This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars.

On May 3rd 1978, construction workers in San Francisco were digging a foundation for a new building on Sansom Street, right next to the tallest skyscraper

in the city, the Transamerica Pyramid, in the heart of the financial district.

They were about 20 feet below street level when their shovels hit something totally unexpected.

It was the hull of an old ship.

That's reporter Emmett Fitzgerald.

Archaeologists immediately came in and started scraping away all the dirt and mud.

And after a few days, they'd uncovered the full skeleton of a 120-foot Gold Rush-era vessel called the Niantic, preserved perfectly in the

earth beneath the streets of San Francisco. As the archaeologists did their work

hundreds of people gathered to watch the bizarre scene.

A massive, massive shep being pulled out from beneath the pavement.

As the construction hoarding was put up, people were carving holes in it to look in and see

Niantic emerge from the mud.

That's James Delgado.

I'm an archaeologist and a historian and I'm the author of Gold Rush Port, the Maritime Archaeology of San Francisco.

Delgado was 20 years old then, an archaeologist in training, and he was part of the excavation that day.

Inside the ship, he found all kinds of artifacts from the gold rush that had been preserved underground

bricks, nails, tin plates for sheathing,

boots, jackets, saddles, shovels, a lot of booze.

49ers like to drink.

Delgado even popped the cork on a bottle of 150 year old champagne.

Tasted awful.

...