There’s a lot of Titanic hoopla these days, including rolling of the few feet of grainy film that still exist of the great ship being maneuvered at the dock by tugs in 1912. No doubt you’ve seen this film clip on TV.

Someone has gone to a lot of trouble of scratching off the names of the tugboats from their sterns on the film. It’s a pretty amateurish job, you can tell that someone has gone through, frame by frame of film, and deliberately scraped the film emulsion where the tugs’ sterns carried what I presumed to be their names, or maybe some company logo. Its a lot of effort, and it was clearly done a long time ago (today it could have been done seamlessly with image processing techniques.

Does anyone know why? My guess it has something to do with copyrights, or maybe public relations, as if some company or town did not want its name associated with such a historical document. But I have no idea why anyone would feel this was necessary. It’s a mystery.

Any ideas?