RMS Titanic

The Vessel

The RMS Titanic was the second of three Olympic-class liners built by Harland and Wolff in Belfast for the White Star Line, the largest ships in the world when she entered service in April 1912. She displaced 46,328 tons, was 269 metres long, and carried a beam of 28 metres; her nine-deck superstructure rose eighteen metres above the waterline. Triple screws driven by two reciprocating engines and a Parsons low-pressure turbine gave her a service speed of 21 knots with reserve for 24.

Her subdivision into sixteen watertight compartments, controlled by electric doors from the bridge, was widely reported in the trade press as the reason she was "practically unsinkable". The phrase came not from her builders or owners but from the mass-market magazines that had covered her launch; it would be repeated against them for the rest of the century. The design could in fact survive any two compartments flooded, and had been calculated to survive any four; five was beyond what the naval architects had considered, and her bulkheads stopped one deck short of the overhead.

She carried lifeboats for 1,178 of her 3,327 berths, a capacity that met and exceeded the British Board of Trade regulations of 1894. Those regulations had been drafted for ships of 10,000 tons; the Board had never updated them for ships four and a half times that size. The Titanic's Welin davits were designed to carry three boats each; the White Star Line had chosen to fit only one. She was, in every meaningful sense, a ship that satisfied every regulation applicable to her and that was still chronically under-equipped for the event she encountered.

The Voyage

She left Southampton on 10 April 1912 under the command of Captain Edward J. Smith, the commodore of the White Star fleet and sixty-two years old, nearing his announced retirement. Two tenders brought passengers aboard at Cherbourg that evening, and a third at Queenstown (now Cobh) the next morning. 2,240 souls were listed on the manifest when she turned west into the Atlantic on the afternoon of 11 April.

The first-class passenger list carried the most concentrated wealth afloat: John Jacob Astor IV, Benjamin Guggenheim, Isidor and Ida Straus, Margaret "Molly" Brown, Dorothy Gibson, the Countess of Rothes, the journalist W. T. Stead, and the industrialist J. Bruce Ismay of White Star itself. Second class carried clergy, teachers, and professionals; third class carried 709 emigrants, mostly British, Irish, and Scandinavian, travelling to the United States on a one-way ticket.

The weather was fair, the sea unnaturally calm. Ice reports began arriving on 12 April from the La Touraine, then the Rappahannock, then the Mesaba. By mid-afternoon on 14 April the Baltic had warned of large icebergs and the Amerika of a vast field of pack ice directly athwart the Titanic's track. Most of these messages reached the bridge; some were paged to Captain Smith and placed in his pocket. The ship ran on through the evening at 22½ knots, close to full speed, through a sea that held no swell.

The Disaster

The lookout Frederick Fleet struck the bell three times at 23:39 on 14 April 1912 and reached the telephone to the bridge: "Iceberg right ahead." First Officer William Murdoch ordered "hard a-starboard" and rang the engine room for full astern. The berg passed the starboard side thirty-seven seconds later.

Below the waterline the contact opened a series of intermittent gashes along the forward five compartments. Thomas Andrews, the ship's designer, made a quick tour of the forward holds with Captain Smith and returned white. He told the captain they had perhaps an hour and a half, possibly two. The order to uncover the boats went at 00:05; the order to load women and children first at 00:20. The first boat was launched at 00:45, half empty. None of the crew had been drilled on the davits; few of the passengers believed the ship was in real danger.

The wireless operators Jack Phillips and Harold Bride began sending CQD at 00:15, switching to the new code SOS around 00:45. The Californian, fewer than twenty miles north, had shut down her wireless for the night at 23:35. The Carpathia picked up the signal at 00:25 and ran south at 17 knots for four hours. By the time her boats reached the scene at 04:00, the Titanic had been gone for an hour and forty minutes, broken in two at the stern and settling to the abyssal plain in two kilometres.

Of 2,240 aboard, 710 survived. 1,517 died. The band was reported to have played until the angle of the deck made standing impossible; the violinist Wallace Hartley's body was recovered with his music case strapped to his chest.

The Legacy

The United States Senate began hearings on 19 April 1912 under Senator William Alden Smith, six days after the sinking; the British Board of Trade Inquiry opened on 2 May under Lord Mersey. The two investigations, running in parallel across the Atlantic, produced the template for every modern maritime inquiry: the close examination of radio procedure, lookout practice, lifeboat provisioning, crew training, bulkhead subdivision, and the chain of responsibility from the quartermaster up to the owner.

Their immediate legacy was the International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea, signed in London on 20 January 1914. SOLAS mandated enough lifeboats for every person aboard, continuous wireless watch, the establishment of the International Ice Patrol, standard rocket-distress signalling, and the mutual recognition of lookout and navigational discipline across the merchant marines of fourteen nations. The convention has been updated seven times since and remains the governing treaty of civilian maritime safety.

The wreck itself was located on 1 September 1985 by Robert Ballard and Jean-Louis Michel, 3,784 metres below the surface, 595 kilometres south-southeast of Newfoundland. Ballard had been funded by the U.S. Navy on condition he would also locate the lost nuclear submarines Scorpion and Thresher; the Titanic work was partly cover for the military survey. James Cameron's 1997 film brought her to a generation that had no memory of her loss.

The Titanic is now a protected site under a 2003 UNESCO convention; her hull plates are collapsing into iron-fed microbial mats, the bow may be recognisable for another three decades, the stern perhaps less. She will not survive the next century; the image of her intact, lit from within, stern upward against the starless night, is now the image that will persist.