Williams, commonly known as R. Norris Williams, was born on January 29, 1891, in Geneva, Switzerland, though his parents were from the US, The New York Times reported.

A descendant of Benjamin Franklin, he grew up in a wealthy family as the son of a prominent lawyer, Charles Duane Williams, who taught him how to play tennis as a child.

After a bout of measles halted his original travel plans to the US, where he planned to attend Harvard University, he booked a ticket on the Titanic, the Times reported.

Williams was 21 when he and his father, 51, boarded the ship at Cherbourg, France, on April 10, 1912.

They both held first-class tickets, according to the Mariners' Museum and Park.

Of all the first-class and second-class passengers who boarded the Titanic, 45% of those passengers died in the sinking, according to Britannica, compared to 75% of third-class passengers who died.

Williams later recounted the events of the ship's sinking in an unpublished memoir, which was passed on to his widow and his four children after his death, Main Line Times & Suburban reported.

During the sinking, he freed a passenger trapped in one of the cabins by breaking down a door that was stuck, Sports Illustrated reported. A member of staff then approached him and threatened to fine him for damaging the ship's property.

A similar scene occurs in James Cameron's film "Titanic," when Jack and Rose break down a door during their escape and are reprimanded for damaging White Star Line property.

Both men either jumped into the water or were washed overboard, The New York Times reported.

Williams later wrote in his memoir, parts of which were republished by Main Line Times & Suburban in 2012, that his father was crushed by a falling funnel, though his accounts differed slightly at different points in his life.

To escape the sinking boat, Williams removed his shoes and swam to a lifeboat about 100 yards away, although he recalled being weighed down by a fur coat he was wearing over his life jacket, The New York Times reported.

He reportedly held on to the lifeboat before climbing into it, and sat up to his knees in freezing water and waited to be rescued.

The Times reported that "only about a dozen" of the passengers in Williams' lifeboat survived.

Once on the Carpathia, Williams was told by a doctor that his frostbitten legs would need to be amputated.

However, the aspiring tennis professional refused.

"I refuse to give you permission," Williams said, according to his 1968 obituary. "I'm going to need these legs."

Determined to save his legs, Williams walked around Carpathia's deck every two hours, eventually regaining sensation in his lower body, The New York Times reported.

The same year he survived the Titanic sinking, Williams won the US National Tennis Championships in mixed doubles alongside Mark K. Brown and ranked among the top 10 players in the world, according to the International Tennis Hall of Fame.

In 1916, he won the national title again and became the highest-ranked tennis player in the US.

In addition to his prowess on the tennis course, Williams also served in the US Army during World War I and was awarded two honors, the Légion d'Honneur and the Croix de Guerre, according to the Olympics.

After the war, Williams resumed his tennis career, and in 1920, he won a Wimbledon doubles title, The New York Times reported.

However, his tennis career reached its peak at the 1924 Paris Olympics when Williams won a mixed-doubles gold medal with his tennis partner, Hazel Hotchkiss Wightman.

According to the Olympics, after retiring from professional tennis, Williams worked as an investment banker and then served as president of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

He was named a member of the International Tennis Hall of Fame in 1957, nine years before his death at the age of 77.

Williams died on June 2, 1968, in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania.

According to his New York Times obituary, he was survived by his widow, Frances "Sue" Gillmore Williams, three sons, and one daughter.

His widow died on June 13, 2001, according to Main Line Times and Suburban.

The ship's size, its famous passengers, the unfathomable loss of life, and the harrowing tales from survivors instantly made it headline news.

Interest in the disaster continued, especially in 1985 when Robert Ballard and Jean-Louis Michel found the shipwreck during a secret US Navy mission.

It's far too fragile to raise. Artifacts and small pieces of the ship have been recovered, but the rusting remains will stay on the ocean floor.

It's risky and expensive to visit the shipwreck — five people died when a submersible visiting the Titanic imploded in June 2023 — and conditions are murky at that depth. The digital twin offers an ultra-clear view that's impossible to see from a submersible.

Two submersibles, Romeo and Juliet, spent three weeks photographing and measuring the ship and the debris surrounding the two halves. The digital model is made up of the images and scans to reveal areas of the ship that are hard to view from trips to the wreck.

Other techniques have been used to create photo mosaics of the Titanic, but this photogrammetry process captured every inch of the wreck — down to its rivets — and its surroundings without losing resolution or details.

"You can zoom right into an area of interest, right down to a floor tile on the ocean floor," Stephenson told BI. "It is amazing."

Stephenson, who appears in the documentary, has viewed the Titanic a few times from crewed and uncrewed submersibles. He said that in person, it's difficult to see much of the ship through a 7-inch viewport. That meant he was glimpsing the ship section by section instead of as a whole. "What you really need to make sense of all this evidence is context," he said.

"It's how it's all put together and presented as a whole that's the paradigm shift here," Stephenson said. "That's what's going to be the future of deep ocean exploration."

Crew member Frederick Fleet described hitting the iceberg as a narrow shave, thinking they'd avoided disaster. Many passengers didn't realize the ship had struck anything. Yet the collision was deadly.

The Titanic's builders designed the ship to withstand four of its 16 compartments flooding. Edward Wilding, a naval architect who worked on the design, speculated from the beginning that the iceberg scraping alongside the ship punctured more than four sections. Enough water flowed in to pull down the entire ship.

The portion of the ship that struck the iceberg slammed into the seafloor when it sank. It's now buried in mud. Even if it were visible, it would likely be difficult to tell the difference between the damage before and after sinking.

For the documentary, researchers from University College London and Newcastle University put together a simulation to find some potential answers. Using the ship's blueprints and estimated speed, they found that the iceberg may have torn open an 18-square-foot gash along six compartments, enough to take down the Titanic.

The simulation aligned very closely with Wilding's speculations from over 100 years ago.

"He really knew that ship," Anthony Geffen, the film's producer, told BI, which is perhaps why they match so well.

With much of the bow sunk in the mud, we may never know the full story of the iceberg's effect, Stephenson said.

In Cameron's movie, the ship basically cracks in half. Passenger Jack Thayer later wrote that part of the ship rose into the sky and seemed to hang there, and then, "with the deadened noise of the bursting of her last few gallant bulkheads, she slid quietly away from us into the sea."

"Even Jim Cameron, today, will say that the way he depicted it in the movie is not correct," Stephenson said. It was based on what was known in 1997, which was eyewitness testimony, like Thayer's.

The way it broke apart may have been far more explosive. The model shows large pieces of the hull scattered around the wreck that may be evidence of such an event.

"It was a giant, catastrophic fracture," metallurgist Jennifer Hooper said in the documentary, which caused a domino effect of compression and buckling that destroyed roughly 20% of the ship.

That might explain why the two large sections of the ship are a third of a mile apart, Geffen said. "Something massive must have happened," he said. "It didn't just float apart."

Before the ocean liner disappeared under the water, survivors recalled its lights still being on. The model gives a clear view of boiler room two. That's likely where the Titanic engineers stayed until the end, shoveling coal to keep the ship illuminated and the wireless transmitting calls for help.

Further away, a valve can be seen in the open position, indicating that steam continued flowing to generate electricity.

"These boilers tell us about a very personal story about the people" who stayed behind on the ship, Geffen said.

First-class passengers John Jacob Astor and Benjamin Guggenheim, two of the wealthiest men on the boat, both lost their lives — the documentary revealed that the crumbling ship may have come apart right where the first-class cabins were located.

The crew's and passengers' possessions are scattered for miles around the Titanic. Researchers have been able to identify the owners' of some of them from these new images, and Geffen said AI could help find more.

For example, there's a shark tooth that seems to have been attached to a pocket watch belonging to a first-class passenger, Colonel John Weir.

The Titanic site is a graveyard, where hundreds of people lost their lives. "I think sometimes that gets lost," Geffen said, but their belongings can help tell their stories.

The new scans have frozen the Titanic in time. It's already covered in rusticles, the pointy structures created by deep-sea bacteria. As it continues to deteriorate, more evidence will be lost.

As well as being dangerous and expensive, some also consider visiting the site via submersible disrespectful. Geffen said there are plans to put the digital twin in simulators so people can do virtual dives to the wreck, instead. Eventually, people will be able to put on a VR headset and walk around the site.

"With this digital twin, we can now bring the entire Titanic wreck site up to the surface and make it available to everyone," Stephenson said.

"Titanic: The Digital Resurrection" premiered on National Geographic on April 11 and is available on Disney+ and Hulu.