We've seen the video, and this picture appears on the back of Dr. Ballard's book, but they never showed you what JJ saw looking into the window of state room U on the starboard boat deck.

JJ saw.....drum roll......nothing! In the raw video, the lights and camera don't align on any object. All the camera recorded was black. No walls, no objects, nada. It might be that the interior wall is gone, but we don't know.

In 1986, Dr. Ballard sent his pioneer rover "JJ" into the Grand Staircase. I've seen the full raw video. There was but a mere hint of wood remaining. The floor tiles are covered with sediment or else gone. As the deck planking and even teak widow frames were gone, the popular conclusion was that all the wood in the ship was pretty well consumed by wood boring organisms.

George Tulloch sent his rover "Robin" into the #1 hold and claims to have found wooden crates. Since pictures were not widely published, many didn't know what to make of this claim. James Cameron's video of the wooden doors, paneling, and coverings for the pillars has confirmed that a fair amount of wood may still exist in the interiors.

It might be that painted, or more heavily treated wood did better over the years. It might be that the wood boring organism also need some help from the moving water of the current. The rusticles apparently gain food or other help from the current. This raises hopes that future, deeper, penetrations into the wreck will reveal more secrets still intact!

For that matter, where's the frame for the weather cover over the dome? A query to H&W revealed that the stairs had an under framework of steel. Where's the steel frame? With the wood eaten away, why isn't the steel flame left?

I've seen two fuzzy looks down the staircase from two sources. They show the same things, the E-deck framework and a small amount of additional debris. Nothing that would account for the amount of missing material appears.

If the water sweeping over the dome collapsed the weather cover, dome and upper stairs into the well, then over the years this may have contributed to the whole pile collapsing down to E-deck.

E-deck over the fan room below appears to have no decking or may have had a wood deck under the stairwell. If this is the case, then much of the lighter sections of framework fell between the joists on E-deck and are piled into the fan room below. Smaller pieces of the fine dome framing way well not appear though the fuzziness of the images and lie in a web over the joists, balustrades, and strip steel. Photos to date haven't solved the mystery.

There will be an awful lot of glass in the bottom of the pile as well.

This stems from a dispute about the claim by George Tulloch of RMS Titanic, the 'Salvers of record' saying the roof of the gymnasium had collapsed recently due to accelerating deterioration. Dr. Ballard claimed that the roof of the gym was collapsed when he looked in the windows in 1986. It was not.

Ken Marschall painted a port rear view of the bow section and depicted the gymnasium caved in along the edge of the #2 funnel uptake based on Dr. Ballard's description. It's possible that Dr. Ballard saw the large lighted map board that was mounted on the interior wall fallen forward, giving the impression of roof damage.

Currently, the entire gym roof is caved in flat, not just just along the inner wall.

The Angus photos used by Ken Marschall in researching the wreck will LIE to you, and tell you anything your assumptions lead you to believe. The roof of the gym is one of a few areas like that. Since the Angus photos look down, you have to rely on the angle of the lights and the shadows they cast to figure out what you're looking at.

When Ken did his research, he had the disadvantage of using raw 400 foot rolls of film in a hand spooled viewer. I had the luxury of having the photos on laser disk, where I could cross reference difference runs over the ship by typing in a frame number. The same spot with Angus cruising from the opposite direction will yield a totally different picture of what's there. The video is a third cross reference that Ken Marschall doesn't seemed to have used as much as I did.

The Angus photos of the roof of the gym show the roof apparently collapsed in one view, but the opposite view show a large section of funnel plating bent over the roof. The photo below shows the aft edge of the #2 funnel, and the roof of the gym is there and intact (1986).

I believe that Ken Marschall used Dr. ballard's description based on the view he had looking in the windows, not from above.

There are thousands of details, and I couldn't have accomplished as much as I did from my research without the road map Ken laid out in his paintings. They made it easy for me to know where I was and what I was looking at. Yes, if Ken isn't sure, he will guess. I know most of the places he guessed. I also know that if you guess, Titanic will prove you wrong. She won't give up her secrets unless you work for them!

When Dr. Ballard sent JJ into the Grand Staircase, it was never sent more than a few feet in from the main shaft. George Tulloch sent his robot camera down the #1 cargo shaft but little has been seen of the pictures. Cameron was more bold with his VERY expensive toy in getting us the clips we'll see in the movie.

Just send that puppy down the halls!! Let's see it all!!

Well, there's a problem with 'swimming eyeballs'. The steering props that guide the remote push a lot of water and if you get close to a rusticle, it literally explodes with a cloud of rust, obscuring your vision and degrading the quality of your photo. For the pro photographers, an outline of an object that's partially obscured by the haze of a rust cloud is not a photo worth publishing. They get information that they'll tell you about, but they won't show you a bad photo.

JJ spent 20 minutes in the Grand Staircase. National Geographic showed 3 minutes of it. I saw all the raw footage. A third of it was JJ moving out of rust clouds caused by it's steering props. The glimpses of the debris on the port side of C-deck and the deeper penetrations by the lights on A and B-decks won't be shown because they're brief and obscured by the rust clouds.

A deep narrow interior corridor will photograph as a red haze unless a new generation of control is invented.

Walter Lord asserts that Wallace Hartley and his band played on the boat deck in the alcove between 3. and 4. at left. This was taken for granted. More recent research raises questions as to why Lord thought they played there. There were reports they played on the starboard promenade deck and confirmation of Lord's assertion cannot be found. It might also have been that the band played in several locations, depending where the action was. This may never be fully resolved.