Titanic Facts

In April 1912, the Titanic, one of the most luxurious and safe ships ever built, hit an iceberg and sank off the coast of Newfoundland, taking more than 1,500 lives.

 

At that time, the Titanic was the world’s largest passenger ship and was on its maiden voyage, headed from Southampton, England, to New York City. After 70 years of disaster, the wreck of Titanic was discovered in 1985 during a US military mission. The Titanic was split in two and is gradually disintegrating at a depth of 12,415 feet.

 

It is rumored that the crew of the ship didn’t spot the iceberg in time and this is because they didn’t have binoculars. An official 1912 inquiry found that only 37 seconds elapsed between actually seeing the iceberg, calling downstairs, and deciding what course of action to take.

 

Around thousands of artifacts have been recovered and displayed at museums around the world. The giant Titanic has become one of the most famous ships in history, portrayed in numerous works of popular culture, including books, folk songs, films, exhibits, and memorials. Furthermore, the Titanic is the second largest ocean liner wreck in the world.

 

However, the Titanic and its passengers still hold secrets and little-known facts that might surprise you.

Silent Film Actress Dorothy Gibson, One of the 700 Survivors of the Collision

The silent film American actress, Dorothy Gibson, was aboard the Titanic and survived. She was starred in a film named ‘Saved from the Titanic’. The film was released just one month after the Titanic sank.

 

While arriving in New York City safe, the actress immediately began filming ‘Saved from the Titanic’. This film was the first to depict the events of the sinking.

 

The film was released in May 1912. Dorothy Gibson is also famous for wearing the same clothes and shoes in the movie as she had worn during the actual sinking.

Lawrence Beesley tried to crash the filming of ‘A Night to Remember’

Lawrence Beesley is another survivor of the Titanic and tried to crash the filming of a 1958 film ‘A Night to Remember’ because he wanted to symbolically go down with the ship.

Lawrence Beesley was on the set of ‘A Night to Remember’. This film is said to be the most accurate of all Titanic films.

 

Lawrence Beesley supposedly tried to jump into the scene portraying Titanic’s sinking. He was a survivor of the second class. He also wrote a memoir about his experience entitled ‘The Loss of the SS Titanic.’

Third-Class Passengers Had to Share Two Bathtubs

About 700 third-class passengers had to share two bathtubs. The third-class accommodations on the Titanic were much better than those on an average ship but they were still pretty rough. Around 700-1000 third-class passengers boarded on the ship and they all had to share two bathtubs.

 

One of the Titanic’s Musicians Wasn’t Officially Declared Dead Until 2000.

 

Roger Bricoux was the Titanic’s cello player. He was just 21 years old when he got freeze during the ship’s sinking.

 

Though all of the ship’s musicians died on April 15, 1912, but Roger Bricoux wasn’t officially declared dead until 2000.

Titanic’s Lookouts Had to Rely on Their Eyesight Alone

The binoculars of the ship were locked inside a cabinet that no one could find the key to. The lookouts of the ship didn’t have access to binoculars during the journey, and therefore couldn’t see very far.

 

The second officer of the ship was replaced at the last minute and unfortunately, he forgot to hand off the key to the locker that contained the ship’s binoculars. However, the key came up at auction in 2010 and was sold for over $130,000.

Plagued by the Tragedy from the Start

It is rumored that the Titanic was plagued since its construction as eight people alone died during its construction.

The Ship’s Musicians Played Music until the Very End

In a bid to try and calm passengers, the musicians of the Titanic played music until the very last moment and for this act, they have been called heroes who played music for about two hours after hitting the iceberg.

Few Men Dressed Up as Women to Get a Spot on a Lifeboat

It is also rumored that a few men dressed up as women to get a spot on a lifeboat because the lifeboats were said to have been for women and children only.

John Jacob Astor IV, the Richest Man Aboard

One of the richest men at that time, John Jacob Astor IV, was on board. Not only Astor was the richest man on the Titanic but widely believed to be the richest man in the world at the time of his death.

 

He was returning home from a months-long honeymoon with his new wife, Madeleine Talmage Force.  After the ship went down, Astor’s body was one of the few that were recovered in the Atlantic Ocean.

 

Back in 2012, some British historians said that that the atmosphere on the night of the sinking created conditions that made it difficult for the crew to spot iceberg.

 

The Titanic, known as the famous passenger liner, sank on its maiden voyage in 1912 following its collision with an iceberg. The huge North Atlantic Ocean disaster claimed the lives of around 1,514 people becoming one of the most devastating maritime disasters in history.

The Britannic

 

Jessop was a woman, who was just 25 when she survived the sinking of the Titanic. She was instructed to get into a lifeboat while the ship was going down to show women that the boats were safe.

 

Jessop began employed on the Britannica (dubbed the Titanic 2 by the media) until it came across a mine that had been planted by a German U-boat in 1916. That ship sank too, and Jessop survived again, but this time with a serious head injury.

 

During its maiden voyage from Southampton to New York, the Titanic sank in the early hours of 15th April 1912 in the Atlantic Ocean.

 

How Much Do You Know about the Disaster?

 

The Titanic was the world’s largest man-made moving object. It was 269 meters long that struck an iceberg at 11.40 pm on 14th April 1912.

 

There were several warnings but still, the Titanic was racing through dangerous waters almost at its top speed of 23 knots.

 

The iceberg was spotted only 30 seconds before impact, and this happened because the lookouts of the ship were not equipped with binoculars.

 

Just in two and a half hours, the Titanic sank and sent survivors into the freezing water. The maritime disaster claimed over 1,500 lives and only 705 people survived.

 

Have a look at 10 facts about the Titanic:

1.   How many lifeboats were available?

The ship was originally designed for 64 lifeboats but it only had 20 and that was not enough for 2,200 passengers and crew on board.

 

A large number of launched boats were not filled to capacity, having one with 24 people, even though it could fit 65. A lifeboat drill was planned for the day the Titanic hit the iceberg, however, it was canceled.

2.   The Freezing Temperatures

The temperature of the Atlantic Ocean was below zero and that is why many people died within minutes of entering the water.

 

The baker of the ship, Charles Joughin, survived for two hours as he was blind drunk on whiskey and claimed that he could not feel the cold.

3.   Damage Caused by the Iceberg:

Along the Titanic’s starboard side, the iceberg caused a crack of over 200ft. This made five of the forward compartments flooded. It is believed that if the collision was head-on, the ship would have survived.

4.   Rumors of ‘No Lives Lost’

The Daily Mail reported that no lives lost in the Titanic’s sinking. On 16th April 1912, the Daily Mail reported on the disaster and the headline read: “Titanic sunk. No lives lost”.  The exact nature of the tragedy was not known for several days.

5.   Two Dogs Survived the Disaster

Out of the 2500 passengers aboard, there were nine dogs brought aboard and two of them were survived.

6.   The Titanic’s Own Newspaper

The Titanic had its own newspaper named ‘The Atlantic Daily Bulletin’. It used to be printed every day. It included news, stock prices, and horseracing results, as well as the day’s menu.

7.   One of the Titanic’s Funnel Was Fake

There were four funnels in the Titanic and three of them were needed to release steam from the boilers, which were burning through 650 tons of coal every day.

 

The fourth funnel was added for decoration only because the designers thought it would make Titanic look bigger.

8.   The Titanic Band

There was a band in the first-class passengers throughout the voyage. It memorized all 350 songs from ‘The White Star Line Songbook’. When the ship was sinking, the band continued to play for two hours to calm people down.

 

9.   Famous Names Dies During the Titanic Disaster

Among the dead, there were some notable names but didn’t get a spot on a lifeboat.

10.                A Novel Predicted the Titanic Sinking 14 Years Previously

Fewer people have heard of is a short novel called ‘Futility: The Wreck of the Titan’. This novel was published by the U.S. writer Morgan Robertson.

 

The novel told the story of the world’s largest passenger ship, the Titan, and how it sank after hitting an iceberg. The novel was published 14 years before the Titanic sank.

 

The Best Ever Lodging:

The first-class accommodation of the Titanic was designed to be the pinnacle of comfort and luxury, with a gymnasium, swimming pool, libraries, high-class restaurants, and opulent cabins.

 

The Titanic had promoted safety measures such as watertight compartments and remotely activated watertight doors. Due to outdated maritime safety regulations, it carried lifeboats for only 1,178 people, one-third of her total capacity.

 

After quitting Southampton on 10^th April 1912, the Titanic called at Cherbourg in France and Queenstown in Ireland before heading west to New York.

 

On 14th April, four days into the crossing and about 375 miles south of Newfoundland, the Titanic hit an iceberg at 11:40 p.m. ship’s time. Some crew members and passengers were evacuated in lifeboats but many of them were launched only partially loaded.

 

A large number of men were left aboard because of a ‘women and children first’ protocol for loading lifeboats. At 2:20 a.m., the ship broke apart and sank with well over one thousand people still aboard.

Why were so few onboard rescued?

More than 1500 people died when the Titanic sank on 15th April 1912 after hitting an iceberg in the Atlantic Ocean. There were only 705 survivors because the vast ocean liner set sail with too few lifeboats to hold everyone on board. This was due to a decision based on the assumption that in the unlikely event the Titanic ran into trouble; other ships would come to the rescue. The others didn’t help, but why?

 

There were two main reasons. First was that a miners’ strike caused a shortage of high-grade steam coal in Britain, which meant that far fewer ships than usual were at sea in the North Atlantic.

 

In a normal situation, the Titanic might have expected to be in sight of two or three ships at all times. But those ships were simply not there.

 

The second reason was that not all ships had radios, and those that had, did not man their radios 24 hours a day.

 

Two ships; SS Californian and SS Parisian, could have reached the Titanic in time to rescue everyone on board if they had received the distress call but unfortunately, the radio sets on both ships were switched off that night.

 

 

When the giant Titanic struck an iceberg and sank on April 15^th, 1912, over 1,500 people died in the cold waters of the North Atlantic. Along the Titanic’s starboard side, the iceberg caused a crack of over 200ft. This made five of the forward compartments flooded. It is believed that if the collision was head-on, the ship would have survived.

 

The temperature of the Atlantic Ocean was below zero and that is why many people died within minutes of entering the water. About 700 people survived and out of those 700.

we have some of the most powerful stories of the Titanic survivors.

1.   The Navratil Orphans

 

The young Michel and Edmond Navratil were on board to the bow of the Titanic in 1912. They were accompanied by their father who was still smarting from his recent separation from their mother, Marcelle Caretto.

 

They were in the second-class of the Titanic. When the Titanic struck the iceberg, Navratil was able to get the boys aboard a lifeboat the very last lifeboat to leave the ship. Their father died in the disaster but the sons survived.

 

They were known as the ‘Titanic Orphans’ because they were the only children rescued without a parent or guardian.

2.   The Unsinkable Molly Brown

 

Margaret Brown is famously known as ‘The Unsinkable Molly Brown’ after she survived the wreck of the Titanic.

 

She got her nickname by effectively taking over one of the ship’s lifeboats and threatening to throw the quartermaster overboard.

 

Later, the authors called Molly Brown ‘The Unsinkable Molly Brown’ because she helped in the evacuation of the ship. She took an oar herself in her lifeboat and urged that the lifeboat go back and save more people.

3.   Eliza Millvina Dean

 

Eliza Gladys Millvina Dean holds the special honor of having been both the youngest passenger on the Titanic when it sank.

 

She was the last living person to have survived the disaster. She was just two months old when the Titanic ship went down in April of 1912.

 

Millvina Dean and her family never intended to board the Titanic. They had initially booked passage to the United States on another ship. However, a strike forced them onto the luxury liner instead.

4.   Frederick Fleet

A British sailor and was just 25 years old when he signed on as a crewman on the Titanic. He was one of five lookouts, and it was Fleet who made the famous call to the bridge: ‘Iceberg! Right ahead’

 

Frederick Fleet spotted the iceberg suddenly off the bow. He rang the bell and notified the bridge. Fleet always insisted that he could have prevented it if he just had binoculars. When he reached old age, he suffered from depression and ultimately committed suicide in 1965.

Afterward, Fleet made his way to the Boat Deck and there the Second Officer put him to help Quarter-Master Robert Lichen load and launch lifeboat 6, the first boat to be launched from the port side.

 

They loaded 28 women and children. As the boat was being lowered, there was a need for an experienced seaman. Frederick Fleet was asked to go down and in the morning, lifeboat 6 was picked up by the Carpathia.

5.   Masabumi Hosono

 

The only Japanese person, Masabumi Hosono was aboard the Titanic. He ultimately endured the scorn of his countrymen for taking a spot on a lifeboat and not going down with the ship.

Hosono was asleep in his cabin at the time of collision. He woke to a frantic knock on the door and the sound of footsteps in the hallway.

 

When he arrived at the lifeboats, he was turned away because he was a foreigner. But when the man turned his back, Hosono saw his chance and joined the man in the lifeboat, the screams of the drowning echoing in his ears as the boat pulled away.

6.   Harold Bride

 

Harold Bride was a junior wireless officer on the Titanic. He was one of the two people responsible for sending SOS messages to nearby ships to rescue the Titanic survivors.

He raced to send distress signals to nearby ships. He worked frantically until Captain Edward Smith came and told them they were relieved of duty; the ship had nearly lost power, and only two lifeboats remained.

 

Harold Bride and 15 others scrambled onto the waterlogged, sinking collapsible and survived until other lifeboats collected them and conveyed them to the Carpathia.

Harold Bride had to be carried ashore when the Carpathia made land. He had sprained one foot in the plunge into the ocean, and the other was frostbitten after a night in the Atlantic’s frigid waters.

7.   Lucile Carter

 

Lucile Carter was also a passenger on the Titanic. She boarded the ship with her husband, her children, a small cadre of servants, and her husband’s car.

Despite Lucile’s aristocratic upbringing, she was not afraid to get her hand dirty and help lead one of the lifeboats to safety.

 

Lucile emerged from the tragedy but her husband was not so lucky. She claimed that her husband had led her and their children to the lifeboats before going off to wait stoically with the other men.

Final Survivor:

Millvina Dean was two months old at the time of sinking and was the youngest passenger aboard. She was the final survivor of the sinking and was a British civil servant, cartographer. She died in 2009 at the age of 97.

 

At the time the Titanic entered service, it was the largest ship afloat as well as the second of three Olympic-class ocean liners operated by the White Star Line.

 

The Harland and Wolff shipyard in Belfast built the Titanic. It was under the command of Capt. Edward Smith. The Titanic carried some of the wealthiest people in the world.

Since the Titanic sank, things just keep on getting worse and worse for the Titanic and it has been revealed that the iconic shipwreck is in an extremely sorry state. More than 1500 people died when the Titanic sank on 15th April 1912 after hitting an iceberg in the Atlantic Ocean. There were only 705 survivors because the vast ocean liner set sail with too few lifeboats to hold everyone on board.

 

In 1912, the Titanic sank to a depth of more than 12,000 feet. Since then, dozens of manned and unmanned submersibles have visited and photographed the Titanic’s disintegrating body on the seafloor. After 70 years of disaster, the wreck of Titanic was discovered in 1985 during a US military mission. The Titanic was split in two and is gradually disintegrating at a depth of 12,415 feet.

Shocking Revelations by the Divers:

After being hit by an iceberg, the Titanic sank to the bottom of the ocean and now the saltwater in the ocean is finishing the job.

 

The metal-eating bacteria and saltwater is destroying the wreckage of the ship. The Titanic is being consumed by the ocean and is returning to its elemental form while providing refuge for a remarkably diverse number of animals.

 

In August, the divers visited the wreckage that lies at a depth of 3,800 meters in the North Atlantic. The pictures reveal that the ship has significantly deteriorated due to deep-sea currents and metal-eating bacteria. It is also reported that some features of the Titanic have completely decayed.

 

The ship’s bow is now covered in rustics and the bacteria are slowly consuming the metal. The divers said that wreck will continue to deteriorate over time.

 

The Titanic has been on the North Atlantic Ocean floor since 1912 after hitting an iceberg on its maiden voyage from Southampton to New York.

 

Intense pressure and the lack of light at a depth of nearly 4km make the Titanic’s environment unfriendly to most life.

How Microbes are eating the Wreckage:

 

The previous expeditions revealed that iron-eating microbes have colonized the ship and turned its 50,000 tonnes of iron into rustics’ that eventually dissolve into a fine powder and carried away on ocean currents. There would be nothing left of the Titanic by 2030, one expedition concluded.

 

It was assumed that the Titanic was sunk in one piece, but in 1985, the wreck was discovered revealing that the ship was broken up before reaching the ocean floor.

 

The latest expedition captured footage by using specially adapted cameras that allow computerized 3D models of the wreck to be constructed using virtual reality technology.

Entire Wreckage of the Ship Would Vanish by 2030:

 

The wreckage of the ship sat undisturbed for more than 70 years until the US Navy discovered it during what was later revealed to be a secret Cold War mission on September 1^st, 1985.

The scientists think that the entire wreck of the Titanic will vanish by 2030 due to bacteria that are eating away at the metal.

 

Like all other things, the Titanic will disappear entirely as the decomposition of the wreck is a natural process. However, it will take a long time before the ship completely disappears.

The wreckage of the Titanic that lies more than 2 miles under the ocean surface is being destroyed by the deep-sea currents, salt corrosion, and metal-eating bacteria.

 

These things were revealed by an international team of deep-sea explorers that surveyed the sunken ship that is 3,800m down in the Atlantic Ocean.

 

This was done over the course of five submersible dives. Surprisingly, some parts of the ship are in good condition but other features had been lost to the sea.

Worst Decay:

 

The latest expedition found the worst decay on the starboard side of the officers’ quarters. Moreover, the sloping lounge roof of the bow section would probably be the next part to be lost.

 

Microbiologists & Scientists

Microbial biologist Lori Johnston told USA Today that much of the deterioration comes from a group of bacteria, named Halomonas titanic. These bacterias are working on ship and causing the rust of iron and the sulfur.

Henrietta Mann, the scientist who co-discovered Halomonas titanic bacteria in 2010, told Time that based on this new expedition footage and research, the Titanic has only 30 years left before it disappears.

‘The Titanic is Surely Returning to Nature’

 

The giant Titanic has been underwater for more than 100 years, lying about 600km off the coast of Newfoundland, Canada.

 

The expedition of the Titanic was carried out by the same team that recently made the deepest ever plunge to the bottom of the Mariana Trench.

 

Strong underwater currents and bad weather in the Atlantic Ocean made the dives difficult and getting entangled with the wreck was also a significant risk for the team.

Creatures Living on the Wreck:

 

While capturing footage, the scientists on the expedition have also seen the creatures living on the wreck. Life is thriving there despite the near-freezing conditions, pitch-black waters and immense pressure. There are microbes on the wreck of the ship.

 

These microbes are eating away the iron of the wreck itself and creating a much weaker form of the metal. The rust hanging off the wreck is so fragile it they can crumble into a cloud of dust if disturbed.

 

The wreck of the ship will continue to deteriorate over time. The reason that the deterioration process ends up being quite a bit faster, is a group of bacteria, working symbiotically to eat the iron and the sulfur. The higher ranges of the Titanic crumble and that is why the velocity of the Titanic’s deterioration will increase.