The RMS Titanic was the largest passenger steamship in the world at the time of her launching. She struck an iceberg on April 14, 1912 during her maiden voyage, and sank 2 hours and fourty minutes later, in the early morning of April 15. The sinking resulted in great loss of life and ranks as one of the deadliest peacetime maritime disasters.
The Royal Mail Ship Titanic was one of three sister ships laid down for Britain's White Star Line, then a subsidiary of American financier J. P. Morgan's International Mercantile Marine.
One of Titanic's greatest innovations was the placement of fifteen watertight bulkheads (with electrically operated watertight doors) that extended from the ship's double bottom through four or five of her nine decks and were said to make the ship "unsinkable." Yet for all her safety features, Titanic carried just sixteen lifeboats and four collapsible boats, which could handle only 1,178 people, a meager 35 percent of the maximum passenger and crew complement of 3,511. Even so, this number exceeded the British Board of Trade's requirements, which dated from 1894 (when the largest ship afloat was 12,950 tons), under which Titanic was required to carry only enough lifeboats to seat 962 people.
Titanic set out on her maiden voyage from southampton on April 10, 1912. Among the 329 first-class passengers were John Jacob Astor, Isidor and Ida Strauss, Harry Widener (for whom Harvard University's Widener Memorial Library would be named), and, among the survivors, J. Bruce Ismay, Managing Director of the White Star Line, and Margaret "the Unsinkable Molly" Brown. There were also 285 second-class and 710 third-class passengers, and 899 crew on the ship's manifest.
Last Voyage On April 14, Titanic's wireless operators Jack Phillips and Harold Bride received warnings of an ice field ahead of the ship. The first of the six messages came at 1340, but only one was formally posted on the bridge, and Smith neither slackened speed nor turned to the south. (The transmitting ships included Baltic, Noordam, Amerika, Mesaba, Californian, and Caronia.) As Titanic plowed forward at better than 22 knots, at 2340, lookout Frederick Fleet reported from the crow's nest: "Iceberg straight ahead."
First Officer William Murdoch immediately acted to leave the berg to starboard, but Titanic brushed 200 feet of her hull along a submerged spur that buckled her hull plates along the riveted seams. A hurried examination of the damage found that the six foremost watertight compartments had been breached; each would flood and spill successively into the next.
At 0015 on April 15, Titanic sent her first distress call and at 0045 she fired her first of eight distress rockets in an effort to bestir a mysterious ship, later thought to be the Leyland Line's Californian, lying about nineteen miles away. By 0220 the last of the lifeboats had pulled away and the ship was perpendicular to the water, her lights still blazing. Finally, she broke apart between the third and fourth funnels and sank in 13,000 feet of water in about 41 46N, 50 14W.
Many lifeboats left the ship partially full, and though 706 survivors were rescued by the Cunard Line's Carpathia she arrived on the scene at about 0330, after speeding fifty-eight miles through the ice field there were 473 empty seats. The death toll was estimated at between 1,500 and 1,635 people.
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