The Titanic

The Titanic could be the most famous cruise ship ever… as well as the most unlucky.
    The Titanic was built in Belfast, Ireland in 1909. It took 3 years to build and was made of over 24,00 tons of steel. Around 3 million rivets were used to hold the steel sections of the Titanic together. It was an luxury ocean liner made for transporting passengers and mail across the Atlantic from Southampton, England, to New York. Being the largest ship at the time, it was 882.5 feet long and 92.5 feet wide at its widest point, had a carrying capacity of 46,328 tons, and was supposedly unsinkable.
    The ship set sail on its maiden voyage on April 10, 1912, from Southampton with around 2,200 passengers and crew onboard. The ship was so luxurious that it had elevators, a swimming pool, a gym, and a lot more. Each ticket cost as much as $4,350, and that was in 1912. That is around $90,000 now.
    The ship only had 20 lifeboats, even though it was built to hold 36. Captain Smith thought that more boats would make the deck too cluttered. The lifeboats supplied could only hold about half of the people onboard, and were there simply to rescue survivors of other sinking ships. In an emergency, women and children were supposed to be the first to board the lifeboats.
The Titanic had received several iceberg warnings, but the captain had ignored them all until it was too late. Just before midnight, four days after the ship left port, to everyone’s surprise and horror, the Titanic hit an iceberg about 400 miles south of Newfoundland, Canada, rupturing five of the ship’s compartments. The compartments slowly filled with water, pulling the hull of the great ship farther under the surface, which resulted in the compartments filling with more water and the ship sinking farther.
About two and a half hours after the collision, the unlucky ship sank beneath the waves of the freezing Atlantic Ocean, taking with it about 1,500 of the passengers and crewmembers left onboard. The Titanic’s sinking was made even more significant by the important passengers onboard. Some of England’s richest and most powerful citizens were on the ship when it sank. John Jacob Aster, one of the richest people in America at the time, was one of the first class passengers that died in the disaster.
    An ocean liner, the Carpathia, arrived an hour and a half later and rescued the 700 survivors. The California, another ship, was nearby and could have come to the sinking ship’s aid and saved more lives, but no one onboard the California got the Titanic’s distress calls, because the transmission operator had gone to sleep and turned off his radio.
    England was devastated by the news of the Titanic’s tragic sinking, so for the next few days, ships were sent to recover bodies from the shipwreck. Only 328 bodies were found of the 1,500 people who were left on the ship when it sank.
    Then, in 1985, 73 years later, Robert Ballard, an oceanographer and marine biologist working for the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), found the sunken Titanic broken in half on the bottom of the ocean, about 13 miles from where it was thought to be. The expedition was made up of three French scientists from Institut Français De Recherché pour l’Exploitation de la Mer (IFREMER), plus Dr. Ballard and another American, aboard the vessel, Knorr, from WHOI.
    The tragic story of the ‘unsinkable’ Titanic will probably never be forgotten.