RMS Titanic

An answer to Cunard

Titanic was conceived as White Star's reply to the fast Cunard rivals Lusitania and Mauretania. Rather than chase outright speed, White Star and the Belfast shipbuilders Harland & Wolff chose to compete on sheer size, steadiness and unrivalled comfort. Three great sisters were planned, and Titanic followed the lead ship Olympic down the same slipways.

Her keel was laid on 22 March 1909, and her hull — the largest object ever riveted together at that point — was launched on 31 May 1911 before a crowd of tens of thousands. After fitting out she was completed on 2 April 1912 and ran her sea trials that same day before sailing round to Southampton.

The “unsinkable” reputation

Titanic's hull was divided into sixteen compartments by fifteen transverse bulkheads with watertight doors. She was built to float with any two of her compartments — or her forward four — open to the sea, a margin that led the press, more than her builders, to call her practically unsinkable. The flaw was subtle: those bulkheads did not reach high enough. If too many forward compartments flooded, the bow would settle until water simply spilled over the top of one bulkhead into the next, like water filling an ice-cube tray.

Titanic's fame rested less on her machinery than on her interiors, which were meant to feel like a grand hotel rather than a ship. First-class passengers moved between a soaring glass-domed Grand Staircase, an oak-panelled lounge modelled on Versailles, a Georgian smoking room, a Turkish bath, a heated swimming pool, a squash court and an à la carte restaurant run as a separate concession.

Second class on Titanic rivalled first class on many competing liners, with its own library, elevator and handsome dining saloon. Third class — the emigrant trade that actually paid the bills — was plainer, but a real advance on the crowded steerage of older ships, with clean cabins and generous meals. The gulf between the decks would become one of the disaster's most enduring themes.

Among the roughly 1,300 passengers were some of the wealthiest people alive: the millionaire Colonel John Jacob Astor IV, the Macy's co-owner Isidor Straus and his wife Ida, and the mining heir Benjamin Guggenheim — travelling in the same hull as hundreds of emigrants chasing a new life in America.

Titanic left Southampton on 10 April 1912 under Captain Edward J. Smith, White Star's most senior master, who was expected to retire after the crossing. She called at Cherbourg in France and Queenstown (now Cobh) in Ireland to take on further passengers and mail, then turned west into the open Atlantic with about 2,200 people aboard.

The first days were calm and clear. The wireless operators received repeated ice warnings from other ships, but those messages competed with a heavy backlog of passengers' personal telegrams, and Titanic held her course and speed. The night of 14 April was moonless and unusually still — a flat, black sea that made icebergs nearly impossible to see until they were almost on top of you.

At 11:40 p.m. on 14 April the lookout Frederick Fleet saw an iceberg dead ahead and sounded the warning. The officers threw the helm over and ordered the engines reversed, but a ship of Titanic's size could not turn in time. The berg scraped along her starboard side below the waterline, springing the hull's seams and opening at least five of her forward compartments to the sea — one more than she could survive.

Thomas Andrews, the ship's designer, made a quick inspection and delivered the verdict: she would founder, and nothing could stop it. Distress rockets were fired and the wireless operators sent the calls that would summon help. The lifeboats, too few to begin with, were often lowered only partly filled amid the confusion and a widespread disbelief that the great ship could really be sinking.

At about 2:20 a.m. on 15 April, two hours and forty minutes after the collision, the ship broke apart and went down, leaving hundreds in water barely above freezing.

Of the roughly 2,200 aboard, only about 710 lived. More than 1,500 were lost, most to the cold rather than to drowning. The dead included Captain Smith, Thomas Andrews, John Jacob Astor, and the Strauses, who chose to stay together rather than be parted.

The Cunard liner Carpathia, some four hours away, drove through the same ice field at reckless speed the moment she heard the distress call. Under Captain Arthur Rostron she reached the scene near dawn, lifted the survivors from the lifeboats, and carried them to New York where a stunned world was waiting.

Two official inquiries followed, one by the United States Senate and one by the British Board of Trade. Both spread the blame widely — the shortage of lifeboats, the ship's speed through known ice, and the nearby liner Californian, whose crew saw rockets in the night but never came. Neither inquiry could undo the loss, but together they forced lasting change.

For more than seventy years the wreck lay lost. On 1 September 1985 a team led by the American oceanographer Robert Ballard, working with French researchers, found her about 12,500 feet down on the ocean floor south of Newfoundland. The ship had broken in two; bow and stern lay roughly a third of a mile apart amid a vast debris field of crockery, shoes, luggage and fittings scattered across the seabed.

The discovery reignited a fascination that has never really faded. Titanic has since inspired countless books, exhibitions and films, and remains a touchstone in arguments about class, technology and human folly. The wreck itself is slowly being eaten away by iron-consuming bacteria and will one day be gone, but the story of the “unsinkable” ship and the night she went down seems fixed permanently in the modern imagination.