RMS Titanic

APR 05 2012 · 12:00

The unsinkable, at 41°43'N 49°56'W Location: North Atlantic, 375 nmi SE of Newfoundland · Coordinates: 41°43'N 49°56'W · Casualties: ~1,517 · Survivors: ~710 · Depth: 3,800 m · Cause: iceberg — Struck an iceberg on the starboard side at 23:40 on 14 April 1912. The collision opened five of sixteen watertight compartments to the sea; she was designed to survive four. Sank in two hours and forty minutes. · Fate: abyssal plain · located 1985 · Type: passenger liner · White Star Line · Tonnage: 46,328 tons · Crew: 899 · Flag: United Kingdom · Launched: 1911 Struck starboard side at 23:40 on 14 April 1912. Sank in two hours and forty minutes. The deadliest peacetime maritime disaster of the 20th century to that date. Led directly to SOLAS (1914), the first international convention for safety at sea. Found by Ballard in 1985. The Vessel The RMS Titanic was the second of three Olympic-class liners built by Harland and Wolff in Belfast for the White Star Line, the largest ships in the world when she entered service in April 1912. She displaced 46,328 tons, was 269 metres long, and carried a beam of 28 metres; her nine-deck superstructure rose eighteen metres above the waterline. Triple screws driven by two reciprocating engines and a Parsons low-pressure turbine gave her a service speed of 21 knots with reserve for 24. Her subdivision into sixteen watertight compartments, controlled by electric doors from the bridge, was widely reported in the trade press as the reason she was "practically unsinkable". The phrase came not from her builders or owners but from the mass-market magazines that had covered her launch; it would be repeated against them for the rest of the century. The design could in fact survive any two compartments flooded, and had been calculated to survive any four; five was beyond what the naval architects had considered, and her bulkheads stopped one deck short of the overhead. She carried lifeboats for 1,178 of her 3,327 berths, a capacity that met and exceeded the British Board of Trade regulations of 1894. Those regulations had been drafted for ships of 10,000 tons; the Board had never updated them for ships four and a half times that size. The Titanic's Welin davits were designed to carry three boats each; the White Star Line had chosen to fit only one. She was, in every meaningful sense, a The Disaster The lookout Frederick Fleet struck the bell three times at 23:39 on 14 April 1912 and reached the telephone to the bridge: "Iceberg right ahead." First Officer William Murdoch ordered "hard a-starboard" and rang the engine room for full astern. The berg passed the starboard side thirty-seven seconds later. Below the waterline the contact opened a series of intermittent gashes along the forward five compartments. Thomas Andrews, the ship's designer, made a quick tour of the forward holds with Captain Smith and returned white. He told the captain they had perhaps an hour and a half, possibly two. The order to uncover the boats went at 00:05; the order to load women and children first at 00:20. The first boat was launched at 00:45, half empty. None of the crew had been drilled on the davits; few of the passengers believed the ship was in real danger. The wireless operators Jack Phillips and Harold Bride began sending CQD at 00:15, switching to the new code SOS around 00:45. The Californian, fewer than twenty miles north, had shut down her wireless for the night at 23:35. The Carpathia picked up the signal at 00:25 and ran south at 17 knots for four hours. By the time her boats reached the scene at 04:00, the Titanic had been gone for an hour and forty minutes, broken in two at the stern and settling to the abyssal plain in two kilometres. Of 2,240 aboard, 710 survived. 1,517 died. The band was reported to have played until the angle of the deck made standing impossible; the viol