Robert Ballard

Robert Duane Ballard (born June 30, 1942) is an American retired Navy officer and a professor of oceanography at the University of Rhode Island who is most noted for his work in underwater archaeology: maritime archaeology and archaeology of shipwrecks. He is best known for the discoveries of the wrecks of the RMS Titanic in 1985, the battleship Bismarck in 1989, and the aircraft carrier in 1998. He discovered the wreck of John F. Kennedy's PT-109 in 2002 and visited Biuku Gasa and Eroni Kumana, who saved its crew. Despite his long successes in shipwrecks, Ballard considers his most important discovery to be that of hydrothermal vents. Ballard has also established the JASON Project and leads ocean exploration on the research vessel E/V Nautilus. Early life Robert Duane Ballard was born on June 30, 1942 in Wichita, Kansas. He had an older brother, Richard, and younger sister, Nancy Ann. When Ballard was two years old, his family moved to southern California, where his father worked as a flight test engineer. He has attributed his early interest in underwater exploration to watching the film 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, an adaptation of Jules Verne’s 1870 novel. While he was a high school student, his father connected him with oceanographers at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and he participated in several short research expeditions. Ballard enrolled at University of California, Santa Barbara, and joined the Army Reserve Officer Training Corps. Beginning in 1962, Ballard worked part-time with Andreas Rechnitzer's Ocean Systems Group at North American Aviation, where his father was the chief engineer of North American's Minuteman missile program. At North American, Ballard worked on its failed proposal to build the submersible Alvin for the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.