RMS Titanic


The RMS Titanic was the largest passenger steamship in the world at the time
of her launching. She struck an iceberg and sank on April 14, 1912 during
her maiden voyage. The sinking resulted in great loss of life and ranks as
one of the deadliest peacetime maritime disasters.

She was built in the Harland and Wolff shipyard in Belfast, Northern
Ireland. She was the second ship of the Olympic-class liners of the White
Star Line Company built in that shipyard, but was the largest and most
prestigious passenger liner of the day. The Titanic was 269 meters (882 1/2
ft) long, 28 meters (92 1/2 ft) wide, and 56 meters (185 ft) tall. Although
she enclosed more space and therefore had a larger displacement rating, 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).

She was considered a pinnacle of technological achievement, and with her 16
watertight compartments she was thought to be unsinkable. At the ship's
launch, one employee was quoted as saying, "Not even God himself could sink
this ship."

The ship began her maiden voyage from Southampton, England, to New York on
April 10, 1912, with Edward Smith as its captain, first stopping 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, popping the rivets along the starboard side below
the waterline and flooding the first six watertight compartments. As it
turned out, although the 16 watertight compartments were watertight from
each other, the tops of each compartment were not watertight, so that once
the forward compartments filled up, the water spilled over the top into the
other compartments, sinking the ship.

The Titanic sank at 2:20 the next morning. There had been enough lifeboats
on board for barely half the passengers and crew. In this tragedy -- the
worst maritime incident during peacetime -- only 711 people from a total of
2,223 survived. (These numbers are approximate. No Titanic passenger list is
known to be entirely accurate.) Among the victims were some famous people:
Benjamin Guggenheim, Isodor Straus, John Jacob Astor IV, Francis David
Millet, and Charles Hays. Famous survivors included Margaret Brown (thus
becoming known as the "Unsinkable" Molly Brown) who kept order on her
lifeboat and assisted with the rescue efforts.

Captain Lord of the Californian, which was called on for help, is sometimes
accused of not responding quickly enough. The 711 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 relatively few dead bodies recovered, 150 were brought to the
search-and-rescue operations center in 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 another of Titanic's sisters, the Britannic.

The sinking was one of the first times the internationally-recognized Morse
code distress signal, SOS (dididit dadadah dididit), was used. 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.

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.

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 wreck was finally located on September 1, 1985 by a joint
American-French expedition led by 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.

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.

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).

The Titanic in Fiction

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

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

   * Saved From the Titanic (1912) - IMDB: [2]
   * Titanic (1943) - IMDb: [3]
   * Titanic (1953) - IMDb: [4]
   * A Night to Remember (1958)- IMDb: [5]
   * S.O.S. Titanic, T.V. Movie (1979) - IMDb: [6]
   * Raise the Titanic (1980) - IMDb: [7]
   * Titanic, T.V. Mini Series (1996) - IMDb: [8]
   * Titanic (1997) - IMDb: [9]

The most widely-viewed is undoubtedly the 1997 film, titled simply Titanic,
directed by James Cameron and starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet.

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

There have also been computer games made about it or based around it:

   * Titanic: Adventure Out of Time


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The worst maritime incident in history, in terms of loss of life in a single
vessel, is recognised as the sinking of the KdF Ship Wilhelm Gustloff by a
Russian submarine in 1945 in which between 5000 and 7000 people died.
However in June 1940, RMS Lancastria (actually HMT Lancastria by the time of
the sinking) evacuating troops and civilians from 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.