If newspaper articles had routinely carried reporters’ bylines 100 years ago, there would be no question now about who got one of the biggest scoops of the early 20th century, the April 18, 1912, interview with the surviving telegraph operator from the Titanic.

It was published the morning after survivors of the disaster arrived in New York aboard the Carpathia, the ship that had rescued them in the Atlantic Ocean. The account, a high point of The New York Times’s coverage of one of the defining events of the years before World War I, was important enough to rate a byline — unusual in those days.

But the article was written in the first person. So the byline was that of the telegraph operator, Harold Bride — not that of the reporter who had taken down Bride’s words.

Who was the reporter?...