Historical Background of the RMS Titanic

The Titanic was conceived in 1907 by Britain’s White Star Line, to compete with Britain’s Cunard Line for the Atlantic shipping trade. The Titanic was intended to be one of a trio of passenger ships – the Olympic, the Titanic, and the Gigantic (later renamed Britannic) – that provided trans-Atlantic transportation. White Star Line hoped to make these “Olympic-class superliners” the largest, most luxurious, and safest ships to ever set sail. In fact, British and American postal services had enough faith in the Titanic that they allowed her to carry official mail – hence the designation RMS: Royal Mail Ship.

The Titanic’s keel was laid on March 31, 1909 at the Harland & Wolff shipyards in Belfast, United Kingdom. Construction proceeded at a frenetic pace. Interestingly, the plates on the ship were attached not by welding, but by the older practice of riveting – hammering hot iron into shape to keep the plates together. The Titanic was launched on May 31, 1911, and was furnished the following year. She set sail from Southampton, United Kingdom on her maiden voyage on April 10, 1912.

The Titanic was declared to be virtually unsinkable – the engineers felt that she would stay afloat even if 2 of her 16 watertight compartments flooded. The imposing size of the ship convinced many that the ship was literally “unsinkable”.

The Titanic famously collided with an iceberg at 11:40 pm on April 14. The officer in the wheelhouse had immediately turned the ship left when the iceberg was spotted. Unfortunately, a protruding underwater part of the iceberg buckled plates, creating a series of holes totalling an area of 1.1 m². Five compartments of the Titanic flooded, and the “unsinkable” ship sank at 2:20 am April 15, south of the Great Banks of Newfoundland. Survivors were picked up by the steamship Carpathia the same morning.

The Titanic disaster is remembered as one of the worst maritime disasters. Several factors contributed to this. The lifeboats could only carry approximately half of the ship’s passengers, due to archaic British laws. The “unsinkable” myth prompted many passengers to not get into lifeboats, and the “women and children first” saying kept many men off the lifeboats. The watertight bulkheads of the ships did not extend all the way up the hull of the ship. The Californian, a ship anchored near the Titanic, did not arrive in due time to save the passengers.

Many safety lessons were learned from the tragedy of the Titanic. For example, the Titanic’s lifeboats could hold less than 1200 people, well short of the over 3000 passengers and crew that she was licensed to carry. Today, legislation ensures that all ships must guarantee a lifeboat seat for every person aboard the ship. It also showed the snobbish aristocracy of the Edwardian era how class separation mattered little in situations such as this. The public’s perception of technology was affected deeply by the disaster. The Titanic disaster taught the world many new lessons, and prompted many new regulations for future ships.