The ship was on its maiden voyage from England to New York City. It had 29 boilers, a swimming pool, gymnasium, Turkish bath, squash court, library, and a grand stair case that dazzled all (in First Class) who saw it.

The Titanic was a marvel of its day. It was three football fields long at 883 ft., and it was 93 ft. wide. Fully loaded, it displaced (weighed) 66,000 tons. Crew and passengers totaled 2,224; there were lifeboat seats for 1,178--a number that met the laws in force in 1912.

The ship was engineered and thought to be unsinkable because it had a double bottom and 16 watertight compartments. The designers calculated that in the event of a collision of any kind, up to four of the compartments could be filled with water and the ship would still float.



Near midnight on the April Sunday the Titanic crashed into an iceberg about 400 miles south of Newfoundland. At least five of the 16 watertight compartments near the bow were slit or ruptured. Subsequent examination indicates that the first four of the five compartments filled with water. The additional weight pulled the bow down into the Atlantic. The compartments were not capped on their tops, so water from the damaged compartments rolled aft over the open tops filling each succeeding compartment aft as the ship slowly tilted downwards by the bow. Titanic sank on Monday at 2:20 a.m.; it was April 15th.

The Cunard liner Carpathia arrived 80 minutes after the big ship slipped beneath the waves. The Carpathia kept the death toll from rising even higher as it rescued the people in the icy water and lifeboats. They could not have lived for any extended period in the frigid conditions. Among those who died were heirs to the Astor and Straus fortunes. Among those who lived was actress, activist, and philanthropist, Margaret Tobin Brown, after whom the 1960 musical and 1964 film (starring Debbie Reynolds), The Unsinkable Molly Brown was named.

According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, on September 1, 1985 the Titanic was found lying upright in two pieces on the ocean floor at a depth of about 13,000 feet. The ship was subsequently explored several times by manned and unmanned submersibles. The expeditions found no sign of a long gash previously thought to have been ripped in the ship's hull by the iceberg. The scientists involved think that the collision's impact produced a series of thin gashes in the hull. In addition, the impact fractured and separated seams, allowing water to flood in and pull the Titanic to the ocean floor.

Readers interested in more of the fascinating details should visit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RMS_Titanic