Titanic

David Ross specialises in maritime, engineering and railway history and he has written and contributed to numerous books on these subjects. His most recent books are Abandoned Industrial Places, Rail Journeys, Bridges, Coast, Lighthouses, Ships Visual Encyclopedia, Submarines, Great Warships and The World’s Greatest Battleships.

• 1: Background to a Tragedy Up to the late 1850s, few people crossed the Atlantic Ocean unless driven by necessity or force. From the European and British explorers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, to the venturesome colonists of the seventeenth and eighteenth (and the infamous slave traffic that followed), human movement westward across the Atlantic grew steadily.2: Three Giant Sisters Titanic was the largest ship afloat at the time she entered service and the second of three Olympic-class ocean liners operated by the White Star Line. This chapter describes the construction of the Titanic, its launch, and sea trials. At the peak of construction, Harland and Wolff shipyard employed approximately 14,000 men to build the enormous ship.3: Trans-Atlantic Route Titanic departed from Southampton on 10 April 1912, then stopped at Cherbourg, France, and Queenstown (now Cobh), Ireland, before heading west towards New York. The first-class accommodation was designed to be the pinnacle of comfort and luxury, with a gymnasium, swimming pool, libraries, high-class restaurants, and opulent cabins. A high-powered radiotelegraph transmitter was available for sending passenger ‘marconigrams’ and for the ship’s operational use.4: The Collision On 14 April, four days into the crossing and about 375 miles (600 km) south of Newfoundland, she hit an iceberg at 11:40 p.m. ship’s time. The collision caused the hull plates to buckle inwards along her starboard (right) side and laid five of her sixteen watertight compartments open to the sea; she had been designed to survive the flooding of up to four compartments. Some passengers and crew members were evacuated in lifeboats, many of which were launched only partially loaded. A disproportionate number of men were left aboard because of a ‘women and children first’ protocol for loading lifeboats. Titanic was under the command of Captain Edward Smith, who went down with the ship. Archibald Gracie IV, one of the wealthiest hoteliers in the world, also drowned.5: Rescue The ship was equipped with 16 lifeboat davits, each of which were capable of lowering three lifeboats, for a total of 48 boats. And yet the Titanic carried only 20 lifeboats, four of which were collapsible and proved hard to launch while the ship was sinking. Together, the 20 lifeboats were capable of holding 1,178 people – which was only about half the number of passengers on board. The nearby Carpathia arrived at the distress call’s position at 4:00 AM, approximately an hour and a half after the ship went down, claiming more than 1,500 lives. For the next four and a half hours, Carpathia took on the 705 survivors of the disaster.6: Aftermath The disaster was met with worldwide shock and outrage, both at the huge loss of life, and at the regulatory and procedural failures that had led to it. Even before the survivors arrived in New York, investigations were being planned to discover what had happened, and what could be done to prevent a recurrence. Inquiries were held in both the United States and the United Kingdom. Many survivors later told their stories to the press and in books, including the ‘Navratil Orphans’, ‘The Unsinkable Molly Brown’, Eliza ‘Millvina’ Dean, Frederick Fleet, Masabumi Hosono, Charles Lightoller, Harold Bride, and Archibald Gracie IV. The wreck of Titanic was discovered in 1985 by a Franco-American expedition sponsored by the United States Navy. The ship was split in two and is gradually disintegrating at a depth of 12,415 feet (2,069.2 fathoms; 3,784 m). Thousands of artefacts have been recovered and displayed at museums around the world.

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