April 2025 Membership Meeting

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Titanic and its Onboard Telegraph Station

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Parks Stephenson, our featured speaker and a life-long Titanic enthusiast, has had a long-standing passion for analyzing shipwrecks for the stories they have to tell. He has had a special fascination with the Marconi marine wireless telegraph station aboard the ill-fated liner.  Parks will present what he knows about Titanic’s Marconi marine wireless telegraph station, some of which is from research but mostly from analysis of the actual remains of the station inside the Titanic wreck. He will show us some original schematics, dive imagery and even a digital reconstruction of the Marconi Room and Silent Cabin.

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Presenter Bio

Parks Stephenson has held a long-standing interest in both history and undersea exploration. He is a 1979 graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy (with post-graduate degree from Auburn University) and 20-year U.S. Navy veteran, with qualifications in submarines, aviation and amphibious operations. After retirement from his military career, Commander Stephenson pursued a 26-year career as a Systems Engineer in the aerospace industry, working for Hughes Aircraft, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Moog Aircraft and General Atomics. 

His research was presented to James Cameron before his 2001 expedition to the wreck site.  Cameron was able to identify the remains of Titanic’s Marconi transmitting apparatus because of Parks’s information and Parks was able to re-create the layout of the Marconi Silent Cabin based on Cameron’s ROV imagery.  Consequently, Parks became part of Cameron’s team as Technical Advisor.  Parks was a co-author and created computer-generated 3D models for Cameron’s 2013 book documenting his Titanic explorations. He's also been a producer, advisor and on-air talent for over 28 televised documentaries; most notably, he was the History Channel field producer during the 2010 RMST/WHOI expedition to the wreck site. Parks dived on the Titanic wreck in 2005 and 2019, participated as dive advisor and principal historian during the 2006 and 2009 expeditions to the Britannic wreck and acted as lead investigator for the U.S.-Japanese team that found and identified the wreck of the last remaining Japanese midget submarine that participated in the 1941 Pearl Harbor attack.  In 2021 and 2022, Parks developed the search plan that found the deepest-ever wrecks: USS Johnston and USS Samuel B. Roberts, both lost during the 1944 Battle off Samar.  Parks is the only person ever to have dived in all 3 of the following deep-submergence vehicles: IO RAS Mir 1; HURL Pisces V; Caladan Oceanic’s Full Ocean Depth submersible, DSV Limiting Factor.

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