Titanic

• 1. Introduction

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  Titanic, a British ocean liner operated by the White Star Line, struck an iceberg in the early hours of the 15th of April 1912. She was on her maiden voyage from Southampton in England to New York City. Of the 2,208 people aboard, approximately 1,500 died, though estimates vary. It remains one of the deadliest peacetime sinkings of a single ship. On board were some of the wealthiest people in the world. Beside them travelled hundreds of emigrants from the British Isles, Scandinavia and elsewhere in Europe, all hoping for a new life in the United States and Canada. The ship had a reputation for being unsinkable. So how did a vessel with that reputation carry so few places in her lifeboats? Who dreamed her up, who built her, and who stepped aboard? And what did the world do when the news finally reached land?

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• 2. Size Over Speed

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  In mid-1907, White Star Line chairman J. Bruce Ismay held a discussion with the American financier J. P. Morgan, who controlled the company's parent, the International Mercantile Marine Company. That conversation produced three giant ships, and Titanic was the second of them. The pressure came from rivals. Cunard Line had recently launched two sister ships, the fastest passenger liners then in service, with help from the Admiralty. German lines such as Hamburg America and Norddeutscher Lloyd were also pushing hard. Ismay chose not to chase speed. He proposed liners bigger than anything afloat, designed as the last word in comfort and luxury. They would still be quick enough to keep a weekly service running with three ships instead of four.

  The builder was Harland and Wolff of Belfast, whose partnership with White Star reached back to 1867. The yard had great freedom. Usually Wilhelm Wolff sketched a general concept, and Edward James Harland turned it into a ship design. Cost mattered little. The yard could spend what it needed, plus a five per cent profit margin. For the first two ships, a price of 3 million pounds was agreed, with extras on top.

  Four men led the design. Lord Pirrie was a director of both the shipyard and White Star. Thomas Andrews was managing director of the design department. His deputy Edward Wilding calculated the ship's stability and trim. Alexander Carlisle, the chief draughtsman and general manager, handled decorations, equipment and an efficient lifeboat davit design.

  On the 29th of July 1908, the drawings went to Ismay and other White Star executives. He approved them and, two days later, signed three letters of agreement. The first ship, later named Olympic, had no name at that point. It was simply Number 400, the yard's 400th hull. Titanic, built on a revised version of the design, became 401. Her name came from the Titans of Greek mythology.

  No shipyard had ever attempted vessels this large. On Queen's Island in Belfast Harbour, now called the Titanic Quarter, the builders demolished three slipways and constructed two new ones, the largest made up to that time. Above them rose the Arrol Gantry, built by Sir William Arrol and Company, the Scottish firm behind the Forth Bridge and London's Tower Bridge. It stood 228 feet high, 270 feet wide and 840 feet long. A floating crane able to lift 200 tonnes was brought in from Germany.

  Olympic's keel was laid on the 16th of December 1908, and Titanic's followed on the 31st of March 1909. Each ship took about 26 months. The hull used 2,000 rolled steel plates and over three million rivets, which weighed more than 1,200 tonnes. Modern welding was still in its infancy. In the 1990s, material scientists concluded that the plate steel turned especially brittle in the cold, worsening the damage from impact and hastening the sinking. By the standards of 1912, however, the steel was good.

  The centre anchor was the largest ever forged by hand. Its head weighed nearly 16 tonnes, and its shank another 8. Twenty Clydesdale draught horses hauled it by wagon from a forge in Netherton, Worcestershire, to Dudley railway station, two miles away.

  The work was dangerous. About 15,000 men worked at Harland and Wolff, and hard hats and machine guards were largely absent. A total of 246 injuries were recorded during Titanic's construction, 28 of them severe, including arms severed by machines and legs crushed under falling steel. Six people died on the ship during construction and fitting out, and two more died in the yard's workshops and sheds. Just before the launch, a worker was killed by a falling piece of wood.

  Titanic was launched at 12:15 pm on the 31st of May 1911. Lord Pirrie, J. Pierpont Morgan, Ismay and 100,000 onlookers watched. Twenty-two tonnes of soap and tallow greased the slipway into the River Lagan. Following White Star tradition, the ship was never formally christened with champagne.

  The fitting-out ran late because of Ismay's design requests and a pause to repair Olympic after a collision in September 1911. Had Titanic been finished earlier, she might well have missed the iceberg. On the 3rd of February 1912 she entered Thompson Graving Dock, the largest dry dock in the world, to receive her propellers and final red hull coating. On the 6th of March she was moved out again so that Olympic, which had lost a propeller blade, could take her place.

  Titanic's sea trials began at 6 am on the 2nd of April 1912, eight days before departure. Over about 12 hours, she was run at different speeds and tested for turning ability. In a crash stop, the engines went from full ahead to full astern, and the ship halted in 850 yards and 3 minutes 15 seconds. She averaged 18 knots and reached just under 21. A Board of Trade surveyor signed an agreement declaring her seaworthy for 12 months. After a journey of about 28 hours, she reached Southampton around midnight on the 4th of April and was towed to Berth 44.

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• 3. The Floating Hotel

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  One passenger said that stepping inside Titanic made you "at once lose the feeling that we are on board ship, and seem instead to be entering the hall of some great house on shore". That was the intention. Other liners had copied the look of an English manor house. Titanic followed a lighter style closer to a high-class hotel, with the Ritz as a reference point. First-class cabins were finished in the Empire style, while other rooms ranged from Renaissance to Louis XV.

  The First Class Grand Staircase was the ship's signature feature. It was built of solid English oak and descended through seven decks, from the boat deck to E deck, before ending in a simpler flight on F Deck. A dome of wrought iron and glass let daylight into the stairwell. At the top landing, a carved wooden panel held a clock flanked by figures of "Honour and Glory Crowning Time". The staircase was destroyed in the sinking, and today it is a void that explorers have used to reach the lower decks. When James Cameron filmed Titanic in 1997, the replica staircase on his set was ripped from its foundations by inrushing water. It has been suggested that the real staircase was thrown upward through the dome.

  First-class passengers also had a saltwater swimming pool seven feet deep, a gymnasium and a squash court on G Deck. A Victorian-style Turkish bath offered a hot room, a warm room, a cooling room and two shampooing rooms. A steam room and an electric bath sat in the same area. The common rooms included a lounge styled after the Palace of Versailles, a large reception room, a men's smoking room and a reading and writing room.

  The dining saloon on D Deck, designed by Charles Fitzroy Doll, measured 114 feet by 92 feet. It was the largest room afloat and seated almost 600 people. For an extra charge, first-class passengers could dine in the à la carte restaurant, run as a concession by the Italian restaurateur Gaspare Gatti. Attached to it was the Café Parisien, dressed as a French pavement café with ivy-covered trellises and wicker furniture. Both were run by subcontracted chefs and staff, who were all lost in the disaster.

  Third Class, often called steerage, was plainer but still better than on many ships, where hundreds were crammed into open dormitories. White Star gave its third-class passengers small private cabins for two, four, six, eight or ten people. Single men were quartered forward, while single women, couples and families stayed aft. A long passageway on E Deck, used by Third Class and crew, was nicknamed Scotland Road after a famous Liverpool street.

  Social life on board had its own habits. A passenger list was published before sailing, and ambitious mothers sometimes used it to spot rich bachelors for their marriageable daughters. On the boat deck, kennels near the Second Class entrance housed the dogs of first-class passengers.

  Although Titanic was a passenger liner, she also carried mail under the Royal Mail designation, and for the United States Post Office Department. On G Deck, five postal clerks, three Americans and two Britons, worked 13 hours a day, seven days a week. They sorted up to 60,000 items daily. Among the cargo was a 1912 Renault Type CE Coupe de Ville motor car.

  The cargo was fairly mundane, whatever the myths say. There were no large quantities of gold bars, exotic minerals or diamonds, and the story of the Unlucky Mummy aboard is false. A jewelled copy of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam was valued at 405 pounds. The most highly valued item was a large oil painting, La Circassienne au Bain, by the French artist Merry-Joseph Blondel. Its owner, first-class passenger Mauritz Håkan Björnström-Steffansson, later claimed $100,000 in compensation. The manifest also listed twelve cases of ostrich feathers and seventy-six cases of dragon's blood resin.

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• 4. Coal, Steam and Wireless

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  More than 600 tonnes of coal a day went into Titanic's furnaces, and every shovelful was moved by hand. It took 176 firemen, working around the clock, to feed 159 furnaces across 29 boilers. The bunkers could hold 6,611 tonnes, with 1,092 more in Hold 3. About 100 tonnes of ash a day was ejected into the sea. The work was relentless, dirty and dangerous. Firemen were paid relatively well, but there was a high suicide rate among them.

  The boilers fed three engines. Two were reciprocating four-cylinder, triple-expansion steam engines, and one was a central low-pressure Parsons turbine. Together the reciprocating engines produced 30000 horsepower, and the turbine added 16000. White Star had already used the combination on an earlier liner. Reciprocating engines alone were not powerful enough, while an all-turbine design caused uncomfortable vibrations that plagued Cunard's turbine liners. Exhaust steam from the reciprocating engines fed the turbine, so fuel use dropped while power rose.

  Each engine turned its own propeller. The two outer propellers each carried three manganese-bronze blades and measured 23.5 feet across. The middle one was 17 feet across and could be stopped but not reversed. The rudder stood 78 feet 8 inches high and weighed over 100 tonnes, so it needed steam steering engines. Only one of the two engines was used at a time, with the other held in reserve.

  Titanic's electrical plant could produce more power than an average city power station of the day. Four steam-driven 400 kilowatt generators sat at the stern, beside two 30 kilowatt emergency units. Because of that position, they kept running until the last few minutes before the ship sank. The ship had four funnels, but the aftmost was a dummy built mainly for looks. It also ventilated the kitchen and the first- and second-class smoking rooms. Titanic carried no searchlight, in line with a ban on their use in the merchant navy.

  In the radio room on the boat deck, the Marconi International Marine Communication Company supplied the equipment and two operators, Jack Phillips and Harold Bride. They kept a 24-hour schedule. Most of the traffic was passenger telegrams called marconigrams, but they also handled weather reports and ice warnings. Next to the operating room, a soundproofed Silent Room housed the loudest equipment.

  The 5-kilowatt rotary spark-gap transmitter had the call sign MGY and sent Morse code. It was one of the first Marconi installations to use a rotary spark-gap, which gave it a distinctive musical tone. It was among the most powerful in the world, guaranteed to reach 350 miles. A T-antenna ran the length of the ship. The normal frequency was 500 kilohertz, but it could also use 1,000 kilohertz, the wavelength favoured by smaller vessels with shorter antennas.

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• 5. Boats for Half

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  Sixteen sets of davits stood on the boat deck, each able to lower three lifeboats, just as Alexander Carlisle had hoped. That meant Titanic could have carried up to 48 boats. White Star decided on only 20. Fourteen were standard wooden boats holding 65 people each. Four were Engelhardt collapsibles, with wooden bottoms and canvas sides, lettered A to D and holding 47 each. Two were emergency cutters, each for 40. In total they could hold 1,178 people, roughly half the people on the maiden voyage and about a third of the ship's full capacity.

  That number was more than the law demanded. Board of Trade rules for British ships over 10,000 tonnes called for lifeboat space for only 990 occupants. The thinking of the era treated lifeboats as ferries. Their job was to carry survivors from a sinking ship to a rescuing ship, not to hold everyone afloat or reach shore. The plan assumed help would be close at hand.

  On the boat deck, starboard boats carried odd numbers from 1 to 15, bow to stern, and port boats carried even numbers from 2 to 16. Lifeboats lined the deck except in the first-class area, where a gap kept the view unspoiled. Both cutters hung swung out from the davits, ready for immediate use. Collapsibles C and D sat beside boats 1 and 2, connected to davits.

  Collapsibles A and B were stored on the roof of the officers' quarters, on either side of the number 1 funnel. No davits reached them, and their weight made them hard to launch by hand. Every boat carried food, water, blankets and a spare life belt. Lifeline ropes along the sides let crews pull additional people out of the water.

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• 6. People Aboard

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  Captain Edward John Smith, the most senior captain in the White Star Line, was moved over from Olympic to command Titanic. Henry Tingle Wilde came with him from Olympic as chief mate. That pushed Titanic's designated officers down a rank. William McMaster Murdoch became first officer and Charles Lightoller second officer, and the original second officer, David Blair, was dropped altogether. Herbert Pitman, the third officer, was the only deck officer who was not in the Royal Naval Reserve. He later became the second-to-last surviving officer.

  About 866 crew sailed on the maiden voyage, and most were not seamen. Liners of the era had no permanent crew, and the vast majority were casual workers who joined only hours before departure. The Deck department numbered 66, the Engine department 325 and the Victualling department 494. Just 23 of them were women, mainly stewardesses. The roster included bakers, butchers, gymnasium instructors, laundrymen and a printer who produced a daily newspaper, the Atlantic Daily Bulletin, from news the wireless operators received. Most signed on in Southampton on the 6th of April, and 699 of the crew came from there.

  Some staff were not White Star employees. Five postal clerks worked for the Royal Mail and the United States Post Office Department. The restaurant staff were subcontractors. Marconi employed the radio operators, and an agency employed the eight musicians, who travelled as second-class passengers. Pay varied widely. Captain Smith earned 105 pounds a month, while stewardesses earned 3 pounds 10 shillings. Lower-paid victualling staff could add a great deal through tips.

  Titanic carried approximately 1,317 passengers: 324 in First Class, 284 in Second Class and 709 in Third Class. Men made up 66 per cent and women 34 per cent. There were 107 children, most of them in Third Class. The ship could have taken 2,453 passengers, so she sailed well under capacity. A national coal strike in the United Kingdom had cancelled many crossings and led would-be travellers to postpone. The strike ended a few days before sailing. Titanic left on schedule only because coal was moved over from other ships tied up at Southampton and coal Olympic had brought back from New York.

  The first-class list read like a social register. It included the American millionaire John Jacob Astor IV, who died, and the industrialist Benjamin Guggenheim, who died. Macy's owner Isidor Straus and his wife Ida both died. Millionaire Margaret "Molly" Brown survived, as did the silent film actress Dorothy Gibson. The journalist and social reformer William Thomas Stead died, as did Archibald Butt, aide to two U.S. presidents. J. P. Morgan, who owned the ship, was scheduled to travel but cancelled at the last minute. J. Bruce Ismay was aboard, as was Thomas Andrews, there to watch for problems and assess the new ship's performance.

  About 50 people cancelled their tickets for various reasons. A third-class ticket cost 7 pounds 5 shillings. The cheapest first-class fare was 23 pounds, and the most expensive suites cost up to 870 pounds in high season.

  Passengers began arriving at 9:30 am on Wednesday the 10th of April 1912, when the boat train from London Waterloo reached the quayside. Third Class boarded first. Officials inspected them for ailments that could get them refused entry to the United States, since White Star would have to carry any rejected passenger back across the Atlantic. In all, 920 people boarded at Southampton, and Captain Smith personally greeted first-class passengers.

  The ship sailed at noon, and trouble came within minutes. As Titanic passed the moored liners New York and Oceanic, her displacement lifted both ships on a bulge of water and dropped them into a trough. New York's mooring cables snapped, and she swung stern-first toward Titanic. The tugboat Vulcan took New York under tow, and Captain Smith ordered full astern. The ships missed each other by about 4 feet. The incident delayed departure by about an hour.

  Cherbourg lacked docking facilities for a ship this size, so tenders carried 274 more passengers out to the liner. Titanic left at 8 pm. At 11:30 am on Thursday the 11th of April, she arrived at Queenstown in Ireland. There 123 passengers boarded, 113 of them in Third Class. Among those who had booked only the short passage from Southampton was Francis Browne, a Jesuit trainee and keen photographer. His pictures included one of the last known photographs of the ship, though Kate Odell took the very last.

  One person left unofficially. The stoker John Coffey, a Queenstown native, hid under mail bags being sent ashore and slipped off the ship. Titanic weighed anchor for the last time at 1:30 pm.

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• 7. Ice Ahead

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  Titanic was scheduled to reach New York's Pier 59 on the morning of the 17th of April. Her daily runs measured 484 nautical miles, then 519, then 546 by noon on the final day. On Sunday the 14th of April, the ship crossed a cold front with strong winds and waves of up to 8 feet. By evening it was clear, calm and very cold.

  One danger was hidden below. A fire had started in the forward-most coal bunker about 10 days before departure and burned for several days into the voyage. Passengers did not know. Such fires were common on steamships because coal could ignite on its own. Crews put them out with hoses and by moving the burning coal to the furnaces. This one was extinguished on the 14th of April. People have debated whether it left the ship more vulnerable to sinking.

  Warnings of drifting ice near the Grand Banks of Newfoundland arrived from other ships, and Captain Smith ignored them. Titanic kept steaming at full speed, which was standard practice. Timekeeping mattered, ice warnings were seen as advisories, and ships relied on lookouts and the bridge watch. Most people thought ice posed little danger to large vessels. In 1907, a German liner had rammed an iceberg and still finished her voyage. That same year, Captain Smith said he "could not imagine any condition which would cause a ship to founder. Modern shipbuilding has gone beyond that."

  At 11:40 pm ship's time on the 14th of April, the lookout Frederick Fleet saw an iceberg dead ahead and alerted the bridge. First Officer William Murdoch ordered the ship steered around it and the engines stopped, but it was too late. The iceberg struck the starboard side below the waterline. The hull was not punctured. Instead it was dented, and the steel plates buckled and separated, letting water rush in.

  Five of the sixteen watertight compartments were heavily breached, and a sixth was slightly damaged. The ship could not stay afloat with more than four flooded. As she sank bow-first, water spilled from one compartment into the next over the top of each bulkhead. The bulkheads reached only as high as D Deck, and only eight of the fifteen got that far.

  Those on board were badly prepared. The crew had not been trained properly for an evacuation. The officers did not know how many people the boats could safely carry, and they launched many boats barely half-full. The lowered boats averaged only about 60 per cent of their rated capacity. Third-class passengers were largely left to fend for themselves, and many became trapped below decks as the ship filled.

  The "women and children first" rule was generally followed. Women survived at a rate of about 75 per cent and children about 50 per cent, but only 20 per cent of men survived. Captain Smith went down with the ship, while Ismay survived in a lifeboat. Thomas Andrews, the designer, died.

  Between 2:10 and 2:15 am, a little over two and a half hours after the collision, the sinking suddenly sped up as the boat deck dipped under. Sea poured through open hatches and grates. The circuit breakers tripped, and the lights flickered and went out. As the stern rose and the propellers lifted clear, the immense force on the keel broke the ship in two between the second and third funnels. The stern stood nearly vertical with hundreds of people clinging to it, then foundered at 2:20 am. Everyone believed she had sunk in one piece until the wreck was discovered in 1985 and showed otherwise.

  The survivors left in the water faced a temperature of minus 2 degrees Celsius. Only five people in the water were helped into the lifeboats, even though the boats had room for almost 500 more. Distress calls went out by wireless, rocket and lamp. None of the ships that answered could reach Titanic before she sank. A radio operator on one of them estimated it would be 6 am before the liner could arrive. Another ship, the last in contact before the collision, saw Titanic's flares but failed to help. Around 4 am, the Carpathia arrived in response to the earlier distress calls. The number of survivors has been reported as between 705 and 708.

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• 8. Aftermath

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  The Carpathia took three days to reach New York after leaving the scene, slowed by pack ice, fog, thunderstorms and rough seas. She still managed to pass news to the outside world by wireless. Early reports were confusing, and on the 15th of April the American press wrongly reported that Titanic was being towed to port. Late that night White Star announced a message saying the ship had sunk but everyone had been moved to another vessel. Confirmation followed later that day that Titanic was lost and most people aboard had died.

  Crowds gathered at White Star Line offices in London, New York, Montreal, Southampton, Liverpool and Belfast. Southampton was hit hardest, because its people suffered the greatest losses.

  Carpathia docked at New York's Pier 54 at 9:30 pm on the 18th of April. About 40,000 people stood on the quayside in heavy rain. The Women's Relief Committee, the Travelers Aid Society of New York and the Council of Jewish Women, among others, provided clothing, transport and shelter. Many survivors went straight on to relatives. Some of the wealthier ones chartered private trains, and the Pennsylvania Railroad laid on a free special train to Philadelphia. Titanic's 214 surviving crew were housed in passenger cabins aboard the Red Star Line's steamer.

  The press descended in a frenzy. Newspapers competed to be first with survivors' stories. Some reporters bribed their way onto the pilot boat New York, which guided Carpathia into the harbour, and one even got aboard Carpathia before she docked. Crowds stood outside newspaper offices to read the latest reports posted in windows and on billboards.

  Carpathia was hurriedly restocked and resumed her journey to Fiume in Austria-Hungary. Cunard gave her crew a bonus of a month's wages. Some of Titanic's passengers joined in with an extra bonus of nearly 900 pounds, divided among the crew.

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