The Titanic

The Mariner's Mirror Podcast

Dr Sam Willis speaks with Don Lynch, a historian who has spoken to more survivors of the Titanic than anyone else alive and was the official historian for James Cameron's 1997 film Titanic. Sam and Don discuss a number of issues including the concept of ‘women and children first’ and how that actually worked in practice. They also discuss unresolved historical issues relating to the history of the Titanic. This episode is made to go alongside a remarkable new 3D model of the Titanic that has been built using the original plans for the ship and allows us to explore the Titanic in great depth and with great accuracy. The video can be found on the Mariner's Mirror Podcast YouTube Channel.

Laid down in March 1909 she was launched a little over two years later and completed just under a year after that, on 2 April 1912. Her size was immense: at 882 feet 9 inches long, she was the largest moveable man made object on earth. This was a major engineering challenge and it revolutionised shipbuilding. No one had ever tried to build a ship the size of the Titanic or her sister ships Olympic and Britannic, ever before.

It took an entire year to put the Titanic’s frames in place. She was built with 2000 hull plates mostly 6ft wide and 30ft long, weighing up to three tons. The hull was held together with over three million iron and steel rivets.

The radio room with the latest Marconi radio equipment was located on the boat deck, as close to the top of the ship as possible to keep the feed line to the antennae short. The transmitter was the most powerful at sea able to contact either New York or London from the centre of the Atlantic.

The First Class accommodation was high up in the ship away from the noise of the machinery. The suites were lavishly decorated in styles of different historical periods. The largest had their own private section of deck.

The Third Class accommodation was split between either end of the ship in the lower decks. Single men were in the bow and single women and families were in the stern where they were subjected to the noise and vibrations of the engine and propellers.

The 20 lifeboats were carried on the uppermost deck but 32 more, featured in the original design were never put in place, to create space for the wealthy to exercise. This meant that the Titanic only had sufficient lifeboats for 33% of her passengers.

At 11.40 on 15 April 1912, the Titanic was 370 miles south of Newfoundland, in 12,500 feet of water – nearly two and a half miles, travelling just under her top speed of just under ten metres per second, when an iceberg was spotted by the lookout.

He telephoned the bridge with the words ‘Iceberg right ahead’. It was 100 ft tall, the size of an eight-story building, and with no light to reflect it, the iceberg appeared almost black. The order was given hard to starboard, to turn the ship to port but she struck on the starboard side, tearing as many as six different holes in her hull, all along the lines of her hull plates, suggesting that the rivets snapped off.

Water poured in at seven tons per second, fifteen times faster than it could be pumped out. The hull was divided into sixteen watertight compartments but they did not extend all the way up to the top of the ship, so the water flooded into each one at a time, as the bow began to sink. Within 45 minutes, 1500 tons of water were in the front section of the ship, and she snapped in half. Each section hit the seabed with such force that it created an enormous debris field, the stern burying itself fifteen metres below the sea bed. 1534 lost their lives.

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