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Royal Mail Ship (RMS) Titanic

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Why did the Titanic sink?

How many people died when the Titanic sank?

Where is the wreck of the Titanic?

Why is the Titanic famous?

Titanic, British luxury passenger liner that sank on April 14-15, 1912, during its maiden voyage, en route to New York City from Southampton, England, killing about 1,500 ( see Researcher's Note: Titanic) passengers and ship personnel. One of the most famous tragedies in modern history, it inspired numerous stories, several films, and a musical and has been the subject of much scholarship and scientific speculation.

Origins and construction

In the early 1900s the transatlantic passenger trade was highly profitable and competitive, with ship lines vying to transport wealthy travelers and immigrants. Two of the chief lines were White Star and Cunard. By the summer of 1907, Cunard seemed poised to increase its share of the market with the debut of two new ships, the Lusitania and the Mauretania, which were scheduled to enter service later that year. The two passenger liners were garnering much attention for their expected speed; both would later set speed records crossing the Atlantic Ocean. Looking to answer his rival, White Star chairman J. Bruce Ismay reportedly met with William Pirrie, who controlled the Belfast shipbuilding firm Harland and Wolff, which constructed most of White Star's vessels. The two men devised a plan to build a class of large liners that would be known for their comfort instead of their speed. It was eventually decided that three vessels would be constructed: the Olympic, the Titanic, and the Britannic.

On March 31, 1909, some three months after work began on the Olympic, the keel was laid for the Titanic. The two ships were built side by side in a specially constructed gantry that could accommodate their unprecedented size. The sister ships were largely designed by Thomas Andrews of Harland and Wolff. In addition to ornate decorations, the Titanic featured an immense first-class dining saloon, four elevators, and a swimming pool. Its second-class accommodations were comparable to first-class features on other ships, and its third-class offerings, although modest, were still noted for their relative comfort.

Understanding the Titanic Disaster

As to safety elements, the Titanic had 16 compartments that included doors which could be closed from the bridge, so that water could be contained in the event the hull was breached. Although they were presumed to be watertight, the bulkheads were not capped at the top. The ship's builders claimed that four of the compartments could be flooded without endangering the liner's buoyancy. The system led many to claim that the Titanic was unsinkable.

Following completion of the hull and main superstructure, the Titanic was launched on May 31, 1911. It then began the fitting-out phase, as machinery was loaded into the ship and interior work began. After the Olympic's maiden voyage in June 1911, slight changes were made to the Titanic's design. In early April 1912 the Titanic underwent its sea trials, after which the ship was declared seaworthy.

As it prepared to embark on its maiden voyage, the Titanic was one of the largest and most opulent ships in the world. It had a gross registered tonnage (i.e., carrying capacity) of 46,328 tons, and when fully laden the ship displaced (weighed) more than 52,000 tons. The Titanic was approximately 882.5 feet (269 metres) long and about 92.5 feet (28.2 metres) wide at its widest point.

Maiden voyage

On April 10, 1912, the Titanic set sail on its maiden voyage, traveling from Southampton, England, to New York City. Nicknamed the "Millionaire's Special," the ship was fittingly captained by Edward J. Smith, who was known as the "Millionaire's Captain" because of his popularity with wealthy passengers. Indeed, onboard were a number of prominent people, including American businessman Benjamin Guggenheim, British journalist William Thomas Stead, and Macy's department store co-owner Isidor Straus and his wife, Ida. In addition, Ismay and Andrews were also traveling on the Titanic.

The voyage nearly began with a collision, however, when suction from the Titanic caused the docked New York to swing into the giant liner's path. After an hour of maneuverings to prevent the accident, the Titanic was under way. On the evening of April 10 the ship stopped at Cherbourg, France. The city's dock was too small to accommodate the Titanic, so passengers had to be ferried to and from the ship in tenders. Among those boarding were John Jacob Astor and his pregnant second wife, Madeleine, and Molly Brown. After some two hours the Titanic resumed its journey. On the morning of April 11 the liner made its last scheduled stop in Europe, at Queenstown ( Cobh), Ireland. At approximately 1:30 pm the ship set sail for New York City. Onboard were some 2,200 people, approximately 1,300 of whom were passengers.

Final hours

Throughout much of the voyage, the wireless radio operators on the Titanic, Jack Phillips and Harold Bride, had been receiving iceberg warnings, most of which were passed along to the bridge. The two men worked for the Marconi Company, and much of their job was relaying passengers' messages. On the evening of April 14 the Titanic began to approach an area known to have icebergs. Smith slightly altered the ship's course to head farther south. However, he maintained the ship's speed of some 22 knots. At approximately 9:40 pm the Mesaba sent a warning of an ice field. The message was never relayed to the Titanic's bridge. At 10:55 pm the nearby Leyland liner Californian sent word that it had stopped after becoming surrounded by ice. Phillips, who was handling passenger messages, scolded the Californian for interrupting him.

Two lookouts, Frederick Fleet and Reginald Lee, were stationed in the crow's nest of the Titanic. Their task was made difficult by the fact that the ocean was unusually calm that night: because there would be little water breaking at its base, an iceberg would be more difficult to spot. In addition, the crow's nest's binoculars were missing. At approximately 11:40 pm, about 400 nautical miles (740 km) south of Newfoundland, Canada, an iceberg was sighted, and the bridge was notified. First Officer William Murdoch ordered both the ship "hard-a-starboard"-a maneuver that under the order system then in place would turn the ship to port (left)-and the engines reversed. The Titanic began to turn, but it was too close to avoid a collision. The ship's starboard side scraped along the iceberg. At least five of its supposedly watertight compartments toward the bow were ruptured. After assessing the damage, Andrews determined that, as the ship's forward compartments filled with water, its bow would drop deeper into the ocean, causing water from the ruptured compartments to spill over into each succeeding compartment, thereby sealing the ship's fate. The Titanic would founder. (By reversing the engines, Murdoch actually caused the Titanic to turn slower than if it had been moving at its original speed. Most experts believe the ship would have survived if it had hit the iceberg head-on.)

Smith ordered Phillips to begin sending distress signals, one of which reached the Carpathia at approximately 12:20 am on April 15, and the Cunard ship immediately headed toward the stricken liner. However, the Carpathia was some 58 nautical miles (107 km) away when it received the signal, and it would take more than three hours to reach the Titanic. Other ships also responded, including the Olympic, but all were too far away. A vessel was spotted nearby, but the Titanic was unable to contact it. The Californian was also in the vicinity, but its wireless had been turned off for the night.

As attempts were made to contact nearby vessels, the lifeboats began to be launched, with orders of women and children first. Although the Titanic's number of lifeboats exceeded that required by the British Board of Trade, its 20 boats could carry only 1,178 people, far short of the total number of passengers. This problem was exacerbated by lifeboats being launched well below capacity, because crewmen worried that the davits would not be able to support the weight of a fully loaded boat. (The Titanic had canceled its scheduled lifeboat drill earlier in the day, and the crew was unaware that the davits had been tested in Belfast.) Lifeboat number 7, which was the first to leave the Titanic, held only about 27 people, though it had space for 65. In the end, only 705 people would be rescued in lifeboats.

As passengers waited to enter lifeboats, they were entertained by the Titanic's musicians, who initially played in the first-class lounge before eventually moving to the ship's deck. Sources differ on how long they performed, some reporting that it was until shortly before the ship sank. Speculation also surrounded the last song they performed-likely either Autumn or Nearer My God to Thee. None of the musicians survived the sinking.

By 1:00 am water was seen at the base (E deck) of the Grand Staircase. Amid the growing panic, several male passengers tried to board lifeboat number 14, causing Fifth Officer Harold Lowe to fire his gun three times. Around this time, Phillips's distress calls reflected a growing desperation as one noted that the ship "cannot last much longer."

As the Titanic's bow continued to sink, the stern began to rise out of the water, placing incredible strain on the midsection. At about 2:00 am the stern's propellers were clearly visible above the water, and the only lifeboats that remained on the ship were three collapsible boats. Smith released the crew, saying that "it's every man for himself." (He was reportedly last seen in the bridge, and his body was never found.) At approximately 2:18 am the lights on the Titanic went out. It then broke in two, with the bow going underwater. Reports later speculated that it took some six minutes for that section, likely traveling at approximately 30 miles (48 km) per hour, to reach the ocean bottom. The stern momentarily settled back in the water before rising again, eventually becoming vertical. It briefly remained in that position before beginning its final plunge. At 2:20 am the ship foundered as the stern also disappeared beneath the Atlantic. Water pressure allegedly caused that section, which still had air inside, to implode as it sank.

Hundreds of passengers and crew went into the icy water. Fearful of being swamped, those in the lifeboats delayed returning to pick up survivors. By the time they rowed back, almost all the people in the water had died from exposure. In the end, more than 1,500 perished. Aside from the crew, which had about 700 fatalities, third class suffered the greatest loss: of approximately 710, only some 174 survived. (Subsequent claims that passengers in steerage were prevented from boarding boats, however, were largely dispelled. Given Smith's failure to sound a general alarm, some third-class passengers did not realize the direness of the situation until it was too late. Many women also refused to leave their husbands and sons, while the difficulty of simply navigating the complex Titanic from the lower levels caused some to reach the top deck after most of the lifeboats had been launched.)
Read our timeline of the Titanic's final hours.

Rescue

The Carpathia arrived in the area at approximately 3:30 am, more than an hour after the Titanic sank. Lifeboat number 2 was the first to reach the liner. Over the next several hours the Carpathia picked up all survivors. White Star chairman Ismay wrote a message to be sent to the White Star Line's offices: "Deeply regret advise you Titanic sank this morning fifteenth after collision iceberg, resulting serious loss life; further particulars later." At approximately 8:30 am the Californian arrived, having heard the news some three hours earlier. Shortly before 9:00 am the Carpathia headed for New York City, where it arrived to massive crowds on April 18.

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Titanic | History, Sinking, Rescue, Survivors, Movies, & Facts

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Titanic, British luxury passenger liner that sank on April 14-15, 1912, during its maiden voyage, en route to New York City from Southampton, England, killing about 1,500 people. One of the most famous tragedies in modern history, it inspired numerous works of art and has been the subject of much scholarship.

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For decades after the disaster, there was little doubt about what sank the Titanic. When the "unsinkable" ship, the largest, most luxurious ocean liner of its time, crashed into an iceberg on its maiden voyage in 1912, it took more than 1,500 of its 2,200 passengers to the bottom. As the ship slipped into the North Atlantic, so, too, did the secret of how and why it sank.

Two government investigations conducted immediately after the disaster agreed it was the iceberg, not any weakness in the ship itself, that caused the Titanic to sink. Both inquiries concluded the vessel had gone to the bottom intact. Blame for the incident fell on the ship's deceased captain, E. J. Smith, who was condemned for racing at 22 knots through a known ice field in the dark waters off the coast of Newfoundland. The case of the Titanic was considered closed.

But lingering questions about what might have sunk the seemingly indestructible ship never completely disappeared. In 1985, when oceanographer Robert Ballard, after years of searching, finally located the ship's remains 2.5 miles down on the ocean bottom, he discovered that it had, in fact, broken in two on the surface before sinking. His findings made the Titanic rise again in the public imagination. Why had it cracked, experts wondered? If the official inquiries were wrong, was the invincible Titanic weak? A few years after Ballard discovered the wreck, the first pieces of the ship were brought to the surface, raising even more eyebrows when they seemed to offer physical evidence that low-quality steel might have caused the disaster. In 1997, James Cameron's film Titanic, largely mirroring the scientific consensus at the time, seared Titanic's terrifying last moments, with its stern soaring high into the air before it cracked in two and disappeared, into popular memory.

Still, the search for answers about the Titanic didn't end there. In two new books, a group of historians, naval architects, and materials scientists argue that fresh evidence has further unraveled the familiar story of the Titanic, raising more questions about what caused the disaster. In What Really Sank the Titanic: New Forensic Discoveries, Jennifer Hooper McCarty, a materials scientist at Oregon Health and Science University, and Tim Foecke, a scientist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, make the case that it wasn't the ship's steel that was weak; it was the rivets, the all-important metal pins that held the steel hull plates together. Titanic's Last Secrets, to be published next month, describes the work of Richie Kohler and John Chatterton, wreck-diving historians who believe two recently discovered pieces of the Titanic's bottom prove the ship's stern never rose high in the air the way many Titanic experts, including Cameron, originally believed. The two divers, whose discovery of a lost German U-boat was chronicled in the book Shadow Divers, say the ship broke up and sank while still relatively flat on the surface-a potential sign of weakness, they believe, that was covered up after the disaster.

When the Titanic's keel was laid down in 1909, Harland & Wolff, the Belfast shipbuilder that constructed the ship, certainly didn't believe its design would still be controversial a hundred years later. Built in response to a rival company's construction of a new generation of fast liners, Titanic and her sister ships, Olympic and Britannic, were the biggest ships ever made-from bow to stern, they were almost 900 feet long, dwarfing even the world's biggest skyscrapers. Specially outfitted to handle the challenges of the North Atlantic, including big waves and major collisions, they were also supposed to be among the safest. The Titanic could stay afloat with four of its 16 watertight compartments flooded, more than anyone could imagine on a ship of its size.

On the night of April 14, 1912, though, only a few days into the Titanic's maiden voyage, its Achilles' heel was exposed. The ship wasn't nimble enough to avoid an iceberg that lookouts spotted (the only way to detect icebergs at the time) at the last minute in the darkness. As the ice bumped along its starboard side, it punched holes in the ship's steel plates, flooding six compartments. In a little over two hours, the Titanic filled with water and sank.

Low quality. More than 70 years passed before scientists were able to study the first physical evidence of the wreck. As luck would have it, the first piece of steel pulled up from the bottom seemed to put an end to the mystery. When the steel was placed in ice water and hit with a hammer, it shattered. For much of the 1990s, scientists thought this "brittle" steel was responsible for the massive flooding. Only recently has testing on other, bigger pieces of the ship disproved this theory. The original piece, scientists discovered, had been unusually weak, while the rest of Titanic's steel passed the tests. "We know now there was nothing wrong with the steel," says William Garzke, chairman of a forensics panel formed by the Society of Naval Architects and Marine Engineers to investigate the wreck.

Experts looking for explanations landed on another potentially weak link: The more than 3 million rivets holding the ship together. McCarty and Foecke began examining 48 rivets brought up from the wreck and found they contained high concentrations of "slag," a residue of smelting that can make metal fracture prone. Researching in the Harland & Wolff archives, they discovered that the shipbuilder's ambitious plans to build three large ships at the same time had put a huge strain on its shipyard. "Not because of cost, but because of time pressures, they started using lower-quality material to fill the gaps," says Foecke. This substandard iron was pounded by hand into the ship's bow and stern, where the large machines required to pound in steel rivets didn't fit. Steel rivets, meanwhile, which are much stronger than iron, were put in the more-accessible middle of the ship.

When the Titanic hit the iceberg, McCarty and Foecke say, the weaker iron rivets in the bow popped, opening seams in the hull-and hurrying the ship's demise. It's no accident, Foecke says, that the flooding stopped at the point in the hull where the steel rivets began.

Harland & Wolff, now an engineering and design firm, flatly rejects the notion that its rivets were weak. Tom McCluskie, the company's retired archivist, points out that Olympic, Titanic's sister ship, was riveted with the same iron and served without incident for 25 years, surviving several major collisions, including being rammed by a British cruiser. "Olympic deliberately rammed a German submarine during the First World War and cut it in half," says McCluskie. "She was plenty strong." The Britannic sank after hitting a mine during World War I. Both ships were strengthened after the Titanic disaster with double hulls and taller bulkheads, but their rivets were never changed.

Stronger rivets might have slowed the sinking process, but once water began flooding six of the Titanic's compartments, it was only a matter of time before the ship went down. Questions remain, though, about exactly how and why the ship ultimately broke apart and sank. In 2005, an expedition organized by Kohler and Chatterton found a new clue. Wandering away from the main wreckage site, they stumbled upon two large pieces of the ship's bottom on the ocean floor. Closer examination revealed the two hull sections had split exactly where the ship broke in two, making them a possible key to the mystery of the ship's final moments. Simon Mills, an Olympic-class-ship historian who advised the divers, calls the find "very likely the most interesting piece of Titanic research to be carried out in the last 20 years."

When Roger Long, a naval architect hired to accompany the expedition, began analyzing the edges of the hull pieces, he came to a surprising conclusion. It was impossible, he believed, for the ship to have broken up the way experts for two decades believed it did, with the stern rising up to a 45-degree angle before the ship's hull split. "There are a lot of very contradictory things you can see in the pieces," he says. "But the only scenario I could come up with to explain all of the contradictions was that the ship broke at a very shallow angle." Close examination of the pieces showed that they had been interrupted in the middle of tearing apart-a sign, Long says, that the ship was still at a low-enough angle (he estimates only 11 degrees) that its stern could regain buoyancy as it began to crack. If the back of the ship had been raised out of the water at a 45-degree angle, as depicted in Cameron's movie, once the stern tore off, nothing would have stopped it, and the hull pieces would have torn in two.

Why does it matter exactly how the ship broke in two? For Titanic's passengers, it may have been the difference between life and death. "In the movie, the stern rises up and [then] sinks," says Chatterton. "It's this protracted, dramatic experience." But in Long's scenario, the ship may have tilted over only slightly as the bow filled with water, giving those on board a false sense of security. "If you're standing on the deck with 10 degrees of incline, and they're saying 'Quick, everyone into the lifeboats,' you're thinking, 'You know, things aren't looking so bad here, maybe I can just stay in the bar,' " says Chatterton. "The passengers and many of the crew didn't understand the seriousness of the situation they were in." Of course, since the Titanic had enough lifeboats for only half its passengers, many people were never going to make it off the ship alive. When the bow filled with enough water, Long says, the ship split in two and sank in a matter of minutes.

Interestingly, much of the survivor testimony seems to confirm this sequence of events. Charlie Joughin, Titanic's chief baker, said that he had been standing near the stern when the ship went under, but he reported none of the signs of a high-angle break. No suction, no big splash, and no roller-coaster ride to the surface. He said he swam away from the ship without even getting his hair wet. Unlike in the Cameron film, there was no huge wave reported from any of the lifeboats when the stern went under. One survivor reported slipping into the water, turning around, and discovering the ship had disappeared. "He was in the water 50 feet from the ship, he heard a 'shloop,' and it was gone," says Long. "That's not what a person would remember if 25,000 tons of steel fell nearby."

Eyewitnesses. While some survivors in the lifeboats did remember seeing the ship's stern rising high in the air, Long says that might have been an optical illusion. At an 11-degree angle, the ship's propellers would have been raised out of the water, making the ship, already nearly 20 stories tall, appear even taller and making its angle in the water appear even steeper. Technical advisers to the movie Titanic say Cameron, who did not respond to a request for comment, may have been aware of this but exaggerated the angle at which the ship sank for effect.

Though experts still quibble about the exact nature of how the ship broke up, a consensus does seem to be forming around how Titanic sank. "We all agree that the ship did sink at a shallow angle," says Garzke, head of the naval architects' forensics panel. Historians believe Harland & Wolff was probably aware of this at the time, but when the official inquiries absolved the shipbuilder of any liability in the matter, the company didn't protest.

Some conspiracy theorists believe that the company's silence was a sign of a coverup, and that the post-disaster retrofitting of Titanic's sister ships proves Harland & Wolff knew its ship was flawed. But most historians come to a different conclusion. "The fact that the ship broke up on the surface does not mean she was weak," says Long. When 38,000 tons of water filled its bow, pushing the stern up even 11 degrees out of the water, the ship was loaded beyond its capacity and cracked in two.

Could the Titanic have been stronger? Certainly. Higher-quality rivets or a thicker hull might have kept the ship afloat longer. But ultimately, the Titanic was designed to be a passenger liner, not a battleship. "[The ship] was built to the best of their knowledge at the time and to the proper standards. Nothing could have survived what happened to it," says McCluskie. Extensive forensic analysis of the wreckage has, in a way, brought the story of the Titanic to a familiar place. "The ship," says Foecke, "was just not designed to run into icebergs." When it did, nothing could stop its journey to the bottom.

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New evidence has experts rethinking how the luxury passenger liner sank.

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These are letters from the Titanic disaster. Some of the letters were written on board the Titanic. Some were written before or after the disaster. All are historically important and quite fascinating.

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An estimated 100,000 people gathered at the dock in Belfast, Ireland, on March 31, 1911, to watch the launch of the Royal Mail Ship (RMS) Titanic. Considered an "unsinkable" ship, the Titanic was the largest and most luxurious cruise liner of its day, measuring more than 882 feet long from prow to stern-the length of four city blocks-and 175 feet high, and weighing more than 46,000 tons. It boasted state-of-the-art technology, including a sophisticated electrical control panel, four elevators and an advanced wireless communications system that could transmit Morse Code. Despite these amenities, the fabled ship would never reach its destination.

When Did the Titanic Sink?

On the night of April 14, 1912, just four days after leaving Southampton, England on its maiden voyage to New York, the Titanic struck an iceberg off the coast of Newfoundland and sank. Now, more than a century after the Titanic went down, experts are still debating the possible causes of this historic disaster that took the lives of more than 1,500 passengers and crew. Most of them agree that only a combination of circumstances can fully explain what doomed the supposedly unsinkable ship.

It was traveling too fast.

From the beginning, some blamed the Titanic's skipper, Captain E.J. Smith, for sailing the massive ship at such a high speed (22 knots) through the iceberg-heavy waters of the North Atlantic. Some believed Smith was trying to better the crossing time of Titanic's White Star sister ship, the Olympic. But in a 2004 paper, engineer Robert Essenhigh speculated that efforts to control a fire in one of the ship's coal bunkers could have explained why the Titanic was sailing at full speed.

The wireless radio operator dismissed a key iceberg warning.

Less than an hour before the Titanic hit the iceberg, another nearby ship, the Californian, radioed to say it had been stopped by dense field ice. But as the warning didn't begin with the prefix "MSG" (Master's Service Gram), which would have required the captain to directly acknowledge receiving the message, the Titanic's radio operator Jack Phillips considered the other ship's warning non-urgent, and didn't pass it along.

It may have taken a fatal wrong turn.

According to a claim made in 2010 by Louise Patten (the granddaughter of the most senior Titanic officer to survive, Charles Lightoller), one of the ship's crewmembers panicked after hearing the order to turn "hard-a-starboard" in order to avoid the approaching iceberg. Because ships at the time operated on two different steering order systems, he became confused and turned the wrong way-directly toward the ice. Patten included this version of events, which she said she heard from her grandmother after Lightoller's death, in her fictionalized account of the Titanic disaster, Good as Gold.

The Titanic's builders tried to cut costs.

In 1985, when an American-French expedition finally located the historic wreck, investigators discovered that, contrary to earlier findings, the Titanic had not sunk intact after hitting the iceberg but had broken apart on the ocean's surface. Materials scientists Tim Foecke and Jennifer Hooper McCarty have cast blame on the more than 3 million rivets that held the hull's steel plates together. They examined rivets brought up from the wreck and found them to contain a high concentration of "slag," a smelting residue that can make metal split apart. This may have weakened the part of the Titanic's hull that hit the iceberg, causing it to break apart upon impact.

Mirages and hazy horizons were created by weather conditions.

Two studies done around the time of the 100th anniversary of the Titanic disaster in 2012 suggested that nature played a key role in the ship's fate. The first argued that the Earth came unusually close to both the moon and the sun that year, increasing their gravitational pull on the ocean and producing record tides, which caused increased amounts of floating ice in the North Atlantic around the time of the sinking.

The second study, by British historian Tim Maltin, claimed that atmospheric conditions on the night of the disaster might have caused a phenomenon called super refraction. This bending of light could have created mirages, or optical illusions, that prevented the Titanic's lookouts from seeing the iceberg clearly. It also would have made the Titanic appear closer, and smaller, to the nearby ship the Californian, causing its crew to assume it was a different ship without a radio, preventing them from attempting to communicate. From their vantage point, and with these hazy conditions, when the Titanic started to sink, the Californian's crew would have thought it was merely sailing away.

The lookouts had no binoculars.

Second officer David Blair, who held the key to the Titanic's store of binoculars in his pocket, was transferred off the ship before it left for its maiden voyage from Southampton and forgot to hand over the key to the officer who replaced him. At a later inquiry into the sinking, a lookout on the Titanic said binoculars might have helped them spot and dodge the iceberg in time. Blair kept the key as a memento of his near-miss; it was auctioned off in 2007 and fetched some £90,000.

There weren't enough lifeboats.

No matter what caused the Titanic to sink, such a massive loss of life could probably have been avoided if the ship had carried sufficient lifeboats for its passengers and crew. But the White Star liner left Southampton with only 20 lifeboats, the legal minimum, with a total capacity of 1,178 people. Though Maurice Clarke, the civil servant who inspected the Titanic in Southampton, recommended it carry 50 percent more lifeboats, his handwritten notes at the time later revealed that he felt his job would be threatened if he did not give the famous ship the go-ahead to sail. Due to the chaos that ensued after the Titanic struck an iceberg, the 20 lifeboats departed the ship with some 400 empty seats, leaving more than 1,500 people to perish in the frigid ocean waters.

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High speeds, a fatal wrong turn, cut costs, weather conditions, a dismissed key iceberg warning and lack of binoculars and lifeboats all contributed to one of the worst maritime tragedies.

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* The Titanic sank on April 15, 1912, killing over 1,500 people.

* Ever since, conspiracy theories have bounced around regarding the nature of the maritime disaster.

* Some of the allegations are pretty out there - like the idea that an ancient Egyptian curse doomed the ocean liner.

The Titanic remains one of the most famous disasters in history.

On its maiden voyage to New York city, the ocean liner hit an iceberg off the coast of Newfoundland, resulting in severe damage to its hull. The Titanic slipped beneath the dark waves of the North Atlantic in the early morning hours of April 15, 1912. Over 1,500 people lost their lives, and the luxury passenger ship became an emblem of disaster.

The sinking of the Titanic prompted a media frenzy, an overhaul of maritime safety practices, and plenty of fictional depictions of what happened on that cold April night over a hundred years ago.

Given the level of public interest and scrutiny, it's not surprising that a handful of conspiracy theories have cropped up about the ship's fate. Some are almost entirely fictional - like the idea that a cursed mummy was onboard the ship. Others allege that the tragedy was a result of insurance fraud, or an attempt by JP Morgan to rid himself of some powerful rivals.

Here are five conspiracy theories about the sinking of the Titanic:

The Titanic was marked by a controversial secret message

One conspiracy theory about the Titanic has been floating around for years.

First, it's important to note that the Titanic was constructed in the city of Belfast by the shipbuilding firm Harland and Wolff.

The conspiracy theory is that Catholic workers reacted in horror when the new ship's hull number - 3909 04 - was unveiled.

The reason? If you flip 3909 04 upside down, it kind of looks like "NO POPE." As far as the theory goes, the Catholic workers saw this as blasphemy, and worried that harm would come to the ship.

But there are a number of big problems with this conspiracy theory, which Snopes has also debunked.

To start, Harland and Wollff assigned the Titanic a yard number of 401. The 3909 04 number is completely made up.

What's more, there would have been no Catholic workers on hand to warn their Protestant colleagues of the problematic hull number.

In 1886, Protestant Harland and Wolff employees launched a large-scale attack on their Catholic coworkers, according to the book " The Invention of the White Race." The result was an exodus of Catholic workers from the shipbuilder, which was Belfast's largest employer at the time.

In " Irish Blood, English Heart, Ulster Fry: Return Journeys to Ireland," Annie Caulfield writes that, "by the twentieth century, Harland and Wolff had a reputation for only employing Protestants."

The Titanic was doomed due to a mummy's curse

Did an ancient mummy seal the Titanic's fate?

No. Human error and a lifeboat shortage brought about the maritime catastrophe.

Still, the idea that an ancient curse sunk the ship is one of the more fanciful conspiracy theories that cropped up in the wake of the disaster.

According to the legend, an ancient, mummified princess left a trail of death and devastation across England in the early 1900s after being excavated and removed from Egypt.

Once the beleaguered community of British art collectors and museum professionals had enough of the haunted mummy, an American archaeologist swooped in to purchase it. Ignoring his colleagues' warnings, he headed back to New York with his new acquisition.

But the unfortunate scholar and the mummy never made to the States. Because, lo and behold, the name of the ship that they sailed off on was the HMS Titanic!

The tale is popular, but also completely fictional. Snopes debunked the story, noting that, even disregarding the tale's fantastical elements, there was no mummy onboard the ship.

That hasn't stopped the British Museum's so-called " unlucky mummy " from getting blamed for the ship's sinking, though.

The ship was attacked by a U-boat

The Titanic is known as one of the biggest peacetime maritime disasters in history. The tragedy missed the onset of the First World War by two years.

But some still speculate that a German U-boat was really behind the ship's sinking.

If such a theory panned out, that would make the Titanic's sinking a precursor to that of the Lusitania. In 1915, a German U-boat torpedoed the British ocean liner off the coast of Ireland, killing 1,198 people.

While the theory lacks an abundance of evidence, it's certainly not outside the realm of possibility.

A number of Titanic survivors reported to have noticed "an unidentified vessel approximately five to six miles away" from the sinking ship, which reportedly lingered until 2 a.m., according to Dr. Franklin Ruehl's piece in The Huffington Post. Ruehl speculated that the craft was possibly "a submarine that had surfaced to assess the damage it had caused, after which time it skulked off," and also cited survivor testimony about a number of explosions that seemed to go off deep with the ship.

"The sub may have deliberately targeted the luxury liner or possibly accidentally collided with it," Ruehl wrote.

The Titanic never sank

What if the Titanic never sank at all?

That's the thinking behind one particular conspiracy theory. According to this idea, the Olympic - the Titanic's older, nearly identical sister ship - was actually the one that went down near Newfoundland.

But what would have been the point of switching the ships in secret?

In the book " Titanic: The Ship That Never Sank? " researcher Robin Gardiner wrote that the whole disaster was the result of an insurance scam by the International Mercantile Marine Co., which owned the White Star Line. The Olympic and the Titanic were both White Star Line vessels.

According to Gardiner's theory, the trouble started when the Olympic crashed into a warship in 1911, and was blamed for the accident in an ensuing inquiry. As a result, the White Star Line - an IMM subsidiary - was unable to receive an insurance payout.

Gardiner theorised that the line fixed up the Olympic as best as it could, and masqueraded it as the Titanic. By allowing the wounded ship to continue on under an assumed name, the company could collect the insurance payment when it sunk.

The alleged intent wasn't to kill anyone onboard - if the plan had gone off without a hitch, the ship would have sunk slowly and close to another ship that could subsequently rescue the crew and passengers. So what went wrong? According to Gardiner, the liner ended up accidentally running over a darkened rescue ship, which passengers and crew members would later mistake for an iceberg.

The blog Ultimate Titanic reported that, despite Gardiner's theory, all numbered items pulled from the wreck of the Titanic bore the construction number 401. The Olympic's construction number, on the other hand, was 400.

What's more, " Conspiracies at Sea: Titanic and Lusitania " author J. Kent Layton wrote that, before the Olympic was broken up for scrap, its woodwork was sold. ""Never, not once, as a single piece of woodwork from the Olympic turned up with the number '401' stamped on the reverse," Layton wrote.

JP Morgan was behind the whole thing

This rumour has everything you could want in a conspiracy theory. A man powerful and wealthy enough to play god. Overly-complicated methods of assassination. A mass casualty event. The Federal Reserve Bank.

There's a theory out there that JP Morgan sank the Titanic in order to pave the way for the establishment of the Federal Reserve Bank in the US. The bank's creation was reportedly opposed by millionaire John Jacob Astor, mining magnate Benjamin Guggenheim, and Macy's co-owner Isidor Straus.

These three wealthy men did indeed lose their lives when the Titanic sank.

Astor was last seen clinging to the side of a raft. Guggenheim, whose body was never recovered, reportedly put a rose in his buttonhole and quipped, "We've dressed up in our best and are prepared to go down like gentlemen." And Straus died alongside his wife Ida, who refused to leave her husband's side as the ship sank.

But Morgan dodged death and disaster when he canceled his trip in the eleventh hour. The powerful financier owned the IMM, which in turn owned the White Star Line. As such, he had his own personal suite, promenade deck, and specially-designed bath on the ship.

Morgan was reportedly supposed to be on the ship, but decided to skip the maiden voyage at the last second. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported that he decided to linger in Europe in order to buy tapestries for his art collection.

So what reason would Morgan have to allegedly sink his own ship? Conspiracy theorists say that, in the interest of clearing away opposition to the Federal Reserve Bank, Morgan somehow manipulated all of his rivals into sail on the maiden voyage, so that he could sink it.

But, Layton pointed out that it's almost unimaginable that Morgan could've gotten all three of his major rivals to take the fateful trip.

"Surely there had to be easier ways to carry out the plan?" Layton wrote. "Even more importantly: how was it that no one came forward in the century since and said, 'Yes, I helped to set up the sinking of the Titanic in order to kill three men who were opposed to the formation of the US Federal Reserve'?"
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5 wild conspiracy theories surrounding the sinking of the Titanic

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The Titanic sank on April 15, 1912, killing over 1,500 people. * Ever since, conspiracy theories have bounced around regarding the nature of the maritime disaster. * Some of the allegations are pretty out there - like the idea that an ancient Egyptian curse doomed the ocean liner.

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The sinking of the RMS Titanic in 1912 shocked the world, and attracted so much controversy that a number of conspiracy theories have been put forward regarding the disaster.

One such theory is that the sunken ship was actually the Olympic, near-identical sister-ship of the Titanic, which was the subject of a large insurance claim, and that the two vessels were secretly switched prior to the Titanic′s maiden voyage. Another was that the Titanic's owner, J.P. Morgan, wanted to eliminate several prominent bankers who were opposing his plan for the creation of a U.S. central bank.

The Titanic struck an iceberg, damaging the hull's plates in her starboard side causing her front compartments to flood above the water line. The ship then sank, causing about 1500 fatalities.

In 2003, Captain L. M. Collins, a former member of the Ice Pilotage Service, published The Sinking of the Titanic: The Mystery Solved, proposing, based upon his own experience of ice navigation and witness statements given at the two post-disaster enquiries, that what the Titanic hit was not an iceberg but low-lying pack ice. He based his conclusion upon three main pieces of evidence.

1. At 11.30pm on the night of the sinking, the two lookouts spotted what they believed to be haze on the horizon, extending approximately 20° on either side of the ship's bow, despite there being no other reports of haze at any time. Collins believes that what they saw was not haze but a strip of pack ice, 3-4 mi (4.8-6.4 km) ahead of the ship.

2. The ice was variously reported as 60 ft (18 m) high by the lookouts, 100 ft (30 m) high by Quartermaster Rowe on the deck, and only very low in the water by Fourth Officer Boxhall, on the starboard side near the darkened bridge. Collins believes that this was due to 'an optical phenomenon that is well known to ice navigators' where the flat sea and extreme cold distort the appearance of objects near the waterline, making them appear to be the height of the ship's lights, about 60 ft (18 m) above the surface near the bow, and 100 ft (30 m) high alongside the superstructure.

3. A ship such as the Titanic turned by pivoting about a point approximately a third of the ship's length from the bow, with the result that with her rudder hard over, she could not have avoided crushing her entire starboard side into an iceberg were such a collision to occur, with the result that 'the hull and possibly the superstructure on the starboard side would have been rent. In all probability, the ship would have flooded, capsized, and sunk within minutes.

Olympic exchange theory

One of the most controversial and elaborate theories was forwarded by Robin Gardiner in his book, Titanic: The Ship That Never Sank? Gardiner draws on several events and coincidences that occurred in the months, days, and hours leading up to the sinking of the Titanic, and concludes that the ship that sank was in fact Titanic's sister ship Olympic, disguised as Titanic, as an insurance scam by her owners, the International Mercantile Marine Group, controlled by American financier J.P. Morgan that had acquired the White Star Line in 1902.

Olympic was the slightly older sister of Titanic, built alongside the more famous vessel but launched in October 1910. Her exterior profile was nearly identical to Titanic, save for minor details such as the number of portholes on the forward C decks of the ships, the spacing of the windows on the B decks, and the forward section of the A deck promenade on Titanic that had been enclosed only a few weeks before she set sail on her ill-fated maiden voyage. Both ships were built with linoleum floors, but shortly before she was due to set sail J. Bruce Ismay, managing director of the White Star Line, inexplicably ordered the floors aboard Titanic carpeted over.

On 20 September 1911, the Olympic was involved in a collision with the Royal Navy Warship HMS Hawke in the Brambles Channel in Southampton Water while under the command of a harbour pilot. The two ships were close enough to each other that Olympic's motion drew the Hawke into her aft starboard side, causing extensive damage to the liner - both above and below her waterline (HMS Hawke was fitted with a re-inforced 'ram' below the waterline, purposely designed to cause maximum damage to enemy ships). An Admiralty inquiry assigned blame to the Olympic, despite numerous eyewitness accounts to the contrary.

Gardiner's theory plays out in this historical context. Olympic was found to be at blame in the collision (which, according to Gardiner, had damaged the central turbine's mountings and bent the keel, giving the ship a slight permanent list to port). Because of this finding, White Star's insurers Lloyd's of London allegedly refused to pay out on the claim. White Star's flagship would also be out of action during the extensive repairs, and the Titanic's completion date, which was already behind schedule due to Olympic's return to the yard after her loss of a propeller blade, would have to be delayed. All this would amount to a serious financial loss for the company. Gardiner proposes that, to make sure at least one vessel would be earning money, the badly damaged Olympic was patched up and then converted to become the Titanic. The real Titanic when complete would then quietly enter service as the Olympic.

The Titanic indeed had a list to port leaving Southampton. Inadequate trimming of cargo and bunkers would likely result in such and the crew seems to have demonstrated a lack of proficiency on several occasions. A list to port was noted by several Titanic survivors including Lawrence Beesley who wrote in his book about the sinking: "I then called the attention of our table to the way the Titanic listed to port (I had noticed this before), and we watched the skyline through the portholes as we sat at the purser's table in the saloon." (The dining saloon windows were double rows of portholes covered on the inside with screens of leaded decorative glass with no clear view of the outdoors.) This was echoed by survivor Norman Chambers, who testified that after the collision: "However, there was then a slight list to starboard, with probably a few degrees in pitch; and as the ship had a list to port nearly all afternoon, I decided to remain up."

Gardiner states that few parts of either ship bore the name, other than the easily removed lifeboats, bell, compass binnacle, and name plates. Everything else was standard White Star issue and was interchangeable between the two ships, and other vessels in the White Star fleet. While all other White Star Line Ships had their names engraved into their hulls, the Titanic alone had her name riveted over the top.

The plan, Gardiner suggests, was to dispose of the Olympic, which had allegedly been damaged beyond economic repair, in a way that would allow White Star to collect the full insured value of a brand new ship. He supposes that the seacocks were to be opened at sea to slowly flood the ship. If numerous ships were stationed nearby to take off the passengers, the shortage of lifeboats would not matter as the ship would sink slowly and the boats could make several trips to the rescuers.

Gardiner uses as evidence the length of Titanic's sea trials. Olympic's trials in 1910 took two days, including several high speed runs, but Titanic's trials reportedly only lasted for one day, with (Gardiner alleges) no working over half-speed. Gardiner says this was because the patched-up hull could not take any long periods of high speed. Perhaps this was due to the fact that Titanic as a nearly identical twin sister of the Olympic was expected to handle exactly the same, or perhaps the Board of Trade inspectors were in on the scheme.

Gardiner maintains that on 14 April, First Officer Murdoch (who was not officially on duty yet) was on the bridge because he was one of the few high-ranking officers other than Captain Smith who knew of the plan and was keeping a watch out for the rescue ships. One of Gardiner's most controversial statements is that the Titanic did not strike an iceberg, but an IMM rescue ship that was drifting on station with its lights out. Gardiner based this hypothesis on the idea that the supposed iceberg was seen at such a short distance by the lookouts on the Titanic because it was actually a darkened ship, and he also does not believe an iceberg could inflict such sustained and serious damage to a steel double-hulled vessel such as the Titanic.

Gardiner further hypothesises that the ship that was hit by the Titanic was the one seen by the SS Californian firing distress rockets, and that this explains the perceived inaction of the Californian (which traditionally is seen as failing to come to the rescue of the Titanic after sighting its distress rockets). Gardiner's hypothesis is that the Californian, another IMM ship, was not expecting rockets but a rendezvous. The ice on the deck of the Titanic is explained by Gardiner as ice from the rigging of both the Titanic and the mystery ship she hit. As for the true Titanic, Gardiner alleges that she spent 25 years in service as the Olympic and was scrapped in 1935.

Researchers Bruce Beveridge and Steve Hall took issue with many of Gardiner's claims in their book, Olympic and Titanic: The Truth Behind the Conspiracy. Author Mark Chirnside has also raised serious questions about the switch theory.

Some theorists believe that the Titanic was sunk on purpose to eliminate opposition to the creation of the Federal Reserve Bank. Some of the wealthiest men in the world were aboard the Titanic for her maiden voyage, several of whom, including John Jacob Astor IV, Benjamin Guggenheim, and Isidor Straus, were allegedly opposed to the creation of a U.S. central bank. All three men died during the sinking. Conspiracy theorists suggest that J.P. Morgan, the legendary 74-year-old financier who set up the investment banking firm that still bears his name, arranged to have the men board the ship and then sink her to eliminate them. Morgan, nicknamed the "Napoleon of Wall Street", had helped create General Electric, U.S. Steel, and International Harvester, and was credited with almost single-handedly saving the U.S. banking system during the Panic of 1907. Morgan did have a hand in the creation of the Federal Reserve, and owned the International Mercantile Marine, which owned the White Star Line, and thus the Titanic.

Morgan, who had attended the Titanic's launching in 1911, had a personal suite aboard the ship with his own private promenade deck and a bath equipped with specially designed cigar holders. He was reportedly booked on the ship's maiden voyage but instead canceled the trip and remained at the French resort of Aix-les-Bains to enjoy his morning massages and sulfur baths. His last-minute cancellation has fuelled speculation among conspiracy theorists that he knew her fate.

Another theory involves Titanic's watertight doors. This theory suggests that if these doors had been opened, the Titanic would have settled on an even keel and therefore, perhaps, remained afloat long enough for rescue ships to arrive. However, this theory appears to be far from reality for two reasons: first, there were no watertight doors between any of the first floor compartments,[clarification needed ] thus it was impossible to lower the concentration of water in the bow significantly. Second, Bedford and Hacket have shown by calculations that any significant amount of water aft of boiler room No. 4 would have resulted in capsizing of the Titanic, which would have occurred about 30 minutes earlier than the actual time of sinking. Additionally, the lighting would have been lost about 70 minutes after the collision due to the flooding of the boiler rooms. Bedford and Hacket also analysed the hypothetical case that there were no bulkheads at all. Then, the vessel would have capsized about 70 minutes before the actual time of sinking and lighting would have been lost about 40 minutes after the collision.

Later, in a 1998 documentary titled Titanic: Secrets Revealed, the Discovery Channel ran model simulations which also rebutted this theory. The simulations indicated that opening Titanic's watertight doors would have caused the ship to capsize earlier than she actually sank by more than one half hour, confirming the findings of Bedford and Hacket.

Titanic researchers continued to debate the causes and mechanics of the ship's breakup. According to his book, A Night to Remember, Walter Lord described Titanic as assuming an "absolutely perpendicular" position shortly before its final plunge. This view remained largely unchallenged even after the wreck's discovery by Robert Ballard in 1985 confirmed that Titanic had broken in two pieces at or near the surface; paintings by noted marine artist Ken Marschall and in James Cameron's film , both of which depicted the ship attaining a steep angle prior to the breakup. Most researchers acknowledged that Titanic's after expansion joint-designed to allow for flexing of the hull in a seaway-played little to no role in the ship's breakup, though debate continued as to whether the ship had broken from the top downwards or from the bottom upwards.[citation needed ][clarification needed ]

In 2005, a History Channel expedition to the wreck site scrutinised two large sections of Titanic's keel, which constituted the portion of the ship's bottom from immediately below the site of the break. With assistance from naval architect Roger Long, the team analysed the wreckage and developed a new break-up scenario which was publicised in the television documentary Titanic's Final Moments: Missing Pieces in 2006. One hallmark of this new theory was the claim that Titanic's angle at the time of the breakup was far less than had been commonly assumed-according to Long, no greater than 11°.

Long also suspected that Titanic's breakup may have begun with the premature failure of the ship's after expansion joint, and ultimately exacerbated the loss of life by causing Titanic to sink faster than anticipated. In 2006, the History Channel sponsored dives on Titanic's younger sister ship, Britannic, which verified that the design of Britannic's expansion joints was superior to that incorporated in the Titanic. To further explore Long's theory, the History Channel commissioned a new computer simulation by JMS Engineering. The simulation, whose results were featured in the 2007 documentary Titanic's Achilles Heel, partially refuted Long's suspicions by demonstrating that Titanic's expansion joints were strong enough to deal with any and all stresses the ship could reasonably be expected to encounter in service and, during the sinking, actually outperformed their design specifications. But, most important is that the expansion joints were part of the superstructure, which was situated above the strength deck (B-deck) and therefore above the top of the structural hull girder. Thus, the expansion joints had no meaning for the support of the hull. They played no role in the breaking of the hull. They simply opened up and parted as the hull flexed or broke beneath them.

Brad Matsen's 2008 book Titanic's Last Secrets endorses the expansion joint theory.

One common oversight is the fact that the collapse of the first funnel at a relatively shallow angle occurred when the forward expansion joint, over which several funnel stays crossed, opened as the hull was beginning to stress. The opening of the joint stretched and snapped the stays. The forward momentum of the ship as she took a sudden lurch forwards and downwards sent the unsupported funnel toppling onto the starboard bridge wing.

One theory that would support the fracturing of the hull is that the Titanic partly grounded on the shelf of ice below the waterline as she collided with the iceberg, perhaps damaging the keel and underbelly. Later during the sinking, it was noticed that Boiler Room #4 flooded from below the floor grates rather than from over the top of the watertight bulkhead. This would be consistent with additional damage along the keel compromising the integrity of the hull.

A fire began in one of Titanic's coal bunkers approximately 10 days prior to the ship's departure, and continued to burn for several days into her voyage. Fires occurred frequently on board steamships due to spontaneous combustion of the coal. The fires had to be extinguished with fire hoses, by moving the coal on top to another bunker and by removing the burning coal and feeding it into the furnace. This event has led some authors to theorise that the fire exacerbated the effects of the iceberg collision, by reducing the structural integrity of the hull and a critical bulkhead.

In 2011 David J H Smith put forward this idea in his book The Titanic's Mummy which looked at the event in a docudrama style. It was stated that the bunker fire was at the heart of the eventual disaster claiming that decisions made because of the blaze led it to a collision course with the iceberg. The book also looks at the fire's physical effect on the ship which claims it weakened the area of impact.

Senan Molony has suggested that attempts to extinguish the fire - by shovelling burning coals into the engine furnaces - may have been the primary reason for the Titanic steaming at full speed prior to the collision, despite ice warnings. Most experts disagree. Samuel Halpern has concluded that "the bunker fire would not have weakened the watertight bulkhead sufficiently to cause it to collapse." Also, it has been suggested that the coal bunker fire actually helped Titanic to last longer during the sinking and prevented the ship from rolling over to starboard after the impact, due to the subtle port list created by the moving of coal inside the ship prior to the encounter with the iceberg. Some of these foremost Titanic experts have published a detailed rebuttal of Molony's claims.

Halpern, Samuel; Weeks, Charles (2011). "Description of the Damage to the Ship". In Halpern, Samuel (ed.). Report into the Loss of the SS Titanic: A Centennial Reappraisal. Stroud, UK: The History Press. ISBN 978-0-7524-6210-3.

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The sinking of the RMS Titanic in 1912 shocked the world, and attracted so much controversy that a number of conspiracy theories have been put forward regarding the disaster. One such theory is that the sunken ship was actually the Olympic , near-identical sister-ship of the Titanic, which was the subject of a large insurance claim, and that the two vessels were secretly switched prior to the Titanic′s maiden voyage.

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Pivotal events have a way of attracting harmful myths and conspiracy theories. This goes for great achievements like the moon landing (which Buzz Aldrin punched a guy for denying) as well as great tragedies like Martin Luther King Jr. 's assassination, the 9/11 attacks and the disaster.

Late in the evening on April 14, 1912, the R.M.S. Titanic hit an iceberg and sank into the icy waters of the North Atlantic, killing 1,517 of the 2,223 passengers and crew members aboard. To make sense of this tragic and seemingly random disaster, people over the past century have told stories of ominous signs of bad luck that were supposedly ignored beforehand, or spun elaborate conspiracy theories to explain the "real" reason it sank.

Here, we explain the most enduring conspiracy theories and myths about the tragedy.

J.P. Morgan planned the disaster to kill his rivals.

According to this theory, millionaire banker J.P. Morgan planned the Titanic disaster to kill off rival millionaires Jacob Astor, Isidor Straus and Benjamin Guggenheim, who all perished aboard.

The theory hinges on the fact that Morgan had originally planned to sail on the Titanic but changed his mind shortly before it took off. Yet it doesn't offer any explanation for how he caused the ship to hit an iceberg and kill over 1,500 people, let alone the three men he supposedly intended to die. To top it off, the theory claims Morgan wanted to kill them because they opposed the creation of the Federal Reserve, even though Astor and Guggenheim don't appear to have taken a position on it and Straus actually supported it.

Alternative versions of this theory claim the Rothschild banking family or the Jesuits were the ones who arranged Astor, Straus and Guggenheim's deaths on the Titanic. As The Washington Post notes, invoking the Rothchilds as international conspirators is "a centuries-old anti-Semitic trope... The Rothschild family founded banking houses across Europe in the early 1800s, and they have been a favorite target of conspiracy theorists ever since."

This theory resurfaced recently in connection with QAnon, a far-right conspiracy theory detailing a supposed secret plot by an alleged "deep state" against U.S. President Donald Trump and his supporters.

The Titanic never sank.

People seem to love a good insurance fraud story, so maybe it's unsurprising that this conspiracy theory is one of the Titanic's most popular. This one posits that someone switched the Titanic with another White Star Line ship, the R.M.S. Olympic. But as Paul Burns, vice president and curator for the Titanic Museum Attractions in Missouri and Tennessee, points out, "it just doesn't make any sense."

This theory starts with the fact that the Olympic was damaged while sailing from Southampton, England to New York in September 1911, and had to return to Harland and Wolff's shipping yard in Belfast for repairs. The company repaired the Olympic and it sailed to New York and back. It returned to Belfast for more repairs in March 1912, a few weeks before the Titanic set sail.

The conspiracy theory claims that some person or people found the Olympic too severely damaged to be profitable, and so at some point switched it with the Titanic to purposefully ditch the damaged ship, reap the insurance money and, it seems, kill a bunch of people in the process.

There are a lot of holes in this theory, but one of the biggest is that the Titanic's insurance wasn't enough to cover the Olympic's loss. As J. Kent Layton writes in Conspiracies at Sea, "the switch conspiracy founders-quite literally-on its financial merits alone."

A mummy's curse doomed the Titanic.

One of the passengers who went down with the Titanic was William Stead, a British editor who subscribed to early 20th-century spiritualism and had spent the past several years claiming a cursed mummy was causing mysterious destruction and disaster in London. As with other myths about "Egyptian curses" and "Native American burial grounds," this myth played off of colonialists' anxiety about the people whose land they had plundered.

On board the Titanic, Stead happily repeated his tale of the mummy's curse to other passengers. After the ship sank, a survivor recounted Stead's story to the New York World, and the media picked it up. The next month, The Washington Post ran this headline: "Ghost of the Titanic: Vengeance of Hoodoo Mummy Followed Man Who Wrote Its History."

Burns says some people linked the "mummy's curse" to Egyptian artifacts that survivor (and hero) Margaret Brown really did take with her on the Titanic to deliver to a museum in Denver. In other versions of the story, the mummy was actually aboard the Titanic because the British Museum had sold it to an American who was shipping it home, Snopes reports.

But the truth is the so-called "unlucky mummy" is still at the British Museum, and no mummy was ever loaded onto the ship. It was an iceberg, not a curse, that sank the Titanic.

The ship's number read 'NO POPE' backwards.

One myth posits that Catholic employees of Harland and Wolff, the Belfast company that built the Titanic, were distressed that the ship's number, 3909 04, seemed to say "NO POPE" when viewed in a mirror. Was this a sign of bad luck that foretold the ship's doom?

Nope. The late Titanic historian Walter Lord wrote that he received letters from people in Ireland relaying this "NO POPE" story beginning in the mid-1950s. Yet as Burns pointed out in his 1986 book, The Night Lives On, there was no such number attached to the Titanic.

The hull number painted on the ship was 401, the same as its yard number at Harland and Wolff, and its Board of Trade number was 131,428. Yet even if one of its numbers had read "NO POPE," there weren't any Catholic workers at Harland and Wolff for it to upset. The company had driven its Catholic employees away in the late 1800s, and "by the twentieth century, Harland and Wolff had a reputation for only employing Protestants," writes Annie Caulfield in Irish Blood, English Heart, Ulster Fry.

Despite this reality, Paul Burns, of the Titanic Museum Attractions in Missouri and Tennessee, says that visitors still occasionally ask about this myth.

Jack Dawson is Jay Gatsby.

OK, this one is actually about the 1997 Titanic movie-and it's a fan theory-but still. There is a theory on the internet that Leonardo DiCaprio'scharacter in Titanic and his character in The Great Gatsby are the same person.

"[T]he movie is obviously an alternate timeline where he survived the sinking of the ship and went on to build a life for himself in America in an attempt to reunite with Rose," writes Chris Lough on Tor.com, a science fiction and fantasy site. "He survives, builds himself into a party-going showman in the Jazz Age in hopes that Rose will one day appear, but ends up finding love with another woman, Daisy."

Because this one is about fictional characters in film, it isn't something we can prove or disprove. We'll leave it up to you to decide if Jack really is the Great Gatsby.

Fact Check

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The Craziest Titanic Conspiracy Theories, Explained | HISTORY

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Did a mummy's curse cause the Titanic to sink?

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History, Culture and Iconic Interests in the United States and Abroad

The R.M.S. is perhaps the most famous shipwreck in our current popular culture. was a British-registered ship in the White Star line that was owned by a U.S. company in which famed American financier John Pierpont "JP" Morgan was a major stockholder. was built in Belfast, Northern Ireland by Harland & Wolff for transatlantic passage between Southampton, England and New York City. It was the largest and most luxurious passenger ship of its time and was reported to be unsinkable. Titanic, launched on May 31, 1911, and set sail on its maiden voyage from Southampton on April 10, 1912, with 2,240 passengers and crew on board. On April 15, 1912, after striking an iceberg, Titanic broke apart and sank to the bottom of the ocean, taking with it the lives of more than 1,500 passengers and crew.

While there has been somesalvage outside of the major hull portions, most of the ship remains in its final resting place, 12,000 feet below sea level and over 350 nautical miles off the coast of Newfoundland, Canada. Its famous story of disaster and human drama has been, and continues to be, recounted in numerous books, articles and movies. Titanic has been recognized by the United States Congress for its national and international significance and in many ways has become a cultural icon. The disaster also resulted in a number of memorials around the world. In the United States, there are major memorials in Washington D.C. and New York; the Widener Library at Harvard University is another major memorial commemorating Henry Elkins Widener, a victim of the sinking.

Investigation and the Development of Measures for Safety in Navigation

The sinking of Titanic was one of the deadliest peacetime maritime disasters in history and quickly became a catalyst for change. The United States Congress held hearings on the casualty that resulted in a report and measures to improve safety of navigation. Similar investigations were held in the United Kingdom. The international community readily came together for the purpose of establishing global maritime standards and regulations to promote safety of navigation, the most important of which was the Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea (SOLAS), widely regarded as the most important of all international agreements on the safety of merchant ships.

Radio acoustic ranging navigation, developed by the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey (USCGS, a NOAA predecessor agency) in 1924, had its roots in the sinking of the Titanic. The transmission and reception of sound waves led to the invention of sonar. USCGS and hydrographic offices around the world grasped the power of sonar as an underwater search tool, and also as a way to measure the depths of the ocean. Today, accurate and precise nautical charts are produced with the data acquired from survey vessels equipped with echo-sounding technology.

Discovery of the Titanic Wreck Site by a Team of Explorers from the United States and France

The wreck of Titanic was discovered on September 1, 1985, by a joint American-French expedition led by Dr. Robert Ballard of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and Jean-Louis Michel of the French Research Institute for Exploration of the Sea (IFREMER). The wreck was found approximately 350 nautical miles (nm) off the Canadian coast of Newfoundland in international waters two and a half miles below the ocean surface (depth of 12,500 feet or 3,800 meters). Shortly after the discovery, Dr. Ballard testified before the United States Congress to encourage the enactment of legislation to designate the wreck as a maritime memorial. In July 1986, a plaque was placed on R.M.S. Titanic recording its discovery the previous year and calling for the wreck to be left undisturbed in memory of those who perished aboard her. In 1987, a United States company working with IFREMER returned to the wreck and began to salvage in artifacts from the artifact field. For more information on salvage, please visit our related Salvage page.

United States Congress Acts to Protect Titanic Through International Cooperation

Recognizing the shipwreck as a site of great historical and cultural significance, Congress passed theR.M.S. Titanic Maritime Memorial Act of 1986 (1986 Act), directing the United States to (1) begin negotiation of an international agreement to initiate multinational conservation efforts; and (2) develop guidelines for exploration, research and salvage. It also calls for the recognition of the site as an international maritime memorial on behalf of those who lost their lives in the tragic sinking.

National and International Significance of the R.M.S. Titanic

The R.M.S. Titanic shipwreck holds exceptional national and international significance. It is one of the greatest jewels of world maritime heritage.

National Significance

As a British-registered, American-owned ship, Titanic represents a tangible link to United States maritime history. The ship was owned and operated by the British White Star Line, a subsidiary of the American-owned International Mercantile Marine Co. of New Jersey of which industrial tycoon J.P. Morgan was the majority shareholder. Discovered in 1985 by American oceanographer Robert Ballard and a team from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and their foreign partners, the Titanic remains closely connected to the academic fields of U.S. maritime history and marine science. As of its 100th birthday on May 31, 2010, Titanic is an "archaeological resource site" as defined within the Archaeological Resources Protection Act. Artifacts and data discovered at the wreck site continue to advance scientific understanding on the process of underwater archaeological preservation and bio-deterioration.

Titanic has inspired the creative genius of lawmakers, historians, filmmakers and ocean enthusiasts around the world. It has provided a storyline for countless books, articles, films and documentaries, including the Academy Award winning James Cameron megahit Titanic. These stand as testaments to the exceptional significance that the shipwreck as assumed in pop culture, as well as American history. However, the significance of the ship's status as a cultural icon is surpassed by its historical significance as the ultimate memorial in honor of those lives that were lost in its sinking. Of the 306 American passengers on board Titanic, 119 were never rescued. The surviving passengers, many of whom lost family and friends in the disaster, returned to the United States. In 2006, at age 99, Lillian Asplund, the last living American survivor of the Titanic, died in Massachusetts. At age five, she lost her father and three brothers (including her twin brother, five-year-old Carl) on the Titanic. Other passengers onboard Titanic were foreign-born immigrants traveling to the United States. A poignant and powerful artifact recovered from the wreck site was a declaration of intent to become a United States citizen filled out by a passenger who did not survive the sinking but whose well-preserved luggage was recovered. This artifact is a reminder that most of these individuals did not survive, and with them died their American dream. Today, the tragedy of the R.M.S. Titanic represents the hardship and struggle faced by many immigrants during this time period as they set off across the Atlantic Ocean in hopes for a better life and a brighter future for themselves and their families. Their lives tell the story of the millions of Americans who today are the living legacy of immigrants who made the same trans-Atlantic voyage intended by the R.M.S. Titanic. The story of the Titanic is the story of America.

International Significance

Much of the current international law relating to maritime shipping and safety developed as a result of the R.M.S. Titanic tragedy. In the immediate aftermath of its sinking on April 14-15, 1912, the Titanic sparked a lawmaking frenzy resonating throughout the international community. From this fervor emerged the adoption of the first International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea (SOLAS) in 1914. SOLAS has been amended several times and is still the most important treaty addressing maritime safety. The establishment of the international organization to address maritime safety, the International Maritime Organization (IMO) may be traced to SOLAS and Titanic. On Sept. 27, 2012, in celebrating its 35th World Maritime Day, the IMO also recalled the 100th anniversary of the disastrous sinking of Titanic that was a catalyst for it establishment.

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Last Updated July 10, 2018

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US Department of Commerce, NOAA, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

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R.M.S Titanic - History and Significance

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The Office of General Counsel provides legal advice and counsel for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) of the U.S. Department of Commerce. The General Counsel is appointed by the Secretary of Commerce, with the approval of the President.

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The Building of the RMS Titanic

The Titanic was the product of intense competition among rival shipping lines in the first half of the 20th century. In particular, the White Star Line found itself in a battle for steamship primacy with Cunard, a venerable British firm with two standout ships that ranked among the most sophisticated and luxurious of their time.

Cunard's Mauretania began service in 1907 and quickly set a speed record for the fastest average speed during a transatlantic crossing (23.69 knots or 27.26 mph), a title that it held for 22 years.

Cunard's other masterpiece, Lusitania, launched the same year and was lauded for its spectacular interiors. Lusitania met its tragic end on May 7, 1915, when a torpedo fired by a German U-boat sunk the ship, killing nearly 1,200 of the 1,959 people on board and precipitating the United States' entry into World War I.

Did you know? Passengers traveling first class on Titanic were roughly 44 percent more likely to survive than other passengers.

The same year that Cunard unveiled its two magnificent liners, J. Bruce Ismay, chief executive of White Star, discussed the construction of three large ships with William J. Pirrie, chairman of the shipbuilding company Harland and Wolff. Part of a new "Olympic" class of liners, each ship would measure 882 feet in length and 92.5 feet at their broadest point, making them the largest of their time.

In March 1909, work began in the massive Harland and Wolff shipyard in Belfast, Ireland, on the second of these three ocean liners, Titanic, and continued nonstop for two years.

On May 31, 1911, Titanic's immense hull-the largest movable manmade object in the world at the time-made its way down the slipways and into the River Lagan in Belfast. More than 100,000 people attended the launching, which took just over a minute and went off without a hitch.

The hull was immediately towed to a mammoth fitting-out dock where thousands of workers would spend most of the next year building the ship's decks, constructing her lavish interiors and installing the 29 giant boilers that would power her two main steam engines.

'Unsinkable' Titanic's Fatal Flaws

According to some hypotheses, Titanic was doomed from the start by a design that many lauded as state-of-the-art. The Olympic-class ships featured a double bottom and 15 watertight bulkhead compartments equipped with electric watertight doors that could be operated individually or simultaneously by a switch on the bridge.

It was these watertight bulkheads that inspired Shipbuilder magazine, in a special issue devoted to the Olympic liners, to deem them "practically unsinkable."

But the watertight compartment design contained a flaw that was a critical factor in Titanic's sinking: While the individual bulkheads were indeed watertight, the walls separating the bulkheads extended only a few feet above the water line, so water could pour from one compartment into another, especially if the ship began to list or pitch forward.

The second critical safety lapse that contributed to the loss of so many lives was the inadequate number of lifeboats carried on Titanic. A mere 16 boats, plus four Engelhardt "collapsibles," could accommodate just 1,178 people. Titanic could carry up to 2,435 passengers, and a crew of approximately 900 brought her capacity to more than 3,300 people.

As a result, even if the lifeboats were loaded to full capacity during an emergency evacuation, there were available seats for only one-third of those on board. While unthinkably inadequate by today's standards, Titanic's supply of lifeboats actually exceeded the British Board of Trade's requirements.

Passengers on the Titanic

Titanic created quite a stir when it departed for its maiden voyage from Southampton, England, on April 10, 1912. After stops in Cherbourg, France, and Queenstown (now known as Cobh), Ireland, the ship set sail for New York with 2,240 passengers and crew-or "souls," the expression then used in the shipping industry, usually in connection with a sinking-on board.

As befitting the first transatlantic crossing of the world's most celebrated ship, many of these souls were high-ranking officials, wealthy industrialists, dignitaries and celebrities. First and foremost was the White Star Line's managing director, J. Bruce Ismay, accompanied by Thomas Andrews, the ship's builder from Harland and Wolff.

Absent was financier J.P. Morgan, whose International Mercantile Marine shipping trust controlled the White Star Line and who had selected Ismay as a company officer. Morgan had planned to join his associates on Titanic but canceled at the last minute when some business matters delayed him.

The wealthiest passenger was John Jacob Astor IV, heir to the Astor family fortune, who had made waves a year earlier by marrying 18-year-old Madeleine Talmadge Force, a young woman 29 years his junior, shortly after divorcing his first wife.

Other notable passengers included the elderly owner of Macy's, Isidor Straus, and his wife Ida; industrialist Benjamin Guggenheim, accompanied by his mistress, valet and chauffeur; and widow and heiress Margaret "Molly" Brown, who would earn her nickname " The Unsinkable Molly Brown " by helping to maintain calm and order while the lifeboats were being loaded and boosting the spirits of her fellow survivors.

The employees attending to this collection of First Class luminaries were mostly traveling Second Class, along with academics, tourists, journalists and others who would enjoy a level of service and accommodations equivalent to First Class on most other ships.

But by far the largest group of passengers was in Third Class: more than 700, exceeding the other two levels combined. Some had paid less than $20 to make the crossing. It was Third Class that was the major source of profit for shipping lines like White Star, and Titanic was designed to offer these passengers accommodations and amenities superior to those found in Third Class on any other ship of that era.

Titanic Sets Sail

Titanic's departure from Southampton on April 10 was not without some oddities. A small coal fire was discovered in one of her bunkers-an alarming but not uncommon occurrence on steamships of the day. Stokers hosed down the smoldering coal and shoveled it aside to reach the base of the blaze.

After assessing the situation, the captain and chief engineer concluded that it was unlikely it had caused any damage that could affect the hull structure, and the stokers were ordered to continue controlling the fire at sea.

According to a theory put forth by a small number of Titanic experts, the fire became uncontrollable after the ship left Southampton, forcing the crew to attempt a full-speed crossing; moving at such a fast pace, they were unable to avoid the fatal collision with the iceberg.

Another unsettling event took place when Titanic left the Southampton dock. As she got underway, she narrowly escaped a collision with the America Line's S.S. New York. Superstitious Titanic buffs sometimes point to this as the worst kind of omen for a ship departing on her maiden voyage.

The Titanic Strikes an Iceberg

On April 14, after four days of uneventful sailing, Titanic received sporadic reports of ice from other ships, but she was sailing on calm seas under a moonless, clear sky.

At about 11:30 p.m., a lookout saw an iceberg coming out of a slight haze dead ahead, then rang the warning bell and telephoned the bridge. The engines were quickly reversed and the ship was turned sharply-instead of making direct impact, Titanic seemed to graze along the side of the berg, sprinkling ice fragments on the forward deck.

Sensing no collision, the lookouts were relieved. They had no idea that the iceberg had a jagged underwater spur, which slashed a 300-foot gash in the hull below the ship's waterline.

By the time the captain toured the damaged area with Harland and Wolff's Thomas Andrews, five compartments were already filling with seawater, and the bow of the doomed ship was alarmingly pitched downward, allowing seawater to pour from one bulkhead into the neighboring compartment.

Andrews did a quick calculation and estimated that Titanic might remain afloat for an hour and a half, perhaps slightly more. At that point the captain, who had already instructed his wireless operator to call for help, ordered the lifeboats to be loaded.

Titanic's Lifeboats

A little more than an hour after contact with the iceberg, a largely disorganized and haphazard evacuation began with the lowering of the first lifeboat. The craft was designed to hold 65 people; it left with only 28 aboard.

Tragically, this was to be the norm: During the confusion and chaos during the precious hours before Titanic plunged into the sea, nearly every lifeboat would be launched woefully under-filled, some with only a handful of passengers.

In compliance with the law of the sea, women and children boarded the boats first; only when there were no women or children nearby were men permitted to board. Yet many of the victims were in fact women and children, the result of disorderly procedures that failed to get them to the boats in the first place.

Exceeding Andrews' prediction, Titanic stubbornly stayed afloat for close to three hours. Those hours witnessed acts of craven cowardice and extraordinary bravery.

Hundreds of human dramas unfolded between the order to load the lifeboats and the ship's final plunge: Men saw off wives and children, families were separated in the confusion and selfless individuals gave up their spots to remain with loved ones or allow a more vulnerable passenger to escape. In the end, 706 people survived the sinking of the Titanic.

Titanic Sinks

The ship's most illustrious passengers each responded to the circumstances with conduct that has become an integral part of the Titanic legend. Ismay, the White Star managing director, helped load some of the boats and later stepped onto a collapsible as it was being lowered. Although no women or children were in the vicinity when he abandoned ship, he would never live down the ignominy of surviving the disaster while so many others perished.

Thomas Andrews, Titanic's chief designer, was last seen in the First Class smoking room, staring blankly at a painting of a ship on the wall. Astor deposited his wife Madeleine into a lifeboat and, remarking that she was pregnant, asked if he could accompany her; refused entry, he managed to kiss her goodbye just before the boat was lowered away.

Although offered a seat on account of his age, Isidor Straus refused any special consideration, and his wife Ida would not leave her husband behind. The couple retired to their cabin and perished together.

Benjamin Guggenheim and his valet returned to their rooms and changed into formal evening dress; emerging onto the deck, he famously declared, "We are dressed in our best and are prepared to go down like gentlemen."

Molly Brown helped load the boats and finally was forced into one of the last to leave. She implored its crewmen to turn back for survivors, but they refused, fearing they would be swamped by desperate people trying to escape the icy seas.

Titanic, nearly perpendicular and with many of her lights still aglow, finally dove beneath the ocean's surface at about 2:20 a.m. on April 15, 1912. Throughout the morning, Cunard's Carpathia, after receiving Titanic's distress call at midnight and steaming at full speed while dodging ice floes all night, rounded up all of the lifeboats. They contained only 706 survivors.

Aftermath of the Titanic Catastrophe

At least five separate boards of inquiry on both sides of the Atlantic conducted comprehensive hearings on Titanic's sinking, interviewing dozens of witnesses and consulting with many maritime experts. Every conceivable subject was investigated, from the conduct of the officers and crew to the construction of the ship. Titanic conspiracy theories abounded.

While it has always been assumed that the ship sank as a result of the gash that caused the bulkhead compartments to flood, various other theories have emerged over the decades, including that the ship's steel plates were too brittle for the near-freezing Atlantic waters, that the impact caused rivets to pop and that the expansion joints failed, among others.

Technological aspects of the catastrophe aside, Titanic's demise has taken on a deeper, almost mythic, meaning in popular culture. Many view the tragedy as a morality play about the dangers of human hubris: Titanic's creators believed they had built an unsinkable ship that could not be defeated by the laws of nature.

This same overconfidence explains the electrifying impact Titanic's sinking had on the public when she was lost. There was widespread disbelief that the ship could not possibly have sunk, and, due to the era's slow and unreliable means of communication, misinformation abounded. Newspapers initially reported that the ship had collided with an iceberg but remained afloat and was being towed to port with everyone on board.

It took many hours for accurate accounts to become widely available, and even then people had trouble accepting that this paragon of modern technology could sink on her maiden voyage, taking more than 1,500 souls with her.

The ship historian John Maxtone-Graham has compared Titanic's story to the Challenger space shuttle disaster of 1986. In that case, the world reeled at the notion that one of the most sophisticated inventions ever created could explode into oblivion along with its crew. Both tragedies triggered a sudden collapse in confidence, revealing that we remain subject to human frailties and error, despite our hubris and a belief in technological infallibility.

Titanic Wreck

Efforts to locate the wreck of Titanic began soon after it sank. But technical limitations-as well as the vastness of the North Atlantic search area-made finding it extremely difficult.

Finally, in 1985, a joint U.S.-French expedition located the wreck of the RMS Titanic. The doomed ship was discovered about 400 miles east of Newfoundland in the North Atlantic, some 13,000 feet below the surface.

Subsequent explorations have found that the wreck is in relatively good condition, with many objects on the ship-jewelry, furniture, shoes, machinery and other items-are still intact.

Since its discovery, the wreck has been explored numerous times by manned and unmanned submersibles-including the submersible Titan, which imploded during what would have been its third dive to the wreck in June 2023.

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The Titanic was a luxury British steamship that sank in the early hours of April 15, 1912 after striking an iceberg, leading to the deaths of more than 1,500 passengers and crew. Read about the timeline of its sinking, the many lives lost and those who survived.

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Dorothy Gibson-the 22-year-old silent film star- huddled in a lifeboat, dressed in only a short coat and sweater over an evening gown. She was beginning to shiver.

Ever since it had been launched, at 12:45 a.m., Lifeboat 7 had remained stationed only 20 yards away from the Titanic in case it could be used in a rescue operation. Dorothy and her mother, Pauline, who had been traveling with her, had watched as lifeboat after lifeboat left the vessel, but by just after 2 o'clock it was obvious that the vast majority of its passengers would not be able to escape from the liner. Realizing that the ship's sinking was imminent, lookout George Hogg ordered that Lifeboat 7 be rowed away from the Titanic. The risk of being sucked down was high, he thought, and so the passengers and crew manning the oars rowed as hard as they could across the pitch-black sea. Dorothy could not take her eyes off the ship, its bow now underwater, its stern rising up into the sky.

"Suddenly there was a wild coming together of voices from the ship and we noticed an unusual commotion among the people about the railing," she said. "Then the awful thing happened, the thing that will remain in my memory until the day I die."

Dorothy listened as 1,500 people cried out to be saved, a noise she described as a horrific mixture of yells, shrieks and moans. This was counterpointed by a deeper sound emanating from under the water, the noise of explosions that she likened to the terrific power of Niagara Falls. "No one can describe the frightful sounds," she remembered later.

Before stepping onto the Titanic, Dorothy Gibson had already transformed herself from an ordinary New Jersey girl into a model for the famous illustrator Harrison Fisher-whose lush images of idealized American beauty graced the covers of popular magazines-and then into a star of the silent screen.

By the spring of 1912, Dorothy was feeling so overworked that she pleaded with her employers at the Éclair studios in Fort Lee, New Jersey, to grant her a holiday. The days were long, and she realized that, in effect, there was "very little of the glamour connected with movie stars." She may have been earning $175 a week-the equivalent of nearly $4,000 today-but she was exhausted; she even went so far as to consider quitting the studio. "I was feeling very run down and everyone insisted I go away for a while," she recalled later. "So Mr. Brulatour made arrangements for me to have a wondrous holiday abroad. It seemed the ideal solution." (Her married 42-year-old lover, Éclair's Jules Brulatour, was one of the most powerful producers in the film industry.)

Dorothy and her mother sailed for Europe on March 17, 1912, with an itinerary that was to include not only the capitals of the Continent, but also Algiers and Egypt. However, when they arrived in Genoa from Venice on April 8, they received a telegram at their hotel requesting that Dorothy return to America. An emergency had arisen at the studio; she was needed to start work at once on a series of films. Although she had been away for only three weeks, she had benefited from the change of scene-she said she felt "like a new woman"-and cabled back to tell the studio of her plans. After a brief stopover in Paris, she would sail back to New York from Cherbourg on April 10.

There was silence in the lifeboat. "No one said a word," recalled Dorothy. "There was nothing to say and nothing we could do." Faced with the bitter cold and increasingly choppy seas, Dorothy had to acknowledge the possibility that she might not last the night. Had the wireless operators managed to send out a distress signal and call for the help of any nearby ships? The possibility that they could drift for miles in the middle of the harsh Atlantic for days on end was suddenly very real.

As dawn broke on April 15, the passengers in Lifeboat 7 saw a row of lights and a dark cloud of smoke in the distance."Warming ourselves as best we could in the cramped quarters of the lifeboat, we watched that streak of black smoke grow larger and larger," recalled Dorothy. "And then we were able to discern the hull of a steamship heading in our direction."

At around 6 o'clock the lifeboat carrying Dorothy Gibson drew up alongside the Carpathia. A few moments later, after she had climbed the rope ladder that had been lowered down from above, she found herself on deck. Still wearing her damp, wind-swept evening gown, Dorothy was approached by Carpathia passengers James Russell Lowell and his wife, and asked whether she would like to share their cabin. After eating breakfast, she retired to their quarters, where she slept for the next 26 hours.

As the Carpathia sailed into New York-on the stormy night of Thursday, April 18-it was surrounded by a mass of tiny vessels, all chartered by news corporations desperate to break what would be one of the biggest stories of modern times. From their tugs, reporters shouted through megaphones offering terrific sums of money for information and exclusives, but Captain Rostron said he would shoot any pressmen who dared venture aboard his ship.

However, one of his original passengers, Carlos F. Hurd, was a veteran journalist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and over the course of the past four days he had spoken to many survivors, amassing enough information for a 5,000-word story. Hurd's only problem was how to get the report off the ship. He managed to send a wireless message to a friend at the New York Evening World, which, in turn, chartered a tug to sail to the Carpathia. Out of sight of the captain, Hurd stuffed his manuscript into an oilskin bag, which he then threw down to the waiting boat. The final edition of the New York Evening World, published on April 18, carried a digest of Hurd's report, which was published in full the next morning. The story-" Titanic Boilers Blew up, Breaking Her in Two After Striking Berg"-began: "Fifteen hundred lives-the figures will hardly vary in either direction by more than a few dozen-were lost in the sinking of the Titanic, which struck an iceberg at 11:45 p.m., Sunday, and was at the ocean's bottom two hours and thirty-five minutes after."

As Dorothy Gibson stood on the deck of the Carpathia, the night was so black that she could hardly make out the skyline of New York. Unknown to her, thousands of people had come out that rainy night to witness the arrival of the Carpathia. Dorothy "ran crying down the ramp" into the arms of her stepfather, soon followed by her mother. Leonard Gibson ushered his stepdaughter and wife through the crowd and into a taxi and whisked them off to a New York restaurant. But there was only one thing on Dorothy's mind-her lover, Brulatour. She realized that it would have been inappropriate for him to meet her at the pier-this would have given rise to scandal-but she desperately needed to see him. After a couple of hours, she drove to the hotel where she had arranged to meet him.

That night Brulatour presented her with an engagement ring-a cluster of diamonds worth $1,000-and a plan: to make a dramatic one-reel film of her survival. Soon, he said, she would not only be his wife, but she would be more famous than ever before. The loss of the Titanic would make both things possible.

The public's appetite for information and details-accounts of suffering, bravery, self-sacrifice and selfishness-seemed insatiable, and Brulatour at first took advantage of it by employing the relatively new medium of newsreel. His footage of the docking of the Carpathia-which was spliced together with scenes of Capt. Edward J. Smith, who had been lost in the disaster, walking on the bridge of the Titanic's sister ship, the Olympic, and shots of icebergs from the area where the liner sank, together with images of the launching of the liner-premiered in East Coast theaters on April 22. Not only was Brulatour's Animated Weekly newsreel "the first on the scene with specially chartered tugboats and an extra relay of cameramen," according to Billboard magazine, but it also showed that "the motion picture may fairly equal the press in bringing out a timely subject and one of startling interest to the public at large."

Within a few days of her arrival in New York, Dorothy had sketched out a rough outline for a story. She would play Miss Dorothy, a young woman traveling in Europe who is due to return to America on the Titanic to marry her sweetheart, Ensign Jack, in service with the U.S. Navy.

Shooting began almost immediately at the Fort Lee studio and on location on board a derelict freighter that lay in New York Harbor. She was clad in the same outfit she had worn the night she had escaped the sinking ship-a white silk evening dress, a sweater, an overcoat and black pumps.The verisimilitude of the experience was overwhelming. This wasn't so much acting, in its conventional form at least, as replaying. Dorothy drew on her memory and shaped it into a reconstruction.

When the film was released, on May 16, 1912, just a month after the sinking, it was celebrated for its technical realism and emotional power. "The startling story of the world's greatest sea disaster is the sensation of the country," stated the Moving Picture News. "Miss Dorothy Gibson, a heroine of the shipwreck and one of the most talked-of survivors, tells in this motion picture masterpiece of the enthralling tragedy among the icebergs." (The actual film no longer survives.)

"The nation and the world had been profoundly grieved by the sinking of the Titanic," she said, "and I had the opportunity to pay tribute to those who gave their lives on that awful night. That is all I tried to do." In truth, the experience had left her feeling hollow, disassociated from her reality. Soon after the release of Saved from the Titanic, Dorothy walked out of her dressing room at the Fort Lee studios and turned her back on the movie business. She was, she stated, "dissatisfied."

At some point during the summer or autumn of 1912-just as Brulatour was forming, with Carl Laemmle, the Universal Film Manufacturing Company, later to become Universal Pictures-Brulatour's wife, Clara, finally decided to bring the farce that was her marriage to an end. After scandalous and protracted divorce proceedings, Gibson married Brulatour on July 6, 1917, in New York. It soon became obvious that whatever spark they had between them had been kept alive by the illicit nature of the relationship. The couple divorced in 1923.

Dorothy fled to Europe, where her mother had already settled. Ensconced in Paris, she had enough money from her alimony for everyday luxuries such as cocktails and champagne and entertained a wide range of bohemian friends including the writers Colette, H.G. Wells and James Joyce. "Oh my, what a time I am having!" she told a journalist in 1934. "I never cared much for motion pictures, you see, and I am too glad to be free of that work. I tell you it was an immense burden. I have had my share of troubles, as you know, but since coming to France, I have recovered from that and feel happy at last. Who could not be deliriously happy in this country? I have such fun. But I fear it cannot go on like this always. I have had my dream life, and am sure that someday a dark cloud will come and wash it all away!"

The shadow she feared would destroy her dream life was World War II. In May 1940, Dorothy was in Florence to collect her mother and bring her back to France when Germany invaded Holland and Belgium. It would still have been possible for the two women to return to America. The reason they didn't? Certainly their experience on the Titanic was a factor. "I must say I never wanted to make the Ocean trip to America at this time," said Dorothy later in an affidavit, "as my mother and I were most timid on the ocean-we had been in a shipwreck-but I also never wanted to stay in Italy, but we just waited in Italy always hoping things would be better to travel."

Trying to make sense of Dorothy's life from this point onward is a difficult task. In the spring of 1944, while still in Florence with her mother, she was informed by the questura, the Italian police, that she would be taken to the German-controlled Fossoli internment center. She tried to escape, but on April 16 was arrested and taken to a Nazi concentration camp. After being moved around various camps, she was imprisoned at San Vittore, which she described as a "living death." It's most likely that Gibson would have died in this camp had it not been for the machinations of a double agent, Ugo Luca Osteria, known as Dr. Ugo, who wanted to infiltrate Allied intelligence in Switzerland (something he subsequently failed to do). Gibson was smuggled out of the camp under the pretense that she was a Nazi sympathizer and spy. Although the plan worked-she did escape and crossed into Switzerland-the experience left her understandably drained. After interrogation in Zurich, where she gave an affidavit to James G. Bell, vice consul of the American consulate general, she was judged too stupid to have been a genuine spy. In Bell's words, Dorothy "hardly seems bright enough to be useful in such capacity."

Dorothy tried to resume a normal life after this episode, but the trauma of her survival-first the Titanic, then a concentration camp-took its toll. After the war ended in 1945, she returned to Paris and enjoyed a few months at the Ritz, where, on February 17, 1946, she died in her suite, probably from a heart attack, at age 56.

The sinking of the world's most famous ship generated three waves of Titanic mania. The first, as we have seen, hit popular consciousness immediately after the disaster, resulting in Brulatour's newsreel, Dorothy Gibson's film Saved from the Titanic, a clutch of books written by survivors, poems like Edwin Drew's "The Chief Incidents of the Titanic Wreck" (published in May 1912) and Thomas Hardy's "The Convergence of the Twain" (June 1912), and a flurry of songs (112 different pieces of music inspired by the loss of the Titanic were copyrighted in America in 1912 alone).

The First World War, and then the Second quieted the Titanic storm; the loss of hundreds of thousands of men on the battlefields of Europe, the whole-scale destruction of cities and communities around the world, and Hitler's single-minded plan to wipe out an entire race of people, together with other "undesirables," placed the sinking of the ship, with its death toll of 1,500, toward the bottom end of the league of global tragedies.

The mid-1950s is generally considered to represent the second wave of Titanic fever. In the midst of the cold war-when there was a perceived threat that, at any moment, the world could end in nuclear Armageddon-the Titanic represented a containable, understandable tragedy. A mist of nostalgia hung over the disaster-nostalgia for a society that maintained fixed roles, in which each man and woman knew his or her place; for a certain gentility, or at least an imagined gentility, by which people behaved according to a strict set of rules; for a tragedy that gave its participants time to consider their fates.

The first full-scale movie representation of the disaster in the '50s was a melodrama called simply Titanic, starring one of the ruling queens of the "woman's picture," Barbara Stanwyck. She plays Julia Sturges, a woman in the midst of an emotional crisis. Trapped in an unhappy marriage to a cold but wealthy husband, Richard (Clifton Webb), she boards the Titanic with the intention of stealing their two children away from him.

The film, directed by Jean Negulesco, was not so much about the loss of the liner as the loss, and subsequent rekindling, of love. If the scenario-a broken marriage, a devious plan to separate children from their father, a revelation surrounding true parenthood-wasn't melodramatic enough, the charged emotional setting of the Titanic was used to heighten the sentiment.

It would be easy to assume that the plotline of the abducted children in producer and screenwriter Charles Brackett's Titanic was nothing more than the product of a Hollywood screenwriter's overheated imagination. Yet the story had its roots in real life. Immediately after the Carpathia docked in New York, it came to light that on board the liner were two young French boys-Lolo (Michel) and Momon (Edmond)-who had been kidnapped by their father (traveling on the Titanic under the assumed name Louis Hoffman). Fellow second-class passenger Madeleine Mellenger, who was 13 at the time, remembered the two dark-haired boys, one aged nearly 4, the other 2. "They sat at our table . . . and we wondered where their mamma was," she said. "It turned out that he [the father] was taking them away from 'mamma' to America." In an interview later in his life, Michel recalled the majesty of the Titanic. "A magnificent ship!" he said. "I remember looking down the length of the hull-the ship looked splendid. My brother and I played on the forward deck and were thrilled to be there. One morning, my father, my brother, and I were eating eggs in the second-class dining room. The sea was stunning. My feeling was one of total and utter well-being." On the night of the sinking, he remembered his father entering their cabin and gently awakening the two boys. "He dressed me very warmly and took me in his arms," he said. "A stranger did the same for my brother. When I think of it now, I am very moved. They knew they were going to die."

Despite this, the man calling himself Louis Hoffman-real name Michel Navratil-did everything in his power to help fellow passengers safely into the boats. "The last kindness . . . [he] did was to put my new shoes on and tie them for me," recalled Madeleine. She escaped to safety with her mother in Lifeboat 14, leaving the sinking ship at 1:30 a.m., but Michel Navratil had to wait until 2:05 a.m. to place his sons in Collapsible D, the last boat to be lowered. Witnesses recall seeing the man they knew as Hoffman crouching on his knees, ensuring that each of his boys was wrapped up warmly.

As he handed his elder son over to Second Officer Charles Herbert Lightoller, who was responsible for loading the boat, Michel stepped back, raised his hand in a salute and disappeared into the crowd on the port side of the ship. His son Michel later recalled the feel of the lifeboat hitting the water. "I remember the sound of the splash, and the sensation of shock, as the little boat shivered in its attempt to right itself after its irregular descent," he said.

After the Carpathia docked in New York, the two boys became instantly famous. Journalists dubbed the boys the "Orphans of the Deep" or the "Waifs of the Titanic " and within days their pictures were featured in every newspaper in America. Back in Nice, Marcelle Navratil, desperate to know about the fate of her children, appealed to the British and French consulates. She showed the envoys a photograph of Michel, and when it was learned that Thomas Cook and Sons in Monte Carlo had sold a second-class ticket to a Louis Hoffman-a name Navratil had borrowed from one of their neighbors in Nice-she began to understand what her estranged husband had done.

The White Star Line promptly offered their mother a complimentary passage to New York on the Oceanic, leaving Cherbourg on May 8. Only a matter of weeks later, Marcelle Navratil arrived in New York. A taxi took her to the Children's Aid Society, which had been besieged by photographers and reporters. According to a New York Times account, "The windows of the building opposite were lined with interested groups of shopworkers who had got wind of what was happening across the way and who were craning their necks and gesticulating wildly toward a window on the fifth floor where the children were believed to be." The young mother was allowed to greet her boys alone. She found Michel sitting in a corner of the room, in the window seat, turning the pages of an illustrated alphabet book. Edmond was on the floor, playing with the pieces of a puzzle.

When she entered, the boys looked anxious, but then, as they recognized their mother, a "growing wonder spread over the face of the bigger boy, while the smaller one stared in amazement at the figure in the doorway. He let out one long-drawn and lusty wail and ran blubbering into the outstretched arms of his mother. The mother was trembling with sobs and her eyes were dim with tears as she ran forward and seized both youngsters."

Although he passed away on January 30, 2001, at the age of 92, the last male survivor of the Titanic disaster, Michel always said, "I died at 4. Since then I have been a fare-dodger of life. A gleaner of time."

One of the most forthright and determined of the real Titanic voices belonged to Edith Russell, the then 32-year-old first-class passenger who had managed to get aboard one of the lifeboats, still clutching a possession she regarded as her lucky talisman-a toy musical pig that played the pop tune "La Maxixe."

Edith, a fashion buyer, journalist and stylist, had contacted producer Charles Brackett when she had first learned that the Barbara Stanwyck film was going to be made, outlining her experiences and offering her services. The letter elicited no response, as Brackett had decided not to speak to any individual survivors. The filmmakers were more interested in constructing their own story, one that would meet all the criteria of melodrama without getting bogged down by the real-life experiences of people like Edith.

The production team did, however, invite her-and a number of other survivors-to a preview of Titanic in New York in April 1953. It was an emotional experience for many of them, not least third-class passengers Leah Aks, who had been 18 at the time of the disaster, and her son, Philip, who had been only 10 months old. Edith recalled how, in the panic, the baby Philip had been torn out of his mother's arms and thrown into her lifeboat. Leah tried to push her way into this vessel, but was directed into the next lifeboat to leave the ship. Edith had done her best to comfort the baby during that long, cold night in the middle of the Atlantic-repeatedly playing the tune of "La Maxixe" by twisting the tail of her toy pig-before they were rescued.

The reunion brought all these memories back. "The baby, amongst other babies, for whom I played my little pig music box to the tune of 'Maxixe' was there," said Edith of the screening. "He [Philip] is forty-one years old, is a rich steel magnate from Norfolk, Virginia."

Edith enjoyed the event, she said, and had the opportunity of showing off the little musical pig, together with the dress she had worn on the night of the disaster. Edith congratulated Brackett on the film, yet, as a survivor, she said she had noticed some obvious errors. "There was a rather glaring inadequacy letting people take seats in the lifeboat as most of them had to get up on the rail and jump into the boat which swung clear of the side of the boat," she said. "The boat also went down with the most awful rapidity. It fairly shot into the water whereas yours gracefully slid into the water." Despite these points, she thought the film was "splendid"-she conceded he had done a "good job"-and, above all, it brought the night alive once more. "It gave me a heartache and I could still see the sailors changing the watches, crunching over the ice and going down to stoke those engines from where they never returned," she said.

After the melodrama of the Titanic film-the movie won an Academy Award in 1953 for its screenplay-the public wanted to know more about the doomed liner. The demand was satisfied by Walter Lord, a bespectacled advertising copywriter who worked for J. Walter Thompson in New York. As a boy, Lord, the son of a Baltimore lawyer, had sailed on the Titanic's sister ship, the Olympic. With an almost military precision-Lord had worked as both a code clerk in Washington and as an intelligence analyst in London during World War II-he amassed a mountain of material about the ship, and, most important, managed to locate, and interview, more than 60 survivors. The resulting book, A Night to Remember, is a masterpiece of restraint and concision, a work of narrative nonfiction that captures the full drama of the sinking. On its publication in the winter of 1955, the book was an immediate success-entering the New York Times best-seller list at Number 12 in the week of December 11-and since then has never been out of print. "In the creation of the Titanic myth there were two defining moments," wrote one commentator, "1912, of course, and 1955."

Madeleine Mellenger wrote to Lord himself, telling him of her emotions when the Carpathia pulled into New York. "The noise, commotion and searchlights terrified me," she said. "I stood on the deck directly under the rigging on which Captain Arthur Rostron climbed to yell orders thru' a megaphone....I live it all over again and shall walk around in a daze for a few days." Memories of the experience came back in flashes-the generosity of an American couple, honeymooners on board the Carpathia, who gave her mother, who was shoeless, a pair of beautiful French bedroom slippers, which were knitted and topped with big pink satin bows; and the horror of being forced to spend what seemed like an eternity in a cabin with a woman, Jane Laver Herman, who had lost her husband in the sinking.

Walter Lord became a receptacle into which survivors could spill their memories and fears. He, in turn, collected survivors' tales, and memorabilia such as buttons, menus, tickets and silver spoons, with a near-obsessive passion, hoarding information about the Titanic 's passengers long after he had sent his book off to the publishers.

There was a rush to transfer Lord's book to the screen, first in an American TV drama made by Kraft Television Theatre, which had an audience of 28 million when it aired in March 1956, and then in a big-budget British movie, which would be released in 1958. The rights to the book were bought by William MacQuitty, an Irish-born producer who, like Walter Lord, had been fascinated by the Titanic since he was a boy. As a child, growing up in Belfast, he remembered teams of 20 draft horses pulling the liner's enormous anchors through the cobbled streets of the city, from the foundry to the Harland and Wolff shipyard.

MacQuitty chose Roy Baker as director, Eric Ambler as scriptwriter and Walter Lord as a consultant on the project. The overall effect MacQuitty wanted to achieve was one of near-documentary realism. Art director Alex Vetchinsky employed his obsessive eye for detail to recreate the Titanic itself. Working from original blueprints of the ship, Vetchinsky built the center third of the liner, including two funnels and four lifeboats, an undertaking that required 4,000 tons of steel. This was constructed above a concrete platform, which had to be strong enough to support the "ship" and the surging mass of hundreds of passengers who were shown clinging to the rails to the very last.

Survivor Edith Russell still felt possessive of the Titanic story-she believed it was hers alone to tell-and she wanted to exploit it for all it was worth. She and Lord met in March 1957 at a lunch given by MacQuitty at a Hungarian restaurant in London. The gentleman writer and the grand lady of fashion hit it off immediately, drawn together by a shared passion for the Titanic and a sense of nostalgia, a longing for an era that had died somewhere between the sinking of the majestic liner and the beginning of World War I. Driven by an equally obsessive interest in the subject, Lord fueled Edith's compulsion, and over the course of the next few years he sent her a regular supply of information, articles and gossip regarding the ship and its passengers.

Edith made regular visits to Pinewood, the film studio near London, to check on the production's progress. Even though Edith was not employed on the project, MacQuitty was wise enough to realize there was little point in making an enemy of her.

In the years after A Night to Remember, the storm that had gathered around the Titanic seemed to abate, despite the best efforts of the Titanic Enthusiasts of America, the organization formed in 1963 with the purpose of "investigating and perpetuating the history and memory of the White Star liners, Olympic, Titanic, and Britannic." The group, which later renamed itself the Titanic Historical Society, produced a quarterly newsletter, the Titanic Commutator, which over the years was transformed into a glossy journal. Yet, at this time, the membership comprised a relatively small group of specialists, maritime history buffs and a clutch of survivors. By September 1973, when the group held its tenth anniversary meeting, the society had a membership of only 250. The celebration, held in Greenwich, Connecticut, was attended by 88-year-old Edwina Mackenzie, who had sailed on the Titanic as 27-year-old second-class passenger Edwina Troutt. After more than 60 years she still remembered seeing the liner sink, "one row of lighted portholes after another, gently like a lady," she said.

Many people assumed that, after 50 years, the liner, and the myths surrounding it, would finally be allowed to rest in peace. But in the early hours of September 1, 1985, oceanographer and underwater archaeologist Robert Ballard from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution-together with French explorer Jean-Louis Michel from the French organization Ifremer-discovered the wreck of the Titanic lying at a depth of roughly two and half miles, and around 370 miles southeast of Mistaken Point, Newfoundland. "The Titanic lies now in 13,000 feet of water on a gently sloping Alpine-looking countryside overlooking a small canyon below," said Ballard, on returning to America a number of days later. "Its bow faces north. The ship sits upright on its bottom with its mighty stacks pointed upward. There is no light at this great depth and little life can be found. It is a quiet and peaceful place-and a fitting place for the remains of this greatest of sea tragedies to rest. Forever may it remain that way. And may God bless these now-found souls."

The world went Titanic-crazy once more, a frenzy that was even more intense than the previous bouts of fever. There was something almost supernatural about the resulting pictures and films, as if a photographer had managed to capture images of a ghost for the first time.

Within a couple of years of Ballard's discovery, wealthy tourists could pay thousands of dollars to descend to the site of the wreck and see the Titanic for themselves, an experience that many likened to stepping into another world. Journalist William F. Buckley Jr. was one of the first observers outside the French and American exploratory teams to witness the ship at close quarters. "We descend slowly to what looks like a yellow-white sandy beach, sprinkled with black rocklike objects," he wrote in the New York Times. "These, it transpires, are pieces of coal. There must be 100,000 of them in the area we survey, between the bow of the ship and the stern, a half-mile back. On my left is a man's outdoor shoe. Left shoe. Made, I would say, of suede of some sort. I cannot quite tell whether it is laced up. And then, just off to the right a few feet, a snow-white teacup. Just sitting there...on the sand. I liken the sheer neatness of the tableau to a display that might have been prepared for a painting by Salvador Dali."

Over the course of the next few years, around 6,000 artifacts were recovered from the wreck, sent to a specialist laboratory in France and subsequently exhibited. The shows-the first of which was held at the National Maritime Museum in London in 1994- proved to be enormous crowd-pleasers. Touring exhibitions such as "Titanic Honour and Glory" and "Titanic: The Artifact Exhibition" have been seen by millions of people all around the world. Items on display include a silver pocket watch, its hands stopped at 2:28 a.m., the time the Titanic was sinking into the ice-cold waters of the Atlantic; the Steiff teddy bear belonging to senior engineer William Moyes, who went down with the ship; the perfume vials belonging to Adolphe Saalfeld, a Manchester perfumer, who survived the disaster and who would have been astonished to learn that it was still possible to smell the scent of orange blossom and lavender nearly 100 years later. There were cut-crystal decanters etched with the swallowtail flag of the White Star Line; the white jacket of Athol Broome, a 30-year-old steward who did not survive; children's marbles scooped up from the seafloor; brass buttons bearing the White Star insignia; a selection of silver serving plates and gratin dishes; a pair of spectacles; and a gentleman's shaving kit. These objects of everyday life brought the great ship-and its passengers-back to life as never before.

After returning to Britain, Millvina grew up to lead what, at first sight, seems to be an uneventful life. Then, Ballard made his discovery. "Nobody knew about me and the Titanic, to be honest, nobody took any interest, so I took no interest either," she said. "But then they found the wreck, and after they found the wreck, they found me."

This was followed in 1997 by the release of James Cameron's blockbuster film, Titanic, starring Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio as two lovers from vastly different backgrounds who meet on board the doomed ship. Suddenly, in old age, Millvina was famous once more. "The telephone rang all day long," she told me. "I think I spoke to every radio station in England. Everybody wanted interviews. Then I wished I had never been on the Titanic, it became too much at times."

In the same way, Millvina was often asked to repeat her story of that night, but her account was secondhand, most of it pieced together from what her mother had told her, along with fragments from newspapers and magazines.

The Titanic came to represent a ship of dreams for Millvina, a vessel that would take her on a surreal journey. She transformed herself not only into a celebrity but also, as she freely admitted, into a piece of "living history." "For many people I somehow represent the Titanic," she said.

After a short illness, Millvina died on May 31, 2009; at 97, she had been the last survivor of the Titanic.

A few weeks after the Titanic disaster, Thomas Hardy wrote "The Convergence of the Twain," his famous poem about the conjunction between the sublime iceberg and the majestic liner. First published in Fortnightly Review in June 1912, it articulates the "intimate wedding" between a natural phenomenon and a symbol of the machine age. The marriage of the "shape of ice" and the "smart ship" is described as a "consummation," a grotesque union that "jars two hemispheres." One hundred years after the sinking we are still feeling the aftershocks of the wreck as the "twin halves" of this "august event" continue to fascinate and disturb us in equal measure.

Indeed, the disaster has become so invested with mythical status-it's been said that the name Titanic is the third most widely recognized word in the world, after "God" and "Coca-Cola"-that it almost seems to be a constant, an event that repeats itself on a never-ending loop.

Andrew Wilson, based in London, drew on unpublished sources and archival research for his new book on the Titanic saga.

Copyright © 2012 by Andrew Wilson. From the forthcoming book Shadow of the Titanic by Andrew Wilson to be published by Atria Books, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. Printed by permission.

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Dorothy Gibson-the 22-year-old silent film star- huddled in a lifeboat, dressed in only a short coat and sweater over an evening gown. She was beginning to shiver. Ever since it had been launched, at 12:45 a.m., Lifeboat 7 had remained stationed only 20 yards away from the Titanic in case it could be used in a rescue operation.

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Not sure what makes a HSC Modern History historical source useful or reliable?

Not sure how to actually get 10/10 marks for a source analysis in HSC Modern History?

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Step 1: What is the question asking?

The first thing you need to do is find out what the question is asking.
A typical HSC question will ask 'Assess the usefulness of Sources X and Y to a historian studying _____".
It is the end of that question that is important as it will normally be straight from a syllabus dot point.

Skeptical? Let me prove it to you - check out these previous HSC questions below and their corresponding syllabus dot points!

How useful would Sources C and E be for a historian studying the nature of trench warfare? In your answer, consider the perspectives provided by the two sources and the reliability of each one.

Syllabus Point: The nature of trench warfare and life in the trenches dealing with experiences of Allied and German soldiers

How useful would Sources E and F be for a historian studying the impact of total war on civilians in Britain and Germany? In your answer, consider the perspectives provided by the TWO sources and the reliability of each one.

Syllabus Point: Total war and its social and economic impact on civilians in Britain and Germany

How useful would Sources A and D be for a historian studying recruitment and propaganda in Britain and Germany? In your answer, consider the perspectives provided by the TWO sources and the reliability of each one.

Syllabus Point: Recruitment, conscription, censorship and propaganda in Britain and Germany

Step 2: Use an analysis checklist

Many students struggle with source analysis questions for HSC Modern History, so we've included a great acronym to help you remember what to discuss and in what order!

Depending on the source, addressing each of the above points should require 1-2 sentences.

So 1-2 sentences for origin, 1-2 sentences about motive, and so on. This means you should have at least 7-14 sentences in your final answer.
To help you out, we're going to give you an example of how to analyse a source using OMCAPUR.
But first, download your HSC Modern History Source Analysis PDF Guide!

Example:
Source D from the 2014 HSC Past Paper

Origin - what is the origin of this source?

Is source primary or secondary?

When was the source created?

Who created the source?

Motive - what was the motive behind the source?

Why did the author create the source?

Was it to document an event, write a historical summery on an event, give their opinion and/or to sway an audience?

Why was the source created?

Here you can also bring in bias if appropriate.

For example, a propaganda poster is created in order to influence public opinion on a matter according to an agenda. The source would be highly biased, as it was not created based solely on neutral facts.

Content - what content is presented in the source?

What is in the foreground?

What is in the background?

How are the figures positioned?

What kind of symbolism has the composer used?

What do these symbols represent?

Tell the reader what the source contains.

Audience - what is the intended audience of the source?

This links to motive, as you must answer who the intended audience of the source is which is often considered when creating a source.

Who is the intended viewer?

In what context would they arise?

Where would they be likely to view this?

What would they be doing with the information?

If it is a historian it is likely that the audience is the general public or an academic circle.

If the source is a diary entry it is highly likely that the intended audience was either solely to author or their family.

Considering the audience is very important, as it will also reveal elements of bias that may be present in the source.

Perspective - what perspective is presented in the source?

What opinions or belief statements are evident in the article?

What is the source's or the composers'/'s context?

Would another source/composer have a different point of view depending on his/her background experiences?

What opinions does the source/composer paint for a reader?

What facts were missing?

What words and phrases did the source/author use to present the information?

Why is the source presented in such a way, or why does the author present it in such a way?

This considers whether a source is objective or subjective.

Perspective is extremely important as it helps establish your two most important arguments of the paragraph reliability and perspective.

Reliability - is it a reliable source of information?

Is the source consistent with data available about the topic?

Are there other sources which could validate the information given from this source?

Does it have scholarly credibility? Where was it published? How was it published?

Does the source fulfil an agenda? (i.e. was the source produced for an opinion/stance, or was the stance a product from the source?)

For a source to be considered reliable it must contain accurate historical information.
This means that a source can be written in a completely subjective manner and still be considered reliable, as all facts are accurate.

Usefulness - is this a useful source of information?

All sources a useful whether or not they are reliable. In order to concisely answer whether a source is 'useful', consider the three R's:

Is the source relevant to what is being asked?

Has the source revealed an insight into the question?

Is the source reliable in providing the information required to answer the question?

Don't forget to download your HSC Modern History Source Analysis PDF Guide!

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Milana Gusavac thought she had seen the end of HSC until she realised that others out there needed help surviving year 12 just like she had. Now she's a member of the Art of Smart team while perusing her studies at the University of Sydney, studying a Bachelor of Psychology. When not learning or helping other's Milana can be found with her nose in a book or marathoning TV shows.

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How to Write a 10/10 HSC Modern History Source Analysis

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Not sure what makes a HSC Modern History historical source useful or reliable? Not sure how to actually get 10/10 marks for a source analysis in HSC Modern History? We've got you covered with a step by step guide to writing a 10/10 HSC Modern History source analysis!

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Passengers of the RMS Titanic - Wikipedia

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On the night of 14 April 1912, around 11:40 pm, while the RMS Titanic was sailing about 400 mi (640 km) south of the Grand Banks of Newfoundland, the ship struck an iceberg and began to sink. Shortly before midnight, Captain Edward Smith ordered the ship's lifeboats to be readied and a distress call was sent out.

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Home World History Accidents & Disasters
Table of Contents

in full:

Royal Mail Ship (RMS) Titanic

(Show more)

Why did the Titanic sink?

How many people died when the Titanic sank?

Where is the wreck of the Titanic?

Why is the Titanic famous?

Titanic, British luxury passenger liner that sank on April 14-15, 1912, during its maiden voyage, en route to New York City from Southampton, England, killing about 1,500 ( see Researcher's Note: Titanic) passengers and ship personnel. One of the most famous tragedies in modern history, it inspired numerous stories, several films, and a musical and has been the subject of much scholarship and scientific speculation.

Origins and construction

In the early 1900s the transatlantic passenger trade was highly profitable and competitive, with ship lines vying to transport wealthy travelers and immigrants. Two of the chief lines were White Star and Cunard. By the summer of 1907, Cunard seemed poised to increase its share of the market with the debut of two new ships, the Lusitania and the Mauretania, which were scheduled to enter service later that year. The two passenger liners were garnering much attention for their expected speed; both would later set speed records crossing the Atlantic Ocean. Looking to answer his rival, White Star chairman J. Bruce Ismay reportedly met with William Pirrie, who controlled the Belfast shipbuilding firm Harland and Wolff, which constructed most of White Star's vessels. The two men devised a plan to build a class of large liners that would be known for their comfort instead of their speed. It was eventually decided that three vessels would be constructed: the Olympic, the Titanic, and the Britannic.

On March 31, 1909, some three months after work began on the Olympic, the keel was laid for the Titanic. The two ships were built side by side in a specially constructed gantry that could accommodate their unprecedented size. The sister ships were largely designed by Thomas Andrews of Harland and Wolff. In addition to ornate decorations, the Titanic featured an immense first-class dining saloon, four elevators, and a swimming pool. Its second-class accommodations were comparable to first-class features on other ships, and its third-class offerings, although modest, were still noted for their relative comfort.

Understanding the Titanic Disaster

As to safety elements, the Titanic had 16 compartments that included doors which could be closed from the bridge, so that water could be contained in the event the hull was breached. Although they were presumed to be watertight, the bulkheads were not capped at the top. The ship's builders claimed that four of the compartments could be flooded without endangering the liner's buoyancy. The system led many to claim that the Titanic was unsinkable.

Following completion of the hull and main superstructure, the Titanic was launched on May 31, 1911. It then began the fitting-out phase, as machinery was loaded into the ship and interior work began. After the Olympic's maiden voyage in June 1911, slight changes were made to the Titanic's design. In early April 1912 the Titanic underwent its sea trials, after which the ship was declared seaworthy.

As it prepared to embark on its maiden voyage, the Titanic was one of the largest and most opulent ships in the world. It had a gross registered tonnage (i.e., carrying capacity) of 46,328 tons, and when fully laden the ship displaced (weighed) more than 52,000 tons. The Titanic was approximately 882.5 feet (269 metres) long and about 92.5 feet (28.2 metres) wide at its widest point.

Maiden voyage

On April 10, 1912, the Titanic set sail on its maiden voyage, traveling from Southampton, England, to New York City. Nicknamed the "Millionaire's Special," the ship was fittingly captained by Edward J. Smith, who was known as the "Millionaire's Captain" because of his popularity with wealthy passengers. Indeed, onboard were a number of prominent people, including American businessman Benjamin Guggenheim, British journalist William Thomas Stead, and Macy's department store co-owner Isidor Straus and his wife, Ida. In addition, Ismay and Andrews were also traveling on the Titanic.

The voyage nearly began with a collision, however, when suction from the Titanic caused the docked New York to swing into the giant liner's path. After an hour of maneuverings to prevent the accident, the Titanic was under way. On the evening of April 10 the ship stopped at Cherbourg, France. The city's dock was too small to accommodate the Titanic, so passengers had to be ferried to and from the ship in tenders. Among those boarding were John Jacob Astor and his pregnant second wife, Madeleine, and Molly Brown. After some two hours the Titanic resumed its journey. On the morning of April 11 the liner made its last scheduled stop in Europe, at Queenstown ( Cobh), Ireland. At approximately 1:30 pm the ship set sail for New York City. Onboard were some 2,200 people, approximately 1,300 of whom were passengers.

Final hours

Throughout much of the voyage, the wireless radio operators on the Titanic, Jack Phillips and Harold Bride, had been receiving iceberg warnings, most of which were passed along to the bridge. The two men worked for the Marconi Company, and much of their job was relaying passengers' messages. On the evening of April 14 the Titanic began to approach an area known to have icebergs. Smith slightly altered the ship's course to head farther south. However, he maintained the ship's speed of some 22 knots. At approximately 9:40 pm the Mesaba sent a warning of an ice field. The message was never relayed to the Titanic's bridge. At 10:55 pm the nearby Leyland liner Californian sent word that it had stopped after becoming surrounded by ice. Phillips, who was handling passenger messages, scolded the Californian for interrupting him.

Two lookouts, Frederick Fleet and Reginald Lee, were stationed in the crow's nest of the Titanic. Their task was made difficult by the fact that the ocean was unusually calm that night: because there would be little water breaking at its base, an iceberg would be more difficult to spot. In addition, the crow's nest's binoculars were missing. At approximately 11:40 pm, about 400 nautical miles (740 km) south of Newfoundland, Canada, an iceberg was sighted, and the bridge was notified. First Officer William Murdoch ordered both the ship "hard-a-starboard"-a maneuver that under the order system then in place would turn the ship to port (left)-and the engines reversed. The Titanic began to turn, but it was too close to avoid a collision. The ship's starboard side scraped along the iceberg. At least five of its supposedly watertight compartments toward the bow were ruptured. After assessing the damage, Andrews determined that, as the ship's forward compartments filled with water, its bow would drop deeper into the ocean, causing water from the ruptured compartments to spill over into each succeeding compartment, thereby sealing the ship's fate. The Titanic would founder. (By reversing the engines, Murdoch actually caused the Titanic to turn slower than if it had been moving at its original speed. Most experts believe the ship would have survived if it had hit the iceberg head-on.)

Smith ordered Phillips to begin sending distress signals, one of which reached the Carpathia at approximately 12:20 am on April 15, and the Cunard ship immediately headed toward the stricken liner. However, the Carpathia was some 58 nautical miles (107 km) away when it received the signal, and it would take more than three hours to reach the Titanic. Other ships also responded, including the Olympic, but all were too far away. A vessel was spotted nearby, but the Titanic was unable to contact it. The Californian was also in the vicinity, but its wireless had been turned off for the night.

As attempts were made to contact nearby vessels, the lifeboats began to be launched, with orders of women and children first. Although the Titanic's number of lifeboats exceeded that required by the British Board of Trade, its 20 boats could carry only 1,178 people, far short of the total number of passengers. This problem was exacerbated by lifeboats being launched well below capacity, because crewmen worried that the davits would not be able to support the weight of a fully loaded boat. (The Titanic had canceled its scheduled lifeboat drill earlier in the day, and the crew was unaware that the davits had been tested in Belfast.) Lifeboat number 7, which was the first to leave the Titanic, held only about 27 people, though it had space for 65. In the end, only 705 people would be rescued in lifeboats.

As passengers waited to enter lifeboats, they were entertained by the Titanic's musicians, who initially played in the first-class lounge before eventually moving to the ship's deck. Sources differ on how long they performed, some reporting that it was until shortly before the ship sank. Speculation also surrounded the last song they performed-likely either Autumn or Nearer My God to Thee. None of the musicians survived the sinking.

By 1:00 am water was seen at the base (E deck) of the Grand Staircase. Amid the growing panic, several male passengers tried to board lifeboat number 14, causing Fifth Officer Harold Lowe to fire his gun three times. Around this time, Phillips's distress calls reflected a growing desperation as one noted that the ship "cannot last much longer."

As the Titanic's bow continued to sink, the stern began to rise out of the water, placing incredible strain on the midsection. At about 2:00 am the stern's propellers were clearly visible above the water, and the only lifeboats that remained on the ship were three collapsible boats. Smith released the crew, saying that "it's every man for himself." (He was reportedly last seen in the bridge, and his body was never found.) At approximately 2:18 am the lights on the Titanic went out. It then broke in two, with the bow going underwater. Reports later speculated that it took some six minutes for that section, likely traveling at approximately 30 miles (48 km) per hour, to reach the ocean bottom. The stern momentarily settled back in the water before rising again, eventually becoming vertical. It briefly remained in that position before beginning its final plunge. At 2:20 am the ship foundered as the stern also disappeared beneath the Atlantic. Water pressure allegedly caused that section, which still had air inside, to implode as it sank.

Hundreds of passengers and crew went into the icy water. Fearful of being swamped, those in the lifeboats delayed returning to pick up survivors. By the time they rowed back, almost all the people in the water had died from exposure. In the end, more than 1,500 perished. Aside from the crew, which had about 700 fatalities, third class suffered the greatest loss: of approximately 710, only some 174 survived. (Subsequent claims that passengers in steerage were prevented from boarding boats, however, were largely dispelled. Given Smith's failure to sound a general alarm, some third-class passengers did not realize the direness of the situation until it was too late. Many women also refused to leave their husbands and sons, while the difficulty of simply navigating the complex Titanic from the lower levels caused some to reach the top deck after most of the lifeboats had been launched.)
Read our timeline of the Titanic's final hours.

Rescue

The Carpathia arrived in the area at approximately 3:30 am, more than an hour after the Titanic sank. Lifeboat number 2 was the first to reach the liner. Over the next several hours the Carpathia picked up all survivors. White Star chairman Ismay wrote a message to be sent to the White Star Line's offices: "Deeply regret advise you Titanic sank this morning fifteenth after collision iceberg, resulting serious loss life; further particulars later." At approximately 8:30 am the Californian arrived, having heard the news some three hours earlier. Shortly before 9:00 am the Carpathia headed for New York City, where it arrived to massive crowds on April 18.

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Titanic | History, Sinking, Rescue, Survivors, Movies, & Facts

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Titanic, British luxury passenger liner that sank on April 14-15, 1912, during its maiden voyage, en route to New York City from Southampton, England, killing about 1,500 people. One of the most famous tragedies in modern history, it inspired numerous works of art and has been the subject of much scholarship.

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Before the R.M.S Titanic set out on her maiden voyage, film footage was taken while the passenger liner was under construction in the Thompson Dry Dock at Belfast.

Nearly 20 years after first finding the sunken remains of the R.M.S. Titanic, marine explorer Robert Ballard returned in June 2004 helped by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Office of Ocean Exploration to study the ship's rapid deterioration.

What really happened the night that the Titanic sank? Was the Titanic really built to be "unsinkable?" What happened to passengers in the first, second, and third class areas as the ship began to sink?

Diagram of the Titanic from the British "Report on the Loss of the Steamship 'Titanic,'" which analyzed the sequence of events when the ship and iceberg collided.

The following are a selection of primary resources available at the Enoch Pratt Free Library/SLRC that include first-hand accounts of Titanic survivors and British and American government inquiries into the cause and circumstances of the collision, rescue efforts, and life-and-death decisions during the Titanic disaster.

Pratt Picks: Sinking of the Titanic - Staff Recommendations for more good reading and viewing on the Titanic

Accounts by Survivors

Gracie, Archibald. Titanic. Chicago: Academy Chicago Publishers, 1986. G530.T6G7 1986.

Memoir by Titanic passenger Colonel Archibald Gracie who initiated his own inquiry by interviewing other survivors. The second half of the book contains excerpts from American hearings on the Titanic disaster in 1912.

Jessop, Violet. Titanic Survivor: The Newly Discovered Memoirs of Violet Jessop Who Survived Both the Titanic and Britannic Disasters. Edited by John Maxtone-Graham. Dobbs Ferry, NY: Sheridan House, 1997. G530.J45 J47 1997.

Memoir written in 1934 by a ship stewardess who survived the Titanic sinking.

Winocour, Jack, ed. The Story of the Titanic: As Told by Its Survivors, Lawrence Beesley, Archibald Gracie, Commander Lightoller, Harold Bride. New York: Dover, 1960. G530.T6W57 [1960]

Four accounts by Titanic survivors: two originally published in 1912, one in 1913, and one in 1935.

Newspaper and Magazine Accounts

Caren, Eric, and Steve Goldman, eds. Extra Titanic: the Story of the Disaster in the Newspapers of the Day: From the Collections of Eric Caren and Steve Goldman. Edison, NJ: Castle Books, 1998. G530.T6E95 1998q.

Consists entirely of photocopies of newspaper pages and some full-page photographs from the time of the Titanic sinking.

The Pratt Library Periodicals Department has the following newspaper and magazine articles published at the time of the Titanic that tell about the launching, voyage, and sinking of the ship, as well survivors' stories:

"866 Total Saved From Wreck; Virginian Failed to Rescue: Death List of Titanic Now 1,492." Evening Sun, April 16, 1912, p. 1+.

This article corrects the misinformation reported by the previous day's Evening Sun, which stated that the Titanic and its passengers were safe.

"All Titanic Passengers Are Safe; Transferred in Lifeboats at Sea." Evening Sun, April 15, 1912, p. 1+.

This famous headline and article reported that all the Titanic's passengers were safe and that the ship Virginian was towing the Titanic to Halifax, Nova Scotia. This article shows that early reports of an historical event may be inaccurate or misleading.

Coit, Stanton. "The Rescued, by an Eyewitness on the Carpathia." Outlook, vol. 100, April 27, 1912, pp. 894-895.

Dr. Coit wrote this account of the rescue of the Titanic survivors within days of the event.

Gracie, Archibald. "Out of the Wreck." Outlook, vol. 100, April 27, 1912, pp. 895-897.

Colonel Gracie, an aide to President Taft, provided this harrowing account of his experiences in the hours after the ship struck the iceberg.

Griffin, Henry Farrand. "Sixteen Boats and a Quiet Sea." Outlook, vol. 100, April 27, 1912, pp. 898-905.

This article pinpoints the insufficient number of lifeboats as a primary cause of the loss of life.

Inglis, William. "Greatest of Sea Tragedies." Harper's Weekly, vol. 56, no. 2887, April 20, 1912, pp. 28-30.

This early account of the sinking of the Titanic and the rescue of its surviving passengers was written prior to the arrival of the rescue ship Carpathia in New York harbor.

"New Liner Titanic Hits an Iceberg; Sinking by the Bow at Midnight; Women Put Off in Life Boats; Last Wireless at 12:27 A.M. Blurred." New York Times, April 15, 1912, p. 1+.

One of the most accurate early reports was this New York Times article that appeared within hours of the last wireless communication from the ship. At this point the extent of the disaster was still not clear to anyone but the survivors in the lifeboats.

Taylor. D. W. "Lessons From the 'Titanic' Disaster." Popular Mechanics Magazine, vol. 17, no. 6, June 1912, pp. 797-808.

This in-depth analysis of what might have prevented this maritime disaster includes some interesting photos and illustrations.

Government Documents (Investigations)

Great Britain, Parliament. Report on the Loss of the S.S. Titanic. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1990. VK1255.T6R47 1990q.

Presents details about the Titanic, the rescue effort, and evidence of the damage from the iceberg. The court states its findings and recommendations.

United States. Congress. Senate. Committee on Commerce. "Titanic" Disaster. Hearings Before a Subcommittee of the Committee on Commerce, United States Senate...Pursuant to S.Res. 283, Directing the Committee on Commerce to Investigate the Causes Leading to the Wreck of the White Liner "Titanic" April 19-May 25, 1912. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1912. VK1255.T5A5

Titanic Websites

Encyclopedia Titanica - Looking for statistics on the Titanic? How about lists of passengers, crew members, and survivors? You'll find it all here at Encyclopedia Titanica

Expedition Titanic: Return to the Deep - This resource, a product of RMS Titanic, Inc., uses new technology to give us a real sense of what it would be like to explore the Titanic in its watery graveyard.

NOAA Ocean Explorer: RMS Titanic Expedition 2004 - Nearly 20 years after first finding the sunken remains of the R.M.S. Titanic, marine explorer Robert Ballard returned in June 2004 helped by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Office of Ocean Exploration to study the ship's rapid deterioration. Don't miss the dramatic (and eerie) video.

"Titanic" Disaster Report of the U.S. Senate 1912 - A total of 82 witnesses testified before a special U.S. Congressional subcommittee about ice warnings that were ignored, the inadequate number of lifeboats, the ship's speed, the failure of nearby ships to respond to the Titanic's distress calls, and the treatment of passengers of different classes.

Titanic Historical Society - The Titanic Historical Society maintains a museum in Indian Orchard, Massachusetts. Although the website features lots of merchandise, it also offers some useful articles and information.

Titanic Universe - This well-designed web resource features articles on the construction, sinking, and wreckage of the Titanic. You'll also find a fascinating collection of Titanic artifacts and videos.

Titanica - This website at the Ulster Folk and Transport Museum offers many details about the Titanic, including personal stories and 500 original artifacts.

UK National Archives - Read stories from passengers and search the passenger and crew list. Explore the Titanic timeline. Watch video's with historians discussing the Titanic.

Ask Us

If you would like more information on the Titanic, e-mail us through our
Ask A Librarian service or contact the Social Science and History Department .

Social Science and History Department
Enoch Pratt Free Library
Maryland's State Library Resource Center
400 Cathedral Street
Baltimore, MD 21201
(410) 396-5321

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Before the R.M.S Titanic set out on her maiden voyage, film footage was taken while the passenger liner was under construction in the Thompson Dry Dock at Belfast. Nearly 20 years after first finding the sunken remains of the R.M.S.

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1,500 people died in the disaster

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The Titanic had 3,300 passengers on board, 900 of them being crew.

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The Truth About the Titanic Has Been Revealed

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Eva Hart describes escaping the sinking Titanic, 1985

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The Titanic sunk on the 15th os April 1912.

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These are letters from the Titanic disaster. Some of the letters were written on board the Titanic. Some were written before or after the disaster. All are historically important and quite fascinating.

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For decades after the disaster, there was little doubt about what sank the Titanic. When the "unsinkable" ship, the largest, most luxurious ocean liner of its time, crashed into an iceberg on its maiden voyage in 1912, it took more than 1,500 of its 2,200 passengers to the bottom. As the ship slipped into the North Atlantic, so, too, did the secret of how and why it sank.

Two government investigations conducted immediately after the disaster agreed it was the iceberg, not any weakness in the ship itself, that caused the Titanic to sink. Both inquiries concluded the vessel had gone to the bottom intact. Blame for the incident fell on the ship's deceased captain, E. J. Smith, who was condemned for racing at 22 knots through a known ice field in the dark waters off the coast of Newfoundland. The case of the Titanic was considered closed.

But lingering questions about what might have sunk the seemingly indestructible ship never completely disappeared. In 1985, when oceanographer Robert Ballard, after years of searching, finally located the ship's remains 2.5 miles down on the ocean bottom, he discovered that it had, in fact, broken in two on the surface before sinking. His findings made the Titanic rise again in the public imagination. Why had it cracked, experts wondered? If the official inquiries were wrong, was the invincible Titanic weak? A few years after Ballard discovered the wreck, the first pieces of the ship were brought to the surface, raising even more eyebrows when they seemed to offer physical evidence that low-quality steel might have caused the disaster. In 1997, James Cameron's film Titanic, largely mirroring the scientific consensus at the time, seared Titanic's terrifying last moments, with its stern soaring high into the air before it cracked in two and disappeared, into popular memory.

Still, the search for answers about the Titanic didn't end there. In two new books, a group of historians, naval architects, and materials scientists argue that fresh evidence has further unraveled the familiar story of the Titanic, raising more questions about what caused the disaster. In What Really Sank the Titanic: New Forensic Discoveries, Jennifer Hooper McCarty, a materials scientist at Oregon Health and Science University, and Tim Foecke, a scientist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, make the case that it wasn't the ship's steel that was weak; it was the rivets, the all-important metal pins that held the steel hull plates together. Titanic's Last Secrets, to be published next month, describes the work of Richie Kohler and John Chatterton, wreck-diving historians who believe two recently discovered pieces of the Titanic's bottom prove the ship's stern never rose high in the air the way many Titanic experts, including Cameron, originally believed. The two divers, whose discovery of a lost German U-boat was chronicled in the book Shadow Divers, say the ship broke up and sank while still relatively flat on the surface-a potential sign of weakness, they believe, that was covered up after the disaster.

When the Titanic's keel was laid down in 1909, Harland & Wolff, the Belfast shipbuilder that constructed the ship, certainly didn't believe its design would still be controversial a hundred years later. Built in response to a rival company's construction of a new generation of fast liners, Titanic and her sister ships, Olympic and Britannic, were the biggest ships ever made-from bow to stern, they were almost 900 feet long, dwarfing even the world's biggest skyscrapers. Specially outfitted to handle the challenges of the North Atlantic, including big waves and major collisions, they were also supposed to be among the safest. The Titanic could stay afloat with four of its 16 watertight compartments flooded, more than anyone could imagine on a ship of its size.

On the night of April 14, 1912, though, only a few days into the Titanic's maiden voyage, its Achilles' heel was exposed. The ship wasn't nimble enough to avoid an iceberg that lookouts spotted (the only way to detect icebergs at the time) at the last minute in the darkness. As the ice bumped along its starboard side, it punched holes in the ship's steel plates, flooding six compartments. In a little over two hours, the Titanic filled with water and sank.

Low quality. More than 70 years passed before scientists were able to study the first physical evidence of the wreck. As luck would have it, the first piece of steel pulled up from the bottom seemed to put an end to the mystery. When the steel was placed in ice water and hit with a hammer, it shattered. For much of the 1990s, scientists thought this "brittle" steel was responsible for the massive flooding. Only recently has testing on other, bigger pieces of the ship disproved this theory. The original piece, scientists discovered, had been unusually weak, while the rest of Titanic's steel passed the tests. "We know now there was nothing wrong with the steel," says William Garzke, chairman of a forensics panel formed by the Society of Naval Architects and Marine Engineers to investigate the wreck.

Experts looking for explanations landed on another potentially weak link: The more than 3 million rivets holding the ship together. McCarty and Foecke began examining 48 rivets brought up from the wreck and found they contained high concentrations of "slag," a residue of smelting that can make metal fracture prone. Researching in the Harland & Wolff archives, they discovered that the shipbuilder's ambitious plans to build three large ships at the same time had put a huge strain on its shipyard. "Not because of cost, but because of time pressures, they started using lower-quality material to fill the gaps," says Foecke. This substandard iron was pounded by hand into the ship's bow and stern, where the large machines required to pound in steel rivets didn't fit. Steel rivets, meanwhile, which are much stronger than iron, were put in the more-accessible middle of the ship.

When the Titanic hit the iceberg, McCarty and Foecke say, the weaker iron rivets in the bow popped, opening seams in the hull-and hurrying the ship's demise. It's no accident, Foecke says, that the flooding stopped at the point in the hull where the steel rivets began.

Harland & Wolff, now an engineering and design firm, flatly rejects the notion that its rivets were weak. Tom McCluskie, the company's retired archivist, points out that Olympic, Titanic's sister ship, was riveted with the same iron and served without incident for 25 years, surviving several major collisions, including being rammed by a British cruiser. "Olympic deliberately rammed a German submarine during the First World War and cut it in half," says McCluskie. "She was plenty strong." The Britannic sank after hitting a mine during World War I. Both ships were strengthened after the Titanic disaster with double hulls and taller bulkheads, but their rivets were never changed.

Stronger rivets might have slowed the sinking process, but once water began flooding six of the Titanic's compartments, it was only a matter of time before the ship went down. Questions remain, though, about exactly how and why the ship ultimately broke apart and sank. In 2005, an expedition organized by Kohler and Chatterton found a new clue. Wandering away from the main wreckage site, they stumbled upon two large pieces of the ship's bottom on the ocean floor. Closer examination revealed the two hull sections had split exactly where the ship broke in two, making them a possible key to the mystery of the ship's final moments. Simon Mills, an Olympic-class-ship historian who advised the divers, calls the find "very likely the most interesting piece of Titanic research to be carried out in the last 20 years."

When Roger Long, a naval architect hired to accompany the expedition, began analyzing the edges of the hull pieces, he came to a surprising conclusion. It was impossible, he believed, for the ship to have broken up the way experts for two decades believed it did, with the stern rising up to a 45-degree angle before the ship's hull split. "There are a lot of very contradictory things you can see in the pieces," he says. "But the only scenario I could come up with to explain all of the contradictions was that the ship broke at a very shallow angle." Close examination of the pieces showed that they had been interrupted in the middle of tearing apart-a sign, Long says, that the ship was still at a low-enough angle (he estimates only 11 degrees) that its stern could regain buoyancy as it began to crack. If the back of the ship had been raised out of the water at a 45-degree angle, as depicted in Cameron's movie, once the stern tore off, nothing would have stopped it, and the hull pieces would have torn in two.

Why does it matter exactly how the ship broke in two? For Titanic's passengers, it may have been the difference between life and death. "In the movie, the stern rises up and [then] sinks," says Chatterton. "It's this protracted, dramatic experience." But in Long's scenario, the ship may have tilted over only slightly as the bow filled with water, giving those on board a false sense of security. "If you're standing on the deck with 10 degrees of incline, and they're saying 'Quick, everyone into the lifeboats,' you're thinking, 'You know, things aren't looking so bad here, maybe I can just stay in the bar,' " says Chatterton. "The passengers and many of the crew didn't understand the seriousness of the situation they were in." Of course, since the Titanic had enough lifeboats for only half its passengers, many people were never going to make it off the ship alive. When the bow filled with enough water, Long says, the ship split in two and sank in a matter of minutes.

Interestingly, much of the survivor testimony seems to confirm this sequence of events. Charlie Joughin, Titanic's chief baker, said that he had been standing near the stern when the ship went under, but he reported none of the signs of a high-angle break. No suction, no big splash, and no roller-coaster ride to the surface. He said he swam away from the ship without even getting his hair wet. Unlike in the Cameron film, there was no huge wave reported from any of the lifeboats when the stern went under. One survivor reported slipping into the water, turning around, and discovering the ship had disappeared. "He was in the water 50 feet from the ship, he heard a 'shloop,' and it was gone," says Long. "That's not what a person would remember if 25,000 tons of steel fell nearby."

Eyewitnesses. While some survivors in the lifeboats did remember seeing the ship's stern rising high in the air, Long says that might have been an optical illusion. At an 11-degree angle, the ship's propellers would have been raised out of the water, making the ship, already nearly 20 stories tall, appear even taller and making its angle in the water appear even steeper. Technical advisers to the movie Titanic say Cameron, who did not respond to a request for comment, may have been aware of this but exaggerated the angle at which the ship sank for effect.

Though experts still quibble about the exact nature of how the ship broke up, a consensus does seem to be forming around how Titanic sank. "We all agree that the ship did sink at a shallow angle," says Garzke, head of the naval architects' forensics panel. Historians believe Harland & Wolff was probably aware of this at the time, but when the official inquiries absolved the shipbuilder of any liability in the matter, the company didn't protest.

Some conspiracy theorists believe that the company's silence was a sign of a coverup, and that the post-disaster retrofitting of Titanic's sister ships proves Harland & Wolff knew its ship was flawed. But most historians come to a different conclusion. "The fact that the ship broke up on the surface does not mean she was weak," says Long. When 38,000 tons of water filled its bow, pushing the stern up even 11 degrees out of the water, the ship was loaded beyond its capacity and cracked in two.

Could the Titanic have been stronger? Certainly. Higher-quality rivets or a thicker hull might have kept the ship afloat longer. But ultimately, the Titanic was designed to be a passenger liner, not a battleship. "[The ship] was built to the best of their knowledge at the time and to the proper standards. Nothing could have survived what happened to it," says McCluskie. Extensive forensic analysis of the wreckage has, in a way, brought the story of the Titanic to a familiar place. "The ship," says Foecke, "was just not designed to run into icebergs." When it did, nothing could stop its journey to the bottom.

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New evidence has experts rethinking how the luxury passenger liner sank.

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An estimated 100,000 people gathered at the dock in Belfast, Ireland, on March 31, 1911, to watch the launch of the Royal Mail Ship (RMS) Titanic. Considered an "unsinkable" ship, the Titanic was the largest and most luxurious cruise liner of its day, measuring more than 882 feet long from prow to stern-the length of four city blocks-and 175 feet high, and weighing more than 46,000 tons. It boasted state-of-the-art technology, including a sophisticated electrical control panel, four elevators and an advanced wireless communications system that could transmit Morse Code. Despite these amenities, the fabled ship would never reach its destination.

When Did the Titanic Sink?

On the night of April 14, 1912, just four days after leaving Southampton, England on its maiden voyage to New York, the Titanic struck an iceberg off the coast of Newfoundland and sank. Now, more than a century after the Titanic went down, experts are still debating the possible causes of this historic disaster that took the lives of more than 1,500 passengers and crew. Most of them agree that only a combination of circumstances can fully explain what doomed the supposedly unsinkable ship.

It was traveling too fast.

From the beginning, some blamed the Titanic's skipper, Captain E.J. Smith, for sailing the massive ship at such a high speed (22 knots) through the iceberg-heavy waters of the North Atlantic. Some believed Smith was trying to better the crossing time of Titanic's White Star sister ship, the Olympic. But in a 2004 paper, engineer Robert Essenhigh speculated that efforts to control a fire in one of the ship's coal bunkers could have explained why the Titanic was sailing at full speed.

The wireless radio operator dismissed a key iceberg warning.

Less than an hour before the Titanic hit the iceberg, another nearby ship, the Californian, radioed to say it had been stopped by dense field ice. But as the warning didn't begin with the prefix "MSG" (Master's Service Gram), which would have required the captain to directly acknowledge receiving the message, the Titanic's radio operator Jack Phillips considered the other ship's warning non-urgent, and didn't pass it along.

It may have taken a fatal wrong turn.

According to a claim made in 2010 by Louise Patten (the granddaughter of the most senior Titanic officer to survive, Charles Lightoller), one of the ship's crewmembers panicked after hearing the order to turn "hard-a-starboard" in order to avoid the approaching iceberg. Because ships at the time operated on two different steering order systems, he became confused and turned the wrong way-directly toward the ice. Patten included this version of events, which she said she heard from her grandmother after Lightoller's death, in her fictionalized account of the Titanic disaster, Good as Gold.

The Titanic's builders tried to cut costs.

In 1985, when an American-French expedition finally located the historic wreck, investigators discovered that, contrary to earlier findings, the Titanic had not sunk intact after hitting the iceberg but had broken apart on the ocean's surface. Materials scientists Tim Foecke and Jennifer Hooper McCarty have cast blame on the more than 3 million rivets that held the hull's steel plates together. They examined rivets brought up from the wreck and found them to contain a high concentration of "slag," a smelting residue that can make metal split apart. This may have weakened the part of the Titanic's hull that hit the iceberg, causing it to break apart upon impact.

Mirages and hazy horizons were created by weather conditions.

Two studies done around the time of the 100th anniversary of the Titanic disaster in 2012 suggested that nature played a key role in the ship's fate. The first argued that the Earth came unusually close to both the moon and the sun that year, increasing their gravitational pull on the ocean and producing record tides, which caused increased amounts of floating ice in the North Atlantic around the time of the sinking.

The second study, by British historian Tim Maltin, claimed that atmospheric conditions on the night of the disaster might have caused a phenomenon called super refraction. This bending of light could have created mirages, or optical illusions, that prevented the Titanic's lookouts from seeing the iceberg clearly. It also would have made the Titanic appear closer, and smaller, to the nearby ship the Californian, causing its crew to assume it was a different ship without a radio, preventing them from attempting to communicate. From their vantage point, and with these hazy conditions, when the Titanic started to sink, the Californian's crew would have thought it was merely sailing away.

The lookouts had no binoculars.

Second officer David Blair, who held the key to the Titanic's store of binoculars in his pocket, was transferred off the ship before it left for its maiden voyage from Southampton and forgot to hand over the key to the officer who replaced him. At a later inquiry into the sinking, a lookout on the Titanic said binoculars might have helped them spot and dodge the iceberg in time. Blair kept the key as a memento of his near-miss; it was auctioned off in 2007 and fetched some £90,000.

There weren't enough lifeboats.

No matter what caused the Titanic to sink, such a massive loss of life could probably have been avoided if the ship had carried sufficient lifeboats for its passengers and crew. But the White Star liner left Southampton with only 20 lifeboats, the legal minimum, with a total capacity of 1,178 people. Though Maurice Clarke, the civil servant who inspected the Titanic in Southampton, recommended it carry 50 percent more lifeboats, his handwritten notes at the time later revealed that he felt his job would be threatened if he did not give the famous ship the go-ahead to sail. Due to the chaos that ensued after the Titanic struck an iceberg, the 20 lifeboats departed the ship with some 400 empty seats, leaving more than 1,500 people to perish in the frigid ocean waters.

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High speeds, a fatal wrong turn, cut costs, weather conditions, a dismissed key iceberg warning and lack of binoculars and lifeboats all contributed to one of the worst maritime tragedies.

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How Did the 'Unsinkable' Titanic End Up at the Bottom of the Ocean? | National Geographic

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New CGI of How Titanic Sank | Titanic 100

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How did the unsinkable Titanic sink?