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. Yet on the night of April 14, , 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 possible causes of this historic disaster that took the lives of more than 1, 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. Smith, for sailing the massive ship at such a high speed 22 knots through the iceberg-heavy waters of the North Atlantic. The wireless radio operator dismissed a key iceberg warning. From the very day that she was designed she was almost doomed…this [the use of iron rivets] was almost the Achilles heel of the Titanic.
The Titanic, like her sister ship Olympic , had not been fitted with any form of public address system. The Titanic is not the worst maritime disaster in history. On 30 January , in the final year of the Second World War, the German flagship MV Wilhelm Gustloff was torpedoed off the coast of Poland with the loss of more than 9, people, many of whom were refugees.
The fortune teller predicted his death aboard the ship. She was right. The plot of Morgan Robertson's novel "Futility" bears an uncanny resemblance to the Titanic disaster.
The novel tells the story of the Titan, the largest ship ever built, billed as "unsinkable," which strikes an iceberg in April and sinks. In the book, more than half the passengers die in the North Atlantic because of a lifeboat shortage.
The book was published 14 years before the Titanic sank. Edward G. Crosby, a Milwaukee veteran of the Civil War, founded a steamship company on Lake Michigan but became famous for refusing to put enough lifeboats for all the passengers on his steamers.
Aboard the Titanic, he was unable to find a place on a lifeboat, and he sank with the ship. He went into the Atlantic waters after the collision. Jennie made it into a lifeboat and lived until Louise Kink Pope was 4 years old when she went on board the Titanic. She and her mother, Luise, were loaded into a lifeboat, but her father was told to remain on deck.
Instead, he jumped into the lifeboat as it was being lowered. The family survived and Pope died in Milwaukee at age 84 in Unfortunately for scriptwriter James Cameron, Lake Wissota is a man-made reservoir that didn't exist until The first-class dining saloon was sheathed in hand-cut mahogany paneling. Many of the first-class female passengers left the Titanic still dressed in the silk evening gowns they had worn to dinner.
The Titanic was stocked with 20, bottles of beer and stout, 1, bottles of wine and 8, cigars for use by first-class passengers. The last dinner served in the first-class saloon consisted of 11 courses. First-class passengers were given copies of "The White Star Music Book" containing songs so they could make requests.
The musicians had to know all the titles. Second-class accommodations were equivalent to first class in most other ocean liners of the time. Third-class passengers could hear the loud roar of the ship's engines in their cabins at all times. Only two bathtubs were available for more than third-class passengers — one for men, one for women. Gates separating the third-class spaces from the other classes were kept locked even after the collision, according to some firsthand reports.
One recent scientific theory holds that the moon's extremely close approach to Earth on Jan. The Titanic's launch was delayed by six weeks because her sister ship Olympic needed repairs in the same dry dock. That delay put seasonal icebergs right in the Titanic's path. Titanic Capt. Edward Smith did try to avoid ice danger by altering the ship's course to the south after receiving warnings of icebergs from other ships.
At p. At 32 degrees, the iceberg was warmer than the water Titanic passengers fell into that night. Modern shipbuilding has gone beyond that. Keeping time was considered a priority in shipping at the time.
To do so, ship captains maintained high speeds consistently. It was also not customary to slow down due to iceberg warnings. There were reasons for this. Collisions with icebergs were not usually fatal for the ship involved. In , the German liner SS Kronprinz Wilhelm crashed into an iceberg and remained afloat and in service. In the last few years, evidence brought to light indicates that the Titanic was suffering from persistent fires in the hull. These bedeviled the ship even when it was in the harbor at Southampton port.
The fires seem to have broken out again while the ship was at sea. While modern ships have two hulls, the Titanic and other ships of that time only had one.
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