TITANIC ("The Ship Of Dreams") FACTS

 

"TITANIC"

 

Titanic was one of three 'Olympic Class' liners commissioned by the White Star Line to be built at the Harland and Wolff shipyard in Belfast. Construction began on the first of these great ships, Olympic, on 16 December 1908. Work on Titanic started soon after, on 31 March 1909. These magnificent vessels were the industrial marvels of their age and Titanic was to be the biggest, fastest and most luxurious liner yet.
After just three years, Titanic was finished - a floating city, ready to set sail on her maiden voyage from Southampton to New York. On board was a collection of passengers comprising millionaires, silent movie stars, school teachers and emigrants, in search of a better life in the United States.

The R.M.S. Titanic was a Royal Mail Ship, a designation which meant the Titanic was officially responsible for delivering mail for the British postal service. On board the Titanic was a Sea Post Office with five mail clerks (two British and three American). These mail clerks were responsible for the 3,423 sacks of mail (seven million individual pieces of mail) on board the Titanic. Interestingly, although no mail has yet been recovered from the wreck of the Titanic, if it were, the U.S. Postal Service would still try to deliver it (the USPS because most of the mail was being sent to the U.S.).

 
On April 10, 1912, the Titanic, largest ship afloat, left Southampton, England on her maiden voyage to New York City. The White Star Line had spared no expense in assuring her luxury. A legend even before she sailed,Under the command of Edward Smith her passengers were a mixture of the world's wealthiest basking in the elegance of first class accommodations and immigrants packedinto steerage. She was touted as the safest ship ever built, so safe that she carried only 20 lifeboats. This discrepancy rested on the belief that since the ship's construction made her "unsinkable," her lifeboats were necessary only to rescue survivors of other sinking ships.    Additionally, lifeboats took up valuable deck space.  

                                                                    

Titanic Route Map

 

1st AprilThe Titanic's sea trials are postponed because of bad weather

2nd April 06.00 - Titanic sea trials begin
20.00 - the trails are completed and Titanic sets sail for Southampton

4th AprilTitanic successfully arrives at Southampton shortly after midnight

10th April12.00 noon - Tugs pull RMS Titanic away from her berth. Ill-health stops William Pirrie travelling on the maiden voyage.
17.30 - Titanic arrives in Cherbourg, France. Nomadic tendered to Titanic carrying first and second class passengers including John Jacob Astor (Titanic's richest passenger) and his eighteen year old wife Madeleine.

11th AprilTitanic arrives in Queenstown (now known as Cobh), Co Cork, Ireland
13.30 - Titanic departs Queenstown for New York City

14th April23.40 - Titanic hits the iceberg

15th April 02.20 - Titanic begins to sink
04.00 - The Carpathia picks up the first survivors from the lifeboats

18th April 21.00 - The Carpathia arrives in New York and the Titanic survivors disembark 

 

 

INTERESTING  FACTS  ABOUT  TITANIC   :

The Titanic was finally ready for her departure on April 10 1912. Delays had occurred as a result of the Olympics collision with the HMS Hawke in September 1911 and in February the Olypmic also lost a propeller. The owners wanted to see the Olympic operational before the Titanic.

Also that year there was a coal strike. A severe problem for any transatlantic liner because ships like the Titanic would consume over 600 tons of coal a day. To partially solve the problem, coal was taken from other ships like the Adriatic and Oceanic to stock up the coal bunkers for the Titanic's voyage.

At noon on the 10 April 1912 the Titanic set sail from Southampton. Immediately, there was a potential disaster. There was a near collision with the steamer New York. The New York being much smaller than the Titanic was sucked in to her wake as the Titanic giant triple screw propellers rotated. The New York's mooring snapped and was dragged towards the port side of her. This is exactly what happened to her sister ship when she collided with the HMS Hawke.

The Titanic sailed to Cherbourg in France and later to Queenstown in Ireland to pick up additional passengers. There were 1320 passengers and 907 crew.

The first few days of the voyage were uneventful. Captain Smith steadily increased speed day by day. The ship covered 386 miles on the first day, 519 the second and 546 miles the third. It was reported that Smith would have increased the mileage day by day.

 

 

 

 

The passengers were unaware that one of the coalbunkers had been on fire since departure. Situations like this were common because coal dust which is very flammable, got everywhere, not just in the air but in machinery. As the slightest spark could ignite the whole bunker, coal had to be kept sufficiently damp to prevent fires from starting.

 

CAPTAIN Edward Smith

 

The sinking of the RMS Titanic occurred on the night of 14 April through to the morning of 15 April 1912 in the north Atlantic Ocean, four days into the ship's maiden voyage from Southampton to New York City. The largest passenger liner in service at the time, Titanic had an estimated 2,224 people on board when she struck an iceberg at around 23:40 (ship's time)^[a] on Sunday, 14 April 1912. Her sinking two hours and forty minutes later at 02:20 (05:18 GMT) on Monday, 15 April resulted in the deaths of more than 1,500 people, which made it one of the deadliest peacetime maritime disasters in history, about 700 peoples were rescued.
Titanic received six warnings of sea ice on 14 April but was travelling near her maximum speed when her lookouts sighted the iceberg. Unable to turn quickly enough, the ship suffered a glancing blow that buckled her starboard (right) side and opened five of her sixteen compartments to the sea. Titanic had been designed to stay afloat with four of her forward compartments flooded but not more, and the crew soon realised that the ship would sink. They used distress flares and radio (wireless) messages to attract help as the passengers were put into lifeboats. However, in accordance with existing practice, Titanic's lifeboat system was designed to ferry passengers to nearby rescue vessels, not to hold everyone on board simultaneously. So with the ship sinking fast and help still hours away, there was no safe refuge for many of the passengers and crew. Compounding this, poor management of the evacuation meant many boats were launched before they were totally full.
Titanic sank with over a thousand passengers and crew still on board. Almost all those who jumped or fell into the water died from hypothermia within minutes. RMS Carpathia later arrived on the scene about an hour and a half after the sinking and had rescued the last of the survivors by 09:15 on 15 April, some nine and a half hours after the collision.

 

Rescue  and  departure  (04:10–09:15)

 

Titanic's survivors were finally rescued around 04:00 on 15 April by the RMS Carpathia, which had steamed through the night at high speed and at considerable risk, as the ship had to dodge numerous icebergs en route. Carpathia's lights were first spotted around 03:30 which greatly cheered the survivors, though it took several more hours for everyone to be brought aboard. The 30 or more men on collapsible B finally managed to board two other lifeboats.

 

When Carpathia arrived at Pier 34 in New York on the evening of 18 April after a difficult voyage through pack ice, fog, thunderstorms and rough seas, some 40,000 people were standing on the wharves, alerted to the disaster by a stream of radio messages from Carpathia and other ships. It was only after Carpathia docked – three days after Titanic's sinking – that the full scope of the disaster became public knowledge.

Even before Carpathia arrived in New York, efforts were getting underway to retrieve the dead. Four ships chartered by the White Star Line succeeded in retrieving 328 bodies; 119 were buried at sea, while the remaining 209 were brought ashore to the Canadian port of Halifax, Nova Scotia, where 150 of them were buried. Memorials were raised in various places – New York, Washington, Southampton, Liverpool, Belfast and Lichfield, among others– and ceremonies were held on both sides of the Atlantic to commemorate the dead and raise funds to aid the survivors. The bodies of most of Titanic's victims were never recovered, and the only evidence of their deaths was found 73 years later among the debris on the seabed: pairs of shoes lying side by side, where bodies had once lain before eventually decomposing.

74 YEARS AFTER SINKING :

 

 

 
The wreck of the RMS Titanic is located about 370 miles (600 km) south-southeast of the coast of Newfoundland, lying at a depth of about 12,500 feet (3,800 m). Over the years since 1912, when the liner hit an iceberg and sank during her maiden voyage, many impractical, expensive and often physically impossible schemes have been put forward to raise the wreck from its resting place. They have included ideas such as filling the wreck with ping-pong balls, injecting it with 180,000 tons of Vaseline, or using half a million tons of liquid nitrogen to turn it into a giant iceberg that would float back to the surface.
Until 1985, the location of the wreck was unknown. Numerous expeditions tried using sonar to map the sea bed in the hope of spotting the wreck, but failed due to a combination of bad weather, technological difficulties and poor search strategy. The wreck was finally located, 13.2 miles (21.2 km) from the inaccurate position transmitted by Titanic's crew while the ship was sinking, by a joint French-American expedition led by Jean-Louis Michel of IFREMER and Robert Ballard of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. The key to its discovery was an innovative remotely controlled deep-sea vehicle called Argo, which could be towed above the sea bed while its cameras transmitted pictures back to a mother ship.

The wreck lies in two main pieces about a third of a mile (600 m) apart. The bow is still largely recognizable, in spite of its deterioration and the damage it suffered hitting the sea floor, and has a great deal of preserved interiors. The stern is completely ruined due to the damage it suffered while sinking 12,000 feet (3,700 m) and hitting the ocean floor, and is now just a heap of twisted metal, which may explain why it has barely been explored during expeditions to the Titanic wreck. A substantial section of the middle of the ship broke apart and is scattered in chunks across the sea bed. A debris field covering about 5 by 3 miles (8.0 km × 4.8 km) around the wreck contains hundreds of thousands of items spilled from ship as she sank, ranging from passengers' personal effects to machinery, furniture, utensils and coal, as well as fragments of the ship herself. The bodies of the passengers and crew once also lay in the debris field, but have since been entirely consumed by sea creatures, leaving only their shoes lying together in the mud.

Dr. Robert D. Ballard, the discoverer of the wreck of Titanic in September 1985


In next BLOG I will discuss the details about the discovery of the sunken TITANIC.
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