Twenty Interesting Things About… Titanic

Here are twenty interesting things you may not know about the The RMS Titanic. (As will always be the case with this Twenty Interesting Things… series, please feel free to jump in with more information, or to correct any inaccuracies, as my name ain’t EncycloREEdia.) (I promise I’ll do away with that joke soon!)

1. Construction on Titanic began on March 31, 1909 in Belfast, Northern Ireland.
2. Construction was completed in May 1911.
3. The designers of Titanic never, despite opinion to the contrary, claimed Titanic was “unsinkable.” They did claim that because of its construction, the ship was “virtually unsinkable” but the word “virtually” was left out in much of the reporting. What a difference…a word makes…
4. Every single item on board Titanic was purchased new or custom made—even the china, iron railings, and furnishings.
5. 300 men worked in shifts around the clock to shovel coal into boilers. This ensured the engines ran at top speed.
6. Out of a crew of 900, only eighteen were women. This was said to be rooted in a longstanding superstition that women brought bad luck to ships. Seventeen of the stewardesses made it on lifeboats and survived the disaster.
7. Colonel John Jacob Astor IV was the wealthiest passenger on board, with an estimated wealth of $87 million.
8. A first-class stateroom on Titanic—which included a sitting room, two bedrooms, two dressing rooms, a private deck, and a private bathroom—cost $4,200 for the trip. (Someone calculate what that would be in 2011 dollars.)
9. Over half of Titanic’s passengers were traveling in third class, also called “steerage.” Most were emigrating to America. The cost of a third class ticket was said to be $36.25.
10. The iceberg was spotted at 11:40 pm on April 14, 1912 and struck the ship’s starboard side.
11. Titanic had fifteen bulkheads (a series of vertical partitions in the bottom of the ship), each of which had watertight doors. Only twelve of the doors (a little over a third of the doors) could be closed automatically from the bridge, however; the others had to be closed by hand. When the ship collided with the iceberg, some of the manually-operated doors were left open. In addition, the bulkheads were only ten feet above the waterline, so when the ship began to sink, water poured over the top of the bulkheads into the next, etc. This rendered the watertight bulkheads ineffective.
12. The closest ship to respond to Titanic’s distress call was Carpathia, which was 58 miles (four hours) away.
13. Titanic finally sank at 2:20 am. Carpathia began rescuing survivors from lifeboats at 4:10 am. She rescued the last of the passengers at 8:30, then left for New York at 8:50.
14. Many passengers and crew were confused about how the lifeboats should work, and many thought the boats should first be lowered into the water before people boarded. This is one reason many lifeboats were launched with less than full capacity. The first lifeboat launched with 28 people, despite its capacity for 65.
15. If all the lifeboats were filled to capacity, 1,178 people would have survived instead of 706.
16. The ship has a maximum allowed capacity of 3,547, but lifeboat space for only 1,178 people. Of the 2,223 on board the ship when it sank, 1,517 died. The majority of deaths were caused by hypothermia.
17. There was a ship (the SS Californian) that was much closer to Titanic than Carpathia. Both the US and British inquiries into the disaster found that the SS Californian and her captain failed to come to the rescue of Titanic’s passengers. A 1992 report found that Californian had actually been farther away than originally thought.
18. The wreckage of Titanic was undiscovered until September 1, 1985, when it was discovered by a joint French-American expedition.
19. It is said that Captain Smith downplayed iceberg warnings early in the evening and declined to reduce the speed of the ship. The US findings blamed Captain Smith’s “indifference to danger” and “overconfidence and neglect” for the disaster. The British inquiry found “that the loss of the said ship was due to collision with an iceberg, brought about by the excessive speed at which the ship was being navigated” but failed to find Captain Smith negligent.
20. In 1898, before Titanic had ever been designed, a retired merchant marine wrote Futility or The Wreck of the Titan. The book was about a ship that hit an iceberg and sank as it was attempting to cross the Atlantic faster than any ship had and is said to contain chilling similarities to the real-live disaster that happened fourteen years later.