The man who found the Titanic is still searching for shipwrecks four decades later

(CNN) — Forty years ago, in the early hours of September 1, grainy black-and-white images of a metal cylinder appeared on the video feeds in the command center of Knorr, a research vessel searching the Atlantic seafloor for the world’s most famous shipwreck: the Titanic.

Members of the four-person watch team, suspecting the object might be a sunken ship’s boiler, were unable to tear themselves away from what was unfolding on the screen, so they dispatched the team’s cook to rouse Bob Ballard, the expedition’s chief scientist who had been searching for the wreck since the 1970s. He was awake, reading in his cabin bunk.

The cook “didn’t even finish his sentence. I jumped out. I literally put my flight suit over my pajamas, which I didn’t take off for several days after that,” recalled Bal