Treated at the CSI Studio in Front Royal, Virgnia, for a Traveling Exhibit

On the evening of April 15, 1912 the RMS Titanic, the world’s largest manmade moving object at the time, hit an iceberg and made its tragic decent to the ocean floor. It remained there for seventy-three years, until explorer Robert Ballard discovered the wreck in 1985.

Following Ballard’s discovery, RMS Titanic, Inc. recovered some six thousand artifacts from the wreck site during six expeditions that took place between 1987 and 2000. While the artifacts ran the gamut from small personal items to larger ship components, the most impressive relic of all (and certainly the largest) was a monumental slab of the ship itself, weighing in at roughly seventeen tons and measuring approximately twenty feet high by twenty-five feet wide. The piece is only a small part of the 883-foot hull, and was located on the starboard side on C Deck.

After eight decades on the floor of the ocean the steel construction of the “Big Piece” had suffered significant surface corrosion and was densely inhabited by “rusticles” (the fetid and voluminous by-product of microorganisms), which devour the steel. The prospect of rigging and moving the piece, both out of the water and then on land, presented a complex challenge due to its enormous size and potentially unstable elements.

The first objective was to stabilize the metal. While the hull was submerged in the ocean it had absorbed sodium chloride salts and became weakened, stained, and encrusted. To help remove the chlorides, the piece was placed in a large aboveground swimming pool and submerged in a solution of sodium carbonate and water for a period of eighteen months. This solution provided an electrical path allowing the sodium chloride salts to move out of the steel and attack the sacrificial aluminum/magnesium anode blocks, which were fastened to the hull.

In September 1999, the “Big Piece” was removed from the tank and transported to the Conservation Solutions Inc. (CSI) studio. After another three months of soaking in the sodium carbonate and water solution, (about twenty months total) the desalinization process was complete and the piece was ready to be conserved. At this point, the massive hull section was suspended from a mobile hydraulic gantry system so that all sides of the piece were made accessible to the conservators. The hull was water-jetted to remove loose corrosion and by-products excreted by the rusticles. The remaining corrosion products were stabilized with a solution of tannic acid and water and the entire piece was treated with a protective barrier coating of microcrystalline wax to help prevent corrosion from forming.

CSI also supervised rigging and shipping the piece to various exhibition sites; provided consultation for the museum display and input for the creation of interpretive information used in the display; and performed all aspects of documentation. In 2004 CSI completed a follow-up maintenance treatment on the “Big Piece.”

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