Titanic Carried 15 Known Cameras, and 12 of Them Went Down With the Ship

Titanic is the most famous ship ever built, yet only a little over 400 photographs of her are known to exist, and that count grows only when an old album or a forgotten newspaper turns up. 

Titanic: Honor & Glory tracks down every camera known to have been aboard for the maiden voyage in April 1912, and the tally lands at 15, at least three of them motion picture cameras. Three left the ship at Queenstown, and the other 12, including three cases of cameras and stands in the cargo hold, went down with her. The backdrop is the boom in amateur photography that followed the Kodak Brownie in 1900, when cheap, simple cameras let tourists record their trips instead of relying on letters and postcards. Francis Browne, a 32-year-old theology student from Cork whose Kodak produced many of the ship's best-known images, sailed only as far as Queenstown, and his photos ran in the Daily Sketch three days after the sinking. He's often called Father Browne, but he wasn't ordained until 1915. Kate Odell, who also got off at Queenstown, took what proved to be the last surviving photograph of Titanic, the liner already shrinking toward the horizon with smoke pouring from her funnels. Her 11-year-old nephew, Jack Odell, appears in her pictures with what looks like a Kodak No. 1A folding pocket camera, and his negatives, sold to a newspaper after the disaster, never ran and have never been found.

The near collision with the liner New York at Southampton turns out to be one of the most heavily recorded moments of the crossing, and most of what was shot of it never made it off the ship. Jack Thayer, the 17-year-old who later survived on an overturned collapsible lifeboat, shot five frames of it and planned to sell them to newspapers once he got home. His mother's lost-property claim listed his camera at $25, which is over $800 today. On the second-class decks, Lawrence Beesley watched an American cameraman following the scene and, as he later wrote, "turning the handle of his camera with the most evident pleasure." That was William Harbeck, who had filmed the aftermath of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and, in Alaska, a glacier collapsing into the sea to form an iceberg. He was reportedly hired by the White Star Line to film the voyage, and everything he shot went down with him, along with more than 110,000 feet of film from his work in Europe earlier that year.

Kodak sold the original Brownie for $1, and the company's pitch going back to 1888 was "You press the button, we do the rest." In 1912, an exposed roll was a latent image and nothing more. The picture existed only after the film left the owner's hands and went through a lab. The pictures taken aboard that survive all left the ship early, at Southampton or Queenstown, and were developed, copied, and printed once they were ashore. The negatives that stayed in staterooms were single copies with nowhere else to live. A memory card sitting in your camera bag is in much the same position today. The habit that would have saved those rolls still protects your files: get the images off the device and into more than one location soon after you shoot, especially when you're traveling.

Albert and Sylvia Caldwell, a second-class couple coming home from teaching in Siam with their baby son, Alden, came away with a single photo of the three of them aboard, taken by a friend who saw them off at Southampton and promised to mail a print. Albert had packed his own tripod camera and, by his later account, talked his way into a boiler room and had a steward photograph him shoveling coal into a furnace. The three of them escaped together in Lifeboat 13, a rare outcome for a second-class family, but every negative stayed behind. As his family recalled it, he used to say, "If they could only find my camera at the bottom, what a story it would tell." In 1994, pieces of a broken tripod camera and trays for developing film turned up wrapped in a blanket in the debris field, and their owner has never been identified, though Albert is one candidate. After he died in 1977, his family found the friend's 3x4-inch print while sorting his things, and none of them had seen it before.

The last cameraman on the list was Daniel Marvin, an 18-year-old newlywed whose father was among the founders of the American Mutoscope Company, later known as Biograph. Daniel and his bride, Mary, staged a second wedding ceremony in March for both families, and it was filmed and reported as one of the first weddings caught on film. His father reportedly gave him a motion picture camera when he married, and he likely brought it on the honeymoon. Mary got into one of the last lifeboats, Daniel stayed behind, and the camera and anything he shot most likely stayed in their stateroom on D Deck.

Look for the Marvins at the rail just below Captain Smith in the Queenstown photo the video shows near the end.