Titanic Facts

All Titanic Facts

RMS Titanic was operated by the White Star Line and built by Harland & Wolff shipyard in Belfast, Northern Ireland.
Construction began on March 31, 1909, and the ship's keel took over two years to complete before its launch on May 31, 1911.
Titanic never underwent a champagne christening at its launch, following White Star Line's long-standing policy of not naming ships with the traditional bottle-smashing ceremony.
At 882 feet 9 inches (269 meters) long, Titanic was nearly as long as three American football fields laid end to end.
The ship weighed 46,328 gross register tons, making it the largest man-made moving object in the world at the time of its launch.
Titanic stood 104 feet (32 meters) tall from the keel to the top of the bridge, roughly the height of an 11-story building.
The ship had four funnels, but only three were functional. The fourth was added purely for symmetry and appearance, and doubled as a ventilation shaft for the kitchens.
Titanic's whistle blasts were reportedly loud enough to be heard up to 11 miles (18 km) away in calm conditions.
Building Titanic cost around $7.5 million in 1912, equivalent to roughly $200 million today when adjusted for inflation.
Titanic was one of three Olympic-class ocean liners built by White Star Line, alongside its sister ships Olympic and Britannic.
Unlike Titanic, its sister ship Olympic had a long, successful 24-year career and was eventually scrapped in 1935.
Titanic's other sister ship, Britannic, never carried paying passengers. It was requisitioned as a hospital ship in World War I and sank in 1916 after hitting a mine.
More than 3 million rivets held Titanic's steel hull plates together, hand-driven by riveters working in the shipyard.
A 2008 forensic study found the steel used in Titanic's hull had a high sulfur content, making it more brittle and prone to fracturing in the near-freezing water of the North Atlantic.
Titanic had 29 boilers and 159 furnaces that powered its steam engines, requiring around 600 tons of coal a day to operate at full capacity.
Around 176 firemen worked in shifts shoveling coal into Titanic's furnaces throughout the voyage.
Titanic could reach a top speed of about 23 knots (26 mph / 42 km/h), though it was traveling at roughly 22 knots when it struck the iceberg.
Titanic had three propellers: two outer three-bladed propellers and one smaller center propeller.
Titanic was the first ocean liner to feature a heated indoor swimming pool, available exclusively to first-class passengers.
First-class passengers also had access to a gymnasium, a squash court, and a Turkish bath, luxuries almost unheard of on ships at the time.
A first-class parlor suite ticket on Titanic's maiden voyage cost around $4,350, equivalent to well over $100,000 today.
The cheapest third-class ticket cost about $7, roughly $200 in today's money, making even the ship's most basic fare out of reach for many.
Titanic departed on its maiden voyage from Southampton, England, on April 10, 1912, with stops planned in Cherbourg, France, and Queenstown, Ireland, before crossing the Atlantic to New York.
Titanic's maiden voyage almost ended before it began: as it left Southampton, suction from its massive propellers nearly pulled the docked liner New York into its hull, and only quick action from tugboats prevented a collision.
Around 2,224 passengers and crew were aboard Titanic when it left Queenstown for New York.
Titanic's lifeboats had a total capacity of just 1,178 people, less than half the number of people on board.
The shortage of lifeboats wasn't a violation of the law. British Board of Trade regulations at the time based lifeboat requirements on a ship's tonnage, not the number of passengers it carried, and hadn't kept pace with the size of new ocean liners like Titanic.
Titanic carried 20 lifeboats in total, including 4 collapsible boats, even though the ship's design allowed space for as many as 64.
On the night of the sinking, many lifeboats were launched only partially full. Lifeboat 1 left with just 12 people aboard despite having room for 40.
Captain Edward Smith commanded Titanic on its maiden and only voyage. He had originally planned to retire after this trip.
A scheduled lifeboat drill on the morning of Sunday, April 14, 1912, was canceled by Captain Smith for reasons that were never fully explained.
Titanic received at least six iceberg warnings from other ships on April 14, 1912, the day it struck the iceberg.
At 11:40 pm on April 14, 1912, lookout Frederick Fleet spotted the iceberg and rang the warning bell, but it was too late to fully avoid a collision.
Titanic struck the iceberg a glancing blow along its starboard side rather than head-on, buckling the hull's steel plates and popping rivets along a roughly 300-foot stretch.
The collision breached five of Titanic's watertight compartments. The ship had been designed to stay afloat with any four of its sixteen compartments flooded, but not five.
Titanic's watertight compartments didn't extend high enough up the hull. As the bow sank, water spilled over the tops of the bulkheads from one compartment into the next.
Second Officer Charles Lightoller and other crew members initially thought the ship might survive the impact, believing the damage was less severe than it was.
Ship designer Thomas Andrews, who was aboard for the maiden voyage, personally inspected the damage and told Captain Smith the ship had only about an hour and a half left before it would sink.
The water temperature in the North Atlantic that night was around 28°F (-2°C), cold enough that most people who ended up in the sea died of hypothermia within 15 to 30 minutes.
Titanic's wireless operators, Jack Phillips and Harold Bride, worked for the Marconi Company rather than White Star Line, and used both the older "CQD" distress call and the newer "SOS" signal that night.
The SS Californian was likely less than 20 miles from Titanic that night but never responded to its distress rockets, reportedly because its wireless operator had gone to bed just before the collision.
RMS Carpathia, roughly 58 miles away when it received Titanic's distress call, sped through a dangerous ice field at nearly full speed to reach the scene, arriving about an hour and 45 minutes after Titanic sank.
Carpathia's captain, Arthur Rostron, was later awarded a Congressional Gold Medal for the rescue.
Carpathia rescued 705 survivors from Titanic's lifeboats.
Titanic sank at 2:20 am on April 15, 1912, roughly two hours and 40 minutes after striking the iceberg.
As the ship's stern rose out of the water, Titanic broke apart into two main sections before sinking, something confirmed only decades later when the wreck was found.
Titanic's wreck now rests about 12,500 feet (3,800 meters) below the surface of the North Atlantic.
The wreck wasn't discovered until September 1, 1985, by a team led by oceanographer Robert Ballard.
Ballard's search for Titanic doubled as a cover story for a classified U.S. Navy mission to locate two sunken nuclear submarines, the USS Thresher and USS Scorpion.
The bow and stern sections of Titanic's wreck lie roughly 2,000 feet (600 meters) apart on the ocean floor.
An estimated 1,500 people died when Titanic sank, making it one of the deadliest peacetime maritime disasters in history.
Survival rates varied sharply by class: about 97% of first-class women survived, compared to roughly 55% of third-class women.
Men in third class had by far the lowest survival rate of any group, with only around 16% making it off the ship alive.
Almost all first-class children aboard survived. Only one first-class child died in the disaster.
Titanic's eight musicians, led by bandleader Wallace Hartley, kept playing music on deck as the ship sank. None of them survived.
J. Bruce Ismay, chairman of White Star Line, survived the sinking by boarding a lifeboat, a decision that drew intense public criticism afterward.
Businessman John Jacob Astor IV, one of the wealthiest men in the world at the time, died in the sinking after helping his pregnant wife into a lifeboat.
Macy's department store co-owner Isidor Straus and his wife Ida died together. Ida reportedly refused a seat in a lifeboat so she could stay with her husband.
Margaret "Molly" Brown survived the sinking and helped row her lifeboat back toward the wreck site to search for survivors. Newspapers later nicknamed her "The Unsinkable Molly Brown."
At least three small dogs are known to have survived the sinking, carried into lifeboats by their first-class owners.
Titanic's ship's cat, Jenny, and her newborn kittens were left behind on the dock at Southampton just before the maiden voyage departed, after apparently being moved off the ship by a crew member days earlier.
Wireless operator Harold Bride survived the sinking and helped transmit some of the first news reports once aboard Carpathia, despite suffering frostbitten feet.
Second Officer Charles Lightoller was the most senior officer to survive. He was pulled underwater against a ventilation grate and then blown clear by an underwater boiler explosion.
None of Titanic's senior officers, including Captain Smith, survived the sinking.
A U.S. Senate inquiry into the disaster began just four days after Carpathia reached New York with the survivors.
The U.S. and British inquiries into the disaster both concluded that Titanic had been traveling too fast for the icy conditions that night.
Titanic's disaster led directly to the creation of the International Ice Patrol, which still monitors iceberg danger in North Atlantic shipping lanes today.
The Titanic sinking also prompted the first International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea (SOLAS) in 1914, which mandated lifeboat space for every person aboard a ship.
After the disaster, maritime regulations were changed to require ships' radio equipment to be staffed 24 hours a day, closing the exact gap that had kept the Californian from hearing Titanic's distress calls.
Titanic's twin propellers, if laid flat on the ground, would each stand roughly as tall as a two-story house.
Titanic carried around 8,000 cigars, 1,500 bottles of wine, and 15,000 bottles of ale and stout in its stores for the voyage.
The ship's a la carte restaurant let first-class passengers dine outside the standard set meal times, an unusual option for ocean liners of the era.
Titanic's postal workers spent the ship's final hour trying to move 200 sacks of registered mail to higher decks, hoping to save them from the flooding. All five postal clerks aboard died in the sinking.
Only about 333 of the roughly 1,500 people who died were ever recovered from the sea, and around a third of those bodies were never identified.
Passengers in third class faced physical barriers, including gates separating their decks from first and second class, originally installed to comply with U.S. immigration laws, which slowed some passengers' access to lifeboats.
Titanic's construction employed around 15,000 workers at the Harland & Wolff shipyard at its peak.
At least eight workers died during Titanic's construction, a toll considered relatively low for shipbuilding projects of that scale at the time.
Titanic completed its sea trials in a single day, April 2, 1912, just over a week before its maiden voyage began.
A national coal miners' strike in Britain earlier in 1912 had left many ships without enough fuel. White Star Line diverted coal from other liners to make sure Titanic could sail on schedule.
Stewardess Violet Jessop survived the Titanic disaster after also surviving a serious collision aboard sister ship Olympic the year before, and she went on to survive the sinking of sister ship Britannic in 1916 as well.
Titanic's rudder alone weighed over 100 tons, roughly as much as several school buses combined.
The largest of Titanic's three anchors weighed about 15.5 tons, and it took a team of 20 horses to haul its chain through Belfast before installation.
The ship's engines generated around 46,000 horsepower, comparable to combining the output of hundreds of modern cars.
Titanic had its own onboard newspaper, the Atlantic Daily Bulletin, printed daily with news received via wireless, stock prices, and the day's menu.
Passengers could send and receive wireless telegrams during the voyage, making Titanic's radio room one of the more advanced features of the ship for 1912.
Author and journalist W.T. Stead, a first-class passenger who died in the sinking, had written stories years earlier warning about the dangers of ocean liners sailing without enough lifeboats.
Titanic's chief baker, Charles Joughin, is reported to have survived for roughly two hours in the freezing water, longer than almost anyone else who ended up in the sea.
Card games, informal concerts, and a Sunday church service led by Captain Smith were among the ways passengers spent their days during Titanic's brief voyage.
Third-class passengers aboard Titanic, many of them emigrants, came from more than a dozen countries, reflecting the wave of migration to the United States in the early 20th century.
Guglielmo Marconi, inventor of the wireless telegraph system used aboard Titanic, was offered a berth on the ship's maiden voyage but chose to sail earlier on another liner.
Titanic's four funnels were each large enough that two locomotives could have been driven through them side by side.
White Star Line's rival, Cunard Line, had launched two even faster liners, Lusitania and Mauretania, a few years before Titanic. White Star's Olympic-class ships were designed to compete on luxury and size rather than raw speed.
Titanic's telegraph operators sent and received hundreds of personal messages from passengers in just the first two days of the voyage, in addition to navigational traffic.
Survivor Charlotte Collyer escaped the sinking with her young daughter but lost her husband. Her firsthand account, published in a magazine soon afterward, became one of the earliest public survivor stories.
The wreck of Titanic is legally protected under a 2004 international agreement between the United States and United Kingdom aimed at preserving the site from souvenir hunting.
Deep-sea expeditions have recovered thousands of artifacts from Titanic's debris field, including pieces of china, personal items, and sections of the hull, many now displayed in traveling exhibitions.
Marine microbes are slowly consuming Titanic's iron hull through a process called "rusticle" formation, and researchers estimate the wreck could collapse into the seabed within a matter of decades.
James Cameron's 1997 film "Titanic" became, at the time, the highest-grossing movie ever made, reigniting global public interest in the ship's story more than 80 years after it sank.
Titanic's maiden voyage was originally meant to be just the first of many regular Atlantic crossings for the ship. Instead, it became the ship's only voyage.
Titanic's forward mast held a crow's nest where lookouts, including Frederick Fleet, kept watch without binoculars, which had been mistakenly left locked in a cabinet with no key aboard.
Because the crow's nest lookouts couldn't access binoculars that night, some historians argue Titanic might have spotted the iceberg with enough time to avoid it entirely had the equipment been available.
Titanic's promenade deck stretched the length of two football fields, giving first-class passengers a sheltered space to walk and take in ocean views.
Second-class accommodations on Titanic were considered comparable in comfort to first-class cabins on many other transatlantic liners of the era.
Titanic carried around 900 crew members, more than a third of everyone aboard, spanning roles from engineers and stewards to chefs and postal clerks.
Many of Titanic's crew came from Southampton, and the disaster devastated the city. Some streets reportedly lost nearly every family with a connection to the sea.
Titanic's electric lighting system ran throughout the ship, powered by four steam-driven generators, an impressive feature for a passenger vessel in 1912.
Passengers could ride one of Titanic's three electric elevators, a novelty at the time reserved for first-class use.
Titanic's grand staircase, capped by an ornate glass dome, was one of the ship's most photographed features and was faithfully recreated for the 1997 film adaptation.
More than a century after it sank, Titanic remains the subject of ongoing scientific expeditions, documentaries, and legal disputes over who has the right to recover items from the wreck.

All Titanic Facts

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