My friend Alison and I were talking about the ship, and we decided that we would have loved to tour the Titanic before it sailed…but we think we would have skipped the voyage. 🙂
The ship was really an amazing piece of work. Here is some basic information about it from the Britannica Online site.
The great ship, at that time the largest and most luxurious afloat, was designed and built by William Pirrie’s Belfast firm Harland and Wolff to service the highly competitive Atlantic Ferry route. It had a double-bottomed hull that was divided into 16 presumably watertight compartments. Because four of these could be flooded without endangering the liner’s buoyancy, it was considered unsinkable.
On Sept. 1, 1985, the wreck of the Titanic was
found lying upright in two pieces on the ocean floor
at a depth of about 4,000 m (about 13,000 feet).
The ship, located at about 41° 46′ N 50° 14′ W,
was subsequently explored several times by manned
and unmanned submersibles under the direction of
American and French scientists. The expeditions
found no sign of the long gash previously thought to
have been ripped in the ship’s hull by the iceberg.
The scientists posited instead that the collision’s
impact had produced a series of thin gashes as well
as brittle fracturing and separation of seams in the
adjacent hull plates, thus allowing water to flood in
and sink the ship. In subsequent years marine
salvagers raised small artifacts from the wreckage
and even attempted to lift a large piece of the hull.
For more information, visit some of these great sites!!
A much more comprehensive list of links: Titanic – a Voyage of Discovery
For a complete diary of the journey: Titanic: Encyclopedia Titanica
Think you know a lot about this ship? Try my quiz!