When: January 11, 7pm
Where: McGees Irish Pub
240 W 55th St Btwn Broadway & 8th Ave
3rd Floor

Glenn Butler will be making a multi-media presentation on the wreck of the RMS Republic and the salvage and archeological work his salvage team performed on it.

In the summer of 1986, 37 men sailed from NYC aboard the salvage vessel Twin-drill to the last known location of the RMS Republic which had sunk in 1909 following a collision with the vessel SS Florida.  Sixty miles south of the Nantucket lightship this team of explorers put 4 men in helium/oxygen saturation and spent 12 to 16 hours bottom time per day diving on the wreck.  The crew also used submarines and robot vehicles to probe the wreck and document thousands of rare artifacts including a working Edison light bulb.  The Republic was the first ship to use the Marconi radio in an emergency and the first ship to be electrified with Edison lights.

The ship carried some of the world’s leading businessmen and their families, some of whom would later be killed on the Titanic.  The entire 2nd class quarters were filled with provisions for the US Navy’s “Great White Fleet”. Rumors persist of a fortune in gold coins also carried on this ship.

Three people were killed in the initial collision; more than 1600 were transferred first to the Florida and then to the Baltic, which had been summoned by radio.  All came ashore safely.  This “uneventful” disaster allowed J.P. Morgan, owner of the White Star line, to suppress the Navy’s and Congress’ attempts to require a lifeboat seat for each person permitted to arrive by ship into the US.  Such a law would greatly reduce Morgan’s income from steerage passengers who were kept in the holds of the ship, not even permitted on deck.
More information on this ship can be found at RMS-Republic.com.

BIO:

Glenn Butler has been diving for over 40 years.  He began teaching with Fran Gaar and Al Boehm at the Aqua-Lung School of NY in 1966. In 1971 He joined Bill Hamilton’s diving research group at Union Carbide – Ocean Systems as an experimental diver working with neon and trimix rapid compressions to 1000 feet.  Glenn worked the North Sea as a saturation diving supervisor and in 1980 developed the North American Hyperbaric Center to teach deep diving. Glenn’s company, Life Support Technologies, provides consulting services to NASA, and the military and operates hospital-based wound care and hyperbaric medicine centers.