For some, the fact that the Titanic was sailing full speed ahead despite concerns about icebergs was Smith's biggest misstep. "Simply put, Titanic was traveling way too fast in an area known to contain ice; that's the bottom line," says Mark Nichol, webmaster for the Titanic and Other White Star Ships website.
The rapid sinking of the Titanic was worsened by the poor design of the transverse bulkheads of the watertight compartments. As water flooded the damaged compartments of the hull, the ship began to pitch forward, and water in the damaged compartments was able to spill over into adjacent compartments.
At the time, the RMS Titanic was the largest passenger ship afloat. The ship's length was 882 feet, 9 inches, and it weighed 46,328 tons. Its top speed was 23 knots.
Furthermore, travelling at half the speed, Titanic would have collided with the iceberg with only a quarter of the force, and this would probably have opened up fewer watertight compartments, and resulted in Titanic staying afloat, although she would still have been badly damaged.
Construction on the Titanic began on March 31, 1909. At the peak of construction, Harland and Wolff shipyard employed approximately 14,000 men to build the enormous ships. It took over one year to fully frame the Titanic.
"Simply put, Titanic was traveling way too fast in an area known to contain ice; that's the bottom line," says Mark Nichol, webmaster for the Titanic and Other White Star Ships website.
Oceanographers have pointed out that the hostile sea environment has wreaked havoc on the ship's remains after more than a century beneath the surface. Saltwater acidity has been dissolving the vessel, compromising its integrity to the point where much of it would crumble if tampered with.
Answer: That's wrong – it would probably have survived. When a ship hits an iceberg head on, all the force would be transferred back to the ship, so it wouldn't have ripped open, but crumpled round, so only 2-3 compartments would have been breached. It was built to survive with 4 compartments breached.
The Titanic would founder. (By reversing the engines, Murdoch actually caused the Titanic to turn slower than if it had been moving at its original speed. Most experts believe the ship would have survived if it had hit the iceberg head-on.)
These actions include: 1) alternating the thrust of the ship's wing screws and advancing the centerline screw to increase the turning response of the ship; 2) allowing the ship to ram the iceberg head- on; 3) counter-flood the aft end of the stricken ship to reduced the rate of water intake by 4.5 hours; 4) employing ...
It was her sister, Edna Kearney Murray who survived the sinking of the Titanic but it wasn't in an overloaded lifeboat. “My great aunt Edna was in England at the time and had purchased a ticket for return passage to America on the Titanic,” Chris said.
The average lifespan of an iceberg in the North Atlantic typically is two to three years from calving to melting. This means the iceberg that sank the Titanic "likely broke off from Greenland in 1910 or 1911, and was gone forever by the end of 1912 or sometime in 1913."
Only 25 percent of the Titanic's third-class passengers survived, and of that 25 percent, only a fraction were men. By contrast, about 97 percent of first-class women survived the sinking of the Titanic. The term steerage originally referred to the part of the ship below-decks where the steering apparatus was located.
One of these is a species of bacteria -- named Halomonas titanicae after the great ship -- that lives inside icicle-like growths of rust, called "rusticles." These bacteria eat iron in the ship's hull and they will eventually consume the entire ship, recycling the nutrients into the ocean ecosystem.
The sea's surface shone like glass, making it hard to spot icebergs, common to the North Atlantic in spring. Nevertheless, Captain Smith kept the ship at full speed. He believed the crew could react in time if any were sighted.
They didn't see it before then, because it was a “black berg;” i.e. when an iceberg flows south, the warmer water causes the bottom to melt (the water was 27F, andfreshwater ice melts in seawater above 19F), while the freshwater ice above the water doesn't melt, since it is only exposed to the 27F air— and icebergs are ...
What would have happened if the Titanic sank in warm water? Had the Titanic sank in warm water, most of those in the water would have survived. Almost all had life jackets on, and the lifeboat passengers were rescued only a couple of hours after the ship sank.
Captain Edward Smith Responsible For Sinking The Titanic | Titanic.
The Titanic sank from human error. According to the granddaughter of the second officer of the Titanic, Louise Patten, a new steering system led to a mistake by the steersman, Robert Hitchins, into going "hard a port" instead of "hard a starboard" and straight into the iceberg instead of away from it.
First class passengers had the highest survival rate at 62 percent, followed by second class at 41 percent, and third class at 25 percent. Women and children survived at rates of about 75 percent and 50 percent respectively, while only 20 percent of men survived (Takis, 1999).
Those changes, along with the advent of superior technologies for navigation and communication, have made the seas much safer since 1912. As such, it is unlikely that the specific circumstances leading to the sinking of the Titanic will recur.
More than just facts and figures, these statistics highlight the massive scale of Titanic's ambition—and of its tragic sinking. It took just two hours and 40 minutes for the “unsinkable” RMS Titanic to sink.
Most of the bodies were never recovered, but some say there are remains near the ship. What could have happened to the bodies? Some Titanic experts say a powerful storm the night of the wreck scattered the life-jacketed passengers in a 50-mile-wide area, so it's likely the bodies scattered across the seafloor.
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RMS Titanic, a subsidiary of Premier Exhibitions, became the ship's official “salvor-in-possession” in 1993, making it the only entity allowed to collect artifacts from the wreck.