Titanic
The RMS Titanic was built on 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. 269 meters long, 28 meters wide, and 56 meters tall, the Titanic had 885 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." [1]
On the night of April 14 1912 she struck an iceberg on her maiden voyage from Southampton to New York. The iceberg punctured the hull, creating a long thin gash along the right side of Titanic, flooding six of the 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.
She sank at 2:20 the next morning. In this tragedy, the worst maritime incident during peacetime, only 705 passengers from a total of 2,222 survived. Among the victims were some famous people: John Guggenheim, Isodore Strauss, John Jacob Astor IV and Charles Hays. Famous survivors included Molly Brown (thus becoming the "Unsinkable" Molly Brown).
Captain Lord, captain of the Californian, which was called on for help, is sometimes blamed for not responding quickly enough.
One crew member, Violet Jessop, survived not only the sinking of the Titanic, but an earlier accident involving the Titanic's sister ship Olympic, and finally, the later sinking of another of Titanic's sisters, the Britannic.
It was a shock to the whole international community because it proved to some people that man and his technological achievements were inferior to 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.
The wreck was finally located in 1985 by Dr. Robert Ballard, and lies 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 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: http://us.imdb.com/Title?0002475
- Titanic (1943) - IMDb: http://us.imdb.com/Title?0036443
- Titanic (1953) - IMDb: http://us.imdb.com/Title?0046435
- A Night to Remember (1958)- IMDb: http://us.imdb.com/Title?0051994
- S.O.S. Titanic, T.V. Movie (1979) - IMDb: http://us.imdb.com/Title?0079836
- Raise the Titanic (1980) - IMDb: http://us.imdb.com/Title?0081400
- Titanic, T.V. Mini Series (1996) - IMDb: http://us.imdb.com/Title?0115392
- Titanic (1997) - IMDb: http://us.imdb.com/Title?0120338
The most widely-viewed is undoubtedly the 1997 film, titled simply Titanic, directed by James Cameron and starring Leonardo DeCaprio and Kate Winslet.
The story was also made into a Broadway musical that ran from 1998 to 2000.
Other Links
"The official archive" for artifacts recovered from the shipwreck, maintained by RMS Titanic, Inc., is at http://www.rmstitanic.net/.
An invaluable source of information concerning the sinking of the Titanic can be found at http://www.encyclopedia-titanica.org/.
Another interesting, related site that stocks reprints of the rare book The Sinking of Titanic and Great Sea Disasters) is http://www.titanicsociety.com/.
The U.S. National Archives and Records Administration also maintains a Titanic page.
[1] http://www.archives.gov/exhibit_hall/american_originals/titanic.html