Ping Pong Balls and Vaseline: The Crazy Ways They Thought of to Save the Titanic

When the Titanic sank in the Atlantic Ocean in 1912 after hitting an iceberg, attention turned almost immediately to how to raise the ship.

One crazy theory about how to refloat the Titanic is to pump it with hundreds of thousands of ping pong balls. Another is to smother it with Vaseline.

Scientists’ proposals to raise the Titanic

Proposals include a 1914 suggestion to use electromagnets to find the ship and then lift it from the ocean floor, and another in the 1960s to use gas-filled balloons.

But these were just the less crazy suggestions. The most outrageous ones included using ping pong balls and 180,000 tons of Vaseline.

So let’s take a look at some of these “scientific” designs – which some might think are the ideas of a toddler rather than a scientist.

iceberg

This view was not a scientist, but an unemployed moving contractor from the UK.

In the 1970s, Arthur Hickey, of Walsall, England, put forward the idea that in order to see the ship again in one piece (according to accounts from those who were rescued, the ship was split in two), it would have to be completely covered with ice.

So it will be possible to float it to the surface before towing it to Canada.

He is said to have said: “If an iceberg can sink the Titanic, why can’t it be sunk?”

The idea never came to fruition, with estimates suggesting it would require more than half a million tons of liquid nitrogen to make it feasible.

lots of ping pong balls

In the same decade, someone came up with the bizarre theory that if you threw enough ping pong balls into a shipwreck, they would simply float to the top of the North Atlantic Ocean.

This requires hundreds of thousands of ping pong balls.

The idea was quickly dropped after someone pointed out that the pressure of the deep water would simply crush the balls.

Greasing the Titanic with Vaseline

Yes, that was indeed a suggestion.

Vaseline works as a dry medium to float someone or something, but to make a 52,310-ton ship float, you’d need 180,000 tons of the stuff.

The use of Vaseline was suggested by British salvage engineer Tony Wakefield in 1985, shortly after the wreck was discovered.