Two Years Since Titan

Today (June 18, 2025) marks two years since the submersible Titan imploded at a depth of about 3,800 meters (12,500 feet), killing all five people aboard. We are prompted to mark the occasion by multiple factors: the recent release of two documentaries about the event, Implosion: The Titan Sub Disaster (available on Max, a.k.a. HBO), and Titan: The OceanGate Disaster (available on Netflix); as well as the fact that this small scale disaster is a kind of delayed epilogue to the Titanic sinking, which occupies a whole section of Travalanche; and finally, the fact that the mad man at the center of the story is a direct descendent of some major players in the American Revolution, which we have been writing a lot about lately in conjunction with the 250 anniversary.

The docs just gloss on the historical angle, but we’ll expand a little as the occasion gives me an excuse to add a couple of important figures to these annals who would have been awkward to justify otherwise.

The gentleman at the center of the story is the late entrepreneur Stockton Rush III (1962-2023). Though he was born and raised in San Francisco, his father Stockton Rush, Jr.…and all the little Rushes who came before him, were prominent citizens of Philadelphia, leading all the way back to one of the leading Founding Fathers, Dr. Benjamin Rush (1746-1813).

I HOPE you have heard his name before, but I fear you haven’t. Rush was second only to Benjamin Franklin as a favorite son of Philadelphia during the time of the Revolution and early Republic, with financier and fellow Declaration signer Robert Morris (1734-1806) as an arguable third. In addition to signing the Declaration of Independence, Rush was one of America’s leading men of medicine, surgeon general of the Continental Army, the Father of American Psychiatry, the Founder of Dickinson University (named after fellow Founder John Dickinson), an adviser to Thomas Paine on the writing of Common Sense, a leading advocate for the ratification of the U.S. Constitution, an influential professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and Treasurer of the U.S. Mint, among many other distinctions. It is through Rush that his descendants were also related to yet another signer of the Declaration of Independence:

Richard Stockton (1730-1781) of New Jersey. Stockton’s father donated the land on which Princeton University was built. He served on the board of that august institution under its previous name, and also sat on the the New Jersey Provincial Council, and the Supreme Court of the Colony, as well as the Continental Congress. Stockton was captured and imprisoned by the British for a good chunk of the war.

Rush admired Stockton so much he married his daughter and they named a son after him. Richard Rush (1780-1859), served as U.S. Attorney General, Secretary of State, Secretary of the Treasury, Minister to the U.K., Minister to France, and John Quincy Adams’ running mate. After these two guys, there were many distinguished generations of Rushes to follow.

As for Stockton Rush III’s mother’s line. Her father Ralph K. Davies was an oil and shipping magnate who served in the FDR administration. Her mother is immortalized in the name of San Francisco’s Louise M. Davies Symphony Hall. While we’re on the topic of family, Stockton’s wife Wendy Weil, was the daughter of Isidor and Ida Straus. Isidor was a Congressman and co-owner of Macy’s Department Store, though Isidor and Ida are more famous today for having died together on the Titanic.

So…we have some instant insight I feel into why Stockton Rush was driven to succeed, and to do so in some kind of pioneering way, and why he was obsessed with making lots of trips to the final resting place of the Titanic.

Rush was not a brilliant student (the Netflix doc showed us a C and D report card) but he had educational advantages. He attended Exeter as a boy, then Princeton (a legacy school in his case) for undergrad in aerospace engineering, and UC Berkley, where surely local strings could be pulled, for his MBA. His boyhood dream was to be an astronaut. Accordingly, he was always a daredevil. He started scuba diving when he was 12, and began flying planes when he was 18. Unfortunately his vision was too bad to become a military pilot as he had hoped, and that was the usual path to being an astronaut at the time. For a while he worked for McDonnell Douglas as an engineer. His interest in scuba diving eventually led to his first excursion as a passenger in a submarine, which sparked his idea to start his own company in 2009.

To this day, there are fewer than 100 passenger submersibles on the planet. Rush’s idea was to create a fleet of more affordable vessels that would expand the infant industry in the service of exploration for the purposes of mining, and such like. Basically he would charge rich tourists to take them to the ocean floor. To make it feasible, however, he needed to undersell all other competition, and to do that he had to build a cheaper submersible. His answer, catastrophically, was to make the hull out of five inch thick carbon fiber, as opposed to steel, titanium, or similar metals. His craft was therefore experimental. And despite numerous tests and no end of tinkering, he never got the product to a place where it could categorically be described as “safe”.

Both documentaries do a wonderful job of getting close to this tragedy. I’ll eat my captain’s hat if it isn’t dramatized at some point, and probably numerous times. Rush combined all the worst attributes of Howard Hughes and Captain Ahab. On some level a kid with a big toy, on another an obsessive who’ll risk anything, including other people’s lives, to reach his goal. Further, the good looking, all-American Rush had all of that leadership guy energy, and he built his corporate culture around it. Those who demonstrated fear or concern or even voiced criticism were quickly dismissed. Those who remained behind were basically trapped in a cult. Several higher-ups in the company quit over safety concerns. Some even approached government agencies. One guy who filed a complaint with OSHA was sued and harassed by Rush and his associates until he finally ran out of money and had to drop his complaint.

We use the word cult advisedly. This was literally a scenario where the apparatus kept failing the tests, but the company continued to proceed with new dives with their fingers crossed, basically praying that something which was inevitable (the failure of the hull) would never occur. When their warning system, which graphed the loud cracking and moaning sounds that the hull made as it descended, gave them too much bad news, they simply stopped using it. Just when the problems needed more attention, they downsized the engineering staff.

On the day of the implosion, that particular submersible had NEVER made a successful dive at the depth to which it was diving. No doubt it creaked and popped as it always did on the way down, until it just gave. The blessing is that the five people onboard would have had no time to have registered what was happening. That much force, so quickly. They were smashed to bits and swallowed up by the ocean in a blink of an eye.

How can anyone be so irrational, you might wonder? Well, Rush and his board of directors had their backs against the wall. They had run out of funds for development and needed to start making money. You may also wonder HOW they could do what they did? Aren’t there safety laws? Well, there were workarounds. They did their dives in international waters. The passengers were more like investors and were called “mission specialists”. And if Rush found himself in trouble? “I’ll buy a congressman” he boasts to one of his appalled underlings. Do you have any doubt that’s the way it works? I don’t.

I recommend watching both documentaries; you won’t find them redundant. Implosion focuses on the fatal final voyage; Titan is very good at describing the whole path leading to that moment. The former film interviews lots of investigators from Canadian agencies and the U.S. Coast Guard, some friends and employees of Rush’s (including a couple who are more sympathetic to him), as well as the producer and host of a Discovery Channel doc who was very dismayed when he saw the jerry-rigged machinery that ran the sub (it was literally steered with a Gameboy joystick), and the fact that passengers were bolted in from the outside (i.e. there was no way out of the submersible once you were in there). This one also has the footage of the Titan‘s support staff hearing the submersible implode on the surface without realizing it (“What’s that bang?”). Whereas, the latter film has great interviews with upper level staff members at Oceangate who had parted ways with the company, Oceangate’s official videographer (and his footage), a reporter for CBS Sunday Morning, and an audio recording of the implosion made from another submarine 900 miles away. Ah! Don’t look so skeptical! Whales do it all the time!

It’s weird that nowadays video coverage is so universal that a story like this is completely documented from the get-go. We have a front row seat, and can witness the personality of the charming but quick-to-anger Stockton Rush, warts and all. (He reminds me not a little of the actor Robert Conrad). While we do get to meet some of the victims’ family members, both documentaries steer pretty clear of talking about them in much detail, probably for legal reasons (there are wrongful death lawsuits pending). For the record the other four were third-generation Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman, a college student; French Naval explorer Paul-Henri Nargeolet; and British businessman Hamish Harding, whose high end tourism had previously taken him to space and the bottom of the Mariana Trench. In short, they were folks not very much unlike the first class passengers on the Titanic, whose remains theirs now rest alongside. Oh the ripples and echoes of these two sinkings! Hulls and Hubris!