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Titanic

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The RMS Titanic was the largest passenger steamship in the world at the time of her launching (although larger ships would soon eclipse her), and her builders hoped that she would dominate the transatlantic ocean liner business. She struck an iceberg and sank on April 15, 1912 during her maiden voyage. The sinking resulted in great loss of life, ranking as one of the worst peacetime maritime disasters in history, and by far the most famous.

The New York Herald reports the disaster.

Construction

File:Titanic-2 April 1912.gif
RMS Titanic (left) undergoes sea trials on April 2.

She was built in the Harland and Wolff shipyard in Belfast, Northern Ireland and the hull was launched on May 31, 1911. She was the second ship of the Olympic-class liners of the White Star Line Company built in that shipyard, and was one of the largest and most prestigious passenger liners of the day. The Titanic was 260 metres (852 ft 6 in) long and 28 metres (92 ft 6 in) wide, 46000 tons. Although she enclosed more space and therefore had a larger gross tonnage, her hull was exactly the same size as her elder sister Olympic. The ship had 899 crewmen and was built for up to 3,300 passengers. Because she carried mail, she was also called RMS Titanic (RMS standing for Royal Mail Steamer).

For its time the ship was also unsurpassed in its luxury and opulence. While not the first ship to offer onboard swimming pools, exercise rooms, baths and elevators, the Titanic pulled out all the stops and offered a level of service never seen before. It also offered 3 elevators for use of passengers in first class, and as an innovation, it offered one elevator for those in second. Passengers in steerage were still made to take the stairs. One of its greatest features was its grand staircase, which was faithfully reproduced in the film by James Cameron.

She was considered a pinnacle of technological achievement, and with her 16 watertight compartments she was thought to be well protected from sinking. At the ship's sailing, one employee was quoted as saying to Second Class Passenger Sylvia Caldwell, "Not even God himself could sink this ship".

Maiden voyage

The ship began her maiden voyage from Southampton, England, to New York, USA on April 10, 1912, with Edward Smith as its captain. When it left it's berth, the liner New York nearly collided with the Titanic's hull due to suction. The near collision caused an hour's delay. The ship called at Cherbourg, France, and Queenstown (known today as Cobh), Ireland, to take on more passengers.

On the night of April 14 she struck an iceberg. The iceberg dented the hull several times, popping the rivets along the starboard side below the waterline and flooding the first six watertight compartments. The weight of the water in her bow pulled it just low enough in the water for the sea to spill over the watertight bulkheads.

On the port side, the lifeboats were loaded with women and children only. On the starboard side, men were allowed in, once women were no longer in the area. Consequently, many more people were rescued on the starboard than port side.

Lifeboat 7 left the ship at around 12:45 am. Collapsible lifeboat D left at 2:05 am, leaving just two boats left on the sloping deck, which floated off, one flooded, the other floated off upside-down.

The Titanic sank at 2:20 am. There had been enough lifeboats on board for barely half the passengers and crew. In this tragedy -- the worst maritime incident during peacetime -- only 712 people from a total of 2,208 survived. 1,496 perished. (These numbers are approximate. No Titanic passenger list is known to be entirely accurate.) Among the victims were the rich and famous: Benjamin Guggenheim, Isidor Straus, John Jacob Astor IV, Jacques Futrelle, Francis David Millet, and Charles Hays. Among the survivors was Margaret Brown (thus becoming known as the "Unsinkable" Molly Brown) who kept order on her lifeboat and assisted with the rescue efforts, and who later formed a survivors group.

 
Survivors aboard a lifeboat.

Captain Lord of the SS Californian, which was called on for help, is sometimes accused of not responding quickly enough. He did not respond until many hours after the sinming. The 712 people who did survive the disaster in lifeboats, were picked up by the Cunard Steamship Lines, RMS Carpathia, commanded by Captain Arthur Henry Rostron who was acclaimed for his immediate and decisive action in coming to the aid of the Titanic. Of the 330 bodies recovered, the unclaimed were taken to Halifax, Nova Scotia, where the majority of them were buried in the Fairview Cemetery.

One crew member, Violet Jessop, survived not only the sinking of the Titanic, but an earlier accident involving her sister ship Olympic, and finally, the later sinking of the other of Titanic's sisters, the HMHS Britannic.

Aftermath and consequences

 
Extract from US Navy memorandum concerning Titanic.

The sinking was one of the first (but certainly not the very first) times the internationally-recognized Morse code distress signal, SOS (... --- ...), was used, transmitted by Chief Marconi Officer John George Phillips. The Californian, like virtually all ships at that time, did not maintain a 24-hour radio watch.

The disaster was a shock to the international community because it proved to some people that man and his technological achievements were inferior to the powers of nature.

Even a century later there are still several myths about the Titanic and its sinking. One is that the rudder was too small and having a larger one may have saved the ship. While a larger rudder may haved saved her, the dimensions of the rudder were not legally too small for a ship its size, and in fact the dimensions of the rudder for a ship the size of the Titanic would still be compliant with ship regulations in use today. Had the ship started turning even 5 seconds earlier, or 5 seconds later when the iceberg was spotted, the ship probably would not have sank. Another myth is that the Titanic alone was derelict in the number of lifeboats it had. In fact the ship was compliant with British law regulating the number of lifeboats on board, which was based not on the number of passengers but the tonnage of the ship. All other passenger ships at the time were also far short of the lifeboats needed, but the purpose was not meant to hold all passengers if a ship sinks, but as a transfer mechanism from a sinking ship to a rescue ship. The sinking of the Titanic changed this mindset forever. Even if the ship had carried boats for all, they probably would not have saved many more people. During the sinking, the crew didn't have time to launch the boats they had!

The sinking of the Titanic had an enormous impact on ship construction, and wireless telegraphy. It also led to the convening of the First International Conference on the Safety of Life at Sea, in London, England, on November 12, 1913. The treaty that was produced by the conference, resulted in the formation and international funding of the International Ice Patrol, an agency of the United States Coast Guard, which to the present day monitors and reports on the ___location of North Atlantic Ocean icebergs that could pose a threat to trans-Atlantic sea lane traffic. It was also agreed in the new regulations that all passenger vessels would have sufficient lifeboats for everyone on board, that appropriate drills would be conducted, and that radio communications would be operated 24 hours a day along with a secondary power supply, so as not to miss distress calls. In addition, it was agreed that the firing of any rockets from a ship must be interpreted as a distress signal.

An often-quoted (but unverified) story states that the person who received the radio distress signal from the Titanic was David Sarnoff, who would become the founder of media giant RCA. The legend (which was willingly promoted by Sarnoff and his supporters) says that he manned his station for three days, relaying messages of the disaster and its aftermath to land-based radio.

The rediscovery of Titanic

File:Titanic-bow seen from MIR I submersible.jpeg
Titanic bow as seen from the MIR I submersible.

The wreck was finally located on September 1, 1985 by a joint American-French expedition led by Jean-Louis Michel and Dr. Robert Ballard of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. It was found at a depth of 3,800 meters, at 41° 43' 55" N, 49° 56' 45" W, near Newfoundland. The ship broke in two large pieces, which lie on the bottom a few hundred meters apart, separated by a debris field. Scientists believe that the heavy water pressure in the forward compartments began to break the ship down the middle as the bow section filled with water and sank first while the stern remained buoyant before sinking later.

Dr. Ballard and his team did not bring up any artifacts from the site, considering it to be tantamount to grave robbing. Under international maritime law, however, the recovery of artifacts is necessary to establish salvage rights to a shipwreck. In the years after the find, the Titanic has been the object of a number of court cases concerning ownership of artifacts and the wreck site itself. Many artifacts have been salvaged and are now permanently on display at the maritime museum in Greenwich, England.

Scientists claim that numerous dives since rediscovery of the ship in 1985 have accelerated the decay of the wreckage. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration estimates that "the hull and structure of the ship may collapse to the ocean floor within the next 50 years."

See also: Casualties of the RMS Titanic sinking

The 'Titanic Curse'

When the Titanic sank, claims were made that a curse existed on the ship. One of the most widely spread legends linked directly into the sectarianism of the city of Belfast, where the ship was built. It was suggested that the ship was given the number '3909 04' which when read backwards in a mirror, was claimed to spell 'no pope', a sectarian slogan attacking Roman Catholics that was (and is) widely used provocatively by extreme protestants in Northern Ireland, where the ship was built. In the extreme sectarianism of northeast Ireland (Northern Ireland itself did not exist until 1920), the ship's sinking, though mourned, was alleged to be on account of the sectarian anti-Catholicism of its manufacturers, the Harland and Wolff company, which had an almost exclusively protestant workforce and an alleged record of sectarianism towards catholics. (Harland and Wolff did have a record of hiring few Catholics; whether that was through policy, because the company's shipyard in Belfast's bay was located in almost exclusively protestant East Belfast, through which few Catholics would dare to travel or a mixture of both, is a matter of dispute). See Urban Legends or simal for more Titanic myths (fictions).

The Titanic in culture

The story of the Titanic has been the basis for many novels.

The Titanic has featured in a large number of movies and TV movies, most notably:

The most widely-viewed is undoubtedly the 1997 Titanic, directed by James Cameron and starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet. Confounding expectations that preceded its release, it became the highest-grossing film in history 9if you do not adjust for inflation. If so, Gone with the Wind takes that honor). It also won 11 out of 14 Academy Awards, tying with Ben-Hur (1959) and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003) for the most awards won in the award's history.

The story was also made into a Broadway musical that ran from 1998 to 2000.

Titanic: Adventure Out of Time was a computer game inspired by the story.

The Itanium microprocessor has often been jokingly called the "Itanic", since (as of 2004) its sales have fallen far short of the amount of effort that was put into it.

Comparable maritime disasters

At the time, the sinking of the Titanic amounted to the worst maritime disaster in history, but it has since been surpassed.

In terms of loss of life in a single vessel, the worst maritime incident in history is recognised as the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff by a Russian submarine in 1945 in which between 5000 and 7000 people died. Some recent studies of the disaster concluded that the actual death toll was over 9000.

The worst maritime incident in history, in terms of loss of life in two vessels, is recognised as the sinking of the Cap Arcona and the Thielbek by RAF Typhoons on May 3 1945 in which around 8000 people died.

However on 17 June 1940, RMS Lancastria (actually HMT Lancastria by the time of the sinking) evacuating troops and civilians from Saint-Nazaire, France, was sunk by German aircraft. The death toll is estimated at anything between 4000 to 9000. The true figure will remain unknown until secret British Government papers are released to the public in 2040.

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