When Chris von Alt heard that ocean explorers had pinpointed the location of the Titanic in 1985, he knew he had to act quickly if he wanted to get in there first.

"People knew where it was, and it wouldn't be long before someone else would mount a mission and steal the thunder," von Alt said.

When explorers found the ship, von Alt was a principal engineer for the nonprofit Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts.

He and a team from the deep submergence laboratory at Woods Hole focused on one goal: building a small underwater robot to give them the first peek inside the Titanic, the famed vessel that on its maiden voyage in 1912 sank off Newfoundland after hitting an iceberg.

And they challenged themselves to do it as rapidly as possible.

By July 1986, von Alt and his crew completed their task. Their robot retrieved the first shots of the Titanic's grand staircase in 12,000 feet of seawater.

The team's work provided a new look at a historic event, says Guy Maser, vice president of online engineering search service GlobalSpec, which in July gave the team an award for its work. "We got a tremendous opportunity to see things in an undisturbed fashion without having risked any individual in the process," Maser said.

The work was also an incredible advance for underwater exploration, says Mark Moline, a California Polytechnic State University biological science professor.

"You could get into those small spaces and see something that was inaccessible up until that point," Moline said.

Von Alt didn't rest on the laurels of his achievement, however. Today, he's president of Hydroid, a leading maker of underwater robots. Customers include oil companies and governments.

Some governments use the robots to find underwater mines, von Alt says. "Finding underwater mines is big business, and the big star in the whole thing is saving lives because you're not putting men at risk to do this," he said.

Von Alt, 55, was born in Danville, Pa. His father was an electrical engineer; his mother was a nurse who became a teacher.

Von Alt wasn't an enthusiastic student. He dropped out of college after trying it briefly and earned a living as a laborer and a waiter while he traveled.

Then his outlook changed.

"I was bumming around Europe and I realized how lucky I was to be an American compared to everyone else in the world," von Alt said. "I figured out that an education was what really gave you the chance to do something."

He went back to school and graduated in 1978 with a degree in electrical engineering from the State University of New York, Stony Brook.

After working as an electrical engineer and an underwater pier inspector, Von Alt took a job as a research engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

While there, he decided to combine his passion for diving with his interest in engineering, and in 1984 earned a master's degree in ocean engineering. A year later, von Alt joined Woods Hole.

Soon after the Titanic discovery, von Alt and his team started brainstorming: How could they get the best images from inside the ship?

Von Alt and his group decided that small was the answer. A small robot with lights and cameras that could be launched from a small, manned underwater vehicle was their best bet. To make sure no one else beat them to it, they decided they had to get the robot ready for launch in seven months.

It wasn't easy. The group had to modify early-stage video cameras for use underwater. Von Alt and his team would also have to use thruster motors for small underwater vehicles, even though the motors had never been tested in 12,000-foot-deep water, von Alt says.

The team combined knowledge with trial-and-error experiments to build the robot.

"It was a process of taking all these bits and pieces and pulling them together into a system that could do what we wanted it to do — that's engineering," von Alt said.

The 10-member crew worked around the clock. "Everybody worked together," von Alt recalled. "That's one of the things that makes people successful, to get that energy and enthusiasm in the people (who) work for you."

The team designed its unmanned robot, the Jason Jr., to fit inside a three-man submarine called Alvin.

Alvin landed on several spots on the Titanic. It then released Jason to shoot video and snap photos from different angles.

Alvin had its own lights and cameras. Videos show both vehicles exploring the Titanic simultaneously, a then-amazing concept.

The team spent 10 days at sea. Alvin and Jason made 10 trips and collected about 20 hours of video.

The daily dives took their toll on Jason. The robot required constant maintenance. So von Alt's crew became night owls.

"We would sleep during the day while they took it down there and then wake up in the night" to perform maintenance and fix any problems on Jason, von Alt said.

Each night, engineers checked Jason systematically, starting at one end and working until they wound up at the other end. Parts were removed and cleaned, lubricated, tweaked and replaced daily. The process took most of each night.

It took a crew 2 1/2 hours to reach the seafloor in Alvin. Once there, they had just two hours to work before the slow ascent.

The Office of Naval Research funded that trip to the Titanic. Soon after, Jason examined the wreckage of submarines for the U.S. Navy.

Von Alt took each of his successes and expanded upon it. In 1989, he co-founded the Oceanographic Systems Laboratory to build seafloor observatories. The lab also built fiber optic-based video cable systems for the Navy.

Von Alt co-founded Hydroid in 2001 to improve on his previous designs. Unlike Jason, Hydroid's robot Remus is self-contained. Customers program the robots with a laptop computer. The company has sold 100 at $300,000 each.

BY PETE BARLAS