where did the titanic's maiden voyage start

A Timeline of the Sinking of the Titanic

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From the time of its inception, the Titanic was meant to be gigantic, luxurious and safe. It was touted as being unsinkable because of its system of watertight compartments and doors, which of course proved to be just a myth. Follow the history of the Titanic, from its beginnings in a shipyard to its end at the bottom of the sea, in this timeline of the building of the ship through its maiden (and only) voyage. In the early morning hours of April 15, 1912, all but 705 of its 2,229 passengers and crew lost their lives in the icy Atlantic .

The Building of the Titanic

March 31, 1909: Construction of the Titanic begins with the building of the keel, the backbone of the ship, at Harland & Wolff's shipyard in Belfast, Ireland.

May 31, 1911: The unfinished Titanic is lathered up with soap and pushed into the water for "fitting out." Fitting out is the installation of all the extras, some on the exterior, like the smokestacks and the propellers, and a lot on the inside, like the electrical systems, wall coverings, and furniture.

June 14, 1911: The Olympic, sister ship to the Titanic, departs on its maiden voyage.

April 2, 1912: The Titanic leaves the dock for sea trials, which include tests of speed, turns, and an emergency stop. At about 8 p.m., after the sea trials, the Titanic heads to Southampton, England.

The Maiden Voyage Begins

April 3 to 10, 1912: The Titanic is loaded with supplies and her crew is hired.

April 10, 1912: From 9:30 a.m. until 11:30 a.m., passengers board the ship. Then at noon, the Titanic leaves the dock at Southhampton for its maiden voyage. First stop is in Cherbourg, France, where the Titanic arrives at 6:30 p.m. and leaves at 8:10 p.m, heading to Queenstown, Ireland (now known as Cobh). It is carrying 2,229 passengers and crew.

April 11, 1912: At 1:30 p.m., the Titanic leaves Queenstown and begins its fated journey across the Atlantic for New York.

April 12 and 13, 1912: The Titanic is at sea, continuing on her journey as passengers enjoy the pleasures of the luxurious ship.

April 14, 1912 (9:20 p.m.): The Titanic's captain, Edward Smith, retires to his room.

April 14, 1912 (9:40 p.m.) : The last of seven warnings about icebergs is received in the wireless room. This warning never makes it to the bridge.

Last Hours of the Titanic

April 14, 1912 (11:40 p.m.): Two hours after the last warning, ship lookout Frederick Fleet spotted an iceberg directly in the path of the Titanic. The first officer, Lt. William McMaster Murdoch, orders a hard starboard (left) turn, but the Titanic's right side scrapes the iceberg. Only 37 seconds passed between the sighting of the iceberg and hitting it.

April 14, 1912 (11:50 p.m.): Water had entered the front part of the ship and risen to a level of 14 feet.

April 15, 1912 (12 a.m.): Captain Smith learns the ship can stay afloat for only two hours and gives orders to make first radio calls for help.

April 15, 1912 (12:05 a.m.): Captain Smith orders the crew to prepare the lifeboats and get the passengers and crew up on deck. There is only room in the lifeboats for about half the passengers and crew onboard. Women and children were put into the lifeboats first.

April 15, 1912 (12:45 a.m.): The first lifeboat is lowered into the freezing water.

April 15, 1912 (2:05 a.m.) The last lifeboat is lowered into the Atlantic. More than 1,500 people are still on the Titanic, now sitting at a steep tilt.

April 15, 1912 (2:18 a.m.): The last radio message is sent and the Titanic snaps in half.

April 15, 1912 (2:20 a.m.): The Titanic sinks.

Rescue of Survivors

April 15, 1912 (4:10 a.m.) : The Carpathia, which was about 58 miles southeast of the Titanic at the time it heard the distress call, picks up the first of the survivors.

April 15, 1912 (8:50 a.m.): The Carpathia picks up survivors from the last lifeboat and heads for New York.

April 17, 1912: The Mackay-Bennett is the first of several ships to travel to the area where the Titanic sank to search for bodies.

April 18, 1912: The Carpathia arrives in New York with 705 survivors.

April 19 to May 25, 1912: The United States Senate holds hearings about the disaster; the Senate findings include questions about why there were not more lifeboats on the Titanic.

May 2 to July 3, 1912: The British Board of Trade holds an inquiry into the Titanic disaster. It was discovered during this inquiry that the last ice message was the only one that warned of an iceberg directly in the path of the Titanic, and it was believed that if the captain had gotten the warning that he would have changed course in time for the disaster to be avoided.

Sept. 1, 1985: Robert Ballard's expedition team discovers the wreck of the Titanic .

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By: History.com Editors

Updated: May 2, 2024 | Original: November 9, 2009

The RMS Titanic, a luxury steamship, sank in the early hours of April 15, 1912, off the coast of Newfoundland in the North Atlantic after sideswiping an iceberg during its maiden voyage. Of the 2,240 passengers and crew on board, more than 1,500 lost their lives in the disaster. Titanic has inspired countless books, articles and films (including the 1997 Titanic movie starring Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio), and the ship's story has entered the public consciousness as a cautionary tale about the perils of human hubris.

The Building of the RMS Titanic

The Titanic was the product of intense competition among rival shipping lines in the first half of the 20th century. In particular, the White Star Line found itself in a battle for steamship primacy with Cunard, a venerable British firm with two standout ships that ranked among the most sophisticated and luxurious of their time.

Cunard’s Mauretania began service in 1907 and quickly set a speed record for the fastest average speed during a transatlantic crossing (23.69 knots or 27.26 mph), a title that it held for 22 years.

Cunard’s other masterpiece, Lusitania , launched the same year and was lauded for its spectacular interiors. Lusitania met its tragic end on May 7, 1915, when a torpedo fired by a German U-boat sunk the ship, killing nearly 1,200 of the 1,959 people on board and precipitating the United States’ entry into World War I .

Did you know? Passengers traveling first class on Titanic were roughly 44 percent more likely to survive than other passengers.

The same year that Cunard unveiled its two magnificent liners, J. Bruce Ismay, chief executive of White Star, discussed the construction of three large ships with William J. Pirrie, chairman of the shipbuilding company Harland and Wolff. Part of a new “Olympic” class of liners, each ship would measure 882 feet in length and 92.5 feet at their broadest point, making them the largest of their time.

In March 1909, work began in the massive Harland and Wolff shipyard in Belfast, Ireland, on the second of these three ocean liners, Titanic, and continued nonstop for two years.

On May 31, 1911, Titanic’s immense hull–the largest movable manmade object in the world at the time–made its way down the slipways and into the River Lagan in Belfast. More than 100,000 people attended the launching, which took just over a minute and went off without a hitch.

The hull was immediately towed to a mammoth fitting-out dock where thousands of workers would spend most of the next year building the ship’s decks, constructing her lavish interiors and installing the 29 giant boilers that would power her two main steam engines.

‘Unsinkable’ Titanic’s Fatal Flaws

According to some hypotheses, Titanic was doomed from the start by a design that many lauded as state-of-the-art. The Olympic-class ships featured a double bottom and 15 watertight bulkhead compartments equipped with electric watertight doors that could be operated individually or simultaneously by a switch on the bridge.

It was these watertight bulkheads that inspired Shipbuilder magazine, in a special issue devoted to the Olympic liners, to deem them “practically unsinkable.”

But the watertight compartment design contained a flaw that was a critical factor in Titanic’s sinking: While the individual bulkheads were indeed watertight, the walls separating the bulkheads extended only a few feet above the water line, so water could pour from one compartment into another, especially if the ship began to list or pitch forward.

The second critical safety lapse that contributed to the loss of so many lives was the inadequate number of lifeboats carried on Titanic. A mere 16 boats, plus four Engelhardt “collapsibles,” could accommodate just 1,178 people. Titanic could carry up to 2,435 passengers, and a crew of approximately 900 brought her capacity to more than 3,300 people.

As a result, even if the lifeboats were loaded to full capacity during an emergency evacuation, there were available seats for only one-third of those on board. While unthinkably inadequate by today’s standards, Titanic’s supply of lifeboats actually exceeded the British Board of Trade’s requirements.

Passengers on the Titanic

Titanic created quite a stir when it departed for its maiden voyage from Southampton, England, on April 10, 1912. After stops in Cherbourg, France, and Queenstown (now known as Cobh), Ireland, the ship set sail for New York with 2,240 passengers and crew—or “souls,” the expression then used in the shipping industry, usually in connection with a sinking—on board.

As befitting the first transatlantic crossing of the world’s most celebrated ship, many of these souls were high-ranking officials, wealthy industrialists, dignitaries and celebrities. First and foremost was the White Star Line’s managing director, J. Bruce Ismay, accompanied by Thomas Andrews, the ship’s builder from Harland and Wolff.

Absent was financier J.P. Morgan , whose International Mercantile Marine shipping trust controlled the White Star Line and who had selected Ismay as a company officer. Morgan had planned to join his associates on Titanic but canceled at the last minute when some business matters delayed him.

The wealthiest passenger was John Jacob Astor IV, heir to the Astor family fortune, who had made waves a year earlier by marrying 18-year-old Madeleine Talmadge Force, a young woman 29 years his junior, shortly after divorcing his first wife.

Other notable passengers included the elderly owner of Macy’s, Isidor Straus, and his wife Ida; industrialist Benjamin Guggenheim, accompanied by his mistress, valet and chauffeur; and widow and heiress Margaret “Molly” Brown, who would earn her nickname “ The Unsinkable Molly Brown ” by helping to maintain calm and order while the lifeboats were being loaded and boosting the spirits of her fellow survivors.

The employees attending to this collection of First Class luminaries were mostly traveling Second Class, along with academics, tourists, journalists and others who would enjoy a level of service and accommodations equivalent to First Class on most other ships.

But by far the largest group of passengers was in Third Class: more than 700, exceeding the other two levels combined. Some had paid less than $20 to make the crossing. It was Third Class that was the major source of profit for shipping lines like White Star, and Titanic was designed to offer these passengers accommodations and amenities superior to those found in Third Class on any other ship of that era.

Titanic Sets Sail

Titanic’s departure from Southampton on April 10 was not without some oddities. A small coal fire was discovered in one of her bunkers–an alarming but not uncommon occurrence on steamships of the day. Stokers hosed down the smoldering coal and shoveled it aside to reach the base of the blaze.

After assessing the situation, the captain and chief engineer concluded that it was unlikely it had caused any damage that could affect the hull structure, and the stokers were ordered to continue controlling the fire at sea.

According to a theory put forth by a small number of Titanic experts, the fire became uncontrollable after the ship left Southampton, forcing the crew to attempt a full-speed crossing; moving at such a fast pace, they were unable to avoid the fatal collision with the iceberg.

Another unsettling event took place when Titanic left the Southampton dock. As she got underway, she narrowly escaped a collision with the America Line’s S.S. New York. Superstitious Titanic buffs sometimes point to this as the worst kind of omen for a ship departing on her maiden voyage.

The Titanic Strikes an Iceberg

On April 14, after four days of uneventful sailing, Titanic received sporadic reports of ice from other ships, but she was sailing on calm seas under a moonless, clear sky.

At about 11:30 p.m., a lookout saw an iceberg coming out of a slight haze dead ahead, then rang the warning bell and telephoned the bridge. The engines were quickly reversed and the ship was turned sharply—instead of making direct impact, Titanic seemed to graze along the side of the berg, sprinkling ice fragments on the forward deck.

Sensing no collision, the lookouts were relieved. They had no idea that the iceberg had a jagged underwater spur, which slashed a 300-foot gash in the hull below the ship’s waterline.

By the time the captain toured the damaged area with Harland and Wolff’s Thomas Andrews, five compartments were already filling with seawater, and the bow of the doomed ship was alarmingly pitched downward, allowing seawater to pour from one bulkhead into the neighboring compartment.

Andrews did a quick calculation and estimated that Titanic might remain afloat for an hour and a half, perhaps slightly more. At that point the captain, who had already instructed his wireless operator to call for help, ordered the lifeboats to be loaded.

Titanic’s Lifeboats

A little more than an hour after contact with the iceberg, a largely disorganized and haphazard evacuation began with the lowering of the first lifeboat. The craft was designed to hold 65 people; it left with only 28 aboard.

Tragically, this was to be the norm: During the confusion and chaos during the precious hours before Titanic plunged into the sea, nearly every lifeboat would be launched woefully under-filled, some with only a handful of passengers.

In compliance with the law of the sea, women and children boarded the boats first; only when there were no women or children nearby were men permitted to board. Yet many of the victims were in fact women and children, the result of disorderly procedures that failed to get them to the boats in the first place.

Exceeding Andrews’ prediction, Titanic stubbornly stayed afloat for close to three hours. Those hours witnessed acts of craven cowardice and extraordinary bravery.

Hundreds of human dramas unfolded between the order to load the lifeboats and the ship’s final plunge: Men saw off wives and children, families were separated in the confusion and selfless individuals gave up their spots to remain with loved ones or allow a more vulnerable passenger to escape. In the end, 706 people survived the sinking of the Titanic.

Titanic Sinks

The ship’s most illustrious passengers each responded to the circumstances with conduct that has become an integral part of the Titanic legend. Ismay, the White Star managing director, helped load some of the boats and later stepped onto a collapsible as it was being lowered. Although no women or children were in the vicinity when he abandoned ship, he would never live down the ignominy of surviving the disaster while so many others perished.

Thomas Andrews, Titanic’s chief designer, was last seen in the First Class smoking room, staring blankly at a painting of a ship on the wall. Astor deposited his wife Madeleine into a lifeboat and, remarking that she was pregnant, asked if he could accompany her; refused entry, he managed to kiss her goodbye just before the boat was lowered away.

Although offered a seat on account of his age, Isidor Straus refused any special consideration, and his wife Ida would not leave her husband behind. The couple retired to their cabin and perished together.

Benjamin Guggenheim and his valet returned to their rooms and changed into formal evening dress; emerging onto the deck, he famously declared, “We are dressed in our best and are prepared to go down like gentlemen.”

Molly Brown helped load the boats and finally was forced into one of the last to leave. She implored its crewmen to turn back for survivors, but they refused, fearing they would be swamped by desperate people trying to escape the icy seas.

Titanic, nearly perpendicular and with many of her lights still aglow, finally dove beneath the ocean’s surface at about 2:20 a.m. on April 15, 1912. Throughout the morning, Cunard’s Carpathia , after receiving Titanic’s distress call at midnight and steaming at full speed while dodging ice floes all night, rounded up all of the lifeboats. They contained only 706 survivors.

Aftermath of the Titanic Catastrophe

At least five separate boards of inquiry on both sides of the Atlantic conducted comprehensive hearings on Titanic’s sinking, interviewing dozens of witnesses and consulting with many maritime experts. Every conceivable subject was investigated, from the conduct of the officers and crew to the construction of the ship. Titanic conspiracy theories abounded.

While it has always been assumed that the ship sank as a result of the gash that caused the bulkhead compartments to flood, various other theories have emerged over the decades, including that the ship’s steel plates were too brittle for the near-freezing Atlantic waters, that the impact caused rivets to pop and that the expansion joints failed, among others.

Technological aspects of the catastrophe aside, Titanic’s demise has taken on a deeper, almost mythic, meaning in popular culture. Many view the tragedy as a morality play about the dangers of human hubris: Titanic’s creators believed they had built an unsinkable ship that could not be defeated by the laws of nature.

This same overconfidence explains the electrifying impact Titanic’s sinking had on the public when she was lost. There was widespread disbelief that the ship could not possibly have sunk, and, due to the era’s slow and unreliable means of communication, misinformation abounded. Newspapers initially reported that the ship had collided with an iceberg but remained afloat and was being towed to port with everyone on board.

It took many hours for accurate accounts to become widely available, and even then people had trouble accepting that this paragon of modern technology could sink on her maiden voyage, taking more than 1,500 souls with her.

The ship historian John Maxtone-Graham has compared Titanic’s story to the Challenger space shuttle disaster of 1986. In that case, the world reeled at the notion that one of the most sophisticated inventions ever created could explode into oblivion along with its crew. Both tragedies triggered a sudden collapse in confidence, revealing that we remain subject to human frailties and error, despite our hubris and a belief in technological infallibility.

Titanic Wreck

Efforts to locate the wreck of Titanic began soon after it sank. But technical limitations—as well as the vastness of the North Atlantic search area—made finding it extremely difficult.

Finally, in 1985, a joint U.S.-French expedition located the wreck of the RMS Titanic . The doomed ship was discovered about 400 miles east of Newfoundland in the North Atlantic, some 13,000 feet below the surface.

Subsequent explorations have found that the wreck is in relatively good condition, with many objects on the ship—jewelry, furniture, shoes, machinery and other items—are still intact.

Since its discovery, the wreck has been explored numerous times by manned and unmanned submersibles—including the submersible Titan, which imploded during what would have been its third dive to the wreck in June 2023.

HISTORY Vault: Titanic's Achilles Heel

Did Titanic have a fatal design flaw? John Chatterton and Richie Kohler of "Deep Sea Detectives" dive the wreckage of Titanic's sister ship, Britannic, to investigate the possibility.

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Titanic Timeline

Titanic sets sail.

Although you cross the Atlantic for years and have ice reported and never see it, at other times it’s not reported and you do see it. -Charles Lightoller (at the public inquiry into the sinking)

The Last Hours – 14 April 1912

Deeply regret advise you Titanic sank this morning after collision with iceberg, resulting in serious loss of life. Full particulars later. -Bruce Ismay, in his wire to the White Star Line

The Last Hours – 15 April 1912

Except for the [life] boats beside the ship and the icebergs, the sea was strangely empty. Hardly a bit of wreckage floated – just a deck chair or two, a few life belts, a good deal of cork. -Arthur Rostron, Captain of the Carpathia

The Aftermath

I think the enquiry is a complete whitewash. You have the [British] Board of Trade in effect enquiring into a disaster that’s largely of its own making. -Paul Louden-Brown, White Star Line Archivist

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The titanic.

The  Titanic  was a White Star Line steamship carrying the British flag. She was built by Harland and Wolff of Belfast, Ireland, at a reported cost of $7.5 million. Her specifications were:

• Length overall: 882.5 feet
• Gross tonnage: 46,329 tons
• Beam: 92.5 feet
• Net tonnage: 24,900 tons
• Depth 59.5 feet
• Triple screw propulsion

On 10 April 1912, the  Titanic  commenced her maiden voyage from Southampton, England, to New York, with 2,227 passengers and crew aboard. At 11:40 p.m. on the night of 14 April, traveling at a speed of 20.5 knots, she struck an iceberg on her starboard bow. At 2:20 a.m. she sank, approximately 13.5 miles east-southeast of the position from which her distress call was transmitted. Lost at sea were 1,522 people, including passengers and crew. The 705 survivors, afloat in the ship's twenty lifeboats, were rescued within hours by the Cunard Liner,  Carpathia.

The wreck of the  Titanic  was located by a French and American team on 1 September 1985 in 12,500 feet (3,810 m) of water about 350 miles (531 km) southeast of Newfoundland, Canada. A 1986 expedition documented the shipwreck more thoroughly.

A section of the National Museum of American History's exhibition  On the Water  is devoted to the story of  Titanic , and the National Postal Museum featured the exhibition  Fire and Ice: Hindenburg and Titanic .

• The Titanic Historical Society Inc.

Prepared by the Division of Work and Industry, Transportation Collections, National Museum  of American History, in cooperation with Public Inquiry Services, Smithsonian Institution PIMS/TRA30/2/11

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International Section

R.m.s titanic - history and significance.

History, Culture and Iconic Interests in the United States and Abroad The R.M.S.  Titanic  is perhaps the most famous shipwreck in our current popular culture.  Titanic  was a British-registered ship in the White Star line that was owned by a U.S. company in which famed American financier John Pierpont "JP" Morgan was a major stockholder.  Titanic  was built in Belfast, Northern Ireland by Harland & Wolff for transatlantic passage between Southampton, England and New York City. It was the largest and most luxurious passenger ship of its time and was reported to be unsinkable.  Titanic,   launched on May 31, 1911 , and set sail on its maiden voyage from Southampton on April 10, 1912, with 2,240 passengers and crew on board. On April 15, 1912, after striking an iceberg,  Titanic  broke apart and sank to the bottom of the ocean, taking with it the lives of more than 1,500 passengers and crew. While there has been some  salvage  outside of the major hull portions, most of the ship remains in its final resting place, 12,000 feet below sea level and over 350 nautical miles off the coast of Newfoundland, Canada. Its famous story of disaster and human drama has been, and continues to be, recounted in numerous books, articles and movies.  Titanic  has been recognized by the United States Congress for its national and international significance and in many ways has become a cultural icon. The disaster also resulted in a number of memorials around the world. In the United States, there are major memorials in  Washington D.C . offsite link  and  New York offsite link ; the  Widener Library  offsite link at Harvard University is another major memorial commemorating Henry Elkins Widener, a victim of the sinking. Investigation and the Development of Measures for Safety in Navigation The sinking of  Titanic  was one of the deadliest peacetime maritime disasters in history and quickly became a catalyst for change. The United States Congress held  hearings offsite link  on the casualty that resulted in a  report offsite link  and measures to improve  safety of navigation offsite link . Similar investigations were held in the United Kingdom. The international community readily came together for the purpose of establishing global maritime standards and regulations to promote safety of navigation, the most important of which was the Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea (SOLAS), widely regarded as the most important of all international agreements on the safety of merchant ships.

• Frequently Asked Questions  on History and Significance
• Titanic’s 100th Birthday May 31, 2012 NOAA
• One hundred years after the sinking of  Titanic  is the  IMO World Maritime Day theme for 2012 offsite link
• R.M.S. Titanic Maritime Memorial Act of 1986  (1986 Act)
• International Agreement Concerning the Shipwrecked Vessel RMS Titanic
• NOAA Guidelines  for Research, Exploration and Salvage of RMS Titanic
• IMO, the Titanic, and the Safety of Life at Sea Convention (SOLAS) offsite link

Last Updated July 10, 2018

Map of the Titanic’s maiden and final voyage

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1909 - April 11, 1912

Construction begins on the Titanic at the Harland and Wolff shipyard on Queen's Island in Belfast, Ireland. The slipway used to build the Titanic is the biggest ever constructed, taking up three of the existing slipways at the shipyard. Construction results in 246 injuries and eight deaths.

May 31, 1911

The Titanic hits the water for the first time in front of about 100,000 spectators. The ship is then towed out to a spot where her engines, funnels and other parts can be installed and the interior finished.

April 2, 1912

The first sea trial of the ship involves 12 hours of testing. The ship is sailed at different speeds, turned and stopped. Overall it goes about 125 kilometers (80 miles) during the tests and returns to Belfast to have the paperwork signed declaring the ship seaworthy.

Credit: U.S. National Archives and Records Administration/Wikimedia Commons

April 10, 1912

The Titanic sets off on its maiden voyage from Southampton in England to New York City.

As the ship leaves the dock, it is so big that it pushes many of the smaller ships up and then down into the trough of its wake. One ship, the New York, breaks away from its cables as it is pulled into the wake, almost colliding with the Titanic . It takes about an hour to get the New York under control and the Titanic out of the docks.

The ship picks up additional passengers in Cherbourg, France, and later that evening sets out for Queenstown, Ireland.

Credit: Wikimedia Commons

April 11, 1912

The Titanic makes a safe stop in Queenstown, Ireland to pick up more passengers and mail, and then at 1:30 P.M. heads out across the Atlantic Ocean toward New York.

April 14, 1912

The Titanic gets warnings from other ships that there is ice drifting around Newfoundland:

Captain, Titanic: Westbound streamers report bergs, growlers and field ice in 42’ N., from 49’ to 51’ W., April 12. Compliments Barr

Capt . Smith, Titanic: Have had moderate variable winds and clear fine weather since leaving. Greek steamer "Athinai" reports passing icebergs and large quantity of field ice today in latitude 41.51 north, longitude 49.52 west.... Wish you and Titanic all success. Commander

"Amerika" passed two large icebergs in 41.27 N., 50.8 W., on April 14

From “Mesaba” to “Titanic” and all east-bound ships: Ice report in latitude 42º N. to 41º 25’ N., longitude 49º W to longitude 50º 30’ W. Saw much heavy pack ice and great number large icebergs. Also field ice. Weather good, clear.

Titanic begins to receive a sixth message about ice in the area, and radio operator Jack Phillips cuts it off, telling the operator from the other ship to “shut up.”

Frederick Fleet, the lookout in the crow’s nest, spots an object ahead, rings the warning bell three times, and calls down to the bridge to say “iceberg right ahead!” William Murdoch, the first officer on duty, gives the command to turn the ship hard.

Thirty-seven seconds later, the Titanic hits the iceberg on its starboard side. The ice bashes several holes along the side of the ship. After 10 minutes, the water pouring in is 4.3 meters above the keel in the forward compartments.

April 15, 1912

Phillips types out “CQD”—the international distress call at the time—“MGY” the Titanic 's call letters, and the ship's position. Captain Edward John Smith orders the crew to get the lifeboats and begin boarding women and children first.

Lifeboats begin to be lowered from the deck into the water. The noise of the steam escaping from the vents on the deck is so loud that the man in charge of directing lifeboat operations has to use his hands to give directions.

The Carpathia, a ship nearby, is alerted to the emergency. Its captain, Arthur H. Rostron, wires that he is coming to their rescue. The Carpathia is only 93 kilometers away.

Phillips switches from using CQD to SOS, the new international distress signal. This is only the second time the SOS code has been used since its approval. Another officer begins to send up distress rockets to try and alert other ships.

The last of the Titanic disappears under the water. The U.S. puts the death toll at 1,517 passengers and crew, the British at 1,503. Final figures cannot be known because official counts are done only after a ship reaches its destination to account for stowaways and passenger movement at ports.

The Carpathia arrives at the site of the sinking. The surviving passengers and crew, 710 in all, board the ship and head for New York.

April 15-16, 1912

News of the Titanic ’s fate reaches the mainland, and thousands of people flood the offices of the ship company, White Star Line, trying to find out if their friends and family have survived the trip.

Wikimedia Commons

April 18, 1912

Carpathia docks at Pier 54 in New York City before a crowd of people numbering 40,000, despite a heavy rain. Aid organizations have blankets and clothes for the surviving passengers. The Carpathia is quickly restocked to resume her trip to Fiume, Austria–Hungary, and her crew is given a bonus.

1914 - 1970s

Charles Smith, an architect, proposes to attach electromagnets to a submarine to pull the wreck of the Titanic from the bottom.

Risdon Beazley, a salvage company, set out on a secret mission to try and salvage the Titanic . Their ship was reported to have dropped explosives overboard to detonate on the seafloor, the idea being to blow up the hull and retrieve objects from the interior. Beazley fails to find the Titanic .

Risdon Beazley tries to find, and blow up the Titanic again, and again fails.

Douglas Woolley, a hosiery worker, proposes to find the Titanic and raise it using nylon balloons attached to her hull. They abandon the plan after they cannot figure out how to inflate the balloons once they are attached to the hull.

More proposals surface for how to retrieve the Titanic, assuming it is found. One suggests pumping 165,000 metric tons of molten wax or Vaseline into the ship. Another proposes to encase the ship in a buoyant jacket of ice, turning her into an iceberg that would float. Another suggests filling her with Ping-Pong balls.

July 17, 1980

Jack Grimm sets off from Florida to look for the Titanic, equipped with wide-sweeping sonar, and a pet monkey named Titan—although the scientists onboard demand he leave Titan behind. But despite their technology, they fail to find the wreck.

Grimm tries again to find the Titanic, this time with a more powerful sonar device. With it, they spot something that looks like a propeller. Grimm is convinced it is the ship, but the scientists on board have doubts.

Grimm returns for a third time to look again at the propeller. They find nothing.

Researchers commissioned jointly by the U.S. Navy and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution set out to find and map two sunken nuclear submarines lost in the same area. They find that as a submarine sinks, parts and contents of the ship spread across a wide area into a debris field far larger than the size of the ship—a clue important for figuring out how the Titanic debris might have scattered.

The second expedition to map these nuclear submarines launches. The U.S. Navy agrees to let oceanographer Robert Ballard look for the Titanic in whatever time he has left after mapping the submarines. This gives him 12 days to find the wreck that has been lost for 73 years.

September 1, 1985

Man-made debris begins to appear on the cameras, eventually leading Ballard and his team to the hull of the Titanic .

Credit: Erik Charlton/Wikimedia Commons

Ballard returns to the Titanic with Alvin, a deep-diving submersible, and Jason, a remotely operated vehicle, to take pictures of the wreck.

Two partners, John Joslyn and George Tulloch, found RMS Titanic, Inc., a company that will attempt to salvage and preserve the ship.

RMS Titanic, Inc., sends a $6-million expedition to dive down to the Titanic and salvage about 1,800 objects. Their removal from the wreck is very controversial.

1990s - 2010s

A French administrator awards RMS Titanic, Inc., the rights to the objects recovered in 1987.

December 19, 1997

Titanic, the Hollywood romance directed by James Cameron, is released in theaters. The blockbuster movie wins Academy Awards for Best Picture and Best Director and grosses more than $1.8 billion, making it the first film to ever crack the billion-dollar mark at the box office. It remains the highest grossing film in history until another Cameron film, Avatar, breaks the record in 2010.

Another research ship, Russia's Akademik Mstislav Keldysh visits the Titanic to take more pictures.

Credit: Lori Johnston, NOAA-OE/Wikimedia Commons

August 15, 2011

After years of legal battling, a judge grants the title to items from the Titanic to RMS Titanic, Inc. The artifacts can be sold, but only to parties who would be able to care for them.

4 April 2012

The James Cameron movie Titanic makes a comeback in 3-D at select movie theaters.

World History Edu

Maiden Voyage of the Titanic

The Titanic was launched on May 31, 1911, and after completion of the interior, it began its maiden voyage from Southampton, England, to New York City on April 10, 1912.

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Encyclopedia Titanica

Olympic and titanic : maiden voyage mysteries, charting the maiden voyage route.

Routes across the Atlantic

The new White Star liner Olympic , the first of three gigantic liners ordered by the White Star Line for the highly competitive transatlantic service, was launched from the Queen’s Island yard of Harland and Wolff on October 20, 1910, and was completed by the end of May 1911. She departed on her maiden voyage from Southampton to New York on June 14, first stopping at Cherbourg that Wednesday evening to pick up passengers and mails, and then stopping at Queenstown the following day to pick up more of the same. The westbound transatlantic passage officially began when the ship passed the Daunt’s Rock Light Vessel at 4:22 p.m. Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) outside of the harbor of Queenstown, and ended when the ship passed the Ambrose Channel Light Vessel at 2:24 a.m. New York Time (NYT) on June 21, 1911, before entering New York Harbor. After taking her departure from the Daunt’s Rock Light Vessel, Olympic traveled around the southern coast of Ireland to Fastnet Light, a lighthouse located on a rock several miles off the tip of Ireland’s southwestern coast. The ship then followed a great circle route from Fastnet Light across the Atlantic to a point called “the corner” at 42° N, 47° W, the turning point for westbound steamers that was used to avoid encountering ice along the route in the vicinity of the Grand Banks of Newfoundland for that time of year. From the corner point, the Olympic followed a rhumb line course to a point south of the Nantucket Shoals Light Vessel, and then straight to the Ambrose Channel Light Vessel marking the arrival point to New York Harbor and the official endpoint of the westbound transatlantic crossing. 1

A rhumb line is the path that a ship follows if its heading remains unchanged. The great circle route is the shortest path between any two points on a globe. When following a great circle path, a ship must make several heading changes to stay close to the track. From detailed data that we studied from several Olympic voyages, it appears that course segments (in true degrees) would be laid down at Local Apparent Noon (LAN) each day. However, it also seems that very small course adjustments took place as often as every six hours. Whenever possible, being on a great circle path is desired, since it minimizes the overall length of a passage.

Olympic departed New York on June 28, 1911 for her eastbound maiden voyage back to Southampton, with two stops along the way. After leaving New York, Olympic crossed the Atlantic to discharge passengers and mails at Plymouth, England on July 4, 1911. From Plymouth she went on to Cherbourg to discharge more passengers and mails, and then on to her home port of Southampton, the final port of call. The official passage across the Atlantic eastbound began by taking departure off the Ambrose Channel Light Vessel outside of New York Harbor on June 28, 1911 at 5:06 p.m. NYT. From Ambrose, she headed for a turning point near 40° N, 70° W, and from there followed a rhumb line course to 41° N, 47° W, the corner point for eastbound steamers at that time of the year. From the corner, Olympic followed the great circle route across the Atlantic to a point south of Bishop Rock Light, a small lighthouse located off the westernmost tip of the Isles of Scilly. From Bishop Rock she went due east to about the longitude of Lizard Point Light, and then on to Eddystone Light, a lighthouse located on a group of rocks some fourteen miles out from the Plymouth breakwater. The arrival of the Olympic off Eddystone Light on July 4, 1911 at 4:36 p.m. GMT marked the official endpoint of the eastbound transatlantic crossing.

A chart of these westbound and eastbound routes for this relatively new White Star Line service is shown below. These routes, known as the southern tracks, were used by steamers from January 15 through August 23 to avoid running into ice. From August 24 to January 14, steamers followed more northerly tracks, thus shortening the transatlantic distance by about 110 miles. 2 The southern tracks shown below are also the same routes that Titanic was to follow when she entered service in April 1912.

Olympic's Maiden Voyage Log Card

Olympic’s maiden voyage details for her first Atlantic crossing appeared on her log card, which gave the departure time and date, the arrival time and date, the latitude and longitude of the ship at Local Apparent Noon for each day, the distance run for each day, the total distance run from departure point to arrival point, the total passage time in days, hours, and minutes, and the average speed for the crossing in knots taken to two decimal places. It also included remarks about the weather and sea conditions, listed the voyage number and direction, the departure and arrival points for the transatlantic part of the voyage, and all the ports visited for the voyage. A scan of her maiden voyage log card, courtesy of Günter Bäbler, is shown below.

The following table summarizes the important data from this log card:

Olympic’s Maiden Voyage Discrepancies

As soon as those in charge of Olympic spoke to reporters and the ship’s passengers carried away their souvenir log cards for “Voyage 1, Westbound,” the impressive statistics of her maiden voyage were known. She had completed the 2,894-mile crossing from Daunt’s Rock to Ambrose in only 5 days, 16 hours and 42 minutes, which added up to a swift 21.17 knots. These statistics were printed on the log card, and widely distributed in the newspapers of the day. Bruce Ismay was ecstatic at the new liner’s performance and cabled the time back to Liverpool. These statistics have been repeated unquestioningly since. However, upon a close examination some discrepancies become apparent.

Olympic’s arrival time at the Ambrose Light Vessel was reported as 2:24 a.m. on Wednesday, June 21, 1911, which appears confirmed by the fact that she was at Quarantine shortly afterwards. However, while this authoritative time was printed on the log card, the departure time from Queenstown (or rather Daunt’s Rock) was printed as 4:22 p.m. on Thursday, June 15, 1911. Captain Smith also used the time in a telegram which was transmitted during the maiden voyage, reporting his ship’s progress. The problem arises when the passage time of 5 days, 16 hours and 42 minutes is taken into account. Counting back from the 2:24 a.m. arrival time, Olympic’s departure on Thursday appears to have been 2:42 p.m. instead of 4:22 p.m. in order for everything to fit. Those researchers aware of the conflict would have considered the likeliest explanation to be a reversal of the first two digits of the printed time, to make it read “4:22” instead of the correct “2:42.” However, there is strong evidence that the 4:22 p.m. departure time was correct, and that there was no such mistake.

Olympic’s Queenstown Departure Time

Although it was known that Olympic had been delayed in arriving at Cherbourg, that was not proof that she was late arriving at (or departing from) Queenstown. Indeed, it could only be expected that Captain Smith would have attempted to make up for lost time so that the maiden voyage would be punctual. This made the departure time of 4:22 p.m. at Daunt’s Rock seem questionable, even if it was recorded on the log card. However, the fact that Olympic had been delayed in leaving Queenstown was confirmed by Captain Smith himself, who was quoted in the Manitoba Free Press in Winnipeg on July 1, 1911. According to the reporter, Smith explained that Olympic had “fulfilled every expectation.”

She had averaged more than twenty-two knots during a part of the voyage, and we started from Queenstown fully three hours late. The Olympic can be depended on to be a Wednesday morning ship, just as she was designed for. To be sure, there was no severe weather to try her out, for the passage was an ordinary June run. But we have power enough to take care of emergencies. In the engine rooms, Chief Engineer John [sic] Bell and Engineer John Fleming both report that everything went without a hitch.

Smith’s words would appear to be the definitive answer. Who better than Olympic’s commander to answer the question as to her departure time? There would seem to be no logical explanation for Smith saying that the Olympic had been late unless he was mistaken or unless she had indeed been late in departing Queenstown.

Olympic’s New York Arrival Time

Olympic’s arrival time of 2:24 a.m. on the Wednesday morning, June 21 at the Ambrose Light Vessel also needs to be borne in mind. In a New York Times article on Tuesday, June 20, 1911, it was reported that the Olympic was expected to reach Ambrose Channel late that night and dock at her pier Wednesday morning. It quoted a dispatch from Capt. Smith received the day before which read:

On Board Olympic , via Cape Race, 9:30 A. M., June 19, 1911 Up to this hour the Olympic has exceeded the speed promised by her builders, her average from noon Saturday to noon Sunday being 21.89 knots. Since passing Daunt’s Rock at 4:22 P. M. Thursday she has done the following: To noon Friday, 458 [sic] knots; to noon Saturday, 524 knots; to noon Sunday 542 knots. Weather fine. Present weather outlook less favorable. At this writing all going smoothly.

The following day, June 21, the same newspaper reported that Olympic was sighted east of Fire Island at 12:17 a.m. The article also said: The Olympic was reported 433 miles east of the Ambrose Channel Light Vessel at 6:58 o’clock yesterday morning. Her commander, Capt. E. J. Smith, commodore of the White Star Line, wirelessed to the liner [sic] soon afterward that he expected to reach Quarantine about 3 o’clock this morning.

Assuming that report was accurate, and assuming the time given in Olympic’s wireless message was Apparent Time Ship (ATS), also known as ship’s time, then that puts Olympic 433 nautical miles east of Ambrose at 6:26 a.m. NYT on Tuesday morning. How would we know this? As seen in the data on her log card, Olympic was at 66° 50’ W longitude at local apparent noon on Tuesday, June 20. For that location and date it turns out that Olympic’s time was 32 minutes ahead of New York Time. Therefore, to get to New York Time, we have to subtract 32 minutes from 6:58 which gets us to 6:26 a.m. NYT for that position report. Assuming the ship would maintain about 22 knots average speed over ground, it would take Olympic 19 hours and 41 minutes to cover those 433 nautical miles. That gives us an expected arrival time off Ambrose at 2:06 a.m. Wednesday morning. So, it appears that the actual recorded arrival time at Ambrose, 2:24 a.m., is also correct.

A 100-Minute Mistake

Since it appears that both the departure time and the arrival time on Olympic’s log card are correct, the only possibility is that there was an error made when some junior officer worked out the total passage time for her westbound crossing – an error never corrected until now.

How can such an error happen? The answer can only be speculated but, to get the total passage time, several conversions must be made, such as days into hours and hours into minutes. Allowance must also be given for a five-hour difference between GMT, the time used by White Star Line ships when in English and Irish waters, and the time for the 75th meridian, used when passing arrival points to the east coast of the United States and Canada. 3 The most probable error appears to have occurred during a subtraction process while working out the crossing time. Once the conversion was made to a common time reference, such as GMT, the time of the passage can easily be derived by subtracting the arrival time from the departure time. The resulting time difference is then converted into days, hours and minutes for the passage. By expressing the same time difference in total hours, one can get the average crossing speed by dividing passage time into the total crossing mileage.

Let’s take the specific example for Olympic’s westbound transatlantic maiden voyage. We begin by referring to the day of departure, June 15, as Day Zero. The recorded time of departure was 4:22 p.m., or 16:22 in GMT. To express this as total minutes since the beginning of Day Zero at 00:00 GMT, we simply convert 16 hours and 22 minutes into total minutes since midnight on the day of the start of the transatlantic crossing from Queenstown. This comes out to a total of 982 minutes of time. 4

Now we look at the arrival time of 2:24 a.m. on June 21. This is the same as 07:24 GMT for the same date. 5 But June 21 is 6 days beyond June 15. Therefore, to get the total minutes counting from 00:00 GMT on June 15, we have to convert 6 days 7 hours and 24 minutes into total minutes. That comes out to a total of 9,084 minutes. 6

The passage time is just the difference between 9,084 minutes and 982 minutes. This works out to 8,102 minutes, or 135.033 hours. This is precisely the same as 5 days, 15 hours and 2 minutes, the correct crossing time for the passage. Also, 135.033 hours divided into the crossing distance of 2894 nautical miles gives an average crossing speed of 21.43 knots, the correct average speed for the transatlantic crossing.

Now suppose, in subtracting 982 minutes from 9,084 minutes, that an error of 100 minutes crept into the process, giving a passage time of 8,202 minutes instead of 8,102 minutes. Converting 8,202 minutes into days, hours, and minutes gives 5 days, 16 hours, and 42 minutes, the value on the log card. Also, 8,202 minutes is the same as 136.700 hours. Dividing that into the crossing distance of 2894 miles gives an average speed of 21.17 knots, the value on the log card.

As we have shown, the correct difference in time from departure at 4:22 p.m. GMT on June 15 off the Daunt’s Rock Light Vessel to 2:24 a.m. NYT on June 21 off the Ambrose Channel Light Vessel really works out to 5 days, 15 hours, and 2 minutes, and the average speed works out to 21.43 knots. At the end of the voyage, Bruce Ismay was greatly pleased with Olympic and her performance, as well as the satisfaction she had given to her passengers. Little did he suspect that there was an error in the crossing time that understated her performance. The ghost of Bruce Ismay, if there be one, must surely be smiling now. The ship did much better than what anyone was told.

Some Maiden Voyage Facts

Based on the location data reported in the Olympic’s log, we can also derive several other interesting facts and statistics regarding her westbound maiden voyage, like the amount the clocks went back each night and the average speed for each day’s run.

On White Star Line ships, the clocks were adjusted at midnight each night so that at Local Apparent Noon the next day the clocks would read 12:00. If necessary, a slight correction was made in the forenoon when a sun line was taken to check their longitude. 7 For westbound ships, the clocks went back. For eastbound ships, the clocks went forward. A 1924 brochure given to White Star Line passengers for the westbound voyage read:

. . . It is necessary to put the clock back every 24 hours. The alteration in time is made at about midnight, and the clock is usually put back from 35 to 45 minutes on each occasion, the exact amount of time depending upon the distance the ship is estimated to make by noon the next day. During the first 24 hours, however, owing to the change from mean time to apparent time, the alteration is likely to be considerably more than 45 minutes, especially while summer time is in use.

The amount the clocks went back each night, the average speed for each day’s run, and the correct totals for Olympic’s westbound maiden voyage are all shown in the table below. Date and times are given in GMT:

What Goes Out Must Come Back if All Goes Well

Olympic left New York on June 28, 1911 for her eastbound return voyage to Southampton by way of Plymouth and Cherbourg. She completed that crossing in 5 days, 18 hours, and 30 minutes arriving off Eddystone Light on July 4, 1911 at 4:36 p.m. The table at the top of the following page summarizes the data on the log card for this return voyage:

Once again, there appears to be a slight error in the data. The total mileage for the eastbound crossing was 3,081 miles. The total time of passage is given as 5 days, 18 hours and 30 minutes. This time, there was no mistake in the passage time calculation. Nor was there a mistake in the crossing distance, which matches closely with other eastbound crossings over the same route of travel. So, it appears that an arithmetic error was made when the average crossing speed was calculated. The correct average crossing speed works out to 22.25 knots, not 22.30 knots as appears to be written on the log card. 8 In this case, Olympic’s average crossing speed was overstated.

As before, we can derive some other interesting statistics, such as the amount the clocks were adjusted forward each night, the average speed for each day’s run, and the totals for the passage distance, time and correct passage speed. These are all shown in the table below. As before, dates and times are given in GMT:

Olympic & Titanic – A Comparison of Two Giants

RMS Titanic left Queenstown on her maiden voyage crossing on April 11, 1912, passing Daunt’s Rock Light Vessel at 2:20 p.m. GMT. She then proceeded at 70 revolutions per minute along a path that hugged the same southern coast of Ireland toward Fastnet light as did her famous sister the year before. As we all know, Titanic never completed her maiden voyage. On the night of April 14, she struck an iceberg at 11:40 p.m. ATS, and sank just 2 hours and 40 minutes later. But we do know some facts about Titanic’s maiden voyage that allow us to make some comparisons.

We know the start time and date of her transatlantic crossing, the date and time she collided with the iceberg, and the date and time she foundered. We also know the daily distances traveled for the first three days out, and we also now know the position of the wreck site. Other details of Titanic’s maiden voyage can be derived such as the approximate position for the ship at Local Apparent Noon for each day of the crossing, the time in GMT of Local Apparent Noon for each day out, the amount the clocks were set back each night so that they would read 12:00 at Local Apparent Noon the next day, and the average speed for each day’s run. These results are all summarized in the following table: 9

There was a clock setback of 47 minutes planned for the night of April 14 that was not done because of the accident. 10 The collision coordinates in the above table were based on the location of the Titanic wreck site after allowance was made for a surface current of 1.2 knots at 197° true based on the location of the wreckage observed Monday morning and the location of the wreck site. 11 The calculated distance from Local Apparent Noon on April 14 to the collision point, 258 miles, was based on the known route of travel between those two points. It should be mentioned that this derived distance agrees very well with the log reading taken by quartermaster George Rowe when Titanic collided with the iceberg at 11:40 p.m. Rowe testified the ship struck at 20 minutes to twelve by his watch and, when he then looked at the patent log, it showed a run of 260 miles through the water since noon. 12 That makes for an average speed of 22.28 knots through the water. The average speed made good over ground that we show, 22.11 knots, is simply obtained by dividing 258 nautical miles, the distance run over ground, by 11 hours and 40 minutes, the time from noon to the collision.

As we shall soon see, the position and times of the Titanic along the route of travel of her maiden voyage were not too different from the positions and times of the Olympic for her second transatlantic crossing.

An Issue of Time

There are some in the Titanic community who are claiming that the real collision time was 12 hours and 4 minutes past noon instead of 11 hours and 40 minutes. If that were the case, the average speed over ground would calculate out to 21.38 knots instead of the 22.11 knots that we show. That is a drop of nearly ¾ of a knot from what was averaged over the previous 24 hours and 45 minutes. This is clearly at variance with all known evidence regarding the increase in revolutions that was occurring during the course of the voyage, and the independent observations of several passengers of increased engine vibrations noticed that Sunday night. 13 It also does not hold up when viewed against the supporting evidence provided by quartermaster Robert Hichens that the ship was observed doing about 22.5 knots through the water during the hours from 8 p.m. to 10 p.m. as measured by the ship’s log, 14 a two-hour average that is consistent with the results obtained from Rowe’s observation and with the apparent increase in revolutions noticed by several passengers. 15 The difference between the speed of the ship through the water and a ground speed of 21.38 knots that comes from using a longer time interval is simply inconsistent with what the ship was actually doing that night. Nor can it be explained by the ship traveling over a longer path because of an alleged delay in turning the corner, something that came about in an attempt to explain how the ship managed to reach a collision point some 13 miles west of the now-known wreck site. 16 Nor does a collision time of 12:04 a.m. hold up when one carefully looks at the reported time of that event as observed by many passengers and crew members alike. From a purely navigational sense, such theories simply do not stand up under careful analysis.

In looking at the positional and time data for Titanic’s maiden voyage, it will be noticed that on April 14, Titanic’s clocks were 2 hours 58 minutes behind GMT, or 2 hours and 2 minutes ahead of NYT. This was based on her expected longitude at Local Apparent Noon when the clocks are adjusted the night before and then corrected slightly if necessary in the forenoon. Those readers familiar with the two inquiries into Titanic’s loss may notice a discrepancy between this result and the times in the final reports of those inquiries. The conclusion of the American Inquiry had Titanic time as 1 hour 33 minutes ahead of NYT. The British Inquiry had Titanic time as 1 hour 50 minutes ahead of NYT. At the limitation of liability hearings in New York in 1913, the time given by the White Star Line in response to a question asked by the interrogatories had Titanic time as 1 hour 39 minutes ahead of NYT. It is far beyond the scope of this article to go into all the details relating to why there has not been a consistent answer to this fundamental question of relating apparent time ship to Greenwich Mean Time or New York time. The process of how time on White Star Line ships was adjusted was explained quite clearly in testimony given by Titanic’s second officer Lightoller and third officer Pitman. Yet, it almost seems as if some people may have deliberately withheld critical information to make solving the question of time a difficult, if not almost impossible task. When tracing back the origins of the numbers that came out in the inquiries and hearings, we find that the American Inquiry settled on a difference of 1 hour 33 minutes, apparently from the testimony of Titanic’s fourth officer Boxhall, a number that had also worked its way into a wireless message sent Monday evening from Captain Rostron on the Carpathia to Captain Haddock on the Olympic , a message which included the incorrect foundering coordinates that came from Boxhall. The British Inquiry settled on a difference of 1 hour 50 minutes from NYT, apparently by equating Titanic time to time on the SS Californian . And at the limitations of liability hearings, a difference of 1 hour 39 minutes was offered up by the White Star Line by simply adjusting ship’s time to the longitude of 50° 14’ W that was sent out in what we now know to be an erroneous distress position.

The question of time will be addressed much more fully in a separate paper dealing specifically with that particular long-standing issue.

“She Was Built for a Wednesday Ship”

After her noted arrival abeam of Ambrose Channel Light Vessel in the early morning hours of Wednesday, June 21, 1911, Olympic proceeded on to her Quarantine station off Staten Island. She left Quarantine at 7:45 a.m., and was saluted on her way up New York Harbor by all kinds of craft as she steamed to Pier 59 in the North River. With the assistance of twelve tugs, Olympic was safely moored at 10 a.m. after taking the better part of an hour, as there was a delay in getting the ship far enough in to allow her gangways to be opened.

It was reported in a New York Times article published on June 22 that Captain Smith said the Olympic had done all that was expected of her, and behaved splendidly. He was then asked, “Will she ever dock on Tuesday?”

“No,” he replied emphatically, “and there will be no attempt to bring her in on Tuesday. She was built for a Wednesday ship, and her run this first voyage has demonstrated that she will fulfill the expectations of the builders.”

Yet, despite Captain Smith’s remark that there would be no attempt to bring her in on Tuesday, he did precisely that on Olympic’s second transatlantic crossing westbound. On Wednesday, July 19, 1911, The New York Times headlined, “ OLYMPIC CUTS HER OWN TIME,” 5 days, 13 hours, 20 minutes from Daunt’s Rock to the [Ambrose] Lightship. Data taken from the Olympic’s second voyage log card showed the following:

As before, we can easily derive additional statistics from the data on the log abstract, such as clock adjustments and average speed over ground for each day’s run. These are all given in the table below.

There are those who believe that it was never intended for these ships to make any arrivals before Wednesday. That is not true. Looking at the progress the Titanic made until the time of the accident, it is quite clear that she was averaging as well as her famous sister did over her entire maiden voyage – and the Titanic had completed only 62% of her crossing.

Over her last 36 hours and 25 minutes before the accident, she was averaging over 22 knots. Using the power of a spreadsheet, we can easily project the expected time of arrival (ETA) for the Titanic at Ambrose, assuming no accident or anything else to cause a major slowdown or change of course. Setting the average speed of the vessel over ground for the remaining 1,084 miles of her voyage as the parameter, we get the following results:

It is quite clear that Titanic under all average speeds considered would have beaten Olympic’s maiden voyage performance. If she would have maintained an average speed of 21.6 knots or greater, she would have been abeam of Ambrose some time on Tuesday night. Notice that the results for the passage time have nothing to do with the time that a voyage begins. It has to do with distance traveled and speed made good over ground.

INCONSISTENCIES UNDER OATH

On Day 16 of the British Inquiry into the loss of the Titanic , J. Bruce Ismay had this to say:

“The reason why we discussed it at Queenstown was this, that Mr. Bell came into my room; I wanted to know how much coal we had on board the ship, because the ship left after the coal strike was on, and he told me. I then spoke to him about the ship and I said it is not possible for the ship to arrive in New York on Tuesday. Therefore there is no object in pushing her. We will arrive there at 5 o’clock on Wednesday morning, and it will be good landing for the passengers in New York, and we shall also be able to economise our coal. We did not want to burn any more coal than we needed.”

If what Ismay said were true, then the Titanic would have had to slow down to something like 19.5 knots for the remainder of her voyage. Yet Mr. Ismay also said,

“The intention was that if the weather should be found suitable on the Monday or the Tuesday that the ship would then have been driven at full speed.”

To what speed would they have increased? Titanic was already doing a measured average of 22½ knots between 8:00 and 10:00 p.m. with none of her single-ended boilers lit. And, apparently, she was going to make Ambrose several hours ahead of Ismay’s 5:00 a.m. target arrival time if it weren’t for an accident and an ice field that lay ahead. She was already out to better Olympic’s maiden crossing speed. 18 As we have seen in Olympic’s second crossing statistics, a Tuesday night arrival for these ships was not only feasible, but had in fact already been accomplished. Despite Ismay’s claim, conservation of coal was certainly not a factor in driving the Titanic at her best speed of her short voyage on the night of April 14, 1912. 19 As Ismay himself had admitted to Senator Perkins, “She had about 6,000 tons of coal leaving Southampton . . . sufficient coal to enable her to reach New York, with about two days’ spare consumption.”

Despite the numerous warnings of ice ahead, there was no plan to reduce speed or change course until danger was clearly seen. As Sir Rufus Isaacs, the Attorney-General at the British Inquiry, said to Bruce Ismay:

“Assuming that you can see far enough to get out of the way at whatever speed you ar e going, you can go at whatever speed you like. That is what it comes to.”

APPENDIX A – CHART OF WESTBOUND VOYAGES OF OLYMPIC AND TITANIC

The following chart shows the noontime positions for the first two westbound voyages of the Olympic and the maiden voyage of the Titanic . The wreck site location of the Titanic is also included as well as a position report sent from the Titanic to La Touraine for 7:00 p.m. GMT on April 12. The Olympic noon positions for voyages 1 and 2 are identified as “ O1 ” and “ O2 ,” respectively. Positions for the Titanic are identified as “ T .”

APPENDIX B – CHART OF EASTBOUND VOYAGES OF OLYMPIC

The following chart shows the noontime positions for the first and third eastbound voyages of the Olympic that were available to us. The Olympic positions for voyages 1 and 3 are identified as “ O1 ” and “ O3 ,” respectively.

• On a Mercator projection chart, rhumb line tracks appear as straight lines while great circle tracks are curved.
• After the Titanic disaster, the southern tracks were shifted farther southward.
• International Mercantile Marine (IMM) Company, Ships’ Rules and Uniform Regulations , issued July 1, 1907, Rule 116 – “Time to be Kept.”
• Note: 16 hours, 22 minutes = 16 x 60 + 22 = 982 minutes.
• To convert NYT to GMT, add 5 hours.
• Note: 6 days, 7 hours, 24 minutes = 6 x 24 X 60 + 7 x 60 + 24 = 9,084 minutes.
• Testimony of Titanic’s third officer Pitman and second officer Lightoller, American Inquiry, p. 294. Also see IMM Rule 259 – “Ship’s Time.”
• 5 days, 18 hours, 30 minutes is the same as 138.5 hours. Dividing this into 3,081 nautical miles gives 22.25 knots.
• Samuel Halpern, Keeping Track of a Maiden Voyage , Irish Titanic Historical Society’s White Star Journal , Vol. 14, No. 2, August 2006, pp. 9-14.
• American Inquiry, p. 294.
• This is consistent with results obtained in the Marine Accident Investigation Branch (MAIB) Reappraisal of Evidence Relating to the SS Californian in 1992.
• American Inquiry, p. 519 and p. 523, and British Inquiry questions 17608-17630.
• These include documented observations from Mr. Lawrence Beesley, Mr. C. E. Henry Stengel, Mrs. Mahala D. Douglas and Mr. George Rheims.
• British Inquiry, questions 965-966.
• It was also mentioned that two or three additional double-ended boilers were lit up that Sunday morning (fireman Frederick Barrett) and put on line that Sunday evening at 7:00 p.m. (fireman Alfred Shiers). This suggests an increase from 75-76 revolutions per minute to about 78 revolutions per minute during the last few hours before the accident.
• Samuel Halpern, A Minute of Time , Titanic Historical Society’s Titanic Commutator , Volume 29, Numbers 171 and 172, pp. 150-157 and 208-219.
• The New York Times , July 19, 1911.
• George Behe, Titanic – Safety, Speed and Sacrifice , Transportation Trails, 1997; and J. Kent Layton, The Arrival That Never Took Place , Titanic International Society’s Voyage 54 , Winter 2005, p. 56.
• Mark Chirnside, Appendix Eleven: “Short of Coal?”, The Olympic-Class Ships – Olympic, Titanic, Britannic , Tempus Publishing, 2004.

Mark Chirnside is a well known researcher and author in the Titanic community. To his credit he has written several books dealing with such ships as the RMS Olympic, RMS Majestic , and RMS Aquitania , as well as a book dealing with the three ' Olympic ' class ships: Olympic, Titanic, and Britannic . He also has authored a number of articles on various related subjects. He maintains a website at www.markchirnside.co.uk.

Sam Halpern has been involved with detailed Titanic related research for the past several years. He has authored a number of research articles for ET as well as published a number of articles that appeared in the Titanic Historical Society's Commutator , the Irish Titanic Historical Society's White Star Journal , and the Titanic International Society's Voyage . In addition, he has presented several technical papers at the Titanic Symposium in Toledo, OH last September, 2006.

This article also appears in the latest edition of Voyage (#59), the journal of the Titanic International Society.

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The Titanic‘s Final Hours: A Detailed Timeline of the Tragic Maiden Voyage

• by history tools
• May 26, 2024

The sinking of the RMS Titanic on April 15, 1912, remains one of the most devastating and captivating maritime disasters in history. The story of the "unsinkable" ship‘s tragic end has been retold countless times, but the intricate details of its final hours are often overlooked. In this article, we‘ll take a closer look at the timeline of events that led to the Titanic‘s demise and the harrowing experiences of those onboard, while also exploring the broader context and consequences of this unforgettable tragedy.

The Birth of a Legend

The Titanic was conceived as the ultimate expression of luxury and technological prowess in the early 20th century. The brainchild of J. Bruce Ismay, chairman of the White Star Line, and Lord William Pirrie, chairman of the Harland and Wolff shipyard, the Titanic was designed to be the largest and most opulent ocean liner ever built.

Construction on the Titanic began on March 31, 1909, at the Harland and Wolff shipyard in Belfast, Ireland. Over the next three years, more than 3,000 workers toiled to bring the ship to life, using the most advanced shipbuilding techniques and materials of the time. The Titanic‘s hull was constructed using over 3 million rivets, and its interior was fitted with lavish amenities, including grand staircases, elegant dining rooms, and a heated swimming pool.

Despite the Titanic‘s impressive size and features, the ship faced several challenges during its construction. The sheer scale of the project required significant innovations in engineering and design, and the tight construction schedule put immense pressure on the workers to complete the ship on time. In the end, the Titanic was finished just three months before its maiden voyage, leaving little time for comprehensive safety testing and crew training.

The Journey Begins

On April 10, 1912, the Titanic set sail from Southampton, England, on its maiden voyage to New York City. The ship carried 2,224 passengers and crew members, representing a cross-section of early 20th-century society. The passenger list included some of the wealthiest and most prominent individuals of the time, such as John Jacob Astor IV and Benjamin Guggenheim, as well as hundreds of immigrants seeking a new life in America.

The Titanic made two stops before heading out into the open sea: one in Cherbourg, France, and another in Queenstown (now Cobh), Ireland. At each port, additional passengers and mail were loaded onto the ship, and by the time the Titanic left Queenstown, it was carrying a total of 2,208 people.

Warnings Ignored

As the Titanic sailed across the Atlantic, it received numerous ice warnings from other ships in the area. On April 14, the Titanic received a total of six ice warnings, with the final warning coming in at 9:40 PM from the nearby SS Mesaba. The message, which warned of a large ice field directly in the Titanic‘s path, was never delivered to the bridge.

Despite the warnings, Captain Edward Smith and the ship‘s crew did not slow down or alter their course. The Titanic was operating under a high-pressure schedule, and there was a prevailing belief among the crew and passengers that the ship was unsinkable. This overconfidence, combined with the lack of adequate safety measures and emergency protocols, would prove to be a fatal mistake.

The Fateful Collision

On the night of April 14, the Titanic was cruising at near full speed when lookouts Frederick Fleet and Reginald Lee spotted an iceberg directly ahead. Fleet immediately rang the warning bell and telephoned the bridge, but it was too late. At 11:40 PM, the Titanic struck the iceberg on its starboard side, causing a series of small punctures in the hull.

At first, the damage seemed minor, and many passengers were unaware that anything had happened. However, as the crew began to assess the situation, it quickly became clear that the ship was in serious trouble. The iceberg had caused a 300-foot gash along the starboard side, and water was pouring into the ship‘s forward compartments at an alarming rate.

The Sinking Begins

As the water continued to flood the ship, the Titanic‘s designer, Thomas Andrews, informed Captain Smith that the ship was doomed. The Titanic could stay afloat with four of its sixteen watertight compartments flooded, but the collision had breached five compartments, making the ship‘s sinking inevitable.

At 12:05 AM on April 15, Captain Smith ordered the crew to begin launching the lifeboats and to signal for help using the ship‘s distress rockets. However, the crew was woefully unprepared for such an emergency, and the evacuation process was marked by confusion and delays.

Not Enough Lifeboats

One of the most tragic aspects of the Titanic disaster was the lack of adequate lifeboats. The ship carried only 20 lifeboats, enough to accommodate about half of the people onboard. This decision was based on outdated maritime regulations and the belief that the Titanic was unsinkable.

As the crew began to lower the lifeboats, it quickly became apparent that there would not be enough space for everyone. Many of the lifeboats were launched only partially filled, and some passengers refused to leave the ship, believing that it was safer to stay onboard.

The Band Plays On

As panic began to spread throughout the ship, the Titanic‘s band, led by Wallace Hartley, assembled in the first-class lounge and began to play. Their music helped to calm the passengers and provide a sense of normalcy in the midst of the chaos.

The band continued to play as the ship began to tilt and the water rose around them. Witnesses reported hearing the band play until the very end, with their final song being either "Nearer, My God, to Thee" or "Autumn."

The Ship‘s Final Moments

By 2:00 AM, the Titanic‘s bow was completely submerged, and the stern began to rise out of the water. Passengers and crew members clung to the deck or jumped into the freezing North Atlantic in a desperate attempt to escape the sinking ship.

At 2:18 AM, the Titanic‘s lights flickered and then went out, plunging the ship into darkness. Two minutes later, the ship broke in half, with the stern section briefly rising back out of the water before plunging down to the ocean floor.

The Titanic disappeared beneath the waves at 2:20 AM, taking over 1,500 lives with it. The screams of the drowning passengers and crew members echoed across the water, gradually fading into silence as the ship sank to its final resting place.

Rescue and Aftermath

The RMS Carpathia, which had received the Titanic‘s distress calls, arrived on the scene around 4:00 AM and began rescuing survivors from the lifeboats. Of the 2,208 people onboard the Titanic, only 706 survived the disaster.

News of the tragedy quickly spread around the world, shocking the public and prompting widespread mourning. The disaster led to significant changes in maritime safety regulations, including the requirement for ships to carry enough lifeboats for all passengers and crew, as well as the establishment of the International Ice Patrol to monitor icebergs in the North Atlantic.

The Titanic‘s Legacy

More than a century later, the story of the Titanic continues to captivate people around the world. The ship‘s legacy lives on through countless books, films, and exhibitions, as well as ongoing research and exploration of the wreckage site.

In recent years, new technologies have allowed scientists and historians to gain a deeper understanding of the events that unfolded during the Titanic‘s final hours. High-resolution images and 3D scans of the wreckage have revealed previously unknown details about the ship‘s construction and the damage it sustained during the collision.

The Titanic disaster also continues to serve as a powerful reminder of the fragility of human life and the importance of preparedness in the face of unforeseen disasters. The tragedy highlighted the need for improved safety measures, better emergency protocols, and a greater emphasis on the value of human life over profits and prestige.

The sinking of the Titanic remains one of the most tragic and enduring stories in modern history. The ship‘s final hours were marked by a series of fateful decisions, missed opportunities, and acts of heroism and sacrifice. By examining the detailed timeline of events and the broader context of the disaster, we can gain a greater appreciation for the experiences of those who lived through the tragedy and the lessons that can be learned from this unforgettable event.

As we continue to study and remember the Titanic, it is important to honor the lives that were lost and to strive for a future in which such tragedies can be prevented. The story of the Titanic is a testament to the power of the human spirit in the face of adversity and a reminder of the enduring impact that a single event can have on the course of history.

Titanic Statistics

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The History Hit Miscellany of Facts, Figures and Fascinating Finds

• 20th Century

When Did the Titanic Sink? A Timeline of Her Disastrous Maiden Voyage

Tristan Hughes

06 mar 2022, @ancientstristan.

On 10 April 1912 RMS Titanic – then the world’s largest ship – cruised down Southampton waters at the start of her maiden voyage to North America, watched by large crowds. Barely 5 days later she was gone, swallowed up by the Atlantic after striking an iceberg.

Below is a timeline of the ship’s ill-fated maiden voyage.

10 April 1912

12:00 RMS Titanic left Southampton, watched by crowds who had come to watch the start of the maiden voyage of the World’s largest ship.

18:30 The Titanic arrived at Cherbourg, France, where it picked up more passengers.

20:10 Titanic departed Cherbourg for Queenstown, Ireland.

11 April 1912

11:30 The Titanic anchored in Queenstown.

13:30 After the last tender left RMS Titanic , the ship departed Queenstown and began its ill-fated voyage across the Atlantic.

Sea Trials of RMS Titanic, 2 April 1912. Depiction by Karl Beutel, oil on canvas.

Image Credit: via Wikimedia Commons / Public Domain

14 April 1912

19:00 – 19:30 Second Officer Charles Lightoller testified a drop of 4 degrees Celsius as RMS Titanic crossed from the warmer waters of the Gulf Stream to the much colder waters of the Labrador Current.

Titanic’s captain, Edward Smith, dined with the passengers. Contrary to the myths, he did not get drunk.

23:39 The lookouts in the Crow’s Nest of RMS Titanic spotted an iceberg ahead of them. Immediately they rang the warning bell three times. This meant iceberg dead ahead.

The engines were ordered to stop, as the crew desperately attempted to evade a collision.

23:40 The Titanic struck the iceberg on its starboard side. The damage appeared relatively light at first. The iceberg had only scraped the ship.

What was significant, however, was the length of the damage. The ‘side-swipe’ collision had occurred along 200 feet of Titanic’s length. 5 water-tight compartments were damaged and started taking in water.

The crew immediately had the watertight doors of the damaged compartments sealed.

23:59 Just before midnight RMS Titanic came to a halt. Excess steam was vented to prevent the boilers in the damaged compartments from exploding when coming into contact with the sea.

Around the same time the order was given to prepare the lifeboats and wake the passengers.

00:22 As the Titanic started taking on a starboard list her designer, Thomas Andrews, who was onboard, confirmed that the damage was too extensive and that Titanic would sink. Titanic was capable of staying afloat with 4 watertight compartments being breached, but it couldn’t sustain 5.

Andrews estimated that they would have 1-2 hours before Titanic submerged beneath the waves. Within minutes Titanic’s radio operators sent out the first distress call.

The nearby SS Californian did not pick up the distress call as their sole radio operator had just gone to bed.

00:45 By quarter to one the lifeboats on board RMS Titanic were readied for loading. So far only two boats had been launched. The lifeboats had the capacity for up to 70 people, but fewer than 40 passengers were on board each.

The first distress rocket was launched.

SS Californian spotted the distress rocket and their crew tried to signal the Titanic with morse lamps. Titanic would respond, but neither ship could read the morse because the still, freezing air was scrambling the lamp signals.

00:49 RMS Carpathia picked up the distress call of Titanic by accident. The ship headed for Titanic’s location, but it was 58 miles away. It would take 4 hours for Carpathia to reach Titanic.

RMS Titanic of the White Star Line sinking around 2:20 AM Monday morning, 15 April 1912 after hitting iceberg in the North Atlantic.

Image Credit: Classic Image / Alamy Stock Photo

01:00 Mrs Strauss refused to leave her husband, as women and children were loaded onto the lifeboats first. She gave her place on the lifeboat to her maid.

As this was unfolding the Titanic orchestra continued to play, trying to keep the passengers calm as the crew lowered them into the lifeboats.

01:15 The water had risen up to Titanic’s nameplate.

c.01:30 Lifeboats continued to be launched, each now with more people onboard. Lifeboat 16, for instance, was launched with 53 people.

Meanwhile more ships had responded to Titanic’s distress call. RMS Baltic and SS Frankfurt were on their way. SS Californian, however, had not moved.

01:45 More lifeboats were launched and there was almost a collision as Lifeboat 13 struggled to escape from under Lifeboat 15 as the latter was being lowered.

01:47 Despite being close, SS Frankfurt was unable to locate Titanic due to miscalculated coordinates.

01:55 Captain Smith ordered the telegraph operators to abandon their posts and to save themselves. The operators, Harold Bride and Jack Phillips, decided to stay longer and continued sending out transmissions.

02:00 Captain Smith made a futile attempt to call back half-filled lifeboats to allow more passengers on. The attempts failed. The orchestra continued playing.

02:08 The last wireless transmission was sent, but with power fading and the ship within minutes of sinking, the message was unintelligible.

02:10 The last collapsible boats were lowered into the water with passengers onboard. Moments later 4 explosions were heard deep within Titanic.

Around 1,500 people were still onboard the ship. Almost all of them were on the stern.

c.02:15 The stern of RMS Titanic broke away from the rest of the ship. Because the ship was so well sub-divided, the stern then crashed back down into the water. For a moment the people still on the stern thought this meant the stern would stay afloat.

But RMS Titanic’ s submerged, water-saturated bow started to tug the floating stern underwater.

A young newspaper seller holds a banner declaring TITANIC DISASTER GREAT LOSS OF LIFE. Cockspur Street, London, UK, 1912.

Image Credit: Shawshots / Alamy Stock Photo

Rather than rise up into the air, the stern slowly – and very quietly – started to sink. One passenger who survived later recalled how he swam off the stern as it started to submerge. He didn’t even get his head wet.

02:20 RMS Titanic’s stern had by now disappeared beneath the water.

The water’s freezing temperatures ensured that many survivors in the water died of hypothermia before rescuers arrived.

c.04:00 RMS Carpathia arrived to rescue the survivors.

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Although it has been over 100 years since rms titanic set sail her story still endures, capturing hearts and minds throughout the world..

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Read the next story in the series ‘The Transatlantic Crossing’ here, and don't forget to follow along with our A Night To Remember event on social media on the evening of April 14th, marking the anniversary of Titanic’s sinking.

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Mental Floss Presents: Titanic Timeline

By mentalfloss .com | apr 11, 2022, 9:27 am edt.

The sinking of the Titanic on April 15, 1912, is surely history’s most storied shipwreck. On the 110th anniversary of the maritime disaster, Mental Floss is looking back at the people, events, and twists of fate that set the Titanic ’s incredible story in motion, and the legacy we still honor today.

All times are approximate.

The Birth of the Titanic

Titanic might not have existed if not for the rivalry between its shipping company, White Star Line, and its competitor, Cunard. Out of this intense business battle emerged the largest and most opulent ship known at that time.

June 7, 1906

British company Cunard launches the world’s largest and fastest passenger ship, the Lusitania , followed by its sister ship, the Mauretania , on September 20. Both would go on to win the Blue Riband for the fastest crossing of the Atlantic.

In response, Joseph Bruce Ismay , the chairman of Cunard’s rival White Star Line, resolves to build three massive luxury ocean liners: ships that would eventually be called the Olympic , the Britannic , and, of course, the Titanic .

All three would be built by Northern Ireland's Harland & Wolff in its Belfast shipyard. Lord Pirrie, chairman of Harland & Wolff, designs the three Olympic-class ocean liners. Alexander Carlisle, Lord Pirrie’s brother-in-law and Harland & Wolff’s general manager, takes responsibility for the “details, the decorations, the equipments, and general arrangements” for Olympic and Titanic .

March 31, 1909

Construction of the Titanic begins . It’s not just the world’s largest passenger ship at the time—it’s the world’s largest moving, man-made object (which sounds impressive until you try to picture a plane or truck as big as even a medium-sized ship, but still …). It measures 882.75 feet long and 92.5 feet broad, with enormous funnels belching exhaust from its 29 monstrous boilers. Its steel hull is held together with 3 million rivets, collectively weighing 1200 tons. Its main anchor weighs 16 tons, roughly the same as 32 concert grand pianos, and each link in its chain weighs 175 pounds.

June 30, 1910

Alexander Carlisle retires and is eventually succeeded by Thomas Andrews.

May 31, 1911

Before it can go out to sea, Titanic has to make its way from land to water via a large slipway—emphasis on the slip. More than 20 tons of lubricant, primarily rendered animal fat and soap, are applied to the slipway to ease the ship’s transition into the water. It works: in just over a minute, the ship is in the water, “as though she were eager for the baptism,” in the somewhat off-puttingly-anthropomorphizing language of the Belfast News Letter .

Contrary to popular belief, the White Star Line never touts the Titanic as flat-out “ unsinkable ” ahead of its maiden voyage. In fact, it isn’t until after the luxury liner sinks that the term starts to float (ahem) around and is subsequently seized upon by the press. But the Titanic ’s safety features are praised in the lead-up to its official launch; in 1911, The Shipbuilder magazine refers to it as “ practically unsinkable ” on account of its 16 watertight compartments, which are innovative for the era. The idea is that, even if up to four of the compartments are damaged or flooded, the others will keep the ship afloat.

Once the Titanic is in the water, it is fitted out : internal systems are put in place and interior detailing begins. Workers start constructing the swimming pool, squash and tennis courts, exercise rooms, sunrooms, libraries, lounges, fine dining rooms, and the passenger cabins in first, second, and third class.

There are 20 lifeboats aboard the RMS Titanic —enough to accommodate around 1178 people, or roughly half the total passengers and crew members expected on the maiden voyage. The White Star Line isn’t flouting safety regulations, however. According to the Merchant Shipping Act of 1894 and Merchant Shipping Act of 1906 (the only safety requirements in place prior to the disaster), the number of lifeboats required aboard is determined by a ship’s tonnage . At the time, the highest requirement—which applies to ships over 10,000 tons—calls for 16 lifeboats. The Titanic , which has a gross carrying capacity of 46,328 tons (and clocked in at 52,000 tons total when weighed) not only meets the safety requirements of the era, but exceeds them.

Late summer 1911

A large iceberg breaks off from a glacier in southwest Greenland. Over the next several months, it will drift in a southwest direction across the Labrador Sea .

The Titanic Begins Its Maiden Voyage

The maiden voyage of the world’s largest, most luxurious ocean liner brings together a who’s who of early 20th-century tycoons , socialites, and movie stars. But not everyone aboard the Titanic is famous. Most of the passengers are regular folks on a visit to New York or emigrants seeking new opportunities in the United States. 

April 2, 1912

Titanic completes tests to confirm its seaworthiness, then sails from Belfast to its home port of Southampton, UK, from which it will depart on its maiden voyage. Its regular transatlantic service between Southampton and New York City will include stops in Cherbourg, France, and Queenstown (now Cobh), Ireland, on its outbound journey.

April 3, 1912

The Titanic arrives in Southampton around midnight .

April 10, 1912

Passengers begin boarding the Titanic in the morning . Among them, Macy's co-owner Isidor Straus and his wife, Ida, board the ship after a trip to Europe. Accompanying them on the voyage are Isidor's valet, John Farthing, and Ida's new maid, Ellen Bird.

At noon , the Titanic sets off from Southampton on its way to Cherbourg, France, with great fanfare. As the ship glides past other vessels along the docks, an incident that can be interpreted as a seriously bad omen occurs. Its colossal propellers displace so much water that some of those vessels become unmoored and get pulled toward the Titanic . Realizing that the SS New York will soon collide with the ocean liner’s port side, the Titanic reverses the port propeller—churning water in the opposite direction. Titanic captain Edward Smith's quick thinking (and quick work from a tugboat, which helps restrain the New York ) succeeds in preventing a crash. The tugboat captain claims that the New York had halted just four feet from the Titanic .

At 6:35 p.m. , the Titanic arrives in Cherbourg. John Jacob Astor IV and his wife, Madeleine Force, board the ship before its 8:10 p.m. departure with Astor’s manservant, Victor Robbins; Madeleine’s maid, Rosalie Bidios; and her nursemaid, Caroline Endres (Madeleine is pregnant at the time). The couple had taken a lengthy holiday in Egypt and Paris and are heading back to New York. Astor, who would be Titanic ’s richest passenger, had married the 18-year-old Madeleine in 1911 after divorcing his first wife, Ava Lowle Willing, in 1909. 

Most of the Titanic ’s other first-class passengers board at Cherbourg, including American socialite Margaret “Molly” Brown , Scottish landowners Sir Cosmo and Lucy Duff Gordon, and American mining heir Benjamin Guggenheim.  

April 11, 1912

After departing Cherbourg, the Titanic sails to its last stop before New York: the Irish port of Queenstown (now Cobh). The ship arrives at 11:30 a.m. Seven second-class and 113 third-class passengers come on board, along with multiple bags of mail , fulfilling the Titanic ’s contract as a royal mail ship. Seven lucky passengers also disembark in Queenstown.

The majority of passengers now aboard the Titanic are either American or European. American, British, Irish, and Swedish passengers are the most represented nationalities. But there are people from all over the world, including a large number of Syrian passengers. South African, Portuguese, Australian, and Chinese travelers fill the cabins as well.

At 1:30 p.m. , the Titanic pulls away from the dock. Third-class passenger Eugene Daly plays the traditional tune “ Erin’s Lament ” on his uilleann pipes as the Irish coast fades into the distance.

The Titanic at Sea

Titanic passengers settle in for the next few days at sea. The ocean liner is equipped with every kind of pastime and diversion to entertain guests, from a Turkish bath to sumptuous meals served by attentive stewards.

April 12, 1912

One activity every passenger looks forward to is the Titanic ’s meal service . Each class has its own formal dining room and the first-class passengers also enjoy an à la carte restaurant in which dishes are sold separately. Unlike earlier passenger liners, the Titanic offers plentiful portions of wholesome, expertly prepared foods at three seatings a day, all included in the ticket price. 

To work off all of those extravagant meals, the passengers (at least the rich ones) have access to a pretty impressive gymnasium. Some of the equipment highlights include punching bags; ‘cycle racing machines,’ which are essentially stationary bikes; an electric horse and an electric camel; and access to a squash court. Women are allowed to use the gym in the morning, and men are permitted in the afternoon. One of the more ironically useful pieces of equipment available is a mechanical rowing machine. 

And the Titanic has its own luxurious Turkish bath, mostly available for first-class passengers. It includes steam rooms, massage rooms, and an electric bath, which sounds like a recipe for disaster. In the book Titanic: Building the World’s Most Famous Ship , author Anton Gill describes it resembling an iron lung or “a modern tanning bed, which even sophisticated first-class passengers [view] with suspicion.”

While passengers spend the majority of their time aboard the Titanic eating, socializing, reading in the libraries, sending messages to loved ones by the Marconi wireless , or playing cards in the smoking lounges, they eventually return to their rooms at night to sleep. First-class passengers have their choice of 333 spacious staterooms spread over five decks and placed amidships, where the rocking of the sea is hardly felt, including four extravagant parlor suites.

Second-class passengers stay in rooms a bit lower in the ship with between two or four beds that have a sink and mirror, but no private bathrooms. They do have access to an outdoor promenade, smoking room, and library, however. Third-class passengers sleep near the noisy bottom of the ship, in rooms with bunkbeds that could accommodate between two and 10 passengers. Single men sleep in the bow of the ship, while single women and families are usually in the stern. There are reportedly only two bathtubs for everyone in third class, which (at full capacity) could be over 1000 passengers.

The Beginning of the End

A cold front passes over the Titanic on the morning of April 14, bringing brisk northwesterly winds. The temperature drops from the spring-like upper 50s to about 50°F by noon, but rapid weather changes are par for the course in the North Atlantic in spring. Nothing in the air signals the catastrophe about to occur.

April 14, 1912

The morning begins like the others on the journey, with breakfast. Third-class passengers gather in their dining room for a filling spread of oatmeal, smoked herring, potatoes, bread, butter, and marmalade. Second-class diners probably enjoy a classic British selection of eggs, grilled meats, fried and mashed potatoes, fresh fish, and an array of breads. In first class, the tables groan under the plates of baked and stewed fruits, puddings, smoked fish, grilled and cold meats, eggs cooked several ways, breads, rolls, spreads, and more.

Following the morning meal, passengers write letters, read, or go up on the decks. Captain Edward Smith and the crew keeps the Titanic going at a fast clip : it burns so much coal that roughly 100 tonnes of ash are dumped into the Atlantic Ocean every day of its journey. Over the wireless, other ships report icebergs on the Titanic ’s route. 

Lunch is served at mid-day . For third class, it’s the biggest meal they will have, and they tuck into rice soup, roast beef with gravy, more potatoes, corn, fresh bread, and plum pudding for dessert. Two decks above them, second-class diners likely have a slightly larger variety of soups, appetizers, meat-based entrees, and fruit, nuts, and sweets. Incredibly, first-class passengers are served another gigantic meal just a couple of hours after their breakfast, consisting of clear or hearty soups, numerous fish dishes and a seafood buffet, grilled mutton, potatoes, chicken dishes, sausages, roast beef, tongue, and a cheese selection.

At 5:50 p.m. , maintaining his speed, Captain Smith orders the ship to be turned. (While some accounts say the ship is now traveling to the south to avoid the ice, some modern historians argue that explanation misunderstands the Titanic ’s route.) 

But the passengers are too busy eating to notice the slight change of direction. They’re already well into the dinner hour . For the third-class folks, a rather anemic array of cold meats, bread, pickles, and stewed figs awaits them in the dining room, while second-class patrons can choose from baked haddock, curried chicken and rice, spring lamb with mint sauce, or roast turkey with cranberry sauce along with vegetables, the ever-present potatoes, and “American ice cream” among the desserts. Not to be outdone, the first-class menu positively bursts its buttons with a multicourse meal beginning with hors d’oeuvres, oysters, soups, salmon, filet mignon, chicken, roast duckling, and beef sirloin; side dishes like roast squab and cress, pâté de foie gras, asparagus vinaigrette, and, yes, potatoes; and éclairs, French ice cream, and peaches in chartreuse jelly. 

After dinner, men get together in the smoking lounges for drinks or to play cards, while women go to the libraries or to their rooms to put their children to bed. George Widener, the superrich CEO of a Philadelphia streetcar corporation, and his wife Eleanor host a party attended by Captain Smith and other wealthy passengers. At the same time, a group of second-class passengers sings hymns in their dining room, and a boisterous party takes place in the third-class area. 

About 7:40 p.m. , the Titanic wireless operator Harold Bride receives a message from the Californian , a ship belonging to the Leyland Line that is en route to Boston, warning of ice. Bride later testifies he delivers the message to the bridge. A few hours later, the Californian turns off its engines to avoid collisions with ice in the dark, and they send another warning to the Titanic . The Titanic ’s operator barks, "Shut up, shut up, I am busy; I am working Cape Race!" He’s likely sending messages to the Marconi tower at Cape Race, Newfoundland. 

At 9 p.m. , Captain Smith leaves Widener’s party and goes to the bridge. The sea is so calm it appears like a sheet of glass. The night is clear and moonless, and stars scatter across the bowl of the sky. He leaves the bridge with First Officer William Murdoch in command and turns in at 9:30 p.m.

At 10 p.m. , most passengers retire to their cabins. Crew members Frederick Fleet and Reginald Lee climb up to the crow’s nest to take over the watch. They are without binoculars, though it’s unclear how much help they would have been.

Captain Stanley Lord of the Californian , having turned off his ship’s engines earlier in the evening, tells his wireless operator to turn in. The Marconi system is shut off at 11:30 p.m . 

Fleet and Lee glimpse a hazy shape in the distance at about 11:30 p.m. In the pitch-black night , it’s difficult to discern the horizon, and the sea is motionless.

Nine minutes later, the object comes into view—a huge iceberg directly on the Titanic ’s course. Fleet rings the lookout bell and phones the bridge. “Iceberg, right ahead!” he cries. Officer Murdoch tells Quartermaster Robert Hichens to turn the ship’s wheel hard a-starboard. But it’s too late. At 11:40 p.m. the Titanic crashes into the berg, and an underwater tongue of ice gashes the hull.

The Sinking of the Titanic

In the moments after the Titanic collides with the iceberg, only the captain and crew are aware of the immense peril the ship will soon face. Passengers remain calm. Many never imagine that the brand-new ocean liner has a chance of sinking.

Following the impact, bits of ice rain onto the ship’s deck; passengers, unaware of the gravity of the situation, use chunks of the debris to play a game of soccer . Captain Smith emerges onto the deck and learns not only that the Titanic has hit an iceberg, but that six of the ship’s watertight compartments are damaged. The Titanic can handle only four flooded compartments. Thomas Andrews, who is on board for its first voyage, surveys the damage and determines the Titanic will sink within two hours .

Meanwhile, the ship’s sea post clerks are enjoying a small birthday party for their colleague Oscar Scott Woody . They rush to the mail sorting room and find it rapidly flooding. The five men begin lugging the Titanic ’s registered mail sacks—a small portion of the up to 9 million pieces of mail aboard the ship—to the upper decks. None of the clerks would survive the disaster to come.

April 15, 1912

At 12:05 a.m. , the captain orders the crew to begin preparing the lifeboats . Officers are dispatched to stations around the ship to oversee the process. It’ll be hard—the Titanic is only carrying enough lifeboats to fit half the people on board. Passengers are roused from their rooms and told to report to the deck. The ship’s musicians entertain everyone, their attempt at maintaining a sliver of normalcy.

The Titanic ’s radio operators begin sending out distress signals at 12:15 a.m . Use of “SOS” as a Morse code distress signal isn’t commonplace in 1912, though it was adopted by the International Radiotelegraph Convention in 1906 and intended to go into effect internationally in 1908. The wireless operators on the Titanic are employed by the Marconi Company, which still favors using “CQD” for distress calls. Operator Jack Phillips uses both in an attempt to get help, but he isn’t the first to use “SOS”—the practice is already in effect among German liners.

The Frankfurt and the Olympic respond, but are too far to render timely aid. Minutes later, the Carpathia begins to head toward the Titanic —it's still hours away from the sinking ship.

At 12:25 a.m. , women and children are helped into the lifeboats. Passengers are at first unaware that there aren’t enough lifeboats for everyone, and the crowd gathered on the deck is calm; some stand quietly, others pace about. “At no time during this period was there any panic, or evidence of fear, or unusual alarm,” notes one first-class passenger . Men say goodbye to their wives and children, and, as time passes, some attempt to snag a spot on the emergency vessels. Many passengers remain unconvinced the ship will actually sink.

Lifeboat Number 7 is lowered into the icy water at 12:45 a.m . The first to leave the ship, it’s carrying around 27 people, though it can fit 65. Meanwhile, the Titanic begins firing distress rockets, hoping to catch the attention of a nearby ship. The Titanic continues to tilt forward as the bow sinks. More lifeboats enter the water, none loaded to full capacity: Number 5 at 12:55 a.m .; Number 6 a few minutes later, carrying Margaret “Molly” Brown and Frederick Fleet.

Number 3 is lowered around 1 a.m. carrying roughly 39 passengers and crew, followed by Number 1 with the Duff Gordons and only 10 other people.

All eight members of the Titanic’ s band continue playing as the women and children clamber into the boats. Later, many survivors remember them playing "Nearer, My God, To Thee" as the ship sinks, while others dispute these claims and suggest that band leader Wallace Hartley offered more uplifting songs, including ragtime melodies and popular hits like “ Songe d’Automne .”

Just before 1:10 a.m ., Ida Straus refuses to take a place in Lifeboat Number 8; she will not leave her husband, who won’t break the crew’s order of women and children first.

Lifeboat Number 10 hits the water at 1:20 a.m. Among its occupants is the Titanic ’s youngest passenger, Millvina Dean , who is only 9 weeks old.

Benjamin Guggenheim and his valet, Victor Giglio, visit the deck. When they realize the Titanic is sinking, the two head back to their suite and don their most formal attire. Guggenheim reportedly says, “We've dressed up in our best and are prepared to go down like gentlemen.” Guggenheim’s alleged mistress is one of 56 people in Lifeboat Number 9. 

Lifeboats 12, 14, 13, 15, and 16 are lowered between 1:25 a.m. and 1:35 a.m.

At 1:40 a.m. , Collapsible Boat C is lowered with White Star executive J. Bruce Ismay among the occupants.

Five minutes later, Lifeboat Number 2 is set adrift with 20 people, followed by Number 11 with 50, and Number 4 with John Jacob Astor IV’s pregnant wife Madeleine in the group. Astor himself is not permitted to board with her.

At 2 a.m. Captain Smith begins releasing the crew from their duties. People have become more frantic, rushing to load the remaining lifeboats and causing chaos. At 2:05 a.m ., the last lifeboat, canvas-sided Collapsible D, is lowered. More than 1500 people remain on the ship. On the narrow staircases, third-class passengers claw their way up the height of seven decks; first-class passengers begin to slide forward on the slanted floors. Deck chairs, tables, potted plants, dishes, and wine glasses cascade into the sea. The bow continues to flood and sink, while the stern tilts so dramatically that the propellers are lifted above water. 

The Titanic sends its final distress call at 2:17 a.m. : “We are sinking fast. Passengers are being put into boats.” Father Thomas Byles, a Catholic priest, comforts the panicked passengers, hearing their confessions and giving absolution. The ship’s lights finally go out as the electricity fails. Everyone, both on the ship and those who managed to make it onto the lifeboats, is plunged into darkness.

The Titanic ’s bow fully sinks below the surface by 2:20 a.m. , sending the stern higher into the air. The strain causes the ship to snap into two pieces. Freed from the still-buoyant stern, the bow begins to fall to the bottom of the ocean. Passengers and crew alike are thrown into the freezing ocean. 

Then the Titanic ’s stern plummets beneath the surface. Like the bow, it shoots nearly vertically toward the ocean floor, where it remains to this day. The great, celebrated ship is fully lost to the sea .

As the Titanic survivors huddle in lifeboats and others clutch floating debris in the icy water, rescue is still hours away. The nearest ship, the Californian , fails to heed the Titanic 's distress signals. But the Cunard passenger liner Carpathia is steaming toward the Titanic 's last known position, almost 60 nautical miles to the northeast . 

By 2:30 a.m ., hundreds of Titanic survivors are shivering in lifeboats, trying to swim toward the half-empty vessels, or simply hanging on to pieces of debris. The lifeboats' occupants try to reach the survivors clinging to flotsam. A horrifying stillness overtakes the scene. Whether they're first class or steerage, the passengers and crew are alone in the North Atlantic, with every object familiar to them now spiraling 12,000 feet down to the seabed. 

Minutes tick past. The boats are able to pick up only a handful of survivors. The screaming and thrashing of people in the water grows quieter. They begin to die of hypothermia, but remain floating upright in their lifebelts, with their heads and shoulders bobbing above the surface.

Nearby ships, not knowing the nature of the disaster, continue to try to reach the Titanic by wireless. The operators attempt to glean information from other vessels. The SS Birma , belonging to the Russian East Asiatic Steam Ship Co., reports in its wireless log , "several ships calling MGY [the Titanic 's call letters], no reply. Fear it is serious." The Birma 's operator speaks to his counterpart on the German liner Frankfurt , who confirms the distress call came from the Titanic . Several vessels sail toward the Titanic 's last position to render aid.

The Californian remains stationary only 10 or so miles from the Titanic . The wireless operator had turned off the system only 10 minutes before the Titanic struck the iceberg. It receives none of the Titanic 's desperate CQD calls, nor does Captain Lord respond to the Titanic emergency rockets, which he thinks are flares used among ships owned by the same company. 

The Cunard steamship Carpathia continues at full speed to the Titanic ’s last position. Captain Arthur Rostron orders his crew to prepare its lifeboats to receive survivors, tells the galley to prepare hot tea and soup, and starts collecting warm clothes and blankets. 

At 4 a.m. , the Carpathia 's crew sees a green signal flare from the Titanic 's lifeboat 2, which carries 18 survivors : four crew, eight women from first class, and two families from third class. The two vessels make their way toward each other. The Carpathia 's crew lowers rope ladders and slings to hoist people onto the passenger liner's decks. As the day wears on and more lifeboats are rescued, the Carpathia 's passengers wrap the shivering castaways in blankets and offer hot beverages. Nineteen-year-old Bernice Palmer takes photos of the rescued survivors—and the infamous iceberg—with her new Kodak Brownie camera.

At 8:30 a.m. , Charles Lightoller , a deck officer, is the last passenger rescued from the last lifeboat to be brought aboard the Carpathia . The ship's decks teem with 705 wet survivors in varying states of shock and grief. Still, Captain Rostron continues to search the debris field with spotlights, hoping to pick up more victims. But he finds no one alive.

Captain Rostron debates what to do next. Halifax, Nova Scotia, is the closest large port, but sailing there would mean traveling through the same dangerous ice fields that had just sunk the Titanic . Sailing east to the Azores would keep the Carpathia relatively on course, but the ship isn't provisioned for so many passengers and risks running out of food. Roston decides to turn around and go back to New York—the Titanic 's original destination. He orders the crew and passengers not to speak to the press until they arrive.

April 17, 1912

As the Carpathia steams toward New York, the crew of the Mackay-Bennett , a cable ship based in Halifax, appropriates all of the embalming fluid in town for its grim mission: collecting the remains of Titanic victims from the sea. Having been hired by the White Star Line for the task, the Mackay-Bennett also carries a minister, an undertaker, 100 wooden coffins, 100 tons of ice, and 12 tons of iron to weigh down bodies buried at sea. It departs in the morning.

April 18, 1912

The Carpathia arrives in New York City at 9:15 p.m. in the eye of a media hurricane. For three days, the other ships in the vicinity of where the Titanic had gone down had received almost no news since the Carpathia arrived on the scene. Reporters had sent frantic wireless messages to the ships that received no reply. On both sides of the Atlantic, friends and family of the passengers and crew didn't know if their loved ones had survived. Now, as the overloaded Cunarder sails up the Hudson River to Pier 54, journalists and photographers in tugboats follow the Carpathia , shouting questions through megaphones, offering huge sums of money for exclusives, and trying to squeeze scoops out of the Titanic survivors. Despite Captain Rostron's media blackout, one of the Carpathia 's original passengers, St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter Carlos Hurd , secretly takes notes and interviews Titanic victims before they get to the pier. Knowing what a bombshell his eyewitness account will be, he seals his notes in a cigar tin, ties champagne corks to the box for buoyancy, and flings it overboard, where it is fished out of the river by a colleague in a boat. Hurd's story is splashed across the paper's front page the following day.

April 22, 1912

The White Star Line hires a second mortuary ship, the Minia , when the Mackay-Bennett finds far more bodies than expected in the Titanic debris field. The Minia departs Halifax and meets with the Mackay-Bennett at sea to transfer supplies. The Mackay-Bennett steams back to Halifax with its grim cargo. 

Meanwhile, John Jacob Astor IV’s son Vincent contacts the Merritt-Chapman Wrecking Company to do whatever it takes to retrieve his father’s body. They have little interest in salvage, though—the plan is to drop 400 pounds of gun cotton in the wreck and use the explosion to bring bodies to the surface. The scheme does not go further because Astor’s body is recovered the same day by the Mackay-Bennett . Families of the wealthier passengers will continue to investigate ways to raise the Titanic , but experts consider it impossible .

April 30, 1912

The Mackay-Bennett arrives in Halifax at 9:30 a.m . and begins unloading the Titanic victims' remains. The crew found a total of 306 bodies , each carefully catalogued according to the clothing, appearance, and personal effects. Not all are able to be identified. While at sea, the crew embalmed and placed the first 100 bodies in coffins; when the coffins ran out, the crew selected those who appeared to be from first class to be embalmed and placed in ice. Apparent Titanic crewmembers and third-class passengers were buried at sea. In total, 190 victims are brought to Halifax for burial and 116 are buried at sea. Of the latter, around 56 were able to be identified. Over the next six weeks, the Minia and two more mortuary ships attempt to pick up the victims' remains. The Minia finds 17 bodies, the Montmagny recovers four, and the Algerine finds one, that of saloon steward James McGrady.

The Aftermath

The public’s fascination with the Titanic only grows stronger in the months and years following the disaster. Movies and books scrutinize the facts and romanticize the survivors’ stories , while discussions about finding and salvaging the Titanic begin almost as soon as the ship goes down. 

May 14, 1912

The first film about the disaster, Saved From the Titanic , is shot and released just 29 days after the ship sank. It stars Dorothy Gibson, a well-known actress and model who was an actual Titanic survivor (she and her mother had been in Lifeboat 7). The film kicks off a century-long trend. More films dramatize the Titanic sinking, including Atlantic (1929), an early talkie; Titanic (1943), a Nazi propaganda film smearing Great Britain; and Titanic (1953), which won an Oscar for screenwriting in 1954.

August 1, 1953

Newspapers report that Southampton-based company Risdon Beazley Ltd. makes what is usually considered the first serious attempt to find and salvage the Titanic . Investigators used explosives underwater to detect the shipwreck’s location via soundwaves. When asked by a reporter from the Liverpool Echo , Risdon Beazley officials neither confirm nor deny whether they’re also looking to recover the Titanic ’s reported “fortune in art treasures, including a priceless gem-set copy of Omar Khayyam.” They fail to locate the ship. (Today, some experts claim Risdon Beazley was looking for a completely different ship, the Empire Manor .)

November 21, 1955

A Night to Remember , a thrilling minute-by-minute telling of the Titanic ’s sinking, hits bookstores . Author Walter Lord interviewed dozens of Titanic survivors still alive in the early 1950s for his fact-based account. The Chicago Tribune gushes that “all the drama, horror, tragedy of that grim, heartbreaking night are here, never before presented in such superb narrative style,” while The New York Times ’s reviewer calls it “a stunning book, incomparably the best on its subject and one of the most exciting books of this or any year.” A Night to Remember lands on bestseller lists and sparks renewed interest in the Titanic saga.

July 3, 1958

A British movie based on Lord’s book, also called A Night to Remember , premieres in London. Widely praised for its accuracy, the film stars British actors Kenneth More as second officer Charles Lightoller and Michael Goodliffe as the ship’s architect Thomas Andrews.

January 23, 1960

Explorers Jacques Piccard and Don Walsh descend in the bathyscaphe Trieste —a blimp-shaped, deep-sea research vessel with a spherical observation chamber—to Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench, some 36,000 feet below the ocean’s surface, the deepest known point on Earth. And make it back alive. The expedition proves it is possible to get equipment and people down to the bone-crushingest depths of the ocean.

The Rediscovery

Scientists may now have the technology to find the Titanic , which one expert pinpoints as being 500 miles from Halifax and 70 miles south of the Grand Banks, at a depth of two miles. The question is, who will get there first?

August 19, 1977

Newspapers report that scientists may launch an expedition to the Titanic to take photos of the wreck. Team leader Robert Ballard, a seafloor geologist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, is inspired by Piccard and Walsh’s groundbreaking voyage, and, after a career in the military, develops submersible prototypes of his own. 

Ballard tells the Boston Globe that it would be possible to locate the wreck in a newly available vessel, the Alcoa Seaprobe , which can hold machinery capable of scanning the seabed with sonar. It can also take photos of any objects it detects and send them back to the scientists on the ship. “Finding the Titanic wouldn’t, to my mind, be difficult,” Ballard says. “The real challenge in something like this is the photography.” But when they get ready to go, a pay dispute with a drilling contractor means they have to use a cheaper replacement crew—which leads to an accident and the loss of $600,000 of equipment. 

July 17, 1980

Jack Grimm —who has also searched for Bigfoot and Noah’s Ark — departs Port Everglades, Florida, on his first unsuccessful expedition to find Titanic . According to Titanic Belfast , his ship passes over the shipwreck, but sonar fails to detect it. Grimm nevertheless pieces together a documentary about the expedition, Search for the Titanic , narrated by Orson Welles. 

June 28, 1981

Grimm once again heads out to the North Atlantic, this time with a documentary crew in tow. He claims that his expedition did snap a photo of the Titanic ’s propellers, but experts disagree.

July 16, 1983

Grimm makes his third and final attempt to find the Titanic . He also claims that computer enhancement of images proves it is a propeller, but in his memoir Into the Deep , Robert Ballard writes that when he checked it out there was nothing there. Grimm will go to his grave (in 1998) claiming to have found the ship first.

Summer 1984

Robert Ballard sets off on a mission to test his new submersible, a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) called the Argo , and to hopefully find the Titanic . This story, however, is just a cover; Ballard is actually checking out two nuclear submarines — USS Thresher and the USS Scorpion —that had sunk in the North Atlantic in the 1960s. The U.S. Navy tells Ballard that if he can examine the subs, he can spend the remaining time on the expedition doing whatever he wants. In summer 1984, he maps and photographs the Thresher . Ballard later tells CNN, “What they wanted me to do was go back and not have the Russians follow me, because we were interested in the nuclear weapons that were on the Scorpion and also what the nuclear reactors (were) doing to the environment.”

August 17, 1985

Ballard maps and examines the Scorpion . His primary mission accomplished, he has just 12 days to search for Titanic before he has to return to shore. With help from a French ship called Le Suroit , he looks for the world’s most famous shipwreck.

Using a concept they learned from mapping the wreckage of the subs—which had imploded under pressure and spread wide debris fields—Ballard’s team begins to scan the seafloor looking not for the Titanic ’s hull, but for its trail of metal parts and objects. The items provide a much bigger target than the ship itself, and will hopefully lead explorers right to the motherlode.

The crew works around the clock. As the days pass, Ballard thinks this mission might also be a failure.

September 1, 1985

At about 2 a.m. , Ballard is in his cabin reading when he hears a knock on the door. The ship’s cook tells him that he’s needed in the command center. Ballard recalls later, “I knew something had happened, so I flew out of my bunk and blew past him. It took me about four seconds to slide down six banisters of stairs.”

The crew monitoring the feed had seen the Titanic ’s debris field come into view. At the moment Ballard enters the room, the ROV glides over one of Titanic ’s boilers, sending images of the long-lost artifact to the stunned researchers. After an initial celebration, the mood quickly turns somber. The researchers realize it’s about the same time of night that the Titanic finally sank in 1912. Ballard tells 60 Minutes , “We were embarrassed we were celebrating … all of a sudden we realized that we should not be dancing on someone’s grave.”

In his memoir Into the Deep , Ballard would later write, “a world tragedy had played itself out on this spot, and now the site itself took hold of me. Its emotion filled me and never let go.”

September 2, 1985

The Titanic itself is discovered at approximately 41°43’57” N, 49°56’49” W—nearly 15 miles from the position given during distress calls. It rests in two pieces on the ocean floor more than 12,000 feet below the surface. The ship appears to be in mostly good condition, with the hull standing upright and little growth from marine organisms.

July 9, 1986

Ballard and crew from Woods Hole set off for the Titanic site to make the first crewed trip down to the wreck in a three-person submersible called the Alvin . Eleven dives total yield nearly 60,000 high-quality photos and hours of video footage. From examining the wreck, they determine that—contrary to popular belief—the iceberg hadn’t created a gash in the Titanic . Rather, the collision had caused the seams in that area to split apart, flooding the ship . They also find that the ship is quite rusty , which leaves it in a fragile state. The rust is caused by ocean microbes feeding on the iron and forming long “rusticles.”

July 18, 1986

Photos and video of the Titanic wreck are released to the public while Ballard’s crew is still at sea . The three major television networks and other media outlets pool funds to charter a helicopter to Ballard’s ship to retrieve the images and tapes, which are flown to Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution under a shroud of secrecy. Reporters get the first glimpses of the storied ship, “ sheathed in icicles of iron ,” that evening.

July 28, 1986

Ballard and crew return to Woods Hole with thousands of photographs and videotapes of the Titanic . “The Titanic can finally rest in peace,” he tells UPI. Over the next few days, the photos are printed in newspapers across the country.

October 21, 1986

The R.M.S Titanic Maritime Memorial Act of 1986, which designates the site as an international maritime memorial, becomes law . The act also regulates research, exploration, and salvage activities regarding the ship. "The R.M.S. Titanic is the premier symbol in modern times of both the perils of the sea and the need for high standards of ship safety," President Ronald Reagan says in a statement . "The significance of the R.M.S. Titanic stems not only from the durable imprint of the disaster upon the consciousness of succeeding generations but also from the enormous strides made by the international community in promoting safety of life at sea, the study and observation of ice conditions, the maintenance of ice patrols in the North Atlantic Ocean, and the development and improvement of standards for the design and construction of vessels."

The Titanic Becomes a Touchstone

After discovering Titanic , Robert Ballard balks at questions about bringing up artifacts from the wreck—doing so, he believes, is like desecrating a gravesite: "I just hope we can somehow rise above the way we have behaved in the past and preserve the Titanic ," he says . Survivor Louise Pope— who was 4 when Titanic sank — takes on the salvage issue when testifying before Congress in 1985, saying, "I do not like the benefit of salvaging for commercial purposes, but if they can use it for research or something on there for museums, I would be more than willing." Over the years, a number of dives are made to the wreck—some for research purposes, some for documentary purposes, and some for the purposes of retrieving objects for exhibitions that traveled around the world. And perhaps more than any artifact brought up from the deep, James Cameron’s feature film Titanic does more to keep the spirit of the ocean liner alive well into the 21st century.

July 25, 1987

Titanic Ventures Limited Partnership (TVLP), in partnership with L'Institut Français de Recherche pour l'Exploitation de la Mer, makes its fir st salvage trip to the wreck. Among the 1800 artifacts it returns with is the bronze bell that lookout Frederick Fleet rang to warn of the iceberg and a bronze cherub from one of the ship's staircases.

November 12, 1992

Marex Inc.—which counts Jack Grimm among its leaders — seeks sole salvage rights to Titanic but is denied. Instead, TVLP is awarded sole salvage rights. The decision is eventually reversed on appeal.

RMST Inc., the successor of TVLP,  visits Titanic again, making "15 trips in 15 days," according to Titanic, Triumph and Tragedy , adding 800 new artifacts to its collection.

June 7, 1994

RMST Inc. is awarded exclusive salvage rights by the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, provided that it remains “in possession” of the wreck. RMST must mount regular expeditions to ensure its status. RMST Inc. makes another trip to Titanic , spotting a huge piece of the hull they mark for future salvage; more than 1000 artifacts are brought to the surface in July and put on display at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, London. 

August 1996

RMST Inc. heads to the wreck's debris field again; this time, the company tries to bring up the piece of the hull spotted two years earlier, but the cable snaps mid-salvage, sending the piece back down to the ocean floor.

James Cameron’s Titanic begins principal photography with a budget of $110 million and almost immediately runs aground . The entertainment media maligns it for its exorbitant budget, which grows to over $200 million before marketing costs, and delays. It is originally scheduled to open in July 1997 as a summer blockbuster to compete with Men in Black . A Night to Remember author Walter Lord is a consultant on the film.

Among those who audition for Cameron’s Titanic is Matthew McConaughey, who loses out on the role of Jack Dawson when Cameron opts for Leonardo DiCaprio. “Walked away from there pretty confident that I had it,” McConaughey later recalls. “I didn’t get it. I never got offered that.”

November 1, 1997

Cameron’s Titanic finally premieres—in Japan. The movie has its world debut at the Tokyo International Film Festival. DiCaprio is big in Japan, so much so that the studio deploys 49 personal security guards for both the actor and director. At the screening, the excited audience keeps shouting “Leo!” There’s no word on their reaction when his character (spoiler alert!!) dies.

December 14, 1997

Titanic premieres in the U.S. and goes on to be the blockbuster studios had hardly dared to hope for. Critics and audiences fall for its sweeping romance set against heart-stopping cinematography and effects. It becomes the first film to make more than $1 billion and sets a record as the highest-grossing film of all time (until 2010, when it is dethroned by Avatar , another Cameron creation).

March 23, 1998

Titanic is the most-nominated film at the 70th Academy Awards with 14 nods in all of the major categories, tying the record set by 1950’s All About Eve . It wins 11 Oscars (tying the number won by Ben-Hur in 1960), including Best Picture, Directing, Score, Song, Art Direction, Cinematography, Visual Effects and more, but is shut out of the acting categories.

August 10, 1998

On this trip down to the debris field, RMST Inc. succeeds in nabbing the piece of hull dropped during the previous attempt. Weighing in at 15 tons, it becomes known as "The Big Piece." It is the largest piece of the ship recovered and still has glass in its portholes .

August 2000

RMST Inc. makes another trip to Titanic , salvaging perfume samples that once belonged to first-class passenger Adolphe Saalfeld.

September 2001

Cameron dives to Titanic to film his 3D documentary Ghosts of the Abyss. The documentary is released in 2003.

June 22, 2003

NOAA embarks on an 11-day mission to dive to the wreck and check the condition of the ship.

May 27, 2004

Ballard returns to study the wreck for the first time in 18 years. Over the course of 11 days, Ballard and a team use ROVs to examine the deterioration of the ship, which Ballard believes is accelerating due to visits by submersibles and salvage missions. "The deep sea is the biggest museum in the world ... yet there's no lock on the door," Ballard tells NPR .

August 25, 2004

RMST Inc. heads to Titanic again. By this point, the seven salvage dives to the wreck's debris field have resulted in the recovery of 5500 artifacts.

December 2010

Scientists announce that a new bacterium has been found in samples of rusticles brought up from the ship. They name the bacterium Halomonas titanicae .

August 15, 2011

RMST Inc. is granted title to the Titanic artifacts it has salvaged, provided the company follows conditions that "ensure that the collection of artifacts recovered from Titanic will be conserved and curated consistent with current international and U.S. historic preservation standards," according to NOAA .

January 31, 2012

Government agencies including NOAA, the U.S. National Park Service, and the U.S. Coast Guard release a circular advising ships not to jettison waste or garbage within the area surrounding the wreck. Submersibles are asked not to land on the wreck itself or leave plaques behind.

April 4, 2012

James Cameron’s Titanic remains unsinkable when it's re-released in theaters to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the real-life disaster. Presented in 3D in select theaters, the film takes in a staggering $100 million internationally in one weekend, putting its overall grosses at over $2 billion.

The Future of the Titanic

A century after the RMS Titanic sinks on its maiden voyage and makes the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean its final resting place, a new ship—dubbed the Titanic II —makes headlines. Envisioned as an almost exact replica of the doomed luxury liner by Australian billionaire and politician Clive Palmer , it becomes something of an iceberg looming on the modern-day legacy of the Titanic . For maritime scholars and fans of Cameron’s 1997 blockbuster alike, it might go down in history as one of the biggest publicity stunts of all time—provided it ever actually gets built or sets sail .

April 30, 2012

The same day he announces his bid for political office in his native Australia, mining mogul Clive Palmer reveals his plans to build a nearly exact replica of the Titanic , to be christened Titanic II . "It will be every bit as luxurious as the original Titanic but of course it will have state-of-the-art 21st-century technology and the latest navigation and safety systems," Palmer says in a press conference. He adds that he hopes the planned liner—to be built by Chinese company CSC Jinling Shipyard as the flagship of Palmer's cruise company, Blue Star Line —will set sail from England to New York in 2016.

October 2012

Titanic experts Steve Hall and Daniel Klistorner, co-authors of Titanic: The Ship Magnificent and Titanic in Photographs , are appointed to work on the forthcoming ship. Descendants of Titanic survivors Joseph Bruce Ismay and Margaret "Molly" Brown later join the ship's advisory board.

February 26, 2013

Palmer releases blueprints for the design of Titanic II at the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum in New York. The proposed ship will have first-, second-, and third-class accommodations and the capacity to carry 2600 passengers and 900 crew members, with enough lifeboats for all those aboard. Additionally, it's revealed that the ship will serve meals from the original Titanic menu and that crew members will don uniforms similar to those worn in 1912. Structurally, Titanic II will differ from the Titanic in key ways: It will be diesel-powered but have four smoke stacks to recreate the look of the original liner and have an enlarged rudder and bow thrusters, so as to better maneuver around whatever obstacles might come its way.

April 16, 2013

Finnish engineering firm Deltamarin signs a deal with Blue Star Line to manage the development of Titanic II and ensure it meets modern-day safety regulations and construction guidelines. "Deltamarin will be responsible for coordinating the various parties involved in the project including the shipyard, architects, interior designers and operations managers," Palmer says in a statement.

September 16, 2013

Palmer files a U.S. federal trademark for "Titanic II Blue Star Line," as well as " Titanic Two " and " RMS Titanic ."

September 19, 2013

A wooden prototype of the Titanic II is tested at the Hamburg Ship Model Basin in Germany at speeds up to 23 knots per hour.

The Aviation Industry Corporation of China (AVIC) partners with Blue Star Line to promote Titanic II from within China, with plans to launch the ship from the country .

Deltamarin, the Finnish engineering firm responsible for the development of Titanic II , reveals that work on the project has come to a halt, as a spokesperson for Palmer claims that he has retired from business to focus on his political career. Workers at the CSC Jinling Shipyard tell The Australian that little work has been done on the project, with one saying: "That ship was just a proposal. It's never been carried out and the project has never launched."

March 21 and 26, 2015

The U.S. federal trademarks for " Titanic II Blue Star Line ," " Titanic Two ," and " RMS Titanic " are classified in status as "Abandoned - Failure to respond or late response," per Trademarkia, a search engine for trademarks held in the U.S.

August 2015

A spokesperson for James McDonald, the global marketing director for Blue Star Line, reveals that the launch date for Titanic II has been pushed back to 2018 , two years after it was originally planned.

Queensland Nickel, a nickel refinery that Palmer purchased in 2009 , alleges amid financial troubles that close to AUD $6 million was taken from the company for the marketing and development of Titanic II ; Palmer denies these allegations.

September 27, 2018

Palmer reveals in a statement that work on Titanic II was suspended because of a financial dispute between the Chinese government-owned Citic Limited and Mineralogy, the parent company of Blue Star Line. He adds that the dispute has since been resolved and the building of Titanic II will resume, with plans to offer a two-week maiden voyage to Dubai, and offer another from Dubai to Southampton.

October 2018

Titanic II , which has still yet to be built, is set to make its maiden voyage in 2022, officially starting in China and traveling to Singapore and Dubai, from where it will sail to Southampton, and then follow the Titanic ’s original 1912 route all the way to New York City.

November 9, 2018

Deltamarin confirms it has recommenced work on the project; in January 2019, the engineering firm reveals Blue Star Line has contracted the company to further handle the design for the proposed ship.

April 16, 2019

The official Twitter account for Titanic II —as linked to by the official Titanic II website —posts about a gala dinner held in honor of the proposed ship in February 2019. This is the last public post made from the account as of April 2022.

August 21, 2019 A group of explorers make the first crewed dive to Titanic in over a decade and find that the wreck is rapidly deteriorating . " Titanic is returning to nature," historian Parks Stephenson tells the BBC .

October 1, 2019

Palmer files a U.S. federal trademark for "Titanic II."

January 21, 2020

RMST Inc. announces plans to dive to Titanic to retrieve the Marconi radio from the wreck. In May, a judge rules that the salvage trip can proceed, against the wishes of NOAA, UNESCO, and many archaeologists.

January 2021

Funding and logistical issues due to the COVID-19 pandemic derail plans to dive to the wreck for the radio.

June 30, 2021

The U.S. federal trademark for "Titanic II" is classified in status as " Abandoned - Failure to respond or late response ," per Trademarkia.

As of April 8, the Titanic II official website notes : "Tickets are not yet available for purchase. Ticketing information including the date of the maiden voyage and ticket prices will, when released, be made available on this website."

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The High Hopes of the Titanic ’s Maiden Voyage

The infamous passenger liner was fitted with advanced safety features—lulling her crew into a false sense of security.

• Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons

The 1912 sinking of the RMS Titanic is arguably the most infamous shipwreck to date. Over a century later, its story lives on through films, books, and memorials. The world remains captivated with uncovering the truth behind the ship's unfortunate fate, as well as the stories of the people who were on board.

Built by the Harland and Wolff shipyard in Northern Ireland, the RMS Titanic was the largest passenger liner in service, and it was the second of three Olympic -class ocean liners. On April 10, 1912, the Titanic set out on her maiden voyage from Southampton, England across the Atlantic Ocean to New York City. 

Related: 11 Captivating Titanic Books

Four days into the journey, the ship collided with an iceberg. What was initially assumed to be a minor scratch ended up causing the deadliest sinking of an ocean liner to date. Ironically, the ship had advanced safety features for the time, and was deemed “unsinkable” before facing her disastrous end. 

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Of the estimated 2,224 passengers and crew aboard the Titanic, over 1,500 lives were lost—including the ship's captain, Edward Smith, who adhered to the maritime tradition of going down with the ship. One critical issue was the amount of lifeboats available. The Titanic set sail with only enough tenders to hold a total of 1,178 passengers—leaving about half of the people onboard with no chance of escape. 

Historian Walter Lord took a closer look at the maritime disaster in his book, A Night to Remember . Originally published in 1955, this classic book recreates the last night aboard the ship with intimate details from personal accounts and interviews with survivors. 

Related: Walter Lord is the Pop Historian All History Lovers Should Read

Lord continued his investigative work in 1976 with The Night Lives On. Combining over 30 years of research with updated insights on some of the most puzzling aspects of the wreck, including the conditions that contributed to its disaster, The Night Lives On provides readers with a deeper look into the sinking of the Titanic .

Thorough and well-researched, these books stand the test of time and are as readable today as when they were first published. Y ou can get your hands on both New York Times bestsellers with The Complete Titanic Chronicles . Including both A Night to Remember and The Night Lives On , this book bundle is the definitive account of the passenger liner’s fate.

Read an excerpt from The Night Lives On, then download The Complete Titanic Chronicles .

____________________

The Complete Titanic Chronicles

By Walter Lord

Not one word about slowing down. Why was this most obvious of all precautions not even mentioned? The usual answer is that Captain Smith thought the Titanic was unsinkable. But even if the ship were unsinkable, the Captain surely didn’t want to hit an iceberg.

Actually, he didn’t slow down because he was sure that on this brilliantly clear night any iceberg could be spotted in time to avoid it. In reaching that decision, Smith did not feel he was doing anything rash. He was following the practice of all captains on the Atlantic run, except for a few slowpokes like James Clayton Barr of the Cunarder Caronia , whose legendary caution at the slightest sign of haze had earned him the derisive nickname “Foggy.”

Knuckling under the competitive pressure of keeping schedule, most captains ran at full steam, despite strong evidence that ice was not as easily sighted as generally claimed. Especially noteworthy was the harrowing ordeal of the Guion Liner Arizona in November 1879. Like the Titanic, she was the largest liner of her day. Eastbound off the Banks of Newfoundland, she raced through a night that was cloudy, but with good visibility. Taking advantage of the calm seas, the passengers gathered in the lounge for a concert.

Suddenly there was a fearful crash, sending everybody sprawling among the palms and violins. The Arizona had smashed head on into a giant iceberg, shattering 30 feet of her bow. But the forward bulkhead held; there were no casualties; and two days later she limped into St. John’s. In a curious twist of logic, the accident was hailed as an example of the safety of ships, rather than the dangers of ice.

Related: 7 Books About Disastrous Shipwrecks in History

There were other close calls too. In 1907 the North German Lloyd Liner Kronprinz Wilhelm dented her bow and scarred her starboard side, brushing a berg in the pre-dawn darkness. In 1909 the immigrant Ship Volturno barely escaped damage, running through a huge ice field. In 1911 the Anchor Liner Columbia struck a berg off Cape Race, driving her bow plates back ten feet. The jar injured several crewmen and broke one passenger’s ankle. It was foggy at the time; so perhaps the accident was discounted.

Such incidents were ignored; most captains continued to run at full speed. Always dangerous, the practice became even more so with the vast leap in the size of ships at the turn of the century. It was one thing to dodge an iceberg in the 10,000-ton Majestic , Captain Smith’s command in 1902, but quite a different matter only ten years later in the 46,000-ton Titanic . The momentum of such a huge ship was enormous, and she just couldn’t stop suddenly or turn on a dime.

The Titanic tested making an emergency stop only once during those brief trials in Belfast Lough, and that at the very moderate speed of 18 knots. Her turning tests seem almost as minimal: she apparently made two complete circles at 18-20 knots and then carried out three other turns at 11, 19½, and 21¼ knots. Her performance at maximum speed remains a mystery.

Captain Edward Smith.

Once again the question arises: how much did Captain Smith really know about the great vessel under his feet?

Arguably, the practice of maintaining speed might have been a practical necessity in the days before wireless, for who knew where the ice really was? The sightings came from vessels reaching port several days later, and by that time the information was too stale to pinpoint the danger. But Signor Marconi’s genius changed everything. The reports reaching the Titanic told exactly where the ice could be found, only hours away.

Why couldn’t Captain Smith and his officers see the difference? Certainly they knew the importance of wireless in an emergency. The help summoned by the sinking liner Republic in 1909 proved that. But no one on the Titanic ’s bridge seemed to appreciate the value of wireless as a constant, continuous navigational aid. Basically, they still thought of it as a novelty—something that lay outside the normal running of the ship. It was a mindset tellingly illustrated by the way the wireless operators were carried on the roster of the crew. Phillips and Bride were not listed with the Deck Department; they came under the Victualling Department—like stewards and pastry chefs. 

So the Titanic raced on through the starlit night of April 14. At 10 P.M. First Officer Murdoch arrived on the bridge to take over Second Officer Lightoller’s watch. His first words: “It’s pretty cold.”

Related: The Secret Cold War Mission That Helped America Find The Titanic

“Yes, it’s freezing,” answered Lightoller, and he added that the ship might be up around the ice any time now. The temperature was down to 32°, the water an even colder 31°. A warm bunk was clearly the place to be, and Lightoller quickly passed on what else the new watch needed to know: the carpenter and engine room had been told to watch their water, keep it from freezing…the crow’s nest had been warned to keep a sharp lookout for ice, “especially small ice and growlers”…the Captain had left word to be called “if it becomes at all doubtful.”

Lightoller later denied that the sudden cold had any significance. He pointed out that on the North Atlantic the temperature often took a nose dive without any icebergs in the area. Indeed this was true. The sharp drop in temperature did not necessarily mean ice, but it was also true that it could mean ice. It was, in short, one more signal calling for caution. After all, that was the whole point of taking the temperature of the water every two hours.

There’s no evidence that either Lightoller or Murdoch saw it that way. The bitter cold and the reported ice remained two separate problems. Lightoller had passed on all the information he could; so now he went off on his final rounds, while Murdoch pondered the empty night.

A few yards aft along the Boat Deck, First Wireless Operator Phillips dug in to a stack of outgoing messages. His set had a range of only 400 miles during daylight, and the American traffic had piled up. Now at last he was in touch with Cape Race and was working off the backlog. Some were passenger messages for New York—arrival times, requests for hotel reservations, instructions to business associates. Others were being relayed for ships no longer in direct touch with the land.

At 11 P.M. the steamer Californian suddenly broke in: “I say, old man, we’re stopped and surrounded by ice.” She was so close that her signal almost blasted Phillips’s ears off.

“Shut up, shut up,” he shot back, “I’m busy. I’m working Cape Race.” Then he went back to the outgoing pile—messages like this one relayed to a Los Angeles address from a passenger on the Amerika :

NO SEASICKNESS. ALL WELL. NOTIFY ALL INTERESTED. POKER BUSINESS GOOD. AL.

In the crow’s nest Lookouts Fleet and Lee peered into the dark. There was little conversation; they were keeping an extra-sharp lookout. At 11:40 Fleet suddenly spotted something even blacker than the night. He banged the crow’s-nest bell three times and lifted the phone to the bridge. Three words were enough to explain the trouble: “Iceberg right ahead.”

Now it was Murdoch’s problem. He put his helm hard astarboard, hoping to “port around” the ice, and at the same time pulled the engine room telegraph to STOP, and then REVERSE ENGINES. But it was too late: 37 seconds later the Titanic brushed by the berg with that faint, grinding jar that every student of the disaster knows so well.

Related: Lost at Sea: What Happened to the Mary Celeste ?

The 37 seconds—based on tests later made with the Olympic —are significant only for what they reveal about human miscalculations. At 22½ knots the Titanic was moving at a rate of 38 feet a second…meaning that the berg had been sighted less than 500 yards away. But all the experts agreed that on a clear night like this the ice should have been seen much farther off. Lightoller thought at least a mile or so, and this undoubtedly reflected Captain Smith’s opinion, for they both had gone over this very point on the bridge shortly after 9:00. The search immediately began for some extenuating circumstance that could explain the difference.

Suspicion focused first on the lookouts. How good were their eyes? Fleet’s had not been tested in five years, and Lee’s not since the Boer War. Yet tests after the collision showed both men had sound vision. Nor were they inexperienced. Unlike most lines, White Star used trained, full-time lookouts, who received extra pay for their work.

Next it was the lookouts’ turn to complain. They charged that there were no binoculars in the crow’s nest. A pair had been supplied during the trip from Belfast to Southampton, but during a last-minute shake-up of personnel they had been removed and never replaced. After hearing numerous experts on the subject, the British Inquiry decided that it really didn’t matter. Binoculars were useful in identifying objects, but not in initially sighting them. That was better done by the naked eye. Here, there was no problem of identification; Fleet knew all too well what he had seen.

The Titanic departs from Southampton on April 10, 1912.

Then Lookout Lee came up with a “haze” over the water. He described dramatically how Fleet had said to him, “Well, if we can see through that, we will be lucky.” Fleet denied the conversation and said the haze was “nothing to talk about.” Lightoller, Boxhall, and Quartermaster Hitchens, who had been at the wheel, all described the night as perfectly clear. In the end, the British Inquiry wrote off Lee’s “haze” as an understandable bit of wishful thinking.

Lightoller himself contributed what became known as the “blue berg” theory. He argued that the iceberg had recently capsized and was showing only the dark side that had previously been under water, making it almost invisible. But this theory did not seem to fit the recollections of the few survivors who actually saw the berg. It was anything but invisible to Quartermaster Rowe, standing on the after bridge. He estimated that it was about 100 feet high, and he initially mistook it for a windjammer gliding along the side of the ship with all sails set.

The only explanation left was “fate.” As Lightoller put it, the Titanic was the victim of an extraordinary set of circumstances that could only happen once in a hundred years. Normally there would have been no problem, but on this particularly freakish night “everything was against us.”

Related: The Deadly Collision Between SS Andrea Doria and MS Stockholm

But this explanation implies that Captain Smith didn’t know—and couldn’t be expected to know—the nature of the night he was up against. But he did know. He fully realized that the sea was flat calm, that there was no moon, no wind, no swell. He understood all this and took it into account in deciding not to reduce speed. Under these circumstances the collision quickly loses its supernatural quality and becomes simply a case of miscalculation.

Given the competitive pressures of the North Atlantic run, the chances taken, the lack of experience with ships of such immense size, the haphazard procedures of the wireless room, the casualness of the bridge, and the misassessment of what speed was safe, it’s remarkable that the Titanic steamed for two hours and ten minutes through ice-infested waters without coming to grief any sooner.

“Everything was against us”? The wonder is that she lasted as long as she did.

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The Titan Submersible Disaster Shocked the World. The Exclusive Inside Story Is More Disturbing Than Anyone Imagined

The Ocean Sciences Building at the University of Washington in Seattle is a brightly modern, four-story structure, with large glass windows reflecting the bay across the street.

On the afternoon of July 7, 2016, it was being slowly locked down.

Red lights began flashing at the entrances as students and faculty filed out under overcast skies. Eventually, just a handful of people remained inside, preparing to unleash one of the most destructive forces in the natural world: the crushing weight of about 2½ miles of ocean water.

In the building’s high-pressure testing facility, a black, pill-shaped capsule hung from a hoist on the ceiling. About 3 feet long, it was a scale model of a submersible called Cyclops 2 , developed by a local startup called OceanGate . The company’s CEO, Stockton Rush, had cofounded the company in 2009 as a sort of submarine charter service, anticipating a growing need for commercial and research trips to the ocean floor. At first, Rush acquired older, steel-hulled subs for expeditions, but in 2013 OceanGate had begun designing what the company called “a revolutionary new manned submersible.” Among the sub’s innovations were its lightweight hull, which was built from carbon fiber and could accommodate more passengers than the spherical cabins traditionally used in deep-sea diving. By 2016, Rush’s dream was to take paying customers down to the most famous shipwreck of them all: the Titanic , 3,800 meters below the surface of the Atlantic Ocean.

Engineers carefully lowered the Cyclops 2 model into the testing tank nose-first, like a bomb being loaded into a silo, and then screwed on the tank’s 3,600-pound lid. Then they began pumping in water, increasing the pressure to mimic a submersible’s dive. If you’re hanging out at sea level, the weight of the atmosphere above you exerts 14.7 pounds per square inch (psi). The deeper you go, the stronger that pressure; at the Titanic ’s depth, the pressure is about 6,500 psi. Soon, the pressure gauge on UW’s test tank read 1,000 psi, and it kept ticking up—2,000 psi, 5,000 psi. At about the 73-minute mark, as the pressure in the tank reached 6,500 psi, there was a sudden roar and the tank shuddered violently.

“I felt it in my body,” an OceanGate employee wrote in an email later that night. “The building rocked, and my ears rang for a long time.”

“Scared the shit out of everyone,” he added.

By Kate Knibbs

By Jaina Grey

By Becky Ferreira

By Matt Reynolds

The model had imploded thousands of meters short of the safety margin OceanGate had designed for.

In the high-stakes, high-cost world of crewed submersibles , most engineering teams would have gone back to the drawing board, or at least ordered more models to test. Rush’s company didn’t do either of those things. Instead, within months, OceanGate began building a full-scale Cyclops 2 based on the imploded model. This submersible design, later renamed Titan , eventually made it down to the Titanic in 2021. It even returned to the site for expeditions the next two years. But nearly one year ago, on June 18, 2023, Titan dove to the infamous wreck and imploded, instantly killing all five people onboard , including Rush himself.

The disaster captivated and horrified the world. Deep-sea experts criticized OceanGate’s choices, from Titan ’s carbon-fiber construction to Rush’s public disdain for industry regulations, which he believed stifled innovation. Organizations that had worked with OceanGate, including the University of Washington as well as the Boeing Company, released statements denying that they contributed to Titan .

A trove of tens of thousands of internal OceanGate emails, documents, and photographs provided exclusively to WIRED by anonymous sources sheds new light on Titan ’s development, from its initial design and manufacture through its first deep-sea operations. The documents, validated by interviews with two third-party suppliers and several former OceanGate employees with intimate knowledge of Titan , reveal never-before-reported details about the design and testing of the submersible. They show that Boeing and the University of Washington were both involved in the early stages of OceanGate’s carbon-fiber sub project, although their work did not make it into the final Titan design. The trove also reveals a company culture in which employees who questioned their bosses’ high-speed approach and decisions were dismissed as overly cautious or even fired. (The former employees who spoke to WIRED have asked not to be named for fear of being sued by the families of those who died aboard the vessel.) Most of all, the documents show how Rush, blinkered by his own ambition to be the Elon Musk of the deep seas, repeatedly overstated OceanGate’s progress and, on at least one occasion, outright lied about significant problems with Titan ’s hull, which has not been previously reported.

A representative for OceanGate, which ceased all operations last summer, declined to comment on WIRED’s findings.

OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush aboard the Cyclops 1 in 2015.

I met Stockton Rush on June 24, 2015, while reporting on OceanGate for New Scientist magazine. A former flight engineer and tech investor, Rush was already styling himself a subaquatic Musk. “I wanted to be the first person on Mars until I realized there was nothing there,” Rush told me at a city center dock in Seattle. “But in the ocean, there are new life-forms, things people have never discovered.” Rush believed that Earth’s oceans, not outer space, were where humanity would find refuge from existential risks like climate change. “My goal is to move the needle,” he told me.

Around us, employees were prepping OceanGate’s prototype submersible, the Cyclops 1 , for its deepest dive to date. The sub was a cylindrical, steel-hulled design rated for dives up to 500 meters. OceanGate had acquired it a few years earlier and refurbished it, adding LEDs and a PlayStation controller for easy steering, and replacing an ugly exterior cabin with a sleek white plastic fairing to protect components outside the hull. Together with the large acrylic viewport, the effect was a sort of one-eyed robot shark. Up to five people could squeeze inside—which is what Rush and I were about to do, for a test dive in Seattle’s Elliott Bay.

Ninety minutes later and 130 meters deeper, we were totally lost. First the thruster software had glitched, leaving us floating just above the seafloor. Now the sub’s compass was acting up. The shipwreck we aimed to explore, a rail ferry that had once carried Teddy Roosevelt, was nowhere to be seen. All I could spy outside the Cyclops ’ forward dome was the occasional salmon dancing in the frigid water.

As I began to feel the chill seeping through the sub’s steel hull, Rush asked me to open my iPhone’s compass app. He wanted to compare it to the one on his phone. The headings did not match, but he rebooted the thrusters and we set off in what he was pretty sure was the right direction.

“You’re heading in exactly the wrong direction,” said a faint voice transmitted via an acoustic link from the support ship tracking us on the surface. We eventually located the sunken ship, its rotting bow emerging into the Cyclops ’ headlight. It was an otherworldly experience, made more thrilling by the hint of danger.

Back at the dock, Rush brushed off the problems we had encountered. This is exactly why OceanGate started with the Cyclops 1 , he said, rather than anything capable of diving deeper. “I could have built a multimillion-dollar version and all of a sudden I’ve got to figure out really stupid stuff like the magnetic compass,” he told me. “The Cyclops 1 is getting us ready. When we do the Cyclops 2 , then all these bugs will be out.”

The Cyclops 2 , which Rush renamed Titan in 2018, was already on the drawing board. And Rush believed he had the biggest bug—how to make a vessel that could safely dive 20 times deeper than America’s nuclear subs—worked out. He would use a modern wonder material: carbon fiber.

Carbon-fiber composites are some of the strongest materials available to engineers. They are formed of thin strands of atomic carbon within plastic resins, layer upon layer, then cured carefully at high temperatures. The resulting composites can be both stronger and lighter than titanium, and it was this combination that caught Rush’s attention. A carbon-fiber Titan could be roughly the same size and weight as the steel Cyclops and yet be able to dive up to 12 times deeper. It would be much cheaper for a support vessel to carry and deploy at sea than a metal sub, and would also be more buoyant, reducing the risk of getting stranded on the ocean floor. While carbon fiber has been used in everything from cars to rockets, no one had ever dived in a deep-water carbon-fiber submersible. Rush wanted to be the first.

In 2013, OceanGate struck up a partnership with the University of Washington’s Applied Physics Laboratory to develop the new sub. The university has a long history of working with composites and designing its own underwater vehicles. It also already had a relationship with OceanGate, after using its subs for research; the physics lab helped write the software used by Cyclops 1 . The university touted the arrangement in press releases at the time: “UW, Local Company Building Innovative Deep-Sea Manned Submarine,” read one headline from October 2013. The story was updated with a note in 2023 saying that “the vessel that resulted from this partnership” was the Cyclops 1 . Emails from OceanGate leaked exclusively to WIRED indicate that UW researchers provided hundreds of detailed 3D CAD drawings of components for a carbon-fiber sub between 2013 and 2016, as part of a $5 million contract. But the relationship between the lab and OceanGate was contentious, according to emails.

UW claims that OceanGate and the lab parted ways after just $650,000 worth of work, and former OceanGate employees told WIRED that none of UW’s hardware or software work wound up in the finished sub.

OceanGate also announced that Boeing Research & Technology was helping with the project. In October 2013, two engineers at Boeing, Mark Negley and William Koch, produced a detailed 70-page preliminary design containing renderings, manufacturing advice, and technical analysis. These details of Boeing’s involvement have not been reported before. “Boeing was not a partner on the Titan and did not design or build it,” Jessica Kowal, a spokesperson for Boeing, said in a statement. The company declined to answer on the record any other questions from WIRED. Negley and Koch, who are still employed by Boeing, did not respond to LinkedIn messages.

Even at this early stage, these engineers were warning of potential problems ahead.

Negley and Koch pointed out that although composites can be stronger than any metal, they have other challenges. Carbon fiber can get progressively weaker, sometimes in unexpected ways. The manufacturing process can introduce defects if the resin is cured too long or not long enough, if debris gets in, or if the material is laid or wound unevenly. And the more layers a structure has, the engineers wrote, the greater the risk of a defect that would weaken it. Titan would ultimately have 660 layers of carbon fiber. To mitigate these risks, the Boeing engineers suggested a rigorous quality assurance process during manufacture and ultrasound testing of the hull after it was made. Ultrasound scans could find defects or delaminations in the hull—places where the carbon-fiber layers had separated.

To manufacture the hull, Rush turned to a company called Spencer Composites. First, though, OceanGate needed a scaled-down model of the hull to test how it would fare against the intense pressures at the bottom of the sea. By 2015, according to a design document written by Spencer, OceanGate wanted its hull to be rated up to 6,000 meters and have a safety factor of up to 2.25—meaning that it should be stable to two and a quarter times that depth, or 13,500 meters. James Cameron’s record-setting Deepsea Challenger had a safety factor of 1.36. Alvin , the submersible that originally explored the Titanic , had a 1.8 or higher. (Spencer Composites did not respond to requests for comment.)

In June 2015, just before my trip in Cyclops 1 , engineers placed a one-third scale model of Titan in an 8-foot-long testing tank at APL-UW for its first pressure test. This model was built entirely of carbon fiber, including the end domes, which ended up failing at pressures equating to around just 3,000 meters, according to a report written by Rush. OceanGate commissioned Spencer to make more domes, but these would take months to arrive. Meanwhile, the cylinder was tested again, this time with solid aluminum discs on the ends, and reached 4,100 meters without incident. But when OceanGate received the new carbon-fiber domes and tested the hull in March 2016, the new domes again imploded at 3,000 meters.

The test that “scared the shit out of everyone,” in one engineer’s words, was OceanGate’s fourth. This time, the hull (again with aluminum caps) reached the equivalent of 4,500 meters before imploding, giving it a miserly 1.18 safety factor for any dives to Titanic depths.

Damage to the scale model after imploding in the testing tank.

“Over the next months we will analyze the data in detail … and then run a test with a new cylinder through at least 1,000 cycles to confirm its durability,” Rush wrote to shareholders at the time. That replacement scale model was not made, and the new tests never happened, former employees tell WIRED, in part because Rush trusted OceanGate’s computer models. Even when OceanGate decided to change the domes in the final design from carbon fiber to titanium, Rush didn’t commission models to test the interactions between the new materials; one former employee who was familiar with Rush’s decision says the CEO balked at the high price tag.

“The modeling says it’s OK. The analysis says it’s OK,” one former employee says. “We build airplanes on the same type of analysis and then we go throw people in them.”

But a low-pressure environment, like flying, is different from a high-pressure one. Carbon fiber is inherently stronger when holding pressure in, like what happens with an aircraft in the stratosphere, than when keeping pressure out, as happens underwater. And all cylindrical vessels resist buckling better when the air pressure is higher inside.

Submersible experts not associated with OceanGate told WIRED that they would do much more testing on a new design. “We did at least 10 scale-model pressure hulls that we tested to destruction,” says Adam Wright, an engineer who had worked on explorer Steve Fossett’s 2005 carbon-fiber sub, which was shelved after Fossett died in a plane crash. And that was for a submersible that would only be used for a single mission. OceanGate was planning to use its submersible repeatedly—up to 10,000 times, according to internal design documents.

“Carbon fiber is a very sensible material if it’s been engineered correctly and manufactured in a controlled way,” says Chase Hogoboom, president and cofounder of Composite Energy Technologies, which has successfully tested small carbon-fiber vessels to the equivalent of 6,000 meters hundreds of times. “It takes millions of dollars and many years, but it’s not rocket science. It’s just connecting the dots.”

OceanGate tested the model hull to destruction only once, and never used the titanium components that would become fixtures on the final sub. Instead, the company simply increased the thickness of the carbon-fiber hull in its design specs from 4.5 to 5 inches, and commissioned Spencer to build the real thing. (Later, OceanGate engineers found that Titan ’s full-size hull was too thick for portable ultrasonic scanners, and a coating Spencer had applied to it would further block the signals. Rush decided that moving the entire sub to a lab for scanning would be too expensive, says a former employee who was familiar with Rush’s thinking. As a result, no scans were made—going against the advice of both Boeing and OceanGate engineers.)

Key components of the Titan submersible

Unlike Cyclops 1 , with its large, 180-degree viewing dome, Titan ’s front dome was made of solid titanium, with a smaller 23-inch viewport in the center. The viewport, made from 9-inch-thick acrylic, was an entirely new design by Tony Nissen, OceanGate’s director of engineering, and it was going to be manufactured by a company called Hydrospace Group.

Will Kohnen, Hydrospace’s CEO, told WIRED that he had originally expected Rush to thoroughly test the viewport according to rigorous standards set by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. Under those standards, OceanGate would test at least five windows to destruction at high pressure, cycle a viewport from low to high pressure a thousand times, and subject another viewport to five times the intended pressure for 300 consecutive hours to see how much the plastic slowly shrank under pressure, says Kohnen.

“The more innovative you get, the more testing you’ve got to do,” Kohnen says. “Over a period of years, it was pretty obvious that OceanGate wasn’t going to do the testing.” The former employees who spoke to WIRED also said that OceanGate wasn’t testing the viewport to the society’s standards.

By the fall of 2017, Kohnen was getting worried. As a last-ditch effort, in November he sent Rush an email offering “a serious discount” to build a second viewport using a design that had been tested and certified to 4,000 meters. It could be swapped out for the experimental window within 24 hours, he wrote. Kohnen says that Rush told him he wasn’t interested.

Kohnen delivered OceanGate’s viewport in December. He would rate it to only 650 meters—one-sixth of the depth to the Titanic . He also shared an analysis, done pro bono by an independent expert, concluding that OceanGate’s design might fail after only a few 4,000-meter dives. OceanGate nevertheless installed the viewport in Titan later that month. Construction on the sub was almost complete, and the company was already advertising its first expedition to the Titanic in May.

It was time for the engineers to hand it over to OceanGate’s operations team for testing at sea. But there was another snag. David Lochridge, who oversaw marine operations at the company and who needed to sign off on the transfer, became convinced that Titan was unsafe. In January 2018, Lochridge sent Rush a quality-control inspection report detailing 27 issues with the vehicle, from questionable O-ring seals on the domes and missing bolts to flammable materials and more concerns about its carbon-fiber hull. Rush fired him the next day. (Although Lochridge later made a whistleblower report to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration about Titan , Rush sued him for breach of contract. The settlement of that lawsuit resulted in Lochridge dropping his complaint, paying OceanGate nearly $10,000, and signing an NDA. Lochridge did not respond to WIRED.)

Will Kohnen also couldn’t forget about Titan , and the foreboding he had about the whole enterprise. “We have a rogue element within the submersible industry,” he remembers thinking. If something went wrong with Titan , it might scare people off deep-sea exploration more widely. In March 2018, he drafted a letter, signed by more than 30 crewed submersible experts, urging Rush to test the vessel with an accredited outside group. (The letter was earlier reported by the New York Times.)

Virtually all marine vessels are certified by organizations such as the American Bureau of Shipping, DNV, or Lloyd’s Register, which ensure that they are built using approved materials and methods and carry appropriate safety gear. It has been widely reported that Rush was dismissive of such certification, but what has not been made public until now is that OceanGate pursued certification with DNV (then known as DNV GL) in 2017—until Rush saw the price. “[DNV] informed me that this was not an easy few thousand dollar project as [it] had presented, but would cost around $50,000,” he later wrote in an email to Rob McCallum, a deep-sea explorer who had also signed Kohnen’s letter.

“ Titan and its safety systems are way beyond anything currently in use … I have grown tired of industry players who try to use a safety argument to stop innovation and new entrants from entering their small existing market,” Rush wrote to McCallum. “Since [starting] OceanGate we have heard the baseless cries of ‘you are going to kill someone’ way too often.”

Days later, Rush received an even more pointed warning from Boeing’s Mark Negley, who had stayed in contact with the CEO after he helped with a preliminary design. Negley had recently carried out an analysis of Spencer Composites’ hull based on information Rush had shared. He did not mince words when sharing his findings, which WIRED is reporting for the first time. “We think you are at a high risk of a significant failure at or before you reach 4,000 meters. We do not think you have any safety margin,” he wrote in an email on March 30. “Be cautious and careful.”

Negley provided a graph charting the strain on the submersible against depth. It shows a skull and crossbones in the region below 4,000 meters.

The chart Mark Negley shared with Stockton Rush

Despite repeated warnings, Rush seemed unfazed. His confidence in Titan was based in part on the new safety systems OceanGate had designed. “A lot of risk mitigation was supposed to ride on the real-time health monitoring,” says one former employee. The heart of that system, designed by an experienced electrical engineer and OceanGate board member named Mike Furlotti, was a suite of sensors and microchips that analyzed the hull’s acoustic emissions—the little pops made by carbon fibers as they break under compression. OceanGate’s theory was that the hull would be fairly noisy on its first few dives but would get quieter when taken to the same depths over and over, one former employee explains. If the acoustic monitoring system started getting really loud on a dive, that would be a clear indication to surface immediately. (Multiple attempts to contact Furlotti for comment were unsuccessful.)

Wright and other industry experts have been extremely critical of this setup. “I’m sure you can pick up these acoustic events fine, but you just don’t know when the end point is,” he says. “You don’t know how many pops is too many, and it could be different for every vessel.”

There was even skepticism within OceanGate itself. In September 2017, the engineer responsible for integrating Furlotti’s design into Titan sent an anxious email to management expressing concerns about the system’s ability to accurately track fiber breakage over time.

OceanGate hired an outside consultant named Allen Green to assess the acoustic monitoring. Green, an authority on the sounds that materials make under stress, endorsed the system in 2018. Later, though, when Green saw how Rush was describing the system to the public—the CEO claimed it could detect the sound of “micro-buckling” in the sub’s hull “way before it fails”—he wrote a concerned email to an OceanGate employee, reported here for the first time.

Rather than warning of failure, Green explained that the sounds indicated “irreversible” damage. “It is my belief, substantiated by many years of experience, that composite structures all have a finite lifetime,” wrote Green, who died in 2021. “While I do not intend to be an alarmist, I did not sleep well and arose early to send this message.”

Rush had pitched OceanGate’s board and investors on a grand vision of what his company could be. By 2018, that included a fleet of self-driving Titan s that could dive to 6,000 meters, and satellite offices in Croatia, Israel, and the South Pacific. He imagined a world whose oceans were populated by OceanGate’s crewed underwater bases, which could be used for data storage or even “Plan B habitats” for billionaire preppers.

Reality was more prosaic. Like most startups, OceanGate was in constant need of funds. Rush was trying to save money wherever he could. Interns, who made up around a third of the engineering team, were paid as little as $13 an hour. (When a manager pointed out in 2016 that Washington’s minimum wage was just $9.47 an hour, Rush responded, “I agree we are high. $10 seems fair.”) Rush also downgraded the sub’s titanium components from aerospace grade 5 quality to weaker and cheaper grade 3, says one former employee.

According to internal documents, by 2018 the company had raised around $9 million in venture capital and another $4 million from subsidiary companies that profited off OceanGate’s research and scientific missions. But the real business opportunity would be trips to the Titanic .

Rush had planned six missions to visit the legendary shipwreck in the summer of 2018, each with nine people paying $105,000. With every mission bringing in nearly a million dollars in revenue but costing OceanGate only an estimated $333,000, the more visits Titan could make to the bottom of the North Atlantic, the better. Although the plan was for the finished sub to make more than 30 dives in shallow water before going to deeper waters, OceanGate managed just 18.

In mid-April, Titan was transported to Marsh Harbour in the Bahamas, where deep water could be found very close to land. But before Titan was even moved into the water, it was hit by lightning, damaging its electronics. Some of the damaged equipment was replaced, but the sub was without many components for weeks. Rush nevertheless insisted on attempting a shallow dive during high, rolling seas.

Choppy waves ripped fairings and foam from Titan as it was being towed back from the dive site, causing it to sink. “I was merely ‘spam in the can’ with no comms for 9+ hours inside the sub,” Rush wrote the next day. “I could see parts of the sub floating away on my cameras, but could not communicate to the tow team—a remarkably surreal and frustrating experience.”

Rush had to face facts: There was now no chance of OceanGate reaching the Titanic in 2018. Eager ticket holders (and investors) would have to wait another year.

While they were still in the Bahamas, the team did manage to lower Titan on a series of uncrewed dives, eventually reaching 4,000 meters. But engineers found the hull was warping more under compression than it was meant to, by perhaps as much as 37 percent. Nevertheless, Rush wanted to keep diving deeper with Titan , with himself at the helm. When one engineer expressed concern about performing crewed tests at this point, Nissen wrote to him, “Yesterday I told you if you don’t have the stomach for this type of engineering then OceanGate isn’t for you.”

On December 10, Rush successfully dove Titan to a depth of 3,939 meters—just enough to get to the Titanic . Nissen wrote to the engineering team: “Diving to such deep depths is extremely complicated if you want to be untethered, communicate with the surface, be location tracked with reasonable accuracy, and monitor the health of your vehicle. And, we have delivered. You all have a lot to brag about.”

Titan reached a similar depth again in April, with a crew of four including Rush. While OceanGate touted the dive as history-making proof of its submersible’s bona fides, even Rush was getting worried about loud noises the hull was making at depth. Then on June 7, three weeks before Titan ’s maiden voyage to the Titanic , an OceanGate pilot inspecting the interior with a flashlight noticed a crack in the hull. He sent Rush an email warning that the crack was “pretty serious.” A detailed internal report later showed that at least 11 square feet of carbon fiber had delaminated—meaning the bonds between layers had separated.

This time, Rush couldn’t ignore the data. The hull that was meant to last for 10,000 dives to the Titanic had made fewer than 50—and only three to 4,000 meters. It would have to be scrapped, and the Titanic missions would be delayed for yet another year. When Rush shared the news with GeekWire a few days later, however, he blamed the delay on legal complications with Titan ’s support vessel.

It’s true that OceanGate ran into issues with maritime law, says one former employee: “The lie is that it was not the reason we delayed.”

After the crack was found in Titan ’s hull, OceanGate started searching for a new carbon-fiber contractor. By early 2020, many OceanGate engineers had been laid off or had left the company, insiders say. Tony Nissen was out, and a team that had once numbered more than 20 was reduced to just a handful. “Stockton never really wanted an engineering team, but he needed somebody to build it,” says one insider. “We were down to a skeleton team,” says another.

Rush then announced that the company had inked a partnership with NASA to “collaborate on the development, manufacturing, and testing” of a new carbon-fiber cylinder. (Covid-19 had other plans, shutting down NASA for months. Ultimately, the agency told ABC, “NASA did not conduct testing and manufacturing via its workforce or facilities.”)

The new hull would instead be made by two aerospace firms in Washington state, Electroimpact and Janicki Industries. Electroimpact laid the carbon fibers, and Janicki cured the material in its ovens, confirmed one former employee. Electroimpact did not provide a response to questions about its role, and Janicki declined to comment.

This time, OceanGate had two scale models made, which were once again tested at the University of Washington. Once again, the models imploded early, possibly due to warping of the hulls during manufacturing, says a former employee.

OceanGate scrambled to solve the issue. One idea: Rather than cure all the layers at once, they would cure the hull in stages. Electroimpact would wind about 100 layers of the hull, then ship it to Janicki to cure and settle. Then Janicki would send the hull back to Electroimpact to repeat the process. They were running out of time, so they went for it—skipping tests of the new procedure on samples and going straight to manufacturing the second hull. “The first time we did multiple cures was when we did the full hull,” says one former employee. The new hull was finished by January 2021. It passed pressure testing, similar to what was done at the University of Washington, but at a facility in Maryland that could accommodate the full-size cylinder.

OceanGate’s engineers now needed to integrate the new hull with the rest of Titan . But Titan ’s two titanium domes were still attached to each end of the old hull, sitting on titanium rings glued to the carbon fiber with aerospace-grade epoxy adhesive. Commissioning new titanium interface rings and domes was ruled “an absolute no” by Rush, one former employee says, because of the extra cost and delay. The company that made the original titanium components told WIRED that it did not make new rings for Rush, and three former employees say that OceanGate did, in fact, salvage and reuse the originals.

But staff had difficulty working out how to separate the old hull from the interface rings without damaging even a sliver of titanium. Gaps or bumps could have weakened the join with the new hull, say the sources. On dives, the hull and the rings needed to compress under pressure in perfect harmony. “I can’t imagine a situation where you could reuse the titanium rings,” Wright, the independent engineer, says. OceanGate somehow managed it.

By February 2021, photos of the newly reconstructed Titan were popping up on OceanGate’s Facebook page and other social media. After the implosion in 2023, one ex-employee looked back at these and noticed an unexpected addition: The company had added metal lifting points to both interface rings, apparently to provide a new way to hoist Titan into and out of the water. The addition of the lifting rings, reported by WIRED for the first time, was confirmed by a former employee who saw the engineering drawings, and by another source.

Previously, OceanGate had lifted Titan using a sling beneath the sub to avoid putting stress on the critical joins between the rings and the carbon-fiber hull. As far back as 2017, when the original Titan was first shipped to OceanGate, Nissen had warned the operations team to use only the sling: “The titanium cannot take load/tension.”

“Lifting points are a very serious part of a pressure vessel design and must be considered carefully, tested, and qualified,” says Will Kohnen. “Any lifting arrangement may impose loads and stresses into the pressure vessel, and this must be mitigated by analysis and test.” It is unclear whether such analysis or tests were carried out.

OceanGate originally used a sling system to lower its sub into the water, shown here.

The diving season was about to begin, and after three years of expensive delays, OceanGate desperately needed income from the Titanic missions (whose tickets now cost $125,000 per person). “We were running out of time,” says a former OceanGate employee. Titan had only a few relatively shallow dives in Puget Sound before the company put it on a truck and sent it all the way across Canada to Newfoundland, the port closest to the Titanic wreck.

On July 13, 2021, OceanGate’s Titan made its first successful dive to the Titanic , with Rush serving as the pilot. “We had to overcome tremendous engineering, operational, business, and finally Covid-19 challenges to get here, and I am so proud of this team and grateful for the support of our many partners,” Rush said in a press release .

After the 2021 expedition, OceanGate was flush with success. The company announced plans for the following year’s expedition to document the wreck “in more detail than ever before” and urging “aspiring mission specialists” to get in touch.

The successes and warm media coverage continued in 2022. OceanGate was profiled by CBS Sunday Morning , which accompanied one of the missions that summer. When reporter David Pogue noticed how improvised the setup on the sub was, Rush reassured him. “The pressure vessel is not MacGyver at all, because that’s where we worked with Boeing and NASA and the University of Washington. Everything else can fail, your thrusters can go, your lights can go. You’re still going to be safe.” The rest of Pogue’s mission was sort of a farce—the sub got lost, things broke—but he came back safely.

That’s not what happened the following year. In June 2023, five eager people got ready to dive back down to the Titanic . They were Rush; Paul-Henri Nargeolet, a deep-sea explorer; and three paying passengers: a businessman named Hamish Harding and a father-son duo, Shahzada and Suleman Dawood. On June 18, they sealed Titan and dove. Within two hours, the support ship had lost contact with them.

Their disappearance set off a media frenzy. People speculated how long the crew might be able survive without power or aid. A massive search-and-rescue operation spent four days combing the sea before finding debris from the sub. The US Navy later confirmed it had detected loud sounds “consistent with an implosion” shortly after contact with Titan ended. OceanGate ceased its commercial and exploration activities a few weeks later.

The US Coast Guard is currently leading an international investigation into the deaths.

Several former employees said they were neither shocked nor surprised at OceanGate’s deadly accident. Three had left the company on safety grounds, and two separately described Titan as a ticking time bomb.

One former employee remembers preparing Titan for multiple successful Titanic missions, prior to 2023. “I put my heart and soul into building that sub,” he says. “Many, many hours inside the sub, outside the sub, building and testing it. She was my baby.”

Each time Titan was about to dip beneath the waves, he would pat her hull lightly. “I’d say, ‘Come on back to me baby, you’ll make it, you can do it.’ And when she’d come back up to the surface, I’d say, ‘Good job. You got everyone back up safe.’”

Until one day, she didn’t.

Now the bottom of the North Atlantic is littered with more evidence of human hubris, tiny pieces of a plastic video-game controller nestling among the barnacle-encrusted gold fixtures of the Titanic . Both vessels were at the cutting edge of technology, both exemplars of safety in the eyes of their overconfident creators. And in both cases, their passengers paid the price.

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RMS Titanic surfaces again at Halifax Public Gardens

Replica ship is the third to be placed in griffin's pond in three decades.

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The RMS Titanic still lies in the inky depths of the North Atlantic after its ill-fated maiden voyage more than a century ago but a model of the ship returned to Griffin's Pond in the Halifax Public Gardens on Saturday.

An enthusiastic crowd lined the banks of the pond to watch as the latest model was rowed out to its mooring spot.

Built by Brad Browne of the Maritime Ship Modelers Guild, the new replica ship is the third to grace the pond and the first to be 3D-printed.

The first Titanic model was placed in the pond in the mid-1990s. 

Browne documented the construction of the 90-kilogram replica online, noting that some of the modules used in the project took 50 hours to print.

The printed modules are reinforced with multiple layers of fibreglass.

A metal keel strike plate is fitted inside and outside to provide support and act as ballast.

An excited Deanna Ryan-Meister, president of the Titanic Society of Atlantic Canada, was at the Public Gardens to see the new model moved into position.

According to Ryan-Meister, there is a tradition of launching pond models in Victorian gardens dating back to the 1800s.

She credited the large turnout for the event to the fact it coincided with the 40th anniversary party for the Friends of the Public Gardens and was held on a weekend.

Ryan-Meister said the previous Titanic launches were staged on weekday mornings in April or May, limiting the number of people who could attend.

She said the presence of the model is a poignant reminder of the role Halifax played after the Titanic struck an iceberg south of the Grand Banks and sank on April 15, 1912.

Ships were dispatched from Halifax to respond to the disaster and 150 of the victims brought back to the city were buried in Halifax cemeteries. Ryan-Meister said the local effort took nearly two months.

"That's how long the recovery took and the burial of bodies and things like that," she said. "So when people come, they get that sense of the Titanic history. It keeps the history alive."

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With files from Jeorge Sadi

Watch CBS News

Debris from OceanGate sub found 1,600 feet from Titanic after "catastrophic implosion," U.S. Coast Guard says

By Alex Sundby

Updated on: June 22, 2023 / 7:24 PM EDT / CBS News

Five people  who were on  a sub  that went missing during a voyage to the wreckage of the Titanic did not survive, the company that planned the trip said Thursday, as the U.S. Coast Guard said the OceanGate vessel experienced a "catastrophic loss of the pressure chamber," and confirmed that the debris found on the sea floor were pieces of the missing sub.

"This is a incredibly unforgiving environment down there on the sea floor and the debris is consistent with a catastrophic implosion of the vessel," Coast Guard Rear Adm. John Mauger told reporters.

A U.S. Navy official said the Navy detected "an acoustic anomaly consistent with an implosion" shortly after the sub, named Titan, lost contact with the surface Sunday, CBS News national security correspondent David Martin reported. The information was relayed to the Coast Guard, which used it to narrow the radius of the search area, the official said.

Meanwhile, banging noises that were detected during the week were assessed to have been noise from other ships in the area, Martin reported.

On Thursday morning, an ROV, or remotely operated vehicle , from a Canadian vessel found the tail cone of the sub about 1,600 feet from the bow of the Titanic, Mauger said during a briefing in Boston on Thursday afternoon. He said more debris was found and authorities consulted with experts who determined the debris found over 2 miles beneath the water's surface was consistent with the sub.

"On behalf of the United States Coast Guard and the entire unified command, I offer my deepest condolences to the families," Mauger said. "I can only imagine what this has been like for them, and I hope that this discovery provides some solace during this difficult time."

Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood, his 19-year-old son Suleman, billionaire adventurer Hamish Harding, French explorer Paul-Henri Nargeolet and OceanGate founder Stockton Rush were on the sub.

Paul Hankins, a U.S. Navy salvage expert, said at the briefing that the sub was found scattered in pieces, and that the team "will do the best we can to fully map out what's down there."

"Essentially we found five different major pieces of debris that told us that it was the remains of the Titan. The initial thing we found was the nose cone," he said. "We then found a large debris field" followed by "a second, smaller debris field."

Carl Hartsfield of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution said the sub's wreck was found in a smooth area of the sea floor where there wasn't any debris from the ocean liner that sank on its maiden voyage in 1912.

Mauger said it was too early to tell when the sub imploded.

"We know that — as we've been prosecuting this search over the course of the last 72 hours and beyond — that we've had sonar buoys in the water nearly continuously and have not detected any catastrophic events when those sonar buoys have been in the water," he said.

The sub launched into the Atlantic from a Canadian research vessel Sunday morning, and the  ship lost contact  with the Titan an hour and 45 minutes into the dive.

"I know that there's also a lot of questions about how, why and when did this happen, and so, you know, those are questions that we will collect as much information as we can on now while the governments are meeting and discussing what an investigation of this nature of a casualty might look like," Mauger said. "...I'm confident that those questions will begin to get answered."

Underwater robots will remain at the search site to gather additional information about the sub, Mauger said. Another robot from a French vessel was also launched into the water Thursday.

"This was a incredibly complex case, and we're still working to develop the details for the timeline involved with this casualty and the response," he said.

Asked about the prospects for recovering the remains of the deceased, Mauger said, "We'll continue to work and continue to search the area down there, but I don't have an answer for prospects at this time."

"Our thoughts are with the families and making sure that they have an understanding as best as we can provide of what happened and begin to find some closure," he said.

Harding's family and his company said in a statement that the adventurer was "one of a kind and we adored him."

"What he achieved in his lifetime was truly remarkable and if we can take any small consolation from this tragedy, it's that we lost him doing what he loved," the statement said. "He will leave a gap in our lives that can never be filled."

Explorers Club president Richard Garriott de Cayeux said in a statement that Harding and Nargeolet "were both drawn to explore, like so many of us, and did so in the name of meaningful science for the betterment of mankind."

The Dawood family said they were experiencing an "unimaginable loss" and thanked search crews.

"Their untiring efforts were a source of strength for us during this time," the family said in a statement .

Thursday's news followed a massive international search effort for the lost 21-foot sub.

In addition to the robots, search planes and ships have been deployed to the northern Atlantic Ocean in the hopes of finding the sub approximately 900 nautical miles from Cape Cod, Massachusetts. The Coast Guard said Wednesday the search area was about twice the size of Connecticut.

Officials previously said the sub had a limited amount of oxygen on board that could have lasted 96 hours, or roughly until Thursday morning.

• United States Coast Guard

Alex Sundby is a senior editor at CBSNews.com. In addition to editing content, Alex also covers breaking news, writing about crime and severe weather as well as everything from multistate lottery jackpots to the July Fourth hot dog eating contest.

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'True explorers': The 5 passengers who died on the missing Titanic submersible

Five men, including one teenager, have been declared dead days after they left for a voyage in a 22-foot submersible to see the wreckage of the Titanic in the North Atlantic Ocean. 

OceanGate, the company that hosted the mission on the Titan submersible to the Titanic, said Thursday that the entire crew – including its founder and CEO who was the pilot in the mission – were “lost at sea.” The U.S. Coast Guard also announced Thursday that rescue teams had found debris from the ship on the ocean floor “consistent with catastrophic loss of the pressure chamber.” 

The passengers were well known for their devotion to extreme exploration, desire to collect artifacts from the Titanic or their exorbitant wealth. Each paid $250,000 to ride on the submersible. The Coast Guard said families of the men had been notified of their deaths.

"These men were true explorers who shared a distinct spirit of adventure, and a deep passion for exploring and protecting the world’s oceans. Our hearts are with these five souls and every member of their families during this tragic time," OceanGate said in a statement Thursday.

Rear Admiral John Mauger of the U.S. Coast Guard said during a press conference Thursday he did not know whether the Coast Guard would be able to recover the bodies. 

"This is an incredibly unforgiving environment down there on the seafloor," he said.

For live updates on this disaster, read USA TODAY’s live blog here . The passengers on the sub were:

OceanGate's CEO Stockton Rush

Stockton Rush, 61,  founded  OceanGate in 2009. He was also the co-founder of  OceanGate Foundation , a non-profit organization "which aims to catalyze emerging marine technology to further discoveries in marine science, history, and archaeology," according to the company's website.

Rush said at a conference in Seattle last year: “One of the reasons I started the business was because I didn’t understand why we were spending 1,000 times as much money to explore space as we were to explore … the oceans. There is no private access to the deep ocean, and yet there’s all this life to be discovered.”

At the same conference, he also said submarine safety programs were “over the top in their rules and regulations.”

Before graduating from Princeton University with a degree in aerospace engineering in 1984 and obtaining a master’s degree in business administration from the University of California in 1989, Rush had obtained his captain’s rating at the United Airlines Jet Training Institute. He went on to oversee business ventures that included serving on the board of Seattle’s BlueView Technologies and as chairman of Remote Control Technology.

Greg Stone, the former executive vice president and chief scientist for Conservation International as well as a friend of Rush, said there was a need for advances in research submersibles.

“That’s the direction he was going in. And I liked where he was going,” Stone said.

But, he added, Rush “had the problem that a lot of frontier people have. And that is he was ahead of the regulations.”

Rush had familial ties to the Titanic, NPR reported . Stockton Rush was married to Wendy Rush, the great-great granddaughter of Isador and Ida Straus, who were on board the sinking Titanic ship together.

British billionaire explorer Hamish Harding

Hamish Harding, 58, was chairman of Action Aviation, a global sales company in business aviation. He held three Guinness World Records related to his explorations by plane and into the deep ocean. He had also been to space.

He had been looking forward to his Titan ride. “Due to the worst winter in Newfoundland in 40 years, this mission is likely to be the first and only manned mission to the Titanic in 2023," Harding wrote in a  Facebook post  Saturday, the day before the Titan voyage, according to the New York Times. "A weather window has just opened up and we are going to attempt a dive tomorrow. We started steaming from St. Johns, Newfoundland, Canada yesterday and are planning to start dive operations around 4am tomorrow morning. Until then we have a lot of preparations and briefings to do."

Richard Garriott de Cayoux, president of The Explorers Club, mourned the loss of his friends Harding and Paul-Henry Nargeolet on Twitter in a letter Thursday to “fellow explorers.”

“They were both drawn to explore, like so many of us, and did so in the name of meaningful science for the betterment of mankind,” he wrote. “Their memories will be a blessing and will continue to inspire us in the name of exploration.”

French maritime and Titanic expert Paul-Henri Nargeolet

Paul Henri-Nargeolet, 73, was director of Underwater Research for E/M Group and RMS Titanic, Inc. He successfully dived in a submersible to the site of the Titanic wreckage 37 times and "supervised the recovery of 5,000 artifacts," according to EMGroup's  website , which also says he's "widely considered the leading authority on the wreck site."

"Born in Chamonix, France, P.H. lived in Africa for 13 years with his family and at 16 returned to France to complete his studies in Paris. He later joined the French Navy for a career that spanned 22 years and saw him rise in the ranks to Commander," according to the company site.

“I really hope they will find them all safe,” his daughter Sidonie Nargeolet said prior to Thursday’s announcement.

Dive expert David Mearns called Harding “a terrific character," and said Nargeolet was “almost a legend really in the field of deep sea exploration,” BBC reported.

Shahzada Dawood

Shahzada Dawood, 48, was one of the richest men in Pakistan and served as vice chairman of Pakistani Engro Corporation , a Pakistani conglomerate founded as a fertilizer company, where he worked for 20 years. He was on the board of trustees for the Dawood Foundation, an education nonprofit, and on the board of the SETI Institute, a non-profit research organization.

Dawood had over two decades of experience “in corporate governance” and “ the transformation of industries, including growth and innovation opportunities through mergers and acquisitions of diversified public-listed companies across textiles, fertilizers, foods, and energy,” his profile on the World Economic Forum site reads.

"He aspires to a sustainable future and believes in inclusive business models involving low-income communities building value chains along business interests," the profile states .

He is survived by his wife, Christine Dawood, and his daughter, Alia Dawood.

Suleman Dawood

Suleman Dawood, 19, loved science fiction, solving Rubik’s Cubes and playing volleyball, the New York Times  reported . He was studying at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, according to the BBC. 

Shahzada Dawood's older sister told  NBC News  she was "absolutely heartbroken" over the deaths.

"I feel like I’ve been caught in a really bad film, with a countdown, but you didn’t know what you’re counting down to," Azmeh Dawood said. "I personally have found it kind of difficult to breathe thinking of them."

She also said her nephew Suleman told one of their relatives that he was “terrified” about the voyage. She told NBC News Suleman went on the trip with his dad because he wanted to make his dad happy and it fell on the Father's Day weekend.

“I am thinking of Suleman, who is 19, in there, just perhaps gasping for breath… It’s been crippling, to be honest,” she told the news outlet. 

In a letter to the “friends, followers and community of the SETI Institute” Thursday, CEO Bill Diamond shared the news of the deaths of Dawood and his son.

“Shahzada was passionately curious and an enthusiastic supporter of the SETI Institute and our mission, being directly involved in philanthropic programs in education, research and public outreach,” said Diamond. “He will be deeply missed by all who knew him, especially his fellow Trustees and the leadership of the SETI Institute.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report.