19th centuries, City commissioners began to expand the grid system north of Lower Manhattan by filling in the ravine with rocks and soil from the rolling hills along Broadway.9 They laid out new streets along the City’s grid system, which facilitated residential and commercial development. The area that was once the largest African Burial Ground became largely forgotten as development began over the cemetery. Africans began burying their dead in the Lower East Side near Chrystie and Delancey Streets.10

In 1990, the General Services Administration (GSA) began construction on a 34-story office tower and a four-story pavilion on the site at 290 Broadway. The property belonged to the Federal Government. Therefore, GSA had to comply with Section 106 mitigation of the National Historic Preservation Act, which legally enforced historic and archaeological investigations prior to construction. Historic Conservation and Interpretation, a small archaeological consulting firm, was hired to survey the area for any archaeological remains. Despite the location of the burial ground on a 1755 map, archaeologists felt that 19th and 20th century development would have obliterated any remains of the cemetery.11

When excavations began in July 1991, several skeletal remains were recovered. One year later, 390 burials were removed and GSA intended to remove 200 additional burials.12 The local African American community along with preservationists became concerned about the preservation of the cemetery and the skeletal analysis conducted at Lehman College. Congressman and Chairman of the House of Representatives on Buildings and Grounds Augustus Savage informed GSA that funding would be stopped until the matters concerning the burial ground were renegotiated. Construction soon stopped, and the archaeological excavations were taken over by John Milner and Associates.13 The remains were relocated to Howard University’s Department of Anthropology. President George H. Bush signed a law prohibiting the construction of the pavilion and approved a $3 million fund for a memorial site on the burial ground.1

More: https://www.nypap.org/preservation-history/african-burial-ground/


Just because there are dead people at a site has not been not been a reason for respect for a very long time, except in a few cases.

marble falls

(56,358 posts)
7. And for the most part they shouldn't be. How about we start digging up civil war graves ...
Tue May 19, 2020, 06:05 PM
May 2020

think of all the historically significant stuff we can dig up!!! Why can't I dig up your neighbor's grandmother's grave, she had a terrific Tanzanite ring she was buried with and you know there's very little high quality Tanzanite is left! This is a significant gem!

Its not about a matter of time, its about respecting their families wishes.

Why even have a commission regarding the exploitation of the Titanic at all?

csziggy

(34,120 posts)
8. Well, I know at least some of my ancestors have been dug up
Tue May 19, 2020, 06:36 PM
May 2020

And I really don't care. Last fall I visited the church in Yorkshire where my ancestors lived. Their gravestones have been removed and other graves placed where they were. I did not get a straight answer as to where the remains that had been in the graves went - maybe they just stacked new bodies on top.

Since I do not have a religion, I don't consider dead bodies to be more than rotting leftovers and don't care what happens to them.

 

ansible

(1,718 posts)
10. Try calling an egyptologist a grave robber and see how they react
Tue May 19, 2020, 08:31 PM
May 2020

It's funny how self-righteous archaeologists get, apparently the only difference between both is the amount of time that's passed for the grave to not be considered sacred anymore

csziggy

(34,120 posts)
11. The difference is also partly the race or status being excavated
Tue May 19, 2020, 08:50 PM
May 2020

In the US, no one flinched at displacing the graves of slaves or poor Appalachian farmers for development, but the graves of the well to do are well out of bounds.

Of course, in England they were happy to dig up the grave of King Richard to solve questions about the way he died and his physical deformity, LOL! But they've been digging up graves since the Romans. Heck, if they did not dig up/displace graves in Europe and the British Isles, there would be no place left to build!

Xolodno

(6,333 posts)
13. Recollect reading somewhere (Quora I think...so take it with a grain of salt)...
Wed May 20, 2020, 09:06 PM
May 2020

...someone asked why there were so many shoes at the Titanic wreck. The highest rated reply was because, well, biology and a bit of physics. All those shoes had bodies connected to them, but when they sank to the bottom, the microbial life down there had a feeding frenzy and "dissolved" all of the bodies. The sheer pressure also didn't help much either in preservation.

Given the wreck is slowly being eaten by microbial life, makes a lot of sense.

If some articles of the wreck can preserved for the future in museums, I'm cool with it, nor consider it a desecration and in context of other desecration's.... There are desecration's around the world I find appalling. Such as Azerbaijan, where they bulldozed a centuries old cemetery to pave a road and develop the area. Some of the graves weren't even a few years old when the government decided to go ahead with their plans.

roamer65

(36,739 posts)
12. The Edmund Fitzgerald's bell is in a Whitefish Point museum along Lake Superior.
Wed May 20, 2020, 12:09 AM
May 2020

There is a now a bell on the wreck that memorializes all who died on it in November 1975.

As long as it is done in memoriam and restricted, I am ok with it. The families approved it as well.

All access to the wreck must be now approved by the Canadian government, since she lies in Canadian waters.

GulfCoast66

(11,949 posts)
14. I thought wrecks were fair game.
Thu May 21, 2020, 01:03 AM
May 2020

International waters. Salvage has always been a thing.

Does anyone object to the folks here in Florida that find the old Spanish Ships and get the treasure? Men died on them as well.

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