Back in 1914, just two years after the Titanic sank, someone came up with a bold idea: why not raise the ship using giant magnets and a special submarine? This concept showed up in a Dutch newspaper on May 17th of that year.
At the time, the Titanic’s story was still fresh, and people were fascinated by the tragedy. The illustration in the paper imagined an enormous recovery effort: ships hovering above the wreck, dropping long cables attached to huge magnets. At the center of it all was a submarine, labeled “ONDERZEEËR,” that would dive down, hook magnets onto the Titanic’s hull, and connect them to the surface ships.
The plan? All the ships would lift at once, hauling the massive liner back to the surface in one synchronized pull. Totally unrealistic by today’s standards, especially since the Titanic lies over 12,000 feet down in the North Atlantic, but back then, this kind of idea wasn’t as far-fetched as it sounds now.
In 1914, submarines were still cutting-edge, and magnetic tech was just getting started in industry. So while the plan was more sci-fi than science, it reflects the era’s belief that technology could solve anything, even pulling a sunken ship from the bottom of the ocean.
This newspaper image was probably meant to stir curiosity as much as it was to inform. But it captures something bigger: a moment in time when imagination, grief, and innovation collided in the shadow of one of history’s most famous disasters, decades before the Titanic was actually found in 1985.
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