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By: History.com Editors

Updated: May 2, 2024 | Original: November 9, 2009

The RMS Titanic, a luxury steamship, sank in the early hours of April 15, 1912, off the coast of Newfoundland in the North Atlantic after sideswiping an iceberg during its maiden voyage. Of the 2,240 passengers and crew on board, more than 1,500 lost their lives in the disaster. Titanic has inspired countless books, articles and films (including the 1997 Titanic movie starring Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio), and the ship's story has entered the public consciousness as a cautionary tale about the perils of human hubris.

The Building of the RMS Titanic

The Titanic was the product of intense competition among rival shipping lines in the first half of the 20th century. In particular, the White Star Line found itself in a battle for steamship primacy with Cunard, a venerable British firm with two standout ships that ranked among the most sophisticated and luxurious of their time.

Cunard’s Mauretania began service in 1907 and quickly set a speed record for the fastest average speed during a transatlantic crossing (23.69 knots or 27.26 mph), a title that it held for 22 years.

Cunard’s other masterpiece, Lusitania , launched the same year and was lauded for its spectacular interiors. Lusitania met its tragic end on May 7, 1915, when a torpedo fired by a German U-boat sunk the ship, killing nearly 1,200 of the 1,959 people on board and precipitating the United States’ entry into World War I .

Did you know? Passengers traveling first class on Titanic were roughly 44 percent more likely to survive than other passengers.

The same year that Cunard unveiled its two magnificent liners, J. Bruce Ismay, chief executive of White Star, discussed the construction of three large ships with William J. Pirrie, chairman of the shipbuilding company Harland and Wolff. Part of a new “Olympic” class of liners, each ship would measure 882 feet in length and 92.5 feet at their broadest point, making them the largest of their time.

In March 1909, work began in the massive Harland and Wolff shipyard in Belfast, Ireland, on the second of these three ocean liners, Titanic, and continued nonstop for two years.

On May 31, 1911, Titanic’s immense hull–the largest movable manmade object in the world at the time–made its way down the slipways and into the River Lagan in Belfast. More than 100,000 people attended the launching, which took just over a minute and went off without a hitch.

The hull was immediately towed to a mammoth fitting-out dock where thousands of workers would spend most of the next year building the ship’s decks, constructing her lavish interiors and installing the 29 giant boilers that would power her two main steam engines.

‘Unsinkable’ Titanic’s Fatal Flaws

According to some hypotheses, Titanic was doomed from the start by a design that many lauded as state-of-the-art. The Olympic-class ships featured a double bottom and 15 watertight bulkhead compartments equipped with electric watertight doors that could be operated individually or simultaneously by a switch on the bridge.

It was these watertight bulkheads that inspired Shipbuilder magazine, in a special issue devoted to the Olympic liners, to deem them “practically unsinkable.”

But the watertight compartment design contained a flaw that was a critical factor in Titanic’s sinking: While the individual bulkheads were indeed watertight, the walls separating the bulkheads extended only a few feet above the water line, so water could pour from one compartment into another, especially if the ship began to list or pitch forward.

The second critical safety lapse that contributed to the loss of so many lives was the inadequate number of lifeboats carried on Titanic. A mere 16 boats, plus four Engelhardt “collapsibles,” could accommodate just 1,178 people. Titanic could carry up to 2,435 passengers, and a crew of approximately 900 brought her capacity to more than 3,300 people.

As a result, even if the lifeboats were loaded to full capacity during an emergency evacuation, there were available seats for only one-third of those on board. While unthinkably inadequate by today’s standards, Titanic’s supply of lifeboats actually exceeded the British Board of Trade’s requirements.

Passengers on the Titanic

Titanic created quite a stir when it departed for its maiden voyage from Southampton, England, on April 10, 1912. After stops in Cherbourg, France, and Queenstown (now known as Cobh), Ireland, the ship set sail for New York with 2,240 passengers and crew—or “souls,” the expression then used in the shipping industry, usually in connection with a sinking—on board.

As befitting the first transatlantic crossing of the world’s most celebrated ship, many of these souls were high-ranking officials, wealthy industrialists, dignitaries and celebrities. First and foremost was the White Star Line’s managing director, J. Bruce Ismay, accompanied by Thomas Andrews, the ship’s builder from Harland and Wolff.

Absent was financier J.P. Morgan , whose International Mercantile Marine shipping trust controlled the White Star Line and who had selected Ismay as a company officer. Morgan had planned to join his associates on Titanic but canceled at the last minute when some business matters delayed him.

The wealthiest passenger was John Jacob Astor IV, heir to the Astor family fortune, who had made waves a year earlier by marrying 18-year-old Madeleine Talmadge Force, a young woman 29 years his junior, shortly after divorcing his first wife.

Other notable passengers included the elderly owner of Macy’s, Isidor Straus, and his wife Ida; industrialist Benjamin Guggenheim, accompanied by his mistress, valet and chauffeur; and widow and heiress Margaret “Molly” Brown, who would earn her nickname “ The Unsinkable Molly Brown ” by helping to maintain calm and order while the lifeboats were being loaded and boosting the spirits of her fellow survivors.

The employees attending to this collection of First Class luminaries were mostly traveling Second Class, along with academics, tourists, journalists and others who would enjoy a level of service and accommodations equivalent to First Class on most other ships.

But by far the largest group of passengers was in Third Class: more than 700, exceeding the other two levels combined. Some had paid less than $20 to make the crossing. It was Third Class that was the major source of profit for shipping lines like White Star, and Titanic was designed to offer these passengers accommodations and amenities superior to those found in Third Class on any other ship of that era.

Titanic Sets Sail

Titanic’s departure from Southampton on April 10 was not without some oddities. A small coal fire was discovered in one of her bunkers–an alarming but not uncommon occurrence on steamships of the day. Stokers hosed down the smoldering coal and shoveled it aside to reach the base of the blaze.

After assessing the situation, the captain and chief engineer concluded that it was unlikely it had caused any damage that could affect the hull structure, and the stokers were ordered to continue controlling the fire at sea.

According to a theory put forth by a small number of Titanic experts, the fire became uncontrollable after the ship left Southampton, forcing the crew to attempt a full-speed crossing; moving at such a fast pace, they were unable to avoid the fatal collision with the iceberg.

Another unsettling event took place when Titanic left the Southampton dock. As she got underway, she narrowly escaped a collision with the America Line’s S.S. New York. Superstitious Titanic buffs sometimes point to this as the worst kind of omen for a ship departing on her maiden voyage.

The Titanic Strikes an Iceberg

On April 14, after four days of uneventful sailing, Titanic received sporadic reports of ice from other ships, but she was sailing on calm seas under a moonless, clear sky.

At about 11:30 p.m., a lookout saw an iceberg coming out of a slight haze dead ahead, then rang the warning bell and telephoned the bridge. The engines were quickly reversed and the ship was turned sharply—instead of making direct impact, Titanic seemed to graze along the side of the berg, sprinkling ice fragments on the forward deck.

Sensing no collision, the lookouts were relieved. They had no idea that the iceberg had a jagged underwater spur, which slashed a 300-foot gash in the hull below the ship’s waterline.

By the time the captain toured the damaged area with Harland and Wolff’s Thomas Andrews, five compartments were already filling with seawater, and the bow of the doomed ship was alarmingly pitched downward, allowing seawater to pour from one bulkhead into the neighboring compartment.

Andrews did a quick calculation and estimated that Titanic might remain afloat for an hour and a half, perhaps slightly more. At that point the captain, who had already instructed his wireless operator to call for help, ordered the lifeboats to be loaded.

Titanic’s Lifeboats

A little more than an hour after contact with the iceberg, a largely disorganized and haphazard evacuation began with the lowering of the first lifeboat. The craft was designed to hold 65 people; it left with only 28 aboard.

Tragically, this was to be the norm: During the confusion and chaos during the precious hours before Titanic plunged into the sea, nearly every lifeboat would be launched woefully under-filled, some with only a handful of passengers.

In compliance with the law of the sea, women and children boarded the boats first; only when there were no women or children nearby were men permitted to board. Yet many of the victims were in fact women and children, the result of disorderly procedures that failed to get them to the boats in the first place.

Exceeding Andrews’ prediction, Titanic stubbornly stayed afloat for close to three hours. Those hours witnessed acts of craven cowardice and extraordinary bravery.

Hundreds of human dramas unfolded between the order to load the lifeboats and the ship’s final plunge: Men saw off wives and children, families were separated in the confusion and selfless individuals gave up their spots to remain with loved ones or allow a more vulnerable passenger to escape. In the end, 706 people survived the sinking of the Titanic.

Titanic Sinks

The ship’s most illustrious passengers each responded to the circumstances with conduct that has become an integral part of the Titanic legend. Ismay, the White Star managing director, helped load some of the boats and later stepped onto a collapsible as it was being lowered. Although no women or children were in the vicinity when he abandoned ship, he would never live down the ignominy of surviving the disaster while so many others perished.

Thomas Andrews, Titanic’s chief designer, was last seen in the First Class smoking room, staring blankly at a painting of a ship on the wall. Astor deposited his wife Madeleine into a lifeboat and, remarking that she was pregnant, asked if he could accompany her; refused entry, he managed to kiss her goodbye just before the boat was lowered away.

Although offered a seat on account of his age, Isidor Straus refused any special consideration, and his wife Ida would not leave her husband behind. The couple retired to their cabin and perished together.

Benjamin Guggenheim and his valet returned to their rooms and changed into formal evening dress; emerging onto the deck, he famously declared, “We are dressed in our best and are prepared to go down like gentlemen.”

Molly Brown helped load the boats and finally was forced into one of the last to leave. She implored its crewmen to turn back for survivors, but they refused, fearing they would be swamped by desperate people trying to escape the icy seas.

Titanic, nearly perpendicular and with many of her lights still aglow, finally dove beneath the ocean’s surface at about 2:20 a.m. on April 15, 1912. Throughout the morning, Cunard’s Carpathia , after receiving Titanic’s distress call at midnight and steaming at full speed while dodging ice floes all night, rounded up all of the lifeboats. They contained only 706 survivors.

Aftermath of the Titanic Catastrophe

At least five separate boards of inquiry on both sides of the Atlantic conducted comprehensive hearings on Titanic’s sinking, interviewing dozens of witnesses and consulting with many maritime experts. Every conceivable subject was investigated, from the conduct of the officers and crew to the construction of the ship. Titanic conspiracy theories abounded.

While it has always been assumed that the ship sank as a result of the gash that caused the bulkhead compartments to flood, various other theories have emerged over the decades, including that the ship’s steel plates were too brittle for the near-freezing Atlantic waters, that the impact caused rivets to pop and that the expansion joints failed, among others.

Technological aspects of the catastrophe aside, Titanic’s demise has taken on a deeper, almost mythic, meaning in popular culture. Many view the tragedy as a morality play about the dangers of human hubris: Titanic’s creators believed they had built an unsinkable ship that could not be defeated by the laws of nature.

This same overconfidence explains the electrifying impact Titanic’s sinking had on the public when she was lost. There was widespread disbelief that the ship could not possibly have sunk, and, due to the era’s slow and unreliable means of communication, misinformation abounded. Newspapers initially reported that the ship had collided with an iceberg but remained afloat and was being towed to port with everyone on board.

It took many hours for accurate accounts to become widely available, and even then people had trouble accepting that this paragon of modern technology could sink on her maiden voyage, taking more than 1,500 souls with her.

The ship historian John Maxtone-Graham has compared Titanic’s story to the Challenger space shuttle disaster of 1986. In that case, the world reeled at the notion that one of the most sophisticated inventions ever created could explode into oblivion along with its crew. Both tragedies triggered a sudden collapse in confidence, revealing that we remain subject to human frailties and error, despite our hubris and a belief in technological infallibility.

Titanic Wreck

Efforts to locate the wreck of Titanic began soon after it sank. But technical limitations—as well as the vastness of the North Atlantic search area—made finding it extremely difficult.

Finally, in 1985, a joint U.S.-French expedition located the wreck of the RMS Titanic . The doomed ship was discovered about 400 miles east of Newfoundland in the North Atlantic, some 13,000 feet below the surface.

Subsequent explorations have found that the wreck is in relatively good condition, with many objects on the ship—jewelry, furniture, shoes, machinery and other items—are still intact.

Since its discovery, the wreck has been explored numerous times by manned and unmanned submersibles—including the submersible Titan, which imploded during what would have been its third dive to the wreck in June 2023.

HISTORY Vault: Titanic's Achilles Heel

Did Titanic have a fatal design flaw? John Chatterton and Richie Kohler of "Deep Sea Detectives" dive the wreckage of Titanic's sister ship, Britannic, to investigate the possibility.

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How the Titanic was lost and found

Researchers have pieced together debris from the Titanic to understand the final hours of the famed the ship and its passengers.

Many historical accounts of the sinking of the RMS Titanic describe the 882.5-foot-long passenger ship as “slipping beneath the ocean waves,” as though the vessel and its passengers drifted tranquilly off to sleep, but nothing could be further from the truth. Based on years of careful analysis of the wreck, which employed then state-of-the-art flooding models and simulations used in the modern shipping industry, experts are able to paint a gruesome portrait of Titanic ’s last hours and minutes.

Earlier this month, research on the ship continued as a team of experts completed five manned submersible dives at the site over an eight day span. Using high tech equipment, the team captured footage and images of the wreck that can be used to create 3D models for future augmented and virtual reality. The assets will help researchers further study the past and future of the ship.

The Titanic is in severe decay caused by salt corrosion and metal eating bacteria, Caladan Oceanic, the company overseeing the expedition, said in an announcement about the dives. A manned submersible reached the bottom of the north Atlantic Ocean in August.

The Titanic dive is being filmed by Atlantic Productions for the documentary special, "Mission Titanic", which will air globally on National Geographic in 2020.

“The most shocking area of deterioration was the starboard side of the officers’ quarters, where the captain’s quarters were,” said Titanic historian Parks Stephenson. The hull had started to collapse taking staterooms with it.

Scientists expect the erosion of the Titanic to continue.

“The future of the wreck is going to continue to deteriorate over time, it’s a natural process,” said scientist Lori Johnson.

The Titanic 's fate was sealed on its maiden voyage from Southampton, England to New York City. At 11:40 p.m. on April 14, 1912, the Titanic sideswiped an iceberg in the north Atlantic, buckling portions of the starboard hull along a 300-foot span and exposing the six forward watertight compartments to the ocean’s waters. From this moment onward, sinking was a certainty. The demise may have been hastened, however, when crewmen pushed open a gangway door on the port side of Titanic in an aborted attempt to load lifeboats from a lower level. Since the ship had begun listing to port, gravity prevented the crew from closing the massive door, and by 1:50 a.m., the bow had settled enough to allow seawater to rush in through the gangway.

By 2:18 a.m., with the last lifeboat having departed 13 minutes earlier, the bow had filled with water and the stern had risen high enough into the air to expose the propellers and create catastrophic stresses on the middle of the ship. Then the Titanic cracked in half.

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Once released from the stern section, the bow fell to the ocean floor at a fairly steep angle, nosing into the mud with such massive force that its ejecta patterns are still visible on the seafloor today.

The stern, lacking a hydrodynamic leading edge like the bow, tumbled and corkscrewed for more than two miles down to the ocean floor. Compartments exploded. Decks pancaked. Heavier pieces such as the boilers dropped straight down, while other pieces were flung off into the abyss.

The wreckage

For decades, a number of expeditions sought to find the Titanic without success—a problem compounded by the North Atlantic’s unpredictable weather, the enormous depth at which the sunken ship lies, and conflicting accounts of its final moments. Finally, 73 years after it sank, the final resting place of Titanic was located by National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence Robert Ballard, along with French scientist Jean-Louis Michel, on September 1, 1985. The Titanic had come to rest roughly 380 miles (612 kilometers) southeast of Newfoundland in international waters. ( Discover how the Titanic was found during a secret Cold War mission. )

In the years since Ballard’s expedition, visitors to the site have made their mark: Modern trash litters the area, and some experts claim that submersibles have damaged the ship by landing on it or bumping into it. Organic processes are also relentlessly breaking down the Titanic : Mollusks have gobbled up most of the ship's wood while microbes eat away at exposed metal, forming icicle-like "rusticles."

"Everyone has their own opinion" as to how long Titanic will remain more or less intact , said research specialist Bill Lange of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts.

"Some people think the bow will collapse in a year or two," Lange said. "But others say it's going to be there for hundreds of years."

What was lost

More than 2,000 passengers and crew were aboard the Titanic ’s maiden voyage, but only 706 survived the trip.

Although the ocean liner could carry 3,511 passengers, the Titanic only had lifeboats for 1,178 people. To make matters worse, not all of the lifeboats were filled to capacity during the desperate evacuation of the doomed ship. Most of the Titanic ’s 1,500-odd victims died of hypothermia at the surface of the icy water. Hundreds of people may also have died inside the ship as it sank, most of them immigrant families in steerage class, looking forward to a new life in America.

Along with the lives lost, something else went down with the Titanic: An illusion of orderliness, a faith in technological progress, a yearning for the future that, as Europe drifted toward full-scale war, was soon replaced by fears and dreads all too familiar to our modern world. ( Test your knowledge of the famous ship. )

“The Titanic disaster was the bursting of a bubble,” said filmmaker James Cameron. “There was such a sense of bounty in the first decade of the 20th century. Elevators! Automobiles! Airplanes! Wireless radio! Everything seemed so wondrous, on an endless upward spiral. Then it all came crashing down.”

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Prologue Magazine

They Said It Couldn’t Sink

Nara records detail losses, investigation of titanic’ s demise.

Spring 2012, Vol. 44, No. 1

By Alison Gavin and Christopher Zarr

The Titanic during sea trials. (306-NT-1308-91560)

View in National Archives Catalog

Perhaps no other maritime disaster stirs our collective memory more than the sinking of the RMS Titanic on April 15, 1912.

The centennial of this event brings to mind the myriad films, books, and electronic media the disaster engenders. The discovery of the ship at the bottom of the sea in the 1980s brought to view intriguing artifacts.

The National Archives holds Titanic -related "treasures" as well: Senate investigation records, documents pertaining to Titanic passengers from limited liability suits, and congressional resolutions. These records tell the stories of the survivors in their own words.

When Titanic set sail from Southampton, England, for New York City on April 10, 1912, no one, especially its builders, dreamed of its demise. The ship's owners, the White Star Line, boasted of the size and stamina of the largest passenger steamship built until that time. Yet the "ship that could never sink" sank less than three hours after the crew spotted an iceberg at 11:40 p.m. on April 14. Of the 2,223 people aboard, 1,517 perished.

The lack of sufficient lifeboats was chief among the reasons cited for the enormous loss of life. While complying with international maritime regulations ( Titanic carried more than the minimum number of lifeboats required), there were still not enough spaces for most passengers to escape the sinking ship.

The Carpathia was the lone ship to respond to Titanic' s distress signals, risking a field of icebergs in a daring rescue. The Carpathia' s passenger manifest includes the names of the 706 persons it picked up from Titanic' s lifeboats on the morning of April 15, 1912. The manifests collected by the Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization list 29 categories of questions asked of all persons entering the United States, from birthplace to where the person would be staying in the United States.

The Titanic Relief Fund, set up by Ernest P. Bicknell in his capacity as director of the American Red Cross, raised $161,600.95 for Titanic survivors and families of the victims. (the British component raised $2,250,000). According to Red Cross "Titanic Relief Fund" documents in the National Archives:

The Director and other representatives of the Red Cross Committee were present when the Carpathia landed its passengers [at the port of New York on April 18]. The office of the committee was opened on the following morning, equipped with telephone service, printed stationery, the necessary blank forms and record cards, and with a staff of visitors and clerks supplied by the Charity Organization Society. Within two days substantially all the survivors of the third cabin passengers and many of the second cabin passengers had been visited and interviewed in their places of temporary shelter or at the Committee's Office. . . . This was extremely important. because comparatively few of the third cabin passengers remained in New York City.

A third-class (steerage) passenger's contract ticket for the White Star Line, similar to those used on the Titanic. (Records of District Courts of the United States, RG 21)

The highest percentage of victims were steerage, or "third cabin" passengers, who were mainly poor immigrants coming to America. The ethical question of why first-class passengers were allowed to get into lifeboats ahead of those in second and third class became an issue for future investigation.

The unimaginable scale of the disaster led many people to write to the President of the United States. Dozens of letters came to President William H. Taft from citizens who were angered, inspired, or moved by the loss of the Titanic. They demanded an investigation into the sinking, shared ideas for the prevention of such disasters in the future, or expressed sympathy for the death of President Taft's military aide, Maj. Archibald Butt. Butt, one of Taft's closest friends, was returning from a six-week vacation aboard the Titanic, and his leave of absence papers and a copy of a letter of introduction from Taft to Pope Pius X are also in the National Archives.

Congressional Hearings Lead to Legislation, Regulations

Almost immediately after the disaster, a congressional hearing was convened on April 19, 1912. Extensive documentation of the Titanic' s voyage is contained within the proceedings of the U.S. Senate's "Titanic Disaster Hearings." The report's 1,042 pages document what a commerce subcommittee learned over its 17-day investigation of the causes of the wreck. The subcommittee's chairman, Senator William Alden Smith (R-Michigan), spoke fervently of why he wished to document the event quickly:

Our course was simple and plain–to gather the facts relating to this disaster while they were still vivid realities. Questions of diverse citizenship gave way to the universal desire for the simple truth. . . . We, of course, recognized that the ship was under a foreign flag; but for the lives of many of our own countrymen had been sacrificed and the safety of many had been put in grave peril, it was vital that the entire matter should be reviewed before an American tribunal if legislative action was to be taken for future guidance on international maritime safety.

The subcommittee interviewed 82 witnesses and investigated everything from the inadequate number of lifeboats to the treatment of passengers riding steerage to the newly operational wireless radio machines. Smith also wanted to know why warnings of icebergs had been ignored.

The Navy Hydrographic Office's daily memorandum notes both ice reports in the North Atlantic and the Titanic' s collision with an iceberg. (Records of District Courts of the United States, RG 21)

One of the themes emerging from the " Titanic Disaster Hearings" is the excesses of the "Gilded Age"—wealth, power, and business in a newly technological world gone wild. The hearings were held in the glamorous Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in Manhattan. (Ironically, John Jacob Astor IV, who perished aboard the Titanic, had built the Astoria Hotel, which later became part of the Waldorf-Astoria.)

Opposite the senators sat the first witnesses, White Star's managing director J. Bruce Ismay and other company officials. Ismay was also president of the International Mercantile Marine Company, White Star's American parent company. He was vilified in the press as a monster, as one who had put his own life and safety before that of women and children as the lifeboats were launched.

Throughout the hearings, he remained confident, almost hubristic, regarding the ship's stamina under pressure. In explaining how Titanic' s disaster could have been averted, he stated simply, "If this ship had hit the iceberg stern on, in all human probability she would have been here to-day [the stern being the most reinforced part of the ship]."

Instead, he said, the iceberg made "a glancing blow between the end of the forecastle and the captain's bridge." He remained sentimental regarding the ship's demise. In the lifeboat, he rowed the opposite direction of the sinking Titanic: "I did not wish to see her go down. . . . I am glad I did not."

Ismay said the trip was a voluntary one for him, "to see how [the ship] works, and with the idea of seeing how we could improve on her for the next ship which we are building." He told the subcommittee, "We have nothing to conceal, nothing to hide." He was grilled again on the 10th day of the investigation, when he denied reports of speeding up the ship to "get through" fields of ice; other eyewitnesses, however, would contradict him.

Also interviewed the first day was Arthur Henry Rostron, the captain of the Carpathia. Rostron gave detailed information about the circumstances under which Titanic' s distress signals had been heard: the wireless operator was undressing for the night but still had his headphones on as the signal came across.

Rostron also related the details of how he prepared the Carpathia to receive the hundreds of survivors in the lifeboats. He came alongside the first lifeboat at 4:10 a.m. on April 15 and rescued the last at 8:30 a.m. He then recruited one of the Carpathia' s passengers, an Episcopal clergyman, to hold a prayer service of thankfulness for those rescued and a short burial service for those who were lost.

The Carpathia was the only ship to respond to the Titanic' s distress signals. The Carpathia' s manifest records the names of the 706 person it rescued from lifeboats on the morning of April 15, 1912. (Records of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, RG 85)

Rostron would later receive a special trophy as a symbol of gratitude from the survivors of the Titanic. It was presented to him by the legendary "Unsinkable Molly [Margaret] Brown," a wealthy Denver matron who assisted with the lifeboats. Rostron received many other memorials and a Medal of Honor from President Taft.

The outcome of the hearings was a variety of "corrective" legislation for the maritime industry, including new regulations regarding numbers of lifeboats and lifejackets required for passenger vessels. In 1914, as a direct result of the Titanic disaster, the International Ice Patrol was formed; 13 nations support a branch of the U.S. Coast Guard that scouts for the presence of icebergs in the Atlantic and Arctic Oceans.

Survivors, Families Seek Millions from White Star

Beyond simply seeking corrective legislation to prevent future disasters, the survivors and the families of victims also sought redress for loss of life, property, and any injuries sustained. The limited liability law at the time, however, could restrict their claims significantly. The Titanic' s liability was protected by an 1851 law ("An Act to limit the Liability of Ship-Owners, and for other Purposes," 9 Stat. 635) designed to encourage shipbuilding and trade by minimizing the risk to owners when disasters occurred.

Under this law, in cases of unavoidable accidents, the company was not liable for any loss of life, property, or injury. If the captain and crew made an error that led to a disaster, but the company was unaware of it, the company's liability was limited to the total of passenger fares, the amount paid for cargo, and any salvaged materials recovered from the wreck. The 706 survivors and the families of the 1,517 dead therefore might be entitled to only a total of $91,805: $85,212 for passengers, $2,073 for cargo, and a $4,520 assessment for the only materials salvaged from the Titanic —the recovered lifeboats.

In October 1912, the Oceanic Steam Navigation Company (more commonly known as the White Star Line) filed a petition in the Southern District of New York to limit its liability against any claims for loss of life, property, or injury. In this petition, the White Star Line claimed that the collision was due to an "inevitable accident." "In the Matter of the Petition of the Oceanic Steam Navigation Company, Limited, for Limitation of its Liability as owner of the steamship TITANIC" (A55-279) is a part of the National Archives holdings in New York City.

Profiles of the Titanic and its decks. (Records of District Courts of the United States, RG 21)

The only way to remove limits on the company's liability would be to prove that the captain and crew were negligent and the ship's owners had knowledge of this fact.

Those individuals seeking payments slowly began to build their case against the White Star Line. They held that although the crew had received wireless messages about the presence of icebergs, the Titanic had maintained its speed, stayed on the same northern course, posted no additional lookouts, and failed to provide the lookouts with binoculars.

In addition, they faulted the White Star Line for not properly training the crew for evacuation, leading to the launching of partially filled lifeboats and the loss of even more lives. For these reasons, combined with the fact that the managing director of the White Star Line, Ismay, was on board the Titanic, claimants believed the liability should be unlimited.

After White Star filed its petition, several notices were placed in the New York Times between October 1912 and January 1913, asking people who claimed damages to prove their claims by April 15, 1913. Hundreds of claims totaling $16,604,731.63 came from people around the world. Claims were divided into four groups: Schedule A: Loss of Life, Schedule B: Loss of Property, Schedule C: Loss of Life and Property, and Schedule D: Injury and Property.

The Schedule D claims for injuries and property detail the harrowing experiences of many survivors of the Titanic. In nearly 50 claims, survivors describe how they lived through the disaster and the physical and mental injuries they sustained.

Anna McGowan of Chicago, Illinois, was unable to get on a lifeboat and jumped from the Titanic onto a lifeboat and sustained permanent injuries from the fall, shock, and frostbite. The experience left her in a state of "nervous prostration" (most likely something similar to post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD) and unable to provide for herself.

Survivors of the Titanic disaster aboard a lifeboat on April 15, 1912. (Records of District Courts of the United States, RG 21)

Patrick O'Keefe of Ireland also jumped overboard to save his life, but he remained in the cold Atlantic waters for hours before being rescued by lifeboat B.

Bertha Noon of Providence, Rhode Island, asked for more than $25,000 due to injuries she sustained after being pushed onto a lifeboat and being exposed to the cold for several hours before being rescued by the Carpathia . Her injuries included an injured back and spine that left her "unable to wear corsets," severe nervous shock, a "misplaced womb," and a recurring congestion in her head and chest that left her delirious and unconscious for days at a time.

Though the Schedule A claims filed by family members for loss of life did not include first-hand accounts of the accident, they document tragic losses of entire families. Finnish immigrant John Panula was preparing for a reunion with his family in Pennsylvania when his wife and four children died on the Titanic. The Skoogh family with their four children Carl, Harold, Mabel, and Margaret Skoogh (ages 12, 9, 11, and 8 respectively) were returning to the United States aboard the Titanic.

Claims for Losses Reveal Class Differences

The loss of life claims also reveal the variety of values assigned to a human life. While Alfonso Meo's widow, Emily J. Innes-Meo, asked for only £300 (approximately $1,500 at the time), Irene Wallach Harris, the widow of Broadway producer and theater owner Henry B. Harris, sought $1 million in her claim. Some of the documents state the ages and annual salaries of the deceased to justify the amounts they were seeking in their claims. The most detailed claim involved the $4,734.80 claim filed by the family of 41-year-old James Veale:

That the said James Veale was by profession a granite carver; that he was earning at the time of his death $1,000 per year or more. That according to the Northampton Table of Mortality, the said James Veale, deceased probably would have lived, except for his death aforesaid, 11.837 years more; that the said James Veale did not expend upon himself more than $600 a year; that his personal estate has been damaged in the sum of $400 per year during the period of 11.837 years and to the extent of $4,734.80 by reason of the aforesaid breach of contract committed by the petitioner herein as aforesaid.

Charlotte Drake Cardeza's claim is the largest and most detailed claim among the Schedule B claims for loss of property. In nearly 20 pages, she itemized the lost contents of 14 trunks, 4 suitcases, and 3 crates. (Records of District Courts of the United States, RG 21)

The claims also reveal the vast class differences apparent among the passengers of the Titanic. This is most apparent in the Schedule B claims for loss of property. The most detailed and largest property claim belongs to socialite Charlotte Drake Cardeza, who occupied the most expensive stateroom on the ship. After surviving the sinking of the Titanic aboard lifeboat 3, Cardeza filed a claim for the lost contents of her 14 trunks, 4 suitcases, and 3 crates of baggage (a total of at least 841 individual items) for a sum of $177,352.75. The nearly 20-page itemized claim includes objects such as her 6 7 / 8 -carat pink diamond ring valued at $20,000. On the other end of the spectrum, Yum Hee of Hong Kong filed a claim for $91.05. His most expensive item: a suit of clothes valued at £2.5 (approximately $12.50 at the time).

From the claims for loss of property, we also discover that Margaret ("Molly") Brown's three crates of ancient models destined for the Denver Museum, Col. Archibald Gracie's documents concerning the War of 1812, and over 110,000 feet of motion picture film owned by William Harbeck are all now at the bottom of the Atlantic. The most expensive individual item lost during the sinking was H. Bjornstrom-Steffanson's four-foot-by-eight-foot oil painting La Circasienne Au Bain by Blondel, valued by him at $100,000.

Schedule C claim 72 was filed on July 24, 1913, by Mabelle Swift Moore, widow of businessman Clarence Moore. Moore had been a member of a Washington, DC, brokerage firm W. B. Hibbs and Company and owned extensive real estate. A "master" of the hunt, he had been in England looking for a pack of 50 hounds. (The dogs, however, were not carried on the Titanic.) Mrs. Moore sued for $510,000.

Survivors Give Eyewitness Accounts of the Sinking

Though the White Star Line filed its petition in October 1912 and individual claims were due by April 1913, hearings were not held in the Southern District of New York until June 1915. Depositions filed with the court throughout 1913 and 1914 provide conflicting reports on blame for the disaster.

In June 1914, White Star Line's Ismay was questioned about the speed of the Titanic, its lifeboats, the lookout, and other issues that may have contributed to the disaster. Throughout his testimony, Ismay restated many of the same opinions given during the congressional hearing—that all decisions were made by Capt. Edward Smith and he was onboard to consider passenger accommodation improvements for the White Star Line's next ship, the Britannic.

The "Unsinkable Molly Brown" filed a claim for lost property that included an extensive collection of gowns, hats, and jewelry as well as "ancient models for Denver Museum." (Records of District Courts of the United States, RG 21)

Statements by two of the survivors, Elizabeth Lines and Emily Ryerson, seemed to contradict Ismay's statements. Lines declared that she overheard parts of a two-hour conversation between Captain Smith and Ismay on Saturday, April 13. Sticking in her mind was Ismay's statement, "We will beat the Olympic and get in to New York on Tuesday," meaning they would arrive one day earlier than originally planned. The following day, Ryerson recalled Ismay holding a message and stating to her that "We are in among the icebergs." Despite this, he told her that they would be starting up extra boilers that evening to surprise everyone with an early arrival.

Other depositions filed by survivors give us eyewitness accounts to the dramatic and tragic final moments aboard the Titanic. Ryerson described the bitter cold of that April night before being told by a fellow passenger to put on her life belt. Though she described the initial scene on the boat deck as without confusion, the situation changed quickly. Passengers were thrown by crew into the lifeboats; Ryerson even describes falling on top of someone. After lifeboat no. 4 was loaded with 24 women and children (far below the 65 it could hold), it was lowered toward the water. Before being fully lowered, the lifeboat jammed, and men swarmed into the boat, which was intended for women and children only. After being lowered, the survivors and crew began to row for their lives, fearing that the sinking Titanic might suck them down with it. Later on that night, near dawn, Ryerson's boat returned to the site of the sinking and began rescuing some 20 survivors.

Among those rescued survivors was George Rheims, who remained for some five hours in waist-high water on a partially submerged collapsible lifeboat. In his deposition he recounts how hours earlier, after Rheims noticed "a slight shock" when returning from the bathroom, he looked out the nearest window and saw a massive white iceberg pass by. He then reported witnessing several lifeboats launching that were between half and three-quarters full. He also described seeing men scrambling onto lifeboats as they were lowered and hearing pistols being shot during his last hour aboard the ship. In the final minutes before Titanic disappeared into the depths, Rheims jumped into the cold waters and waited for his rescue.

Over several days in June and July 1915, testimony continued. Negotiations carried on outside of court led to a tentative settlement with nearly all of the claimants in December 1915. The settlement was for a total of $664,000 to be divided among the claimants. A final decree, signed by Judge Julius M. Mayer in July 1916, held the company guiltless of any privity and knowledge and not liable for any loss, damage, injury, destruction, or fatalities.

In a page from her testimony, passenger Elizabeth Lines recounts overhearing Bruce Ismay remark to Captain Smith on the speed of the ship's crossing, saying that they will beat the Olympic and get in to New York on Tuesday. (Records of District Courts of the United States, RG 21)

George Rheims recalled that as he swam away from the sinking Titanic, he looked back and saw the screws [propellers] out of the water in the air; she went down perfectly straight. He was rescued the next morning. (Records of District Courts of the United States, RG 21)

The Titanic' s tragic story fascinated people both at the time of the disaster and for generations after. For more than 70 years, the exact location of the ship's remains was unknown. On September 1, 1985, a joint American and French expedition team found the vessel under more than 12,400 feet of water off the coast of Newfoundland. On November 21 of the same year, Rep. Walter Jones, Sr., of North Carolina, chairman of the House Committee on Merchant Marine and Fisheries, submitted a report to accompany House Resolution 3272. It recommended that the shipwreck Titanic be designated "as a maritime memorial and to provide for reasonable research, exploration, and, if appropriate, salvage activities."

Perhaps in the end, the 1986 Memorial Act sums it up best by stating, where marine resources are concerned, at least, "we must maintain a sense of perspective regarding man's abilities and nature's powers." Nature's power, in the form of an iceberg in the frigid north Atlantic Ocean one April night in 1912, seems to impress us all the more 100 years later.

Alison Gavin received her M.A. in history from George Mason University in 2004; she was the 2003 Verney Fellow for Nantucket Studies. She has worked in the National Archives since 1995, and her work has appeared in New England Ancestors, Historic Nantucket, Quaker History, and Prologue.

Christopher Zarr is the education specialist for the National Archives at New York City. He works with teachers and students to find and use primary sources in the classroom.

Note on Sources

Learn more about:

• Other Titanic records online
• Stories from the Titanic on the Prologue blog
• The sinking of the Christmas tree ship in Lake Michigan

Additional research for this article was conducted by William Roka at the National Archives at New York City.

The Carpathia' s passenger manifests listing survivors of the Titanic are in Records of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, RG 85, at the National Archives Building (NAB), Washington, DC. They have been microfilmed as T715, Passenger and Crew Lists of Vessels Arriving at New York, 1897–1957, roll 1883.

The letters to President Taft regarding the disaster are in "Letters Sent by President Taft to the Department of Commerce and Labor," Entry 15, General Records of the Department of Commerce, Record Group (RG) 40, National Archives at College Park, MD (NACP).

Archibald Butt's leave of absence papers and a copy of his letter of introduction to Pope Pius X are in Records of the Adjutant General's Office, RG 94, NAB.

The largest and most far-reaching of the documents NARA has concerning the sinking of Titanic (at 1,176 pages) can be found in the United States Congressional Serial Set (serial 6167): U.S. Senate, Subcommittee of the Committee on Commerce, " Titanic " Disaster: Hearings before the Subcommittee of the Committee on Commerce United States Senate, pursuant to S. Res. 283 directing the Committee on Commerce to investigate the causes leading to the wreck of the White Star Liner " Titanic ," S.Doc. 726, 62nd Congress, 2nd sess., 1912 (Washington, Government Printing Office, 1912), Publications of the U.S. Government, RG 287, NACP.

A more accessible source for the Senate hearings, at only 571-pages, is The Titanic Disaster Hearings: The Official Transcripts of the 1912 Senate Investigation, edited by Tom Kuntz (New York: Pocket Books, 1998). It gives accounts of the 17 days of hearings, an introduction and epilogue, an appendix, a list of witnesses, and a digest of testimony.

The records from the limited liability suits are in the case file "In the Matter of the Petition of the Oceanic Steam Navigation Company, Limited, for Limitation of its Liability as owner of the steamship TITANIC"; Admiralty Case Files Records of District Courts of the United States, Record Group 21; National Archives at New York City.  

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‘Digital Twin’ of the Titanic Shows the Shipwreck in Stunning Detail

Researchers hope new 3-D images will provide clues about what happened to the ocean liner when it sank on its maiden voyage in 1912.

By April Rubin

An ambitious digital imaging project has produced what researchers describe as a “digital twin” of the R.M.S. Titanic, showing the wreckage of the doomed ocean liner with a level of detail that has never been captured before.

The project, undertaken by Magellan Ltd., a deepwater seabed mapping company, yielded more than 16 terabytes of data, 715,000 still images and a high-resolution video. The visuals were captured over the course of a six-week expedition in the summer of 2022, nearly 2.4 miles below the surface of the North Atlantic, Atlantic Productions, which is working on a documentary about the project, said in a news release.

The researchers used two submersibles, named Romeo and Juliet, to map “every millimeter” of the wreckage as well as the entire three-mile debris field. Creating the model, which shows the ship lying on the ocean floor and the area around it, took about eight months, said Anthony Geffen, the chief executive and creative director of Atlantic Productions.

“We’re now going to write the proper science of the Titanic,” he said.

Previous images of the wreckage, which was found less than 400 miles off the coast of Newfoundland in 1985, suffered from low light and murky water. The new images have effectively removed the ocean water, allowing the wreckage to be viewed in “extraordinary detail,” Atlantic Productions said, noting that a serial number can be seen on a propeller.

The Titanic, the largest passenger ship built at the time, sank on April 15, 1912, after hitting an iceberg on its maiden voyage. Many details of the disaster, in which more than 1,500 people perished, have remained a mystery ever since.

The models offer new details about the shipwreck that hadn’t previously been known, Mr. Geffen said. For example, he said, one of the lifeboats was blocked by a jammed metal piece and couldn’t be deployed.

The submersibles captured images of personal artifacts, such as watches, top hats and unopened champagne bottles, that were strewn across the debris field. Experts hope they will be able to match personal items to Titanic passengers using artificial intelligence, Mr. Geffen said. He added that people someday would also be able to witness the shipwreck through virtual reality and augmented reality.

“In accordance with tight regulations in place, the wreck was not touched or disturbed,” Atlantic Productions said, adding that the site was treated “with the utmost of respect, which included a flower-laying ceremony in memory of those who lost their lives.”

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April Rubin is a breaking news reporter and a member of the 2022-2023 New York Times fellowship class. More about April Rubin

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Visualising the Titanic Disaster

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Michael Friendly, Jürgen Symanzik, Ortac Onder, Visualising the Titanic Disaster, Significance , Volume 16, Issue 1, February 2019, Pages 14–19, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1740-9713.2019.01229.x

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The sinking of the Titanic has inspired books, movies and documentaries. But it has also motivated data visualisation designers to tell the story of the tragedy in new ways. Michael Friendly, Jürgen Symanzik and Ortac Onder review the first graph of the disaster and some recent history

T he sinking of the RMS Titanic is one of the most storied shipwrecks in maritime history. Touted as the ultimate in transatlantic travel and said to be “unsinkable”, the Titanic collided with an iceberg on 14 April 1912 on her maiden voyage and sank shortly thereafter on 15 April, killing 1502 out of 2224 passengers and crew. The sinking of the Titanic is not the largest in terms of lives lost. But it is the one that has been documented most thoroughly – in government reports and personal accounts of survivors, and in numerous books and several popular movies.

This is one legacy of the Titanic disaster, but it left another: a wealth of data, comprising details of passengers and crew, many with names, ages, passenger class, and even cabin numbers for those in first and second class.

We recently discovered an early and relatively unknown graph showing survival among the Titanic passengers and crew, published less than one month after the disaster. This graph had a surprisingly modern look. It prompted us to review the history of this graph and the variety of uses to which the Titanic data have been put in the two decades since the data set became available in machine-readable form.

The Sphere was a popular British illustrated weekly newspaper, published by the Illustrated London News Group from January 1900 until June 1964. It was dedicated to worldwide reporting on popular issues. On 4 May 1912, only three weeks after the Titanic disaster, it published a chart (Figure 1 , page 16) by the graphic artist G. Bron using data released the week before by the House of Commons.

G.Bron's chart of “The Loss of the ‘Titanic'”, from The Sphere , 4 May 1912. Each subgroup is shown by a bar whose area is proportional to the numbers of cases. © Illustrated London News Ltd/Mary Evans.

Bron's graph shows the breakdown of survival among the passengers and crew – by passenger class, gender and age (comparing adults and children) – in what is clearly an early innovation in data display. It combines back-to-back bar charts for those who lived and those who perished, using area of the bars to convey the actual numbers. Within the passenger classes, the numbers and bars are subdivided by gender for adults, while children are shown as a separate group. It also includes two similar summary panels, showing the totals for all passengers and for all passengers and crew.

Today, we might describe this as an early form of a mosaic plot, or as an area-proportional back-to-back array of bar charts. Whatever name we give, it deserves to be admired as an exceptional early example of data visualisation and a tribute to the skills of the illustrator.

G. Bron was a prolific technical illustrator who worked for The Sphere , the Illustrated London News and similar publications between about 1910 and 1925. Today, he would be called a data-graphic or info-vis designer, one far ahead of his time. Little about him was previously known, not even his first name. A search in the British Newspaper Archive ( bit.ly/2Rzv5dm ) turned up over 20 examples of his work, most published in The Sphere . In the course of writing this article we discovered that G. Bron was most likely the pseudonym adopted by William B. Treeby, born in London, but further biographical details are still sketchy (see supplementary material at bit.ly/titanicvis ).

Bron's use of back-to-back proportional bar charts to show death versus survival was a stroke of graphic genius

By and large, Bron's illustrations were graphic stories, designed to convey an interesting but possibly complex topic visually, in ways in which mere words and numbers could not compete. It is difficult to know what led him to produce his remarkable chart of the Titanic . Sometime between the sinking on 15 April and the publication of his Sphere graph on 4 May, he became aware of a numerical table classifying passengers and crew that would shortly be published by the House of Commons. We can imagine that he looked at this and asked himself how he could make it comprehensible to his readers. His use of back-to-back proportional bar charts was novel and a stroke of graphic genius. Just a glance showed that, overall, two-thirds of the passengers and crew perished. The separate conditional panels for class showed directly to the eye that survival was greatest in first class and least among the crew. The reader could “drill down” to examine the breakdown by gender and age within each class.

The primary sources of data on the Titanic derive from official inquiries launched in Britain and the USA. (Complete documents can be found at titanicinquiry.org .) Shortly after the disaster, the British Parliament authorised the British Board of Trade Inquiry with Lord Mersey as chair. The committee interviewed over 100 witnesses over 36 days of hearings. Their report, issued on 30 July 1912, contained extensive tables of passengers and crew, broken down by age group, gender, class and survival, as well as details on the launching of the 20 lifeboats. In April–May 1912 a similar inquiry was initiated in the US Senate which interviewed 82 witnesses over 18 days. Among other things the report (over 1000 pages) contained lists of the names and addresses of most passengers and crew.

As far as we are aware, the first public data set appeared in 1995 in an article by Robert Dawson, titled “The ‘Unusual Episode’ Data Revisited”, in the Journal of Statistics Education . 1 Its classroom use was illustrated by an exercise in statistical thinking, where students were shown tables of deaths and death rates – classified by economic status, age and gender – for an “unusual episode” (without context) and asked to reason about what the causes might have been. The data set contains 2201 observations and the variables Class, Age, Sex and Survived.

In September 1995, Phillip Hind launched encyclopedia-titanica.org , the first publicly available database on all passengers and crew aboard the ship. At the time, it was the only reasonably complete individual list giving details of name, actual age, profession, cabin number, lifeboat number, and so forth. Two surviving canine pets (one named Sun Yat Sen) were also listed. 2 The website now includes photos and biographies on many of the passengers and crew.

Popular interest in the Titanic surged with the release of James Cameron's movie in November 1997. Immediately following this, Random House released a boxed set, Titanic: The Official Story , containing the Mersey report and facsimiles of 18 original documents from London's Public Record Office. 3 These included the Titanic deck plans, the final telegram sent from the ship just prior to sinking, newspaper articles excoriating the White Star Line for criminal negligence, lists of deaths recorded in official logs, and so on. It is not explicitly clear what the goal or purpose was, but these materials serve as a model case for courses in history of statistics and archival research.

The Titanic data, taken from Dawson, made their first public appearance in a software package in R, version 0.90.1, in December 1999, expressed as a four-way contingency table of counts, classified by Class, Age, Sex and Survived. A variety of other data sets are available in contributed R packages, including TitanicSurvival (in the car package), which gives details (name, sex, age, class, survived) on 1309 passengers, and Lifeboats (in the vcd package), which gives data on the composition and launch times of the lifeboats. Passenger data from the Titanic , split into training and test samples, is also used in a Kaggle prediction competition ( bit.ly/2RxcwGU ).

The significance of the disaster and the availability of information regarding the passengers and crew made the Titanic data attractive for various uses. The range of disciplines gives a sense of the appeal of these data as a compelling example of popular interest, of a novel graphical method or illustration of some statistical technique. The context makes it easy to tell an interesting story to illustrate a new method or graph.

In statistics, narrowly defined, the data have been used to illustrate graphical methods for categorical data and their use as a visualisation method for log-linear models and related generalised linear models. Recursive partitioning methods (also known as classification and regression trees, or CART models) is another area where the Titanic data provide an easily understood concrete example, and this has led to tree-based visualisations.

In a wider scope, encompassing computer science and data science, with an emphasis on predictive modelling and cross-validation, the Titanic data provide an important test case; while in the InfoVis community, the data provide a challenge – and opportunity – for graphic designers to try to tell the story of the disaster in a single sheet, containing words, numbers, pictures and data visualisations.

What follows is a selection of a few highlights to illustrate the themes described above.

Mosaic-type plots

Bron's initial graphic idea, to show deaths and survival on the Titanic , broken down by passenger class, gender and age group, was brilliant at the time, and perhaps underappreciated in the history of data visualisation. He was on to something important: how to display the proportions of survivors, classified by the other variables he had available. His solution anticipated modern methods.

In the 1990s two new ideas for graphical analysis of categorical data arose for this problem. The Titanic data provided great examples because they gave a context and a story to appreciate these new methods.

First, mosaic plots, proposed by Hartigan and Kleiner, provided a new graphic method for visualising multivariate frequency tables, in a single view rather than a collection of oneway or two-way diagrams. 4 The essential idea was a mosaic of rectangles (“tiles”), with the area of each made proportional to the cell frequency. Friendly connected these with log-linear models by shading the cells in relation to residuals in a given model. 5 , 6 For example, Figure 2 shows the result of fitting two models to the Titanic data. The left-hand panel shows the fit of the model with the symbolic formula [CGA][S], which asserts that Survival ([S]) is independent of Class, Gender and Age jointly. This is the baseline, null model. The pattern of shading (blue for positive residuals, red for negative) shows that important associations remain unaccounted for: that is, one or more of Class, Gender and Age affects Survival. The right-hand panel shows the fit of the model [CGA][CS][GS][AS], which allows “main effect” associations of each of Class, Gender and Age with Survival. This model fits much better, but still shows significant lack of fit. The pattern of residuals here suggests some interactions are present: adding the term [GAS] would allow an interaction of Gender and Age (“women and children first”); adding the association [CGS] would allow Survival to depend on the combinations of Class and Gender.

Mosaic plots for two log-linear models fitted to the Titanic data. Left: joint independence model [CGA][S]; right: main effects model [CGA][CS][GS][AS]. Source: author graphic, based on Friendly (1999). 6

Second, interactive software for visualising and manipulating multivariate contingency tables was developed. MANET 7 and MONDRIAN 8 from the Augsburg lab are notable here. Hofmann illustrated how selecting a category of one variable (Survived) highlighted those cases in all other views. 9 Valero-Mora et al . used the Titanic data to illustrate ViSta , a system combining multiple interacting windows, using both log-linear models and multiple correspondence analysis. 10

Figure 3 shows a double-decker plot, a variation of a mosaic plot in which the tiles for all predictors (Class, Gender and Age) are split horizontally and the response variable (Survived) is split vertically. 11 In this type of plot, the widths of the bars are proportional to the joint frequencies of C, G, and A. When each bar is split vertically by Survived, the heights of the black bars are proportional to the conditional probabilities of S given C, G, and A. If Survival were independent of all predictors (the model [CGA][S] shown in the left panel of Figure 2 ), the black bars would all have the same height. Note that showing the bars for survivors and those who perished back-to-back would give something similar to Bron's chart.

Double-decker plot of the Titanic data. Each bar has an area proportional to the frequency in the table. The proportion that survived is shaded black. Source: author graphic, recreated from Meyer et al . 12

Tree diagrams

Cross-classified data can also be displayed as tree diagrams of various types, with branches corresponding to splits of the categories for variables in some order. Tree-maps are a simple example, similar to mosaic plots in that they also display a measure of size by areas of rectangles. 13

Other graphical methods The Titanic data served to illustrate, or even motivate, a wide variety of graphical and analytic methods. A few are mentioned in this article, but more can be found online at bit.ly/titanicvis , including Venn diagrams, trilinear plots and nomograms.

A more powerful use arises in connection with classification trees as models for an outcome variable such as survival. For a binary response, these are similar to a series of logistic regression models, where predictors are chosen to maximise predictive accuracy at each step. Pruning methods and cross-validation are used to control model complexity and minimise out-of-sample classification error. Varian was among the first to use the Titanic data for this purpose. 14

Figure 4 gives the result of fitting a conditional inference tree (“ctree”) predicting survival from sex, class, age and a measure of family size (sibsp = number of siblings plus spouse aboard). The first node splits the data by sex. The second divides by class. The third node (in the right branch) splits males by age, and those aged 9 and under are further split by sibsp. The bars at the bottom show the survival rate in each terminal node. As opposed to log-linear models and generalised linear models, classification trees are somewhat more intuitive when shown visually, and have the additional advantage that what might be complex interaction terms in linear models can be easily fitted by successive splits on the branches to improve prediction.

Graphic representation of a conditional inference tree, predicting survival from sex, passenger class, age and family size. 14 © American Economic Association; reproduced with permission of the Journal of Economic Perspectives .

Information visualisation

Following in the footsteps of Bron, modern graphic designers continue to be inspired by the tragedy of the Titanic and challenge themselves to tell the story of the disaster in ways that are both visually appealing and provide sufficient details. Unlike statistical graphs which usually focus on just one aspect, an information graphic often attempts to tell the entire story all on one sheet, as in a poster presentation.

The best example we have found of this genre is the graphic produced by Andrew Barr and Richard Johnson for the National Post (Figure 5 , and bit.ly/2RyjdbL ). This illustration strikes us as a tour de force of visual storytelling: numbers, words and pictures (both images and graphs) are woven seamlessly into a narrative. The top portion contains back-to-back bar plots of the passengers by age and class, showing the age distributions of those who survived and those who died, with pie charts summarising survival by class. It uses colours keyed to the locations of cabins for the classes in the dominant graphic of the ship. The bottom portion shows the loading of the lifeboats in the order they were launched, shaded to show the proportion of seats that were filled. It is clear that those launched early and those launched just before the ship sank were only partially filled. Other charts at the lower right give the death rates by gender and class and by nationality of the passenger. A text box gives an interpretation of survival, including the ideas of “women and children first” and the declining survival according to class.

Infographic by Barr and Johnson ( bit.ly/2RyjdbL ) telling a graphic story of survival on the Titanic . Notable is the integration of rich numerical information shown in graphs with images providing context and visual explanation. Material republished with the express permission of: National Post, a division of Postmedia Network Inc.

The sinking of the Titanic was surely a tragedy, but, unlike other historical events resulting in great loss of life, it left behind detailed information on the individuals involved – both victims and survivors – whose stories attracted wide interest. Bron's 1912 chart should be appreciated as an attempt at visual explanation far ahead of its time: the idea that survival could be understood through graphic displays.

We started this project with the discovery of Bron's chart, and the thought that it would be useful to collect and catalogue the various ways in which the Titanic data had been depicted in graphs over the past century. We were pleasantly surprised by the wide range of graphical methods and other applications we found. This attests to the compelling nature of the Titanic disaster and to the desires of modern graphical developers and designers to illustrate their methods and skills by continuing to tell the Titanic story. We believe that the Titanic data still have much to offer to graphic designers and visual storytellers.

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Friendly , M. ( 1994 ) Mosaic displays for multi-way contingency tables . Journal of the American Statistical Association , 89 , 190 – 200 .

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A remarkable new view of the Titanic shipwreck is here, thanks to deep-sea mappers

Rachel Treisman

Scientists were able to map the entirety of the shipwreck site, from the Titanic's separated bow and stern sections to its vast debris field. Atlantic/Magellan hide caption

Scientists were able to map the entirety of the shipwreck site, from the Titanic's separated bow and stern sections to its vast debris field.

A deep sea-mapping company has created the first-ever full-sized digital scan of the Titanic, revealing an entirely new view of the world's most famous shipwreck.

The 1912 sinking of the Titanic has captivated the public imagination for over a century. And while there have been numerous expeditions to the wreck since its discovery in 1985, its sheer size and remote position — some 12,500 feet underwater and 400 nautical miles off the coast of Newfoundland, Canada — have made it nearly impossible for anyone to see the full picture.

Until now, that is. Using technology developed by Magellan Ltd., scientists have managed to map the Titanic in its entirety, from its bow and stern sections (which broke apart after sinking) to its 3-by-5-mile debris field.

Newly released footage of a 1986 Titanic dive reveals the ship's haunting interior

The result is an exact "digital twin" of the wreck, media partner Atlantic Productions said in a news release.

"What we've created is a highly accurate photorealistic 3D model of the wreck," 3D capture specialist Gerhard Seiffert says. "Previously footage has only allowed you to see one small area of the wreck at a time. This model will allow people to zoom out and to look at the entire thing for the first time ... This is the Titanic as no one had ever seen it before."

The Titanic site is hard to get to, hard to see and hard to describe, says Jeremy Weirich, the director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Ocean Exploration program (he's been to the site).

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"Imagine you're at the bottom of the ocean, there's no light, you can't see anything, all you have is a flashlight and that beam goes out by 10 feet, that's it," he says. "It's a desert. You're moving along, you don't see anything, and suddenly there's a steel ship in front of you that's the size of a skyscraper and all you can see is the light that's illuminated by your flashlight."

This new imagery helps convey both that sense of scale and level of detail, Weirich tells NPR.

Magellan calls this the largest underwater scanning project in history: It generated an unprecedented 16 terabytes of data and more than 715,000 still images and 4k video footage.

"We believe that this data is approximately ten times larger than any underwater 3D model that's ever been attempted before," said Richard Parkinson, Magellan founder and CEO.

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Experts in Titanic history and deep-sea exploration are hailing the model as an invaluable research tool. They believe it could help scientists and historians solve some of the ship's lingering mysteries — and learn more about other underwater sites, too.

Longtime Titanic explorer and analyst Parks Stephenson described the model as a "game changer" in a phone interview with NPR.

"It takes [us] further into new technology that's going to be the standard, I think, not just for Titanic exploration, but all underwater exploration in the future," he adds.

The effort yielded 16 terabytes of data and more than 715,000 still images, in what Magellan calls the largest underwater scanning project ever. Atlantic/Magellan hide caption

The effort yielded 16 terabytes of data and more than 715,000 still images, in what Magellan calls the largest underwater scanning project ever.

A project years in the making, featuring Romeo and Juliet

Explorers and artists have spent decades trying to depict the Titanic wreck, albeit in lower-tech ways.

After Robert Ballard — along with France's Jean-Louis Michel — discovered the site in 1985, he combined all of his photos to form the first photomosaic of the wreck, which showed the ship's bow and was published in National Geographic. Those efforts have been replicated in the years since.

"But the problem with all that is it requires interpretation," Stephenson says. "It requires human interpretation, and there are gaps in the knowledge."

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Flash forward to the summer of 2022. Scientists spent six weeks capturing scans of the site, using technology that Magellan says it had been developing over the course of five years.

The expedition deployed two submersibles, named Romeo and Juliet, some 2.3 miles below the surface to map every millimeter of the wreck site.

They didn't go inside the ship, let alone touch the site, in accordance with existing regulations, and paid their respects to the more than 1,500 victims with a flower laying ceremony.

And they describe the mission as a challenge, with the team fighting bad weather and technical challenges in the middle of the Atlantic.

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James cameron: diving deep, dredging up titanic.

"When we saw the data come in it was all worth it," Seiffert says. "The level of detail we saw and recorded was extraordinary."

The scientists spent months processing and rendering the data to create the "digital twin," which the company says it's looking forward to sharing publicly.

Stephenson saw an early version of the model, when Atlantic Productions brought him on to consult on its validity. So did Ken Marschall, the maritime artist known for his Titanic paintings.

"We've both seen it with our eyes. We've both seen thousands of digital images of the wreck in imagery, moving imagery," Stephenson said. "But we'd never seen the wreck like this. It was different, but at the same time you just knew it was right."

Experts say the model will be a valuable tool for future Titanic research and deep-sea exploration in general. Atlantic/Magellan hide caption

Experts say the model will be a valuable tool for future Titanic research and deep-sea exploration in general.

There's still a lot left to learn about the Titanic

Can there really be that much left to discover about the Titanic, more than 110 years on?

Stephenson says "at the end of the day, none of this matters." But there's a reason people keep visiting and talking about the wreck, he adds, and it's not because of any buried treasure.

"It's fame, I guess," Stephenson says. "People can't get enough of Titanic. And as long as people can't get enough of the Titanic, people will keep going to ... these mysteries."

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Robert ballard: what hidden underwater worlds are left to discover.

In Stephenson's case, it's the unanswered questions that keep drawing him back.

"I've been grinding away at this for a while, and I'm not on a crusade to dismantle the Titanic narrative that has grown since 1912," he says. "But ... I have had enough experience and seen enough evidence that makes me seriously question even some of the most basic aspects of the Titanic story."

One example: Stephenson says there's reason to doubt the long-accepted conclusion that the ship hit the iceberg along its starboard side. He points to a growing body of evidence that suggests it actually grounded briefly on part of the iceberg that was submerged underwater instead.

Just looking at the preliminary modeling has helped Stephenson bring a lot of his evidence and questions into focus — it may be early days, but he says he already has a better understanding of how the ship's stern came to be in such bad shape.

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Stephenson sees this moment as a paradigm shift in underwater archaeology.

"We're essentially getting to the end of the first generation of Titanic research and exploration, and we're getting ready to transition into the next generation," he says. "And I think this tool basically signals a shift from that generation to the next."

Stephenson wants to use the model to document the extent of Titanic exploration up to this point, from Ballard to James Cameron and beyond. He says a "massive project" is underway, and will hopefully result in a scientific paper and online archive. Then, he plans to use the tool to answer whatever questions remain.

There have been "photomosaics" and other renderings of the shipwreck over the decades, but this is the first such 3D model. Atlantic/Magellan hide caption

There have been "photomosaics" and other renderings of the shipwreck over the decades, but this is the first such 3D model.

The Titanic is a gateway into deep ocean exploration

As a maritime archaeologist, Weirich is most interested in what the ship's condition can teach us about how to better preserve deep-sea shipwrecks in general. For example, how has it impacted the environment since it sunk, and how have the visits since its discovery impacted the site?

The Titanic site has been designated as a maritime memorial, which makes preservation even more important. And Weirich says research on everything from its rate of deterioration to the microbial environment can be applied to other such sites worldwide.

Scientists discover fantastical creatures deep in the Indian Ocean

There are estimated to be hundreds of thousands of wrecks in the world, from ancient wooden ships in the Black Sea to World War II vessels in the Gulf of Mexico, Weirich says.

And this kind of technology could play a crucial role in learning more about deep-sea environments in general, from undersea resources to geological features to unknown species.

Weirich says he hopes these images of the Titanic will give people a greater appreciation for the deep ocean, and a better understanding of just how much is left to explore.

Your Next Car May Be Built With Ocean Rocks. Scientists Can't Agree If That's Good

"The story of Titanic and the shipwreck itself is extremely compelling, but it is a gateway for people to understand what we know and don't know about the deep ocean," he adds.

Weirich remembers being personally captivated by those first images of the shipwreck in National Geographic when he was just 10 years old. That sparked his lifelong interest in ocean exploration — and he hopes young people seeing these latest images are inspired too.

• deep sea exploration

April 4, 2012

Titanic : Resonance and Reality

A century ago a great ship struck an iceberg and sank, earning a permanent place among the stories we tell—and lessons we should learn

By Daniel C. Schlenoff

The tragedy One hundred years ago, during the night of April 14, 1912, the RMS Titanic collided with an iceberg, and in the small hours of the next day went down into the cold Atlantic Ocean with the loss of 1,517 lives.

There have been worse tragedies in history. Some were more violently spectacular, some still govern the daily routines of the survivors. Yet the Titanic disaster has strongly resonated with us for a century. Why? Because it is a tale of humanity as classic as a Greek tragedy. The story has been told and retold for the past century in movies , books , songs and magazine articles. Even James Cameron made a film using the Titanic saga as a backdrop.

Hubris—an excess of pride and confidence—is central to any classical tragedy. The Titanic set out from Queenstown, Ireland, on April 11, 1912, as a grand symbol of modernity and comfort. As she steamed at high speed through the dark of night her captain ignored the Cassandra-like warnings that icebergs lurked nearby, and through hubris the ship collided with one.

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Within the tale of the sinking are interwoven many ( mostly true ) vignettes of human suffering—and also some cathartic scenesof triumph. Benjamin Guggenheim and his valet shucked off their life belts and donned their formal wear, saying, "We've dressed up in our best and are prepared to go down like gentlemen." Thomas Andrews , the designer of the flawed ship, sat forlornly in the opulent smoking lounge awaiting death, perhaps contemplating this awful reversal of fortune. J. Bruce Ismay , chairman of the White Star Line (which owned the Titanic ), quietly slunk into a lifeboat and was later widely excoriated by the public for taking up a place when so many women and children were left to die on his ship. Charles John Joughin , the kitchen staff's chief baker, provides the comic relief in our retelling: He was the last person to step off the sinking ship into the ice-cold water, but was so well-fortified with liquor he survived to be picked up, his hair still dry. The " Unsinkable Molly Brown " was arguably the ship's most famous survivor: she defied convention and in an act of compassion commandeered her lifeboat to go back and look for survivors in the frigid water.

Heroes and villains. The quick and the dead. And all of this pathos communicated to the world by radio and by newspaper within hours of the tragedy.

The reality Over the past century, a more prosaic reality has appeared in our path and the mythic tale has collided with it. Every detail mentioned here has been endlessly disputed (or fabricated) since April 15, 1912. With the growth of the Internet, a host of Titanic experts have become newly obsessed with the details down to the nanoscopic level. Google shows there are now 11 million sites with "Titanic" in the URL. (There are only 1.9 million for "gigantic.")

With every assertion and counterclaim, a pattern emerges, one that is not far different from the one that Scientific American reported  two weeks after the ship went down . Despite some wonderfully creative conspiracy theories that have been floated in the past 100 years, the building and sinking of the ship is a study in failure: of engineering systems, of law, of design, of private profit versus public safety.

Unsinkable The ship was never touted by the White Star Line as unsinkable—the term " practically unsinkable " appeared in a couple of admiring reviews of the ship beforehand and was played up for ironic effect afterward. The perception in the public mind was that the ship exuded modernity and comfort, giving a great impression of solidity and safety—the same way a bank built of solid masonry does even as it founders from unstable finances. The article "Wreck of the White Star Liner Titanic " from Scientific American from April 27, 1912, shows how the ship was designed with safety in mind. Unfortunately the ship was not designed with safety as the first priority . There were watertight doors and bulkheads, but even in 1912 engineers recognized that the bulkheads did not rise high enough—some were only three meters above the waterline. But such barriers cut up the interior space and made it harder to accommodate the easy flow of fare-paying passengers, and so they were discouraged. The ship had a double bottom for safety, but the company decided to save money and interior space and not build double sides. After the sinking, engineers immediately retrofitted the Titanic ’s sister ship Olympic with a double hull.

Lifeboats These days we believe there must have been a special kind of Dionysian madness to send a ship into the ocean without enough lifeboats to carry every soul on board. Early designs for the Titanic did in fact call for 64 lifeboats, but by the time the ship was launched, the company had whittled that complement down to 20.

Astonishingly, the number of boats carried was actually above and beyond what was legally required by the British Board of Trade for seagoing ocean liners. One argument said that a full complement of lifeboats would have made the ship too top-heavy, perhaps risking capsize. Another argument was that in an emergency the lifeboats would not have time to be loaded and launched, especially if the ship was heeling over. But the main reason for dispensing with lifeboats may have been to provide plenty of room for luxurious sundecks and sumptuous parlors for the pleasure of the well-to-do passengers. There were certainly plenty of technical fixes available: the front cover of Scientific American from April 27, 2012 , shows one possible solution of stacking all the boats on the top deck.

Speed in ice fields The Titanic was never designed to be as fast as more powerful competitor ships. A fast first crossing, though, made for good media image and better business for the White Star Line in the highly competitive transatlantic steamer business. Therefore, quite possibly, the chairman of the company, J. Bruce Ismay, pushed the venerable Capt. Edward John Smith to steam ahead with all possible speed. Other ships in the area had radioed that they had seen icebergs, and Smith may have altered course slightly to avoid possible locations of these known hazards, but in the balance between speed and risk, the company line won out. Yet there was no shortage of knowledge about the perils of ice, as you can see from this April 27, 1912, Scientific American article . Sonar was developed within the next two years as a way to avoid icebergs.

The blow For many years it was widely believed that only a giant ripping gash torn by the iceberg could have doomed such a magnificent ship. A " 300-foot gash in the hull " was often mentioned—just like the image we show in our issue from two weeks after the tragedy:

Later calculations looked at the rate with which water flooded the ship during the two hours and 40 minutes it stayed afloat after the collision and showed that "the gash" in reality would have resulted in only slight damage to the hull, perhaps amounting a dozen square meters in total. This deduction was confirmed in 1985 when submersibles imaged the hull of the Titanic resting on the ocean floor four kilometers down. The images revealed several small gashes, or perhaps several hull plates had popped apart giving the illusion of gashes. (Historians have suggested that the wrought iron rivets holding the plates together were not as strong as they should have been.)

Conclusion As the complexity of engineering projects increases exponentially, so does the focus on safety. Within any system there is no danger more potent, more capable of causing harm, than human frailty. In January of 2012 the Costa Concordia, the largest luxury liner built in Italy, manufactured at the Fincantieri shipyards in the ancient seafaring city of Genoa to the highest standards of safety specified by law, struck a reef in the Mediterranean, and partially capsized, killing dozens of people. The ship's captain, Francesco Schettino, seems to have steered his ship onto the rocks in a moment of weakness : The courts and the tabloids as well as armchair experts of the Internet are still disputing whether that weakness had anything to do with a comely 25-year-old Moldovan ex-dancer —and a Roman god called Cupid.

Why the Titanic Still Fascinates Us

One hundred years after the ocean liner struck an iceberg and sank, the tragedy still looms large in the popular psyche

Andrew Wilson

Dorothy Gibson—the 22-year-old silent film star— huddled in a lifeboat, dressed in only a short coat and sweater over an evening gown. She was beginning to shiver.

Ever since it had been launched, at 12:45 a.m., Lifeboat 7 had remained stationed only 20 yards away from the Titanic in case it could be used in a rescue operation. Dorothy and her mother, Pauline, who had been traveling with her, had watched as lifeboat after lifeboat left the vessel, but by just after 2 o’clock it was obvious that the vast majority of its passengers would not be able to escape from the liner. Realizing that the ship’s sinking was imminent, lookout George Hogg ordered that Lifeboat 7 be rowed away from the Titanic . The risk of being sucked down was high, he thought, and so the passengers and crew manning the oars rowed as hard as they could across the pitch-black sea. Dorothy could not take her eyes off the ship, its bow now underwater, its stern rising up into the sky.

“Suddenly there was a wild coming together of voices from the ship and we noticed an unusual commotion among the people about the railing,” she said. “Then the awful thing happened, the thing that will remain in my memory until the day I die.”

Dorothy listened as 1,500 people cried out to be saved, a noise she described as a horrific mixture of yells, shrieks and moans. This was counterpointed by a deeper sound emanating from under the water, the noise of explosions that she likened to the terrific power of Niagara Falls. “No one can describe the frightful sounds,” she remembered later.

Before stepping onto the Titanic , Dorothy Gibson had already transformed herself from an ordinary New Jersey girl into a model for the famous illustrator Harrison Fisher—whose lush images of idealized American beauty graced the covers of popular magazines—and then into a star of the silent screen.

By the spring of 1912, Dorothy was feeling so overworked that she pleaded with her employers at the Éclair studios in Fort Lee, New Jersey, to grant her a holiday. The days were long, and she realized that, in effect, there was “very little of the glamour connected with movie stars.” She may have been earning $175 a week—the equivalent of nearly $4,000 today—but she was exhausted; she even went so far as to consider quitting the studio. “I was feeling very run down and everyone insisted I go away for a while,” she recalled later. “So Mr. Brulatour made arrangements for me to have a wondrous holiday abroad. It seemed the ideal solution.” (Her married 42-year-old lover, Éclair’s Jules Brulatour, was one of the most powerful producers in the film industry.)

Dorothy and her mother sailed for Europe on March 17, 1912, with an itinerary that was to include not only the capitals of the Continent, but also Algiers and Egypt. However, when they arrived in Genoa from Venice on April 8, they received a telegram at their hotel requesting that Dorothy return to America. An emergency had arisen at the studio; she was needed to start work at once on a series of films. Although she had been away for only three weeks, she had benefited from the change of scene—she said she felt “like a new woman”—and cabled back to tell the studio of her plans. After a brief stopover in Paris, she would sail back to New York from Cherbourg on April 10.

There was silence in the lifeboat. “No one said a word,” recalled Dorothy. “There was nothing to say and nothing we could do.” Faced with the bitter cold and increasingly choppy seas, Dorothy had to acknowledge the possibility that she might not last the night. Had the wireless operators managed to send out a distress signal and call for the help of any nearby ships? The possibility that they could drift for miles in the middle of the harsh Atlantic for days on end was suddenly very real.

As dawn broke on April 15, the passengers in Lifeboat 7 saw a row of lights and a dark cloud of smoke in the distance.“Warming ourselves as best we could in the cramped quarters of the lifeboat, we watched that streak of black smoke grow larger and larger,” recalled Dorothy. “And then we were able to discern the hull of a steamship heading in our direction.”

The men on the lifeboat, now with hands numbed by cold, rowed with extra vigor toward the Carpathia , which had picked up Titanic ’s distress signals and had traveled 58 miles in an effort to rescue its survivors. As the sun cast its weak early-morning light across the sea, Dorothy noticed a few green cushions floating in the ocean; she recognized them as being from the sofas on the Titanic . The morning light—which soon became bright and fierce—also revealed the numerous icebergs that crowded around them.

At around 6 o’clock the lifeboat carrying Dorothy Gibson drew up alongside the Carpathia . A few moments later, after she had climbed the rope ladder that had been lowered down from above, she found herself on deck. Still wearing her damp, wind-swept evening gown, Dorothy was approached by Carpathia passengers James Russell Lowell and his wife, and asked whether she would like to share their cabin. After eating breakfast, she retired to their quarters, where she slept for the next 26 hours.

Jules Brulatour had always intended to send a film crew to the pier to record Dorothy’s arrival in New York; he was one of the first to realize that the newsreel could be used as a powerful publicity tool and that the star’s return to America on board the world’s most famous rescue ship would help boost box-office numbers. But suddenly he found himself with an extraordinary story on his hands. Information about the loss of the Titanic was in short supply—initially some newspapers had claimed that all its passengers had survived. Capt. Arthur Rostron of the Carpathia had placed a blanket ban on information from the vessel being leaked to the news media—the wireless service could be used, he said, only for communication with the authorities and for relay of messages between survivors and their families, as well as the task of providing a list of which of the Titanic ’s passengers had perished.

As the Carpathia sailed into New York—on the stormy night of Thursday, April 18—it was surrounded by a mass of tiny vessels, all chartered by news corporations desperate to break what would be one of the biggest stories of modern times. From their tugs, reporters shouted through megaphones offering terrific sums of money for information and exclusives, but Captain Rostron said he would shoot any pressmen who dared venture aboard his ship.

However, one of his original passengers, Carlos F. Hurd, was a veteran journalist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch , and over the course of the past four days he had spoken to many survivors, amassing enough information for a 5,000-word story. Hurd’s only problem was how to get the report off the ship. He managed to send a wireless message to a friend at the New York Evening World , which, in turn, chartered a tug to sail to the Carpathia . Out of sight of the captain, Hurd stuffed his manuscript into an oilskin bag, which he then threw down to the waiting boat. The final edition of the New York Evening World , published on April 18, carried a digest of Hurd’s report, which was published in full the next morning. The story—“ Titanic Boilers Blew up, Breaking Her in Two After Striking Berg”—began: “Fifteen hundred lives—the figures will hardly vary in either direction by more than a few dozen—were lost in the sinking of the Titanic , which struck an iceberg at 11:45 p.m., Sunday, and was at the ocean’s bottom two hours and thirty-five minutes after.”

As Dorothy Gibson stood on the deck of the Carpathia , the night was so black that she could hardly make out the skyline of New York. Unknown to her, thousands of people had come out that rainy night to witness the arrival of the Carpathia . Dorothy “ran crying down the ramp” into the arms of her stepfather, soon followed by her mother. Leonard Gibson ushered his stepdaughter and wife through the crowd and into a taxi and whisked them off to a New York restaurant. But there was only one thing on Dorothy’s mind—her lover, Brulatour. She realized that it would have been inappropriate for him to meet her at the pier—this would have given rise to scandal—but she desperately needed to see him. After a couple of hours, she drove to the hotel where she had arranged to meet him.

That night Brulatour presented her with an engagement ring—a cluster of diamonds worth $1,000—and a plan: to make a dramatic one-reel film of her survival. Soon, he said, she would not only be his wife, but she would be more famous than ever before. The loss of the Titanic would make both things possible.

The public’s appetite for information and details—accounts of suffering, bravery, self-sacrifice and selfishness—seemed insatiable, and Brulatour at first took advantage of it by employing the relatively new medium of newsreel. His footage of the docking of the Carpathia —which was spliced together with scenes of Capt. Edward J. Smith, who had been lost in the disaster, walking on the bridge of the Titanic ’s sister ship, the Olympic , and shots of icebergs from the area where the liner sank, together with images of the launching of the liner—premiered in East Coast theaters on April 22. Not only was Brulatour’s Animated Weekly newsreel “the first on the scene with specially chartered tugboats and an extra relay of cameramen,” according to Billboard magazine, but it also showed that “the motion picture may fairly equal the press in bringing out a timely subject and one of startling interest to the public at large.”

Brulatour hyped the newsreel as “the most famous film in the whole world,” and so it proved, packing theaters across America over the following weeks. The pioneering movie mogul organized a private screening for Guglielmo Marconi—the inventor of the wireless technology that had played a central part in the Titanic story—and gave a copy of the film to President William Howard Taft, whose close friend Maj. Archie Butt had died in the sinking. Spurred on by the success of his Animated Weekly feature, Brulatour decided to go ahead with a silent film based on the disaster, starring his lover, authentic Titanic survivor Dorothy Gibson.

Within a few days of her arrival in New York, Dorothy had sketched out a rough outline for a story. She would play Miss Dorothy, a young woman traveling in Europe who is due to return to America on the Titanic to marry her sweetheart, Ensign Jack, in service with the U.S. Navy.

Shooting began almost immediately at the Fort Lee studio and on location on board a derelict freighter that lay in New York Harbor. She was clad in the same outfit she had worn the night she had escaped the sinking ship—a white silk evening dress, a sweater, an overcoat and black pumps.The verisimilitude of the experience was overwhelming. This wasn’t so much acting, in its conventional form at least, as replaying. Dorothy drew on her memory and shaped it into a reconstruction.

When the film was released, on May 16, 1912, just a month after the sinking, it was celebrated for its technical realism and emotional power. “The startling story of the world’s greatest sea disaster is the sensation of the country,” stated the Moving Picture News . “Miss Dorothy Gibson, a heroine of the shipwreck and one of the most talked-of survivors, tells in this motion picture masterpiece of the enthralling tragedy among the icebergs.” (The actual film no longer survives.)

“The nation and the world had been profoundly grieved by the sinking of the Titanic ,” she said, “and I had the opportunity to pay tribute to those who gave their lives on that awful night. That is all I tried to do.” In truth, the experience had left her feeling hollow, disassociated from her reality. Soon after the release of Saved from the Titanic , Dorothy walked out of her dressing room at the Fort Lee studios and turned her back on the movie business. She was, she stated, “dissatisfied.”

At some point during the summer or autumn of 1912—just as Brulatour was forming, with Carl Laemmle, the Universal Film Manufacturing Company, later to become Universal Pictures—Brulatour’s wife, Clara, finally decided to bring the farce that was her marriage to an end. After scandalous and protracted divorce proceedings, Gibson married Brulatour on July 6, 1917, in New York. It soon became obvious that whatever spark they had between them had been kept alive by the illicit nature of the relationship. The couple divorced in 1923.

Dorothy fled to Europe, where her mother had already settled. Ensconced in Paris, she had enough money from her alimony for everyday luxuries such as cocktails and champagne and entertained a wide range of bohemian friends including the writers Colette, H.G. Wells and James Joyce. “Oh my, what a time I am having!” she told a journalist in 1934. “I never cared much for motion pictures, you see, and I am too glad to be free of that work. I tell you it was an immense burden. I have had my share of troubles, as you know, but since coming to France, I have recovered from that and feel happy at last. Who could not be deliriously happy in this country? I have such fun. But I fear it cannot go on like this always. I have had my dream life, and am sure that someday a dark cloud will come and wash it all away!”

The shadow she feared would destroy her dream life was World War II. In May 1940, Dorothy was in Florence to collect her mother and bring her back to France when Germany invaded Holland and Belgium. It would still have been possible for the two women to return to America. The reason they didn’t? Certainly their experience on the Titanic was a factor. “I must say I never wanted to make the Ocean trip to America at this time,” said Dorothy later in an affidavit, “as my mother and I were most timid on the ocean—we had been in a shipwreck—but I also never wanted to stay in Italy, but we just waited in Italy always hoping things would be better to travel.”

Trying to make sense of Dorothy’s life from this point onward is a difficult task. In the spring of 1944, while still in Florence with her mother, she was informed by the questura , the Italian police, that she would be taken to the German-controlled Fossoli internment center. She tried to escape, but on April 16 was arrested and taken to a Nazi concentration camp. After being moved around various camps, she was imprisoned at San Vittore, which she described as a “living death.” It’s most likely that Gibson would have died in this camp had it not been for the machinations of a double agent, Ugo Luca Osteria, known as Dr. Ugo, who wanted to infiltrate Allied intelligence in Switzerland (something he subsequently failed to do). Gibson was smuggled out of the camp under the pretense that she was a Nazi sympathizer and spy. Although the plan worked—she did escape and crossed into Switzerland—the experience left her understandably drained. After interrogation in Zurich, where she gave an affidavit to James G. Bell, vice consul of the American consulate general, she was judged too stupid to have been a genuine spy. In Bell’s words, Dorothy “hardly seems bright enough to be useful in such capacity.”

Dorothy tried to resume a normal life after this episode, but the trauma of her survival—first the Titanic , then a concentration camp—took its toll. After the war ended in 1945, she returned to Paris and enjoyed a few months at the Ritz, where, on February 17, 1946, she died in her suite, probably from a heart attack, at age 56.

The sinking of the world’s most famous ship generated three waves of Titanic mania. The first, as we have seen, hit popular consciousness immediately after the disaster, resulting in Brulatour’s newsreel, Dorothy Gibson’s film Saved from the Titanic , a clutch of books written by survivors, poems like Edwin Drew’s “The Chief Incidents of the Titanic Wreck” (published in May 1912) and Thomas Hardy’s “The Convergence of the Twain” (June 1912), and a flurry of songs (112 different pieces of music inspired by the loss of the Titanic were copyrighted in America in 1912 alone).

The First World War, and then the Second quieted the Titanic storm; the loss of hundreds of thousands of men on the battlefields of Europe, the whole-scale destruction of cities and communities around the world, and Hitler’s single-minded plan to wipe out an entire race of people, together with other “undesirables,” placed the sinking of the ship, with its death toll of 1,500, toward the bottom end of the league of global tragedies.

The mid-1950s is generally considered to represent the second wave of Titanic fever. In the midst of the cold war—when there was a perceived threat that, at any moment, the world could end in nuclear Armageddon—the Titanic represented a containable, understandable tragedy. A mist of nostalgia hung over the disaster—nostalgia for a society that maintained fixed roles, in which each man and woman knew his or her place; for a certain gentility, or at least an imagined gentility, by which people behaved according to a strict set of rules; for a tragedy that gave its participants time to consider their fates.

The first full-scale movie representation of the disaster in the ’50s was a melodrama called simply Titanic , starring one of the ruling queens of the “woman’s picture,” Barbara Stanwyck. She plays Julia Sturges, a woman in the midst of an emotional crisis. Trapped in an unhappy marriage to a cold but wealthy husband, Richard (Clifton Webb), she boards the Titanic with the intention of stealing their two children away from him.

The film, directed by Jean Negulesco, was not so much about the loss of the liner as the loss, and subsequent rekindling, of love. If the scenario—a broken marriage, a devious plan to separate children from their father, a revelation surrounding true parenthood—wasn’t melodramatic enough, the charged emotional setting of the Titanic was used to heighten the sentiment.

It would be easy to assume that the plotline of the abducted children in producer and screenwriter Charles Brackett’s Titanic was nothing more than the product of a Hollywood screenwriter’s overheated imagination. Yet the story had its roots in real life. Immediately after the Carpathia docked in New York, it came to light that on board the liner were two young French boys—Lolo (Michel) and Momon (Edmond)—who had been kidnapped by their father (traveling on the Titanic under the assumed name Louis Hoffman). Fellow second-class passenger Madeleine Mellenger, who was 13 at the time, remembered the two dark-haired boys, one aged nearly 4, the other 2. “They sat at our table . . . and we wondered where their mamma was,” she said. “It turned out that he [the father] was taking them away from ‘mamma’ to America.” In an interview later in his life, Michel recalled the majesty of the Titanic . “A magnificent ship!” he said. “I remember looking down the length of the hull—the ship looked splendid. My brother and I played on the forward deck and were thrilled to be there. One morning, my father, my brother, and I were eating eggs in the second-class dining room. The sea was stunning. My feeling was one of total and utter well-being.” On the night of the sinking, he remembered his father entering their cabin and gently awakening the two boys. “He dressed me very warmly and took me in his arms,” he said. “A stranger did the same for my brother. When I think of it now, I am very moved. They knew they were going to die.”

Despite this, the man calling himself Louis Hoffman—real name Michel Navratil—did everything in his power to help fellow passengers safely into the boats. “The last kindness . . . [he] did was to put my new shoes on and tie them for me,” recalled Madeleine. She escaped to safety with her mother in Lifeboat 14, leaving the sinking ship at 1:30 a.m., but Michel Navratil had to wait until 2:05 a.m. to place his sons in Collapsible D, the last boat to be lowered. Witnesses recall seeing the man they knew as Hoffman crouching on his knees, ensuring that each of his boys was wrapped up warmly.

As he handed his elder son over to Second Officer Charles Herbert Lightoller, who was responsible for loading the boat, Michel stepped back, raised his hand in a salute and disappeared into the crowd on the port side of the ship. His son Michel later recalled the feel of the lifeboat hitting the water. “I remember the sound of the splash, and the sensation of shock, as the little boat shivered in its attempt to right itself after its irregular descent,” he said.

After the Carpathia docked in New York, the two boys became instantly famous. Journalists dubbed the boys the “Orphans of the Deep” or the “Waifs of the Titanic ” and within days their pictures were featured in every newspaper in America. Back in Nice, Marcelle Navratil, desperate to know about the fate of her children, appealed to the British and French consulates. She showed the envoys a photograph of Michel, and when it was learned that Thomas Cook and Sons in Monte Carlo had sold a second-class ticket to a Louis Hoffman—a name Navratil had borrowed from one of their neighbors in Nice—she began to understand what her estranged husband had done.

The White Star Line promptly offered their mother a complimentary passage to New York on the Oceanic , leaving Cherbourg on May 8. Only a matter of weeks later, Marcelle Navratil arrived in New York. A taxi took her to the Children’s Aid Society, which had been besieged by photographers and reporters. According to a New York Times account, “The windows of the building opposite were lined with interested groups of shopworkers who had got wind of what was happening across the way and who were craning their necks and gesticulating wildly toward a window on the fifth floor where the children were believed to be.” The young mother was allowed to greet her boys alone. She found Michel sitting in a corner of the room, in the window seat, turning the pages of an illustrated alphabet book. Edmond was on the floor, playing with the pieces of a puzzle.

When she entered, the boys looked anxious, but then, as they recognized their mother, a “growing wonder spread over the face of the bigger boy, while the smaller one stared in amazement at the figure in the doorway. He let out one long-drawn and lusty wail and ran blubbering into the outstretched arms of his mother. The mother was trembling with sobs and her eyes were dim with tears as she ran forward and seized both youngsters.”

Although he passed away on January 30, 2001, at the age of 92, the last male survivor of the Titanic disaster, Michel always said, “I died at 4. Since then I have been a fare-dodger of life. A gleaner of time.”

One of the most forthright and determined of the real Titanic voices belonged to Edith Russell, the then 32-year-old first-class passenger who had managed to get aboard one of the lifeboats, still clutching a possession she regarded as her lucky talisman—a toy musical pig that played the pop tune “La Maxixe.”

Edith, a fashion buyer, journalist and stylist, had contacted producer Charles Brackett when she had first learned that the Barbara Stanwyck film was going to be made, outlining her experiences and offering her services. The letter elicited no response, as Brackett had decided not to speak to any individual survivors. The filmmakers were more interested in constructing their own story, one that would meet all the criteria of melodrama without getting bogged down by the real-life experiences of people like Edith.

The production team did, however, invite her—and a number of other survivors—to a preview of Titanic in New York in April 1953. It was an emotional experience for many of them, not least third-class passengers Leah Aks, who had been 18 at the time of the disaster, and her son, Philip, who had been only 10 months old. Edith recalled how, in the panic, the baby Philip had been torn out of his mother’s arms and thrown into her lifeboat. Leah tried to push her way into this vessel, but was directed into the next lifeboat to leave the ship. Edith had done her best to comfort the baby during that long, cold night in the middle of the Atlantic—repeatedly playing the tune of “La Maxixe” by twisting the tail of her toy pig—before they were rescued.

The reunion brought all these memories back. “The baby, amongst other babies, for whom I played my little pig music box to the tune of ‘Maxixe’ was there,” said Edith of the screening. “He [Philip] is forty-one years old, is a rich steel magnate from Norfolk, Virginia.”

Edith enjoyed the event, she said, and had the opportunity of showing off the little musical pig, together with the dress she had worn on the night of the disaster. Edith congratulated Brackett on the film, yet, as a survivor, she said she had noticed some obvious errors. “There was a rather glaring inadequacy letting people take seats in the lifeboat as most of them had to get up on the rail and jump into the boat which swung clear of the side of the boat,” she said. “The boat also went down with the most awful rapidity. It fairly shot into the water whereas yours gracefully slid into the water.” Despite these points, she thought the film was “splendid”—she conceded he had done a “good job”—and, above all, it brought the night alive once more. “It gave me a heartache and I could still see the sailors changing the watches, crunching over the ice and going down to stoke those engines from where they never returned,” she said.

After the melodrama of the Titanic film—the movie won an Academy Award in 1953 for its screenplay—the public wanted to know more about the doomed liner. The demand was satisfied by Walter Lord, a bespectacled advertising copywriter who worked for J. Walter Thompson in New York. As a boy, Lord, the son of a Baltimore lawyer, had sailed on the Titanic ’s sister ship, the Olympic . With an almost military precision—Lord had worked as both a code clerk in Washington and as an intelligence analyst in London during World War II—he amassed a mountain of material about the ship, and, most important, managed to locate, and interview, more than 60 survivors. The resulting book, A Night to Remember , is a masterpiece of restraint and concision, a work of narrative nonfiction that captures the full drama of the sinking. On its publication in the winter of 1955, the book was an immediate success—entering the New York Times best-seller list at Number 12 in the week of December 11—and since then has never been out of print. “In the creation of the Titanic myth there were two defining moments,” wrote one commentator, “1912, of course, and 1955.”

The publication of A Night to Remember —together with its serialization in the magazine Ladies’ Home Journal in November 1955—had an immediate effect on the remaining survivors, almost as if the Titanic had been raised from the murky depths of their collective consciousness.

Madeleine Mellenger wrote to Lord himself, telling him of her emotions when the Carpathia pulled into New York. “The noise, commotion and searchlights terrified me,” she said. “I stood on the deck directly under the rigging on which Captain Arthur Rostron climbed to yell orders thru’ a megaphone....I live it all over again and shall walk around in a daze for a few days.” Memories of the experience came back in flashes—the generosity of an American couple, honeymooners on board the Carpathia , who gave her mother, who was shoeless, a pair of beautiful French bedroom slippers, which were knitted and topped with big pink satin bows; and the horror of being forced to spend what seemed like an eternity in a cabin with a woman, Jane Laver Herman, who had lost her husband in the sinking.

Walter Lord became a receptacle into which survivors could spill their memories and fears. He, in turn, collected survivors’ tales, and memorabilia such as buttons, menus, tickets and silver spoons, with a near-obsessive passion, hoarding information about the Titanic ’s passengers long after he had sent his book off to the publishers.

There was a rush to transfer Lord’s book to the screen, first in an American TV drama made by Kraft Television Theatre, which had an audience of 28 million when it aired in March 1956, and then in a big-budget British movie, which would be released in 1958. The rights to the book were bought by William MacQuitty, an Irish-born producer who, like Walter Lord, had been fascinated by the Titanic since he was a boy. As a child, growing up in Belfast, he remembered teams of 20 draft horses pulling the liner’s enormous anchors through the cobbled streets of the city, from the foundry to the Harland and Wolff shipyard.

MacQuitty chose Roy Baker as director, Eric Ambler as scriptwriter and Walter Lord as a consultant on the project. The overall effect MacQuitty wanted to achieve was one of near-documentary realism. Art director Alex Vetchinsky employed his obsessive eye for detail to recreate the Titanic itself. Working from original blueprints of the ship, Vetchinsky built the center third of the liner, including two funnels and four lifeboats, an undertaking that required 4,000 tons of steel. This was constructed above a concrete platform, which had to be strong enough to support the “ship” and the surging mass of hundreds of passengers who were shown clinging to the rails to the very last.

Survivor Edith Russell still felt possessive of the Titanic story—she believed it was hers alone to tell—and she wanted to exploit it for all it was worth. She and Lord met in March 1957 at a lunch given by MacQuitty at a Hungarian restaurant in London. The gentleman writer and the grand lady of fashion hit it off immediately, drawn together by a shared passion for the Titanic and a sense of nostalgia, a longing for an era that had died somewhere between the sinking of the majestic liner and the beginning of World War I. Driven by an equally obsessive interest in the subject, Lord fueled Edith’s compulsion, and over the course of the next few years he sent her a regular supply of information, articles and gossip regarding the ship and its passengers.

Edith made regular visits to Pinewood, the film studio near London, to check on the production’s progress. Even though Edith was not employed on the project, MacQuitty was wise enough to realize there was little point in making an enemy of her.

As Edith aged, she became even more eccentric. When she died, on April 4, 1975, she was 96 years old. The woman who defined herself by the very fact that she had escaped the Titanic left behind a substantial inheritance and a slew of Titanic stories. To Walter Lord she pledged her famous musical pig. When Lord died in May 2002, he in turn left it to the National Maritime Museum, which also holds Edith’s unpublished manuscript, “ A Pig and a Prayer Saved Me from the Titanic .”

In the years after A Night to Remembe r, the storm that had gathered around the Titanic seemed to abate, despite the best efforts of the Titanic Enthusiasts of America, the organization formed in 1963 with the purpose of “investigating and perpetuating the history and memory of the White Star liners, Olympic , Titanic , and Britannic .” The group, which later renamed itself the Titanic Historical Society, produced a quarterly newsletter, the Titanic Commutator , which over the years was transformed into a glossy journal. Yet, at this time, the membership comprised a relatively small group of specialists, maritime history buffs and a clutch of survivors. By September 1973, when the group held its tenth anniversary meeting, the society had a membership of only 250. The celebration, held in Greenwich, Connecticut, was attended by 88-year-old Edwina Mackenzie, who had sailed on the Titanic as 27-year-old second-class passenger Edwina Troutt. After more than 60 years she still remembered seeing the liner sink, “one row of lighted portholes after another, gently like a lady,” she said.

Many people assumed that, after 50 years, the liner, and the myths surrounding it, would finally be allowed to rest in peace. But in the early hours of September 1, 1985, oceanographer and underwater archaeologist Robert Ballard from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution—together with French explorer Jean-Louis Michel from the French organization Ifremer—discovered the wreck of the Titanic lying at a depth of roughly two and half miles, and around 370 miles southeast of Mistaken Point, Newfoundland. “The Titanic lies now in 13,000 feet of water on a gently sloping Alpine-looking countryside overlooking a small canyon below,” said Ballard, on returning to America a number of days later. “Its bow faces north. The ship sits upright on its bottom with its mighty stacks pointed upward. There is no light at this great depth and little life can be found. It is a quiet and peaceful place—and a fitting place for the remains of this greatest of sea tragedies to rest. Forever may it remain that way. And may God bless these now-found souls.”

The world went Titanic -crazy once more, a frenzy that was even more intense than the previous bouts of fever. There was something almost supernatural about the resulting pictures and films, as if a photographer had managed to capture images of a ghost for the first time.

Within a couple of years of Ballard’s discovery, wealthy tourists could pay thousands of dollars to descend to the site of the wreck and see the Titanic for themselves, an experience that many likened to stepping into another world. Journalist William F. Buckley Jr. was one of the first observers outside the French and American exploratory teams to witness the ship at close quarters. “We descend slowly to what looks like a yellow-white sandy beach, sprinkled with black rocklike objects,” he wrote in the New York Times . “These, it transpires, are pieces of coal. There must be 100,000 of them in the area we survey, between the bow of the ship and the stern, a half-mile back. On my left is a man’s outdoor shoe. Left shoe. Made, I would say, of suede of some sort. I cannot quite tell whether it is laced up. And then, just off to the right a few feet, a snow-white teacup. Just sitting there...on the sand. I liken the sheer neatness of the tableau to a display that might have been prepared for a painting by Salvador Dali.”

Over the course of the next few years, around 6,000 artifacts were recovered from the wreck, sent to a specialist laboratory in France and subsequently exhibited. The shows—the first of which was held at the National Maritime Museum in London in 1994— proved to be enormous crowd-pleasers. Touring exhibitions such as “Titanic Honour and Glory” and “Titanic: The Artifact Exhibition” have been seen by millions of people all around the world. Items on display include a silver pocket watch, its hands stopped at 2:28 a.m., the time the Titanic was sinking into the ice-cold waters of the Atlantic; the Steiff teddy bear belonging to senior engineer William Moyes, who went down with the ship; the perfume vials belonging to Adolphe Saalfeld, a Manchester perfumer, who survived the disaster and who would have been astonished to learn that it was still possible to smell the scent of orange blossom and lavender nearly 100 years later. There were cut-crystal decanters etched with the swallowtail flag of the White Star Line; the white jacket of Athol Broome, a 30-year-old steward who did not survive; children’s marbles scooped up from the seafloor; brass buttons bearing the White Star insignia; a selection of silver serving plates and gratin dishes; a pair of spectacles; and a gentleman’s shaving kit. These objects of everyday life brought the great ship—and its passengers—back to life as never before.

Millvina Dean first became a Titanic celebrity at the age of 3 months when she, together with her mother, Georgette Eva, and her brother, Bertram, known as Vere, traveled back after the disaster to England on board the Adriatic . Passengers were so curious to see, hold and have their photographs taken with the baby girl that stewards had to impose a queuing system. “She was the pet of the liner during the voyage,” reported the Daily Mirror at the time, “and so keen was the rivalry between women to nurse this lovable mite of humanity that one of the officers decreed that first- and second-class passengers might hold her in turn for no more than ten minutes.”

After returning to Britain, Millvina grew up to lead what, at first sight, seems to be an uneventful life. Then, Ballard made his discovery. “Nobody knew about me and the Titanic , to be honest, nobody took any interest, so I took no interest either,” she said. “But then they found the wreck, and after they found the wreck, they found me.”

This was followed in 1997 by the release of James Cameron’s blockbuster film, Titanic , starring Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio as two lovers from vastly different backgrounds who meet on board the doomed ship. Suddenly, in old age, Millvina was famous once more. “The telephone rang all day long,” she told me. “I think I spoke to every radio station in England. Everybody wanted interviews. Then I wished I had never been on the Titanic , it became too much at times.”

Of course, Millvina had no memories of the disaster—she was only 9 weeks old at the time—but this did not seem to bother either her legion of fans or the mass media. As the last living survivor of the Titanic Mill­vina Dean became an emblem for every survivor. She stood as a symbol of courage, dignity, strength and endurance in the face of adversity. The public projected on to her a range of emotions and fantasies. In their eyes, she became part Millvina Dean and part Rose DeWitt Bukater, the fictional heroine in Cameron’s film, who, in old age, is played by the elderly Gloria Stuart. “Are you ready to go back to Titanic ?” asks modern-day treasure hunter Brock Lovett, played by Bill Paxton. “Will you share it with us?” Rose stands in front of one of the monitors on board Lovett’s ship, her hand reaching out to touch the grainy images of the wreck sent up from the bottom of the ocean. For a moment it all seems too much for her as she breaks down in tears, but she is determined to carry on. “It’s been 84 years and I can still smell the fresh paint,” she says. “The china had never been used, the sheets had never been slept in. Titanic was called the ship of dreams and it was, it really was.”

In the same way, Millvina was often asked to repeat her story of that night, but her account was secondhand, most of it pieced together from what her mother had told her, along with fragments from newspapers and magazines.

“All I really know is that my parents were on the ship,” she told me. “We were emigrating to Wichita, Kansas, where my father wanted to open a tobacconist’s shop—and one night we were in bed. My father heard a crash and he went up to see what it was about. He came back and said, ‘Get the children out of bed and on deck as quickly as possible.’ I think that saved our lives because we were in third class and so many people thought the ship to be unsinkable. I was put in a sack because I was too small to hold and rescued by the Carpathia , which took us back to New York. We stayed there for a few weeks, before traveling back to Britain. My mother never talked about it, and I didn’t know anything about the Titanic until I was 8 years old and she married again. But from then on, the Titanic was, for the most part, never mentioned.”

The Titanic came to represent a ship of dreams for Millvina, a vessel that would take her on a surreal journey. She transformed herself not only into a celebrity but also, as she freely admitted, into a piece of “living history.” “For many people I somehow represent the Titanic ,” she said.

After a short illness, Millvina died on May 31, 2009; at 97, she had been the last survivor of the Titanic .

A few weeks after the Titanic disaster, Thomas Hardy wrote “The Convergence of the Twain,” his famous poem about the conjunction between the sublime iceberg and the majestic liner. First published in Fortnightly Review in June 1912, it articulates the “intimate wedding” between a natural phenomenon and a symbol of the machine age. The marriage of the “shape of ice” and the “smart ship” is described as a “consummation,” a grotesque union that “jars two hemispheres.” One hundred years after the sinking we are still feeling the aftershocks of the wreck as the “twin halves” of this “august event” continue to fascinate and disturb us in equal measure.

Indeed, the disaster has become so invested with mythical status—it’s been said that the name Titanic is the third most widely recognized word in the world, after “God” and “Coca-Cola”—that it almost seems to be a constant, an event that repeats itself on a never-ending loop.

Andrew Wilson , based in London, drew on unpublished sources and archival research for his new book on the Titanic saga.

Copyright © 2012 by Andrew Wilson. From the forthcoming book Shadow of the Titanic by Andrew Wilson to be published by Atria Books, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. Printed by permission.

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What the Titanic Reveals About Class and Life Expectancy

The recent anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic reminds us of the serious and often-roundabout influence  socioeconomic status  can have on public health.  In general, socioeconomic status is a primary determinant of health , even when we think a specific group of people is being treated fairly or prioritized. Differential mortality as a result of socioeconomic status has been consistently documented. Notably Evelyn Kitagawa and Philip Hauser conducted a  seminal study  finding difference in mortality strongly correlated to socioeconomic status, specifically education and income. Disparities in class impacts access to healthy food, the built and natural environments, job security, social inclusion, early childhood development and more, subsequently dictating a hierarchy of health.

So how did class affect mortality on a sinking ship, which would seem to be a profound, if unfortunate, equalizer? Common knowledge has it that women and children were evacuated of the sinking ship first, but this is only partially true. Women and children were indeed evacuated first, but not all women and children were given the same priority and opportunity to evacuate the sinking ship. Survival was not only based on gender or age but also class.

In fact, the death rate for all individuals on the Titanic decreased as socioeconomic status and cabin class increased (as you might recall from a certain film ). The majority of children who died were in third class. Even in exceptional circumstances (like being on the sinking Titanic), socioeconomic status haunted the life expectancy of the passengers. From long before the Titanic began its voyage—from the moment the individuals were born—it would seem their life expectancy was predetermined.

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Class cabins were linked with the likelihood of death, but a closer reading can help us understand that this relationship is not isolated to the Titanic. If we applied a “social determinants of health” lens to catastrophic events like the sinking of the Titanic we could better understand how closely life expectancy is tied to social class. Popular discourse in health education often offloads onus on individuals. But individuals do not dictate their social location from birth.

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For the three organizations that partnered in the discovery, it proved the capabilities of new camera and sonar systems. Both Argo and SAR were undergoing sea trials and were not yet in final form. The primary mission of both French and American cruises was to conduct deep-water engineering tests, and finding Titanic was a secondary but dramatic bonus. The tests were significant advances in the development of the Argo/Jason system at WHOI for the US ocean research community, but were lost in the media attention given to the wreck’s discovery.

Argo, designed for large-area imaging of the ocean floor, returned to sea in December 1985 for its first scientific application following the successful test cruise to Titanic. Dr. Robert Ballard, who studied the mountains beneath the sea known as the mid-ocean ridge system, and his colleagues returned to sea and surveyed a 120-mile section of the East Pacific Rise, a submarine mountain range between San Diego and Manzanillo, Mexico. The East Pacific Rise is part of the 45,000-mile mid-ocean ridge, the world's largest geological feature covering some 23 percent of the planet’s surface. Since the first major efforts to study this system began in 1973, scientists had seen only some 50 miles of the ridge system, about one-half of one percent. The Argo survey in December 1985 nearly equaled the previous twelve years of work in just 20 days. Approximately 170 hours of videotape of the East Pacific Rise were taken during the cruise, confirming Argo's tremendous imaging capabilities and value to ocean exploration.

"Finding the Titanic is a dramatic demonstration of our present capability to explore the ocean depths for scientific purposes," Institution Director John H. Steele said of the Titanic discovery in 1985. "It has taken years of work by dedicated engineers and will prove its value to science and the nation in the years ahead."

The discovery team leaders from left to right Jean-Louis Michel (IFREMER), Lt. George Ray (US Navy), Jean Jerry (IFREMER), Bob Ballard and Bernard Pillaud (IFREMER). (© National Geographic)

The discovery team poses on the R/V Knorr. (© National Geographic)

Team leaders Bob Ballard of WHOI and Jean Louis Michel of IFREMER researched the history of the Titanic disaster and had a thorough knowledge of the ship and of previous efforts to find Titanic. They narrowed the search field to 100 square miles and planned a two-phased strategy. (© Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)

The search area is bisected from northeast to southwest by a submarine valley with many tributaries called Titanic Canyon. The geologic features in the area could obscure Titanic from sonar detection—providing confusing echoes. The strategy was to search in a methodical, overlapping pattern about 800 meters (1/2 mile) apart. This approach has been termed “mowing the lawn.” (©Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)

Watch CBS News

Stunning new digital scans of the Titanic reveal unprecedented views of the iconic shipwreck

By Emmet Lyons

May 17, 2023 / 9:39 AM EDT / CBS News

Brand new images of the Titanic reveal unprecedented views of the shipwreck and may shed new light on how the iconic liner sank more than a century ago.

The first ever full-sized digital scan of the ship liner's wreckage, which lies 12,500 feet below water on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean, has been developed using deep sea mapping.

Analysts hope that the images will provide fresh insight into how the Titanic went down on April 15, 1912 after the liner struck an iceberg during its ill-fated maiden voyage.

The disaster — which has been immortalized in popular culture through documentaries, books and a Hollywood blockbuster — killed more than 1,500 people on board – roughly 70% of the ship's passengers and crew.

The scan was carried out last year by Magellan Ltd, a deep-sea mapping company, in partnership with Atlantic Productions, a London-based company that is currently making a film about the project. 

"I felt there was something much bigger here that we could get from the Titanic," Anthony Geffen, the CEO of Atlantic Production, told CBS News. "If we could scan it, if we could capture in all its detail… we could find out how it sank and how the different parts of the boat fell apart and we can find a lot of personal stories down there as well."

The scan provides a three-dimensional view of the wreckage in its entirety, enabling the ship once known as  "unsinkable"  to be seen as if the water has been drained away. 

While the Titanic has been examined in detail since the wreck was discovered in 1985, the sheer size of the ship has meant that prior to the digital scan, cameras had only ever been able to capture the decaying wreckage in snapshots.

Small submersibles boats, remotely controlled by a team on board a specialist ship, spent more than 200 hours analyzing the entirety of the wreck. The team took more than 700,000 pictures from every angle, creating an exact 3D reconstruction of the boat.

The rust-colored wreckage lies in two parts, with the bow and the stern separated by over 2,600 feet in opposite directions. A huge field of debris surrounds the broken vessel.

The iconic bow remains instantly recognizable despite lying underwater for over a century.

In the debris surrounding the ship, lies miscellaneous items including ornate metalwork from the ship, statues and unopened champagne bottles.

There are also personal possessions, including dozens of shoes.

The digital scan has come at a critical time as the Titanic continues to deteriorate, Geffen told CBS News.

"What we now have for the historical record is, before it falls apart, literally a record of everything to do with the wreck of the Titanic, which will be around forever," he said.

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Encyclopedia Titanica

Survivability study of the 1912 rms titanic disaster.

A Statistical and Machine Learning Analysis

While being almost a decade since the centenary of the RMS Titanic disaster, researchers still search for reasons as to why passengers with certain characteristics were more likely to survive than others. Utilising a privately available dataset, passenger features were analysed to study the extent of their importance in determining the mortality of those onboard during her fateful maiden voyage . The characteristics studied were sex, ticket class, age, nationality, allocated cabin, port of boarding, number of companions travelled with, whether a spouse boarded with them and the purpose of their voyage.

This study was performed through a manual statistical analysis of the dataset and the utilisation of two machine learning models; a Random Forest and a Linear Discriminant Analysis model. During training, each model weighted the importance of each passenger feature, which verified the patterns found from the initial statistical analysis.

In addition to those two models, a Support Vector Machine and a Neural Network were produced and compared to observe which classification method performed the most optimally. The Random Forest achieved the highest score and was subsequently integrated into a Graphical User Interface, which gave the user the capability to input theoretical passenger characteristics into the model to predict whether that passenger would have survived the disaster.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

For those who suffered as a result of the 1912 RMS Titanic disaster, in memoriam.

Eternal Father! strong to save, Whose arm hath bound the restless wave, Who bid'st the mighty ocean deep Its own appointed limits keep: O hear us when we cry to Thee For those in peril on the sea.

- William Whitling

1 INTRODUCTION

1.1 project background.

RMS (Royal Mail Ship) Titanic was a four-funnelled steamship built in 1912 for transatlantic crossings, designed with customer comfort in mind alongside the latest innovations in safety technology. Four days after leaving Southampton for New York , she struck an iceberg in the North Atlantic Ocean and sank, tragically taking 1496 of the 2208 souls onboard with her. (Encyclopedia Titanica, 2018)

While conclusions regarding the causes of the catastrophe are already well-established (Garzke, Foecke, Matthias, & Wood, 2000), individuals from both professional and amateur backgrounds still analyse passenger datasets to determine the extent in which each passenger characteristic contributed to passenger’s chance of survival. This project is a continuation of this research, which confirms the widely recognised key determinant factors in survivability; sex, class and age. In addition to this, several new passenger attributes of varying importance were discovered, prepared and analysed; nationality, number of travel companions and whether or not they boarded with a spouse.

The common approach to RMS Titanic passenger analysis was to employ the publicly available dataset from Kaggle, who distributed it as the basis of their introductory machine learning competition (Kaggle, 2019). According to Vanderbilt University who distribute a more complete version of this dataset however, it had not been updated since 1999 (Cason, 2012). In light of this, far more up-to-date data has been obtained from the leading RMS Titanic online archive, Encyclopedia Titanica , for this project. The survivability patterns found from this extended dataset are not definitive, but rather exist to inspire others to pursue further research and to search archived primary sources to create a more complete explanation of mortality rates across different passenger characteristics.

1.2 Aims and Objectives

The primary aim of this project was to continue the study of the importance of RMS Titanic passenger characteristics on survival rates by employing the most up-to-date archive data possible; analysing new features that had not yet been studied through manual data analysis and machine learning techniques.

The secondary aim was to provide the reader with the capability to program a MLM (Machine Learning Model) to predict survivability for theoretical passenger data.

This project had eight objectives:

• Obtain the most up-to-date RMS Titanic passenger archive data.
• Format the data from (1) into datasets useful for analytical purposes.
• Perform a statistical analysis on the passenger population demographics using the dataset from (2).
• Perform a historic study on how passenger characteristics affected their likelihood of surviving the disaster using the dataset from (2).
• Employ several machine learning methods, training MLMs using the datasets from (2).
• Compare the accuracy of MLMs from (5) in a variety of ways.
• Numerically establish the importance of each passenger feature in survivability.
• Create a GUI (Graphical User Interface) that employs the most optimal MLM from (6) to predict the outcome of a theoretical passenger, who’s features are inputted bythe user.

1.3 Methodology

The raw dataset was gathered through a query run by the Encyclopedia Titanica Facebook team on their most up-to-date database at the time of data generation, November 2018.

An additional query request was made to Encyclopedia Titanica, who kindly sent data for pairs of passengers who were recorded as having travelled together. They cautiously advised that these queries were works-in-progress, so may not be fully representative of the actual passengers, therefore meaning that statistical patterns found may not be fully reliable.

Three different versions of the dataset were subsequently formatted appropriately for the purposes of statistical analysis and to train machine learning models that use different learning techniques.

Using Microsoft Excel, statistical analyses were manually carried out on the first dataset to determine the demographic makeup of the ship’s population and how each passenger characteristic affected survival rates. These analyses are located in APPENDIX A and APPENDIX B respectively; it is highly recommended that the reader study these.

Utilising the MATLAB 2018b Statistics and Machine Learning Toolbox & Deep Learning Toolbox, several MLMs were optimised and trained; a SVM (Support Vector Machine), RF (Random Forest), LDA (Linear Discriminant Analysis) and NN (Neural Network).

The RF and LDA properties were investigated to observe how the algorithm had judged the importance of each passenger feature in survival probability. These values were subsequently used to verify the findings in the manual statistical analysis.

The generated MLMs were compared in a variety of ways to conclude which was the best-performing and the RF came out on-top.

A GUI was produced using the MATLAB 2018b App Designer that gave users the capability to enter custom passenger parameters into the RF and make it predict whether they would have been lost or saved in the disaster.

2 SUBJECT REVIEW

2.1 data gathering.

The vast majority of RMS Titanic data analyses in the last few years have utilised the Kaggle dataset from 1999 (Carter, 2016) (Donges, 2018). Older analyses from the 1980s and 1990s however used a dataset that was released over a century ago (Hall, 1986). Overall, it was clear that no one had undergone an analysis of a dataset that had been updated since 1999; What set this project apart from other RMS Titanic data analyses was that it employed a brand-new dataset that contained the most recent findings surrounding the passengers.

2.1 Use of Passenger Features

2.1.1 travel companions.

The Kaggle dataset (Kaggle, 2019) represented the number of passenger travel companions by creating two combined features; the number of siblings/spouses and parents/children on the same ticket number. This project differed from this approach by:

• Utilising a dataset that incorporated all passengers who travelled together in groups as companions, regardless of whether they were on the same ticket number.
• Separating the travel companion data into four distinctive attributes; number of adults, young adults, children and spouses that each passenger travelled with.

2.1.2 Age Categorisation

Previous analyses categorised passengers into age groups (i.e. children, adolescents and adults) without any historical justification (Cicoria , Sherlock, Muniswamaiah, & Clarke, 2014) (Carter, 2016). In this project, age grouping is instead performed by analysing historical sources to calculate the ages in which people were judged to have transitioned through different stages of development.

2.1.3 Cabin Allocation

Due to how 77% of passengers didn’t have allocated cabin data records in the Kaggle dataset, previous studies either removed the cabin attribute (Carter, 2016), replaced the blank data with ‘unknowns’ (Donges, 2018) or over-generalised the data by not specifying which part of the ship the cabin was located in (Kelley, 2014). This project however embraces the substantially small volume of cabin data available by performing an in-depth analysis of it.

2.2 Importance of Passenger Features

The correlation coefficients (values of predictor performance) of RFs produced by Donges (2018) and Durojayne, et. al. (2014) depicted in Table 1 show that passenger sex and ticket class were ranked within the three most important characteristics. Further confirming the importance of passenger sex in survivability, the report by Cicoria, Sherlock, & Muniswamaiah (2014) stated, ‘Sex clearly had the most significant relationship demonstrated within the dataset for survival rate’.

The number of siblings, spouses, parents and children a passenger boarded with however does not appear to have been particularly decisive in determining their likelihood of survival.

This project repeated this correlation coefficient analysis, but with new alternative features and a LDA as well as a RF.

Table 1—Feature Importance

2.3 Machine Learning Method

RF was the most widely used machine learning technique in previous data analyses (Kelley, 2014) (Durojayne, et al., 2014) and was the most accurate when compared to other methods (Donges, 2018). In light of this, it was expected that a RF was going to be the best performing MLM in this project.

3 PREPARING THE DATASET FOR HISTORIC STUDIES

3.1 articulating the problem.

The problem at hand was that of binary classification, as the MLM was to be trained using known data to predict a categorical response; whether a passenger was saved or lost in the sinking.

3.2 Gathering Data

The raw dataset was obtained through a query run by the Encyclopedia Titanica social media team on their most up-to-date database at the time of data generation.

An additional query request was made to Encyclopedia Titanica, who kindly sent data showing pairs of passengers who were recorded as having travelled together. They cautiously advised that it was an incomplete work-in-progress, so may not be fully representative of the actual passengers and patterns found may be incorrect.

3.3 Data Sampling

3.3.1 records.

The raw data included everyone who boarded the Titanic from the time of the initial crossing from Belfast to Southampton onwards. In order to be purely representative of the passengers who were onboard at the time of the disaster, the ship’s crew and those who disembarked prior to the maiden voyage to New York were filtered out.

3.3.2 Attributes

The passenger attributes in Table 2 were removed from the raw dataset as they did not affect the probability of passenger’s survival.

Table 2—Deleted Attributes

3.4 Formatting Data

3.4.1 standardising titles.

Titles were standardised for consistency (e.g. instances of ordained titles were changed to ‘Rev.’) and, where applicable, foreign titles were translated to English. Only the Mexican honorific title ‘Don’ wasn’t translated, as there was no equivalent English title.

In the raw data, the titles ‘Lady’ and ‘Countess’ were embedded as forenames. These were moved to the ‘Title’ attribute for standardisation.

3.4.2 Renaming Attributes

The following passenger attributes were renamed to make them more representative of the data they held:

• ‘Forename’ was renamed to ‘Forename(s)’.
• ‘Class/Dept’ was changed to ‘Class’.
• ‘Subgroup’ was altered to ‘Purpose of Voyage’.
• ‘nationality’ was renamed to ‘Nationality’.
• ‘ET URL.html’ was changed to ‘ET URL’.
• The country columns within ‘Last Address’ and ‘Birthplace’ were altered to ‘Last Country of Residence’ and ‘Country of Birth’ respectively.

3.4.2 Renaming Records

The following passenger records were adjusted to make them more user-friendly:

• ‘Y’ and ‘N’ in Survivor were relabelled ‘Saved’ and ‘Lost’ respectively.
• ‘M’ and ‘F’ in Sex were changed to ‘Male’ and ‘Female’ correspondingly.
• ‘1 st Class’, ‘2 nd Class’ and ‘3 rd Class’ were altered to ‘First’, ‘Second’ and ‘Third’ accordingly.
• Blank records in Purpose of Voyage were labelled ‘Passenger’.

3.5 Discretising Age Records by Range

When age records were plotted individually, they did not show any pattern in relation to passenger mortality, as shown in Figure 1. In order for this attribute to have a correlation with survival rates, data was discretised into age ranges spanning five years each (0-4, 5-9 years etc.), as show in Figure 29 in APPENDIX B. The discretisation of age records supported the training of machine learning models, as each ‘Age Range’ category had an adequate number of samples, whereas the raw age records individually did not.

Figure 1—Passenger Survivability by Raw Age Records

3.6 Discretising Age Records by Group

Age groups were aggregated within the historical context of the maritime industry in early 20 th century Europe; around the same time as the RMS Titanic catastrophe. The sources referenced in this section are from the Genoa International Labour Conference in 1920 and the British Wreck Commissioner’s Inquiry in 1912. Aggregation is performed in this specific context to replicate how White Star Line deck crewman may have judged young passengers as children or adults while allocating places in lifeboats.

3.6.1 Adults

Throughout the Genoa International Labour Conference, people’s perceptions of the age in which adulthood began varied between 15-24 years, as described below:

• The Commission discussed how young men who prematurely began work in the stoke-hold (boiler and furnace compartment) were bound to get serious diseases. Additionally, they discussed how boys under 17 should not be left with the care of men. (Dahlén, 2007, p. 149)
• In light of their discussion, the Commission unanimously agreed to add two articles to the draft Convention (part of their report). The first of these fixed a minimum age of 18 years for working as stoke-hold firemen and coal trimmers and a minimum age of 17 years for working on night watch. (Dahlén, 2007, p. 149)
• The British shipowners’ delegation, Sir Cuthbert Laws opposed the Commission’s higher minimum age for stoke-hold workers. He criticised the age-oriented view of when adulthood begins and consequently argued in favour of a view oriented around physical and mental development: “The principle test is … the state of … development … at which the young man … has arrived. We know that there are many youths of 17 who are much more developed than men of 24, and there are men of 24 who have less physical development than youths of 18 or 19.” (Dahlén, 2007, p. 152)

Based on the research embedded in this section, passengers who were 18 years and above were categorised as adults.

3.6.2 Children

Throughout the Genoa International Labour Conference, people’s perceptions of the age in which childhood ended varied between 6-12 years, as described below:

• The majority of the Commission agreed that children who went to sea at 12 years were deprived of an education, as the complex engine maintenance of post-industrialisation era steamships did not leave any time for study. This source indicates that it was widely known that children were being taken to work at sea on steamships at 12 years (this is relevant as Titanic was a steamship). (Dahlén, 2007, p. 148)
• During the plenary session of the conference, a Greek seaman stated that he took boys at 12 years to train on steamships. (Dahlén, 2007, p. 150)
• During the same session, the British seaman Henson stated that in the mind of the maritime employer, working ‘boys’ become adults nominally at 8-12 years, but in some circumstances as young as 6 years. (Dahlén, 2007, p. 152)

Based on the research contained in this section, passengers who were below 12 were categorised as children. Confirming this as a sensible grouping, a few months after the disaster the British Wreck Commissioner’s Inquiry classed passengers below the age of 13 as children in section 4 of their ‘Report on the Loss of the Titanic’ (British Wreck Commisioner's Inquiry, 1912). This was calculated by comparing their number of ‘children’ onboard (109) with the number of passengers below 13 years of age in the Encyclopedia Titanica dataset (109).

3.6.3 Young Adults

Young adults were categorised as the intermediate range between adults and children, whereby they began to hold some adult responsibilities, such as caring for their younger siblings.

Based on the categorisation boundaries described in section 3.6.1 and section 3.6.2, the transitional age range is defined as passengers who were between 12 and 17.9 years.

3.7 Aggregating Nationality Records

Given the sheer number of nationalities on the ship, there were too few data records per nationality to analyse survival patterns from. In light of this, nationality data was aggregated into regions of nationality to assist in MLM training, as shown in Table 3. For those who held joint nationality, their ‘region’ was categorised by studying passenger pages on Encyclopedia Titanica for information such as which country they resided in for most of their lives and the nationality of their parents.

Table 3—Region of Nationality

3.8 Decomposing Passenger Pairs Data

Three new attributes relating to groups of passengers that travelled together were created for this project; the number of children, young adults and adults that each passenger voyaged with. These were produced by utilising both manual and automated data management techniques on different parts of the second dataset provided by Encyclopedia Titanica:

• Microsoft Excel was used to manually sort through pairs of passengers who travelled together but booked on different ticket numbers to calculate how many companions from each age group they were with.
• A python script was used to automatically calculate the number of people on the same ticket number in each age group per passenger. (Tunstall, 2018)

3.9 Creating Spouse Attribute

‘Embarked with Spouse’ was a new attribute that indicated whether or not a passenger boarded with their significant other (only applicable to those who were married). It was created by utilising the ‘Title’, ‘Sex’ and ‘Surname’ features to manually match up the married couples onboard.

3.10 Decomposing Cabin Attribute

Utilising the ‘Cabin ID’ attributefrom the dataset and compartmentalising RMS Titanic deck plans from Encyclopedia Titanica, as seen in Figure 2 (Beveridge, 2008), the following features were created to analyse passenger survival rates according to cabin locations:

• Cabin Number
• Forward/Astern (towards the front or rear) Cabin (separated by black line)
• Aport/Astarboard (towards the left or right) Cabin (separated by green line)
• Inner /Outer Cabin (separated by orange outline)

Figure 2—Cabin Categorisation

4 STATISTICAL ANALYSES

4.1 statistical study of passenger population.

A statistical analysis was conducted to produce an overview of who was on RMS Titanic at the time of the disaster; located in APPENDIX A. From this statistical analysis, the largest passenger variable in each characteristic was recorded, as seen in Table 4. It is thoroughly recommended that the reader studies APPENDIX A in order to understand the historical context of the seaborne community.

Table 4—Overall Passenger Demographics

4.2 Historic Study of Passenger Survivability

A historical survivability study was performed as part of this project to find patterns in the mortality rates of passengers in respect to each characteristic; found in APPENDIX B. It is highly recommended that the reader studies this in order to develop an understanding of exactly how each characteristic affected passenger survivability. From this study, the standard deviation (σ) of each feature’s survival rate was calculated, as shown in Table 5. Here, the variance in survival rates differed not only per characteristic, but per age-sex group too:

• For adults overall, sex had the highest σ, unlike children who had a 50% survival rate regardless of their sex.
• The features with the largest σ for male adults were ticket class, the number of children they travelled with and region of nationality (excluding sex and age).
• Similar to male adults, the survival rate of female adults was most significantly varied by ticket class and the number of children and young adults they travelled with (excluding sex and age).
• Children had comparatively higher σ per feature than adults, whereby the features with the highest σ were the port they embarked in and the number of children and young adults they boarded with (excluding age).

Table 5—Standard Deviation of Survival Rate vs Passenger Feature

5 PREPARING THE DATASET FOR MACHINE LEARNING

Further modifications were made to the dataset described in section 3 to make two new datasets that could be used to train a variety of MLMs with.

The SVM and RF MLMs were trained using a dataset that employed the alterations described in section 5.1 and section 5.2. The NN and LDA employed this same dataset, but including the adjustments described in section 5.3.

5.1 Filling Missing Records

The age records missing from three third-class males with the title ‘Mr’ were filled by using the average age of passengers with that ticket-class, sex and title; 28. These age records were then converted into the age range of ’25-29’ in order to be categorised in line with the rest of the ‘Age Range’ attribute.

5.1.2 Region of Nationality

The 383 nationality records missing were filled by making educated assumptions based on passenger’s surnames and the last country they resided in. These nationality records were consequently converted into the region they belonged to, in order to be grouped in accordance with the ‘Region of Nationality’ feature.

5.2 Attribute Sampling

The ‘Survivor’ attribute was moved to a separate table, in order to serve as separate output data during MLM training. Each passenger feature in Table 6 was deleted from the dataset for one of the following reasons:

• It did not comprise of useful numerical or categorical data that a MLM could be trained with.
• The data had been aggregated into a different attribute.
• Too much data was missing in order to create a dataset that was representative of the passengers onboard.

Table 6—Deleted Attributes for MLMs

5.3 Converting Records

In order to be able to train a NN and LDA, all categorical attributes (i.e. everything but ‘travel companions’ features) were encoded, as seen in APPENDIX C. For example, ‘Male’ and ‘Female’ were converted to integers ‘1’ and ‘0’ respectively. To avoid some characteristics overweighting others, all records remained within the integer range of 0 – 14.

6 PRODUCING MACHINE LEARNING MODELS

6.1 building & training.

The RF, SVM and LDA were built in similar ways using functions within the MATLAB 2018b Statistics and Machine Learning Toolbox, as described in section 6.1.1. The NN on the other hand was constructed in a dissimilar way, utilising the Deep Learning Toolbox, as described in section 6.1.2.

6.1.1 Statistics & Machine Learning Toolbox

The RF, SVM and LDA were built using the method described below:

• Input data was imported.
• Output data was loaded and reformatted into a cell array.
• The random seed was set for repeatability.
• The Classification Learner app was employed to find which number of k-folds validated the model to show the lowest misclassification rate.
• The output data was randomly partitioned for a stratified k-fold (value found in [4]) cross-validation to ensure that for each sample made, there was an equal number of ‘saved’ and ‘lost’ passengers. This was important to include, as only 38% of passengers in the dataset were classified as ‘saved’.
• The MLM was trained using the appropriate technique (RF, SVM or LDA) and the highest-performing parameters found through the automatically run ‘OptimizeHyperparameters’ function.

6.1.2 Deep Learning Toolbox

Using the Neural Net Pattern Recognition app, a neural network (represented in Figure 3) was produced through the following steps:

• Input and output data were selected and loaded.
• The dataset was randomly divided into training, validation, and testing samples; 70%, 15% and 15% of the whole dataset respectively.
• Through trial and error, the optimal number of hidden neurons was selected as 1000.
• The NN was trained and retrained enough times to achieve the lowest misclassification rate on testing data possible.

Figure 3—Neural Network Block Diagram

6.2 Testing

6.2.1 statistics & machine learning toolbox.

The RF, SVM and LDA predicted the outputs (lost or saved) for the entire passenger dataset using the ‘predict’ function. Utilising the ‘confusionchart’ function, these results were compared with the true outputs to produce confusion matrices, as seen in Figure 4, Figure 5 and Figure 6.

Figure 4—RF Confusion Matrix Figure 5—SVM Confusion Matrix Figure 6—LDA Confusion Matrix

6.2.2 Deep Learning Toolbox

Using the ‘net’ function, the NN predicted outputs for the whole passenger dataset. Employing these results, true outputs and ‘perfcurve’ function, the optimal operating point of the ROC (Receiver Operating Characteristic Curve) was found, as shown in Figure 7. This value (0.5115) was applied to the NN’s predictions as the label threshold (i.e. results = 0.5115 were labelled ‘saved’). Utilising the ‘plotconfusion’ function, these results were compared with the true outputs to produce a confusion matrix, as seen in Figure 8.

Figure 7—Neural Network ROC Curve Figure 8—NN Confusion Matrix

6.3 Performance Analysis

6.3.1 metrics.

The TPs (True Positive), TNs, (True Negative), FPs (False Positive) and FNs (False Negatives) from the MLM testing described in section 6.2.1 and section 6.2.2 were inputted into formulas to measure different aspects of performance (Joseph, 2016), as seen in Table 7 whereby the best MLM per calculation was highlighted in green.

Classifier Accuracy calculated the overall ‘correctness’ of each MLM. This method provided a misleadingly high measure of MLM performance, as it didn’t consider the misclassifying rates proportionately. That is, the accuracy of predicted lost and saved passengers were over- and under-represented respectively, due to the imbalance of data records as described in section 6.1.1.

Sensitivity (True Positive Rate) worked out the fraction of saved passengers that the MLM predicted correctly to the total number of actual saved passengers. Specificity (True Negative Rate) on the other hand calculated the fraction of predicted lost passengers to the total number of genuine lost passengers. Therefore, in this application, Sensitivity and Specificity showed how complete the predicted casualty list was with real survivors and victims respectively.

Precision (Positive Predictive Value) calculated the percentage of truly saved passengers in the pool of predicted saved passengers. The Negative Predictive Value however worked out the percentage of actual lost passengers in the pool of predicted lost passengers. Thus, Precision and the Negative Predictive Value represented the probability that the predicted survival of a passenger (saved or lost respectively) was correct. Incorporating both Sensitivity and Precision, the F1 Score gave a more balanced representation of MLM performance compared to the metrics in this section’s preceding paragraphs. TNs however were not included in this calculation, meaning it did not provide a fully representative measure of MLM accuracy.

Combining all predictions within the confusion matrices, the Matthews Correlation Coefficient (MCC) provided accuracy values that were easy to interpret and were representative of overall MLM performance, whereby ‘-1’ represented a worst-case model and ‘+1’ indicated a perfect model.

Not only did the RF show itself to be the overall most accurate MLM by scoring the highest in MCC; it also achieved the highest values in four out of the six other tests, thus conforming with the findings from Donges (2018) (described in section 2.3) that showed a RF to provide the best-performing MLM. The NN on the other hand narrowly won on Specificity and Precision, but scored poorly on Sensitivity. In light of this, the NN would have been the most suitable MLM to employ for producing a complete casualty list of victims. The NN however would not have been an appropriate MLM for predicting how likely it was that a passenger that was predicted ‘saved’ was truly saved, as it’s casualty list of actual saved passengers would have only been 67% complete.

Table 7—MLM Accuracy Calculations

6.3.2 Passenger Feature Importance

Whilst training the RF and LDA, MATLAB weighted the significance of each feature in affecting the survival outcome of passengers in the form of correlation coefficients, shown in Table 8.

Conforming with the findings from Donges (2018) and Durojayne et al. (2014) (analysed in section 2.2), Sex and Ticket Class were measured as being within the top three most important passenger features in not only the RF, but the LDA too. An additional observation was that the three Travel Companions attributes, when compares to Donges’ equivalent attributes, were weighted as being slightly more important in predicting survivability.

Interestingly, the RF judged features drastically different to the LDA. For instance, the RF judged Voyage Purpose as having no importance, but the LDA calculated it as being the fourth most important characteristic. These differences could have been a factor in why the LDA had such a low MCC performance rating compared to the other MLMs (shown in Table 7).

The findings from the statistical analyses in section 4 concurred with both the MLMs in Table 8 that show Sex as being the most deciphering overall factor, but indicated that when passenger data was analysed by standard-deviation in age-sex groups, Travel Companions features had more of an impact on passenger mortality than age or ticket class.

Table 8—Passenger Feature Significance Comparison

7 GRAPHICAL USER INTERFACE

Using the MATLAB App Designer, a graphical user interface was built to provide the capability of employing the best-performing MLM (i.e. the RF) to predict the survival of a bespoke theoretical passenger.

7.1 Input Validation

As seen in Figure 9, all ten passenger features were available for the user to customise for inputting into the RF. In order for the features to be logically and historically feasible, they were programmed to be validated prior to MLM prediction in the following ways:

• Males and Females couldn’t board with a spouse if they were below the age of 14 and 12 respectively; under common law in the early 20 th century, these were the lowest ages a person could legally marry. (Lowe & Bromley, 1992)
• If a passenger boarded with a spouse, they must be inputted as having travelled with at least one adult or young adult.
• Age was limited to integers in a range of 0-100 years.
• The number of travel companions was limited to 10 per age category.
• Categorical data could only be entered through pre-set drop-down menus, to ensure the validity of values entered.

Figure 9—Graphical User Interface

7.2 Operation

Upon pressing the Predict Button, the GUI followed the following processes to predict the outcome of a theoretical passenger:

• Predict Button was disabled to stop the user erroneously initiating another prediction while the system already predicting data.
• Prediction Text Box was cleared to remove any previous results.
• A Wait Bar popped up (seen in Figure 10) to show the user how close the GUI was to completion.
• GUI features were inputted as raw data.
• Age integer data was discretised into the appropriate ‘Age Range’ category.
• Input data was formatted into a table.
• The RF was loaded and predicted a response from the input data formatted in (6).
• RF response was displayed in the Prediction Text Box.
• Wait Bar pop-up was closed.
• Predict Button was re-enabled to allow for a new prediction to take place.

Figure 10—Wait Bar

8 CONCLUSION

8.1 outline of work - fulfilment of project objectives.

The most up-to-date datasets describing passengers onboard the RMS Titanic during the infamous disaster in 1912 were gathered from the leading online RMS Titanic archivists, Encyclopedia Titanica (Objective 1). These datasets were subsequently formatted appropriately for the purposes of statistical analysis and to train machine learning models (Objective 2).

Manual statistical analyses were carried out to determine the demographic makeup of the ship’s population (Objective 3) and how each passenger characteristic affected survival rates (Objective 4).

Several machine learning models were trained (Objective 5) and their performance compared through a variety of metrics to determine the best method (Objective 6). Two of these models were further examined to see how they measured the importance of each passenger feature in predicting survivability (Objective 7). These values were subsequently compared with the findings from the manual statistical analysis.

A GUI was produced that gave users the capability to enter a theoretical passenger into the best-performing machine learning model and make it predict whether they would have been lost or saved in the disaster (Objective 8).

8.2 Major Findings

8.2.1 importance of passenger features in survivability.

In this project, the significance of each passenger feature in determining the fate of passengers onboard the RMS Titanic was measured in two ways; training two machine learning models to automatically determine the overall importance (correlation coefficients) of each characteristic (Objective 7) and performing a manual statistical analysis of survival rates per feature in the dataset (Objective 4). The method used in the statistical analysis greatly differed from the production of MLMs in that it measured feature importance in accordance with passenger sex and age categories, as opposed to looking at the overall significance of the characteristics.

The MLMs created were a Random Forest and Linear Discriminant Analysis model. Despite having drastically different performance ratings, they both concluded the same results as previous studies that overall, Sex and Ticket Class were within the top three most important features in predicting survival, with Sex being the most substantial.

There were however some notable differences in characteristic importance in MLMs, both between previous studies and the models trained in this project. The two most accurate models however largely conformed with the same level of importance measured for each feature; the Random Forests created in this project and by Donges (2018). In light of this, the Random Forest made in this project was employed to make the final conclusions.

Thus, the most influential passenger characteristics in determining mortality overall were, in numerical order:

• Ticket class and the region of their nationality
• Number of adults travelled with
• Port of embarkation and number of young adults and children voyaged with

The following additional conclusions were met regarding the importance of passenger features when the data was split by age-sex group (i.e. male adults, female adults and children):

• For male adults, the most divisive factors in determining their fate were their region of nationality and number of children journeyed with.
• Similarly, female adults’ survival rates were largely determined by the number of young adults and children they travelled alongside.
• Factors that were most significant in child mortality were the port in which they boarded and the number of fellow children they were with.

8.2.2 Optimal Machine Learning Method

As expected, just as with the study by Donges (2018), the highest performing machine learning method for predicting the survival outcome of passengers onboard the RMS Titanic was a Random Forest; beating the next-best model’s Matthews Correlation Coefficient (MCC) by 0.09.

8.3 Further Development

8.3.1 repeat model training.

With the intention of creating a model that predicts passenger mortality in a more representative manner of the actual casualties of the RMS Titanic tragedy, it is recommended that a RF is trained but with the following attributes removed:

• ‘Port of Boarding’ as it is at least partially dependent on ticket class, as described in the report by Cicoria, Sherlock, Muniswamaiah, & Clarke (2014).
• ‘Boarded with Spouse’ and ‘Purpose of Voyage, as they had so little significance that the RF weighted them as having correlation coefficients of 0; no significance on passenger mortality. This will likely create a more accurate representation of the factors that affected passenger survival rates.

8.3.2 Graphical User Interface Export

To provide RMS Titanic enthusiasts with the capability to predict the survival outcome of theoretical passengers, the GUI (described in section 7) should be generated into C or C++ code using the MATLAB Coder tool to produce an application which doesn’t require MATLAB to run.

8.3.3 Additional Statistical Study

Further historic study should be undertaken to understand the following survivability patterns found in APPENDIX B:

• Survivability dramatically dropped for passengers within the age range of 40-44.
• Male adults who held Western European nationalities had an anomalously high survival rate, compared to other male adults.
• The higher the number of young adults and children that adults travelled with, the less likely they were to survive. That is aside from if they journeyed with only one child, whereby their survival likelihood increased.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

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STATISTICAL STUDY OF PASSENGER POPULATION

This appendix analyses the demographics of the passenger population who were onboard for the New York-bound maiden voyage.

Ticket Class

Passengers boarded with first-, second- and third- (steerage) class tickets, which generally reflected their social class.

First-class passengers were the wealthiest to board. Their class comprised of highly upheld members of society including businessmen, stockbrokers, socialites, high-ranking military officers, doctors and writers.

Those who travelled in the second-class were mostly blue-collar workers with careers such as bakers, engineers, teachers, carpenters and clergymen.

The passengers voyaging in the third-class were largely emigrants on their way to the United States for a better life. (Hall, 1986, p. 687). While much of the media at the time focused on the celebrities from the first-class, it was the second- and third-class who drove the economic success for White Star Line. (Encyclopedia Titanica, 2018). As shown in Figure 11, there were approximately as many third-class passengers as first- and second-class passengers combined. This ticket class also had a higher male-female ratio (~5:2) than the other two classes (~5:3.5).

Figure 11—Passenger Ticket Class

The age of passengers spanned across three generations with both new-borns and elderly people onboard; Most were between the age of 15 and 34 years, as shown in Figure 12.

Additionally, the following observations can be made:

Passenger population by age generally decreased after 20 – 24 years.

Elderly passengers (≥ 65 years) were the smallest age group (1% of whole population).

There was a comparatively large population gap (123) between passengers aged 10-14 and 15-19.

Figure 12—Passenger Age Range

Age Category

As observed in Figure 13, there were around twice as many male adults as female adults and only a small minority of passengers were young adults or children.

Figure 13—Passenger Age Category

Voyage Purpose

The vast majority of people boarded RMS Titanic for personal reasons, such as returning home to the United States. A few however (5%) travelled to perform commercial services. As shown in Figure 14, these were the Ship’s Orchestra , Harland & Wolff (H&W) Guarantee Group and servants of first- and second-class passengers. Further information on these passengers is located in section ‘Role of Commercial Services’.

Figure 14—Passenger Purpose of Voyage

Role of Commercial Services

Most passengers performing commercial services were servants who served first-class passengers (63%), of which most were female as shown in Figure 15. A minority of only five mostly-male servants served second-class passengers; the presence of these servants indicates that these second-class passengers were wealthier than others in the same ticket class.

Figure 15—Passengers of Commercial Services

Servants were employed serving some of the wealthier first- and second-class passengers, whereby the class of passenger they served reflected the ticket class they held. They are recorded in the dataset as having performed the roles of secretary, chauffeur, maid, nurse, cook and clerk.

Ship’s Orchestra

The eight-strong Ship’s Orchestra were employed by the Liverpool firm ‘C.W. and F.N. Black’ fulfilling a contract that provided all the steamship companies with musicians for the purpose of passenger entertainment. They all boarded with second-class tickets, resulting in them having a more luxurious voyage than other, less fortunate workers on the Titanic. (Encyclopedia Titanica, 2019)

These musicians went down in history as ‘The band That Played On’ (Turner, 2011), performing pieces of music to comfort those still on-deck until the ship’s final plunge (Bride, 1912). It has often been suggested that the last piece played by the band was ‘Nearer My God to Thee’ , as dramatised in James Cameron’s movie adaptation of the disaster (Encyclopedia Titanica, 2005) (Cameron, 1997). Tragically, none of the Ship’s Orchestra survived the disaster. Of the bodies that were recovered, only three were identified as theirs.

Harland & Wolff Guarantee Group

Harland & Wolff (H&W) is the name of the shipyard Titanic was constructed in and the name of the shipbuilding company who designed and built her. There were around 14,000 employees working in the H&W shipyard on the year of the disaster (1912). Of these several thousand workers, approximately 3000 men and boys were engaged in the building of the Titanic. The other workers were engaged in projects such as the building of Titanic’s sister ship, Olympic. (Titanic Facts, 2019)

Of the core teams within the Titanic workforce, eight exceptional employees were specially selected to work on-board during the maiden voyage, forming the Guarantee Group. Led by the ship’s chief designer, Thomas Andrews, they were technical trouble-shooters who ensured the smooth-running of the ship (National Geographic, 2012) (Encyclopedia Titanica, 2018). Tragically, none of the Guarantee Group survived the disaster and their bodies, if recovered, were never identified.

Marital Status

The number of married and single passengers onboard was approximately the same, as shown in Figure 16. A further observation is that the ratio of male to female passengers was similar in those who were married (~5:3) and single (~5:4.2).

Interestingly, there is only one divorced passenger recorded in the dataset; Rhoda Abbot . She suffered a difficult divorce from her husband, Stanton Abbot, a year prior to the voyage. She had boarded the Titanic to return to her home of Rhode Island, United States. This was for the benefit of her sons, who had become homesick in England. Tragically her two boys, Rossmore and Eugene , died after the three of them jumped from the deck during the sinking. Miraculously, Rhoda survived after climbing into a partially swamped collapsible lifeboat. Her further distinction was that she was the only female passenger in the disaster to be exposed to the cold Atlantic water and survive (Bracken, 2004). A factor in her anomalous survival could have been accrued mental strength from the suffering she experienced during her divorce.

Figure 16—Passenger Marital Status

Married Passengers

Of the wedded passengers onboard approximately as many boarded with than without their spouse, as shown in Figure 17. These 106 married couples comprised approximately a sixth of the whole ship’s passenger population.

Figure 17—Married Passengers Who Boarded with a Spouse

Travel Companions

A slim majority of passengers voyaged with at least one companion (56%), meaning that just under half travelled alone. Age categorisation is described in section 3.6.

Adult Companions

Just over half of passengers travelled with at least one adult (53%), as shown in Figure 18.

Figure 18—Passenger Adult Travel Companions

Young Adult Companions

A small minority of passengers travelled with young adults (9%), with most of those who did only journeying with one as portrayed in Figure 19.

Figure 19—Passenger Young Adult Travel Companions

Child Companions

Not many passengers travelled with children (14%), with most of those who did only travelling with one as shown in Figure 20.

Figure 20—Passenger Child Travel Companions

Ports of Embarkation

Passengers boarded the ship in English, Irish and French ports. The distribution of passengers who boarded the ship in each port is shown in Figure 21.

Titanic made several trips prior to the New York-bound maiden voyage, as depicted in Figure 22. These were as follows:

After the Titanic had passed sea trials in the littoral waters of the Irish coast, The H&W Guarantee Group sailed from Belfast to Southampton to pick up the majority of passengers (69%).

From Southampton, there was a channel crossing to Cherbourg to pick up approximately a quarter of passengers (21%).

From Cherbourg, there was a trip back to Ireland in Queenstown to pick up the remaining passengers (9%).

From Queenstown, Titanic set sail on the New York-bound maiden voyage.

Figure 21—Passenger Port of Boarding

Figure 22—RMS Titanic Sea Route

Nationality

People boarded the Titanic from all over the world to set sail to America, with notable differences in the demographic of each ticket class.

First-Class

The majority of first-class passengers were American, as depicted in Figure 23. Just under a quarter were English or Canadian and around a fifth were non-English Europeans. The only non-western passengers in the first-class were three Uruguayan passengers and an Egyptian servant.

Figure 23—First-Class Passenger Nationality

Second-Class

For the most-part, second-class passengers were English, as shown in

Figure 24. Here, American passengers comprised significantly less of the class demographic than in the first-class. This is possibly due to how as American passengers had enough wealth to travel both to the United Kingdom and back to the United States, they could also afford the highest grade of ticket.

Figure 24—Second-Class Passenger Nationality

Third-Class

Almost half of third-class passengers were Irish or English, as displayed in Figure 25. Despite only comprising less than a quarter of the class demographic, there were roughly the same number of English passengers in the third- and second-class. The third-class held the largest non-western group of people to board the Titanic; the 83 Syrian passengers.

Figure 25—Third-Class Passenger Nationality

Region of Nationality

Despite the United Kingdoms close proximity to France, overall four times as many Northern European passengers than Western European passengers boarded, as shown in Figure 26. Unsurprisingly as the Titanic was built and launched from Britain, almost half of passengers were British.

Passenger regions of nationalities are split by ticket class in Figure 27, whereby it can be observed that British passengers comprised a fifth of the first-class, most of the second-class and just under half of the third-class.

Figure 26—Overall Passenger Region of Nationality

Figure 27—Passenger Region of Nationality Distribution by Class

HISTORIC STUDY OF PASSENGER SURVIVABILITY

This appendix investigates the survival rates of passengers relative to personal characteristics that were prepared in section 3. The number of data entries for these characteristics is found in APPENDIX A.

Due to inadequate volumes of data being available for Marital Status and Nationality, they have been omitted from this analysis.

The survival rate of passengers by their ticket class is depicted in Figure 28.

First-class male adults were approximately three time as likely to live through the sinking than those who boarded with a second- or third-class ticket, whom of which almost all would not survive.

Female adults of the first- and second-class were around twice as likely to be saved than those of the third-class, who had only half a chance of surviving.

First- and second- class children were roughly twice as likely to survive than those in the third-class, whom of which tragically less than half were saved.

Figure 28—Passenger Survivability by Ticket Class

Passenger survivability varied substantially in accordance with age, as shown in Figure 29, which is annotated with dotted lines and diamond-shaped points to show the age category boundaries and survival rate of the passengers on those boundaries (12 [11-13] and 18 [17-19]) accordingly.

It was probable that new-borns, infants and toddlers (0 – 4 years) would survive, regardless of sex. Children (5 – 9 years) were about as likely to survive as they were to be lost in the disaster, irrespective of sex.

It was unlikely that male young adults (10 – 19 years) would survive the disaster. Likelihood of survival in female young adults was dependent on how far they were through teenagerhood; those in their early adolescent years (10 – 14 years) were unlikely to survive while it was probable that those later in their in their late juvenile years (15 – 19 years) would survive.

Males in their earlier adult years (20 – 44 years) were decidedly unlikely to survive, however adults in the middle of this age range (25 – 34 years) were slightly more likely to survive than those on the edges (20 – 24 and 40 – 44 years). Middle-aged males (45 – 54 years) had the best chance to survive, however were still fairly unlikely to. Males of senior age (≥ 55 years) were distinctly unlikely to survive.

It was probable that females in earlier adulthood (20 – 39) and middle-aged (45 – 59) years would survive the catastrophe. Those nearing their middle-aged years (40 – 44 years) however only had half a chance of survival and seniors (≥ 60 years) were only slightly more likely to survive than be lost in the disaster.

Figure 29—Passenger Survivability by Age Range

Passenger survivability by age category is further shown in Figure 30, whereby the age categories are defined in section 3.6. Here it can be observed that adults and young adults had comparable survival rates in each sex. Children had similar survivability regardless of whether they were male or female.

In order that survival rates could be analysed across sex and age for each passenger feature, based on the observations described above, data was further grouped as such: a) Male Adults including young adults b) Female Adults including young adults c) Children

Figure 30—Passenger Survivability by Age Category

The survivability of passengers by the purpose of their voyage is portrayed in Figure 31. Children are excluded in this section as none of them were passengers who performed commercial services.

Manservants had a slightly lower survival probability than male adult passengers, however both of these subgroups were still unlikely to live. Notably, the H&W Guarantee Group and Ship’s Orchestra had a zero-survival rate.

Incredibly, all woman servants lived through the disaster, whereas approximately only three quarters of female adult passengers had the same luck.

Figure 31—Passenger Survivability by Purpose of Voyage

Spouse Boarding

As shown in Figure 32, the likelihood of passenger’s survival didn’t particularly vary depending on whether or not they boarded with a spouse; those who boarded with a spouse were only slightly more likely to live through the disaster. Children and young adults are not included in this section as understandably, none boarded with spouses.

Figure 32—Passenger Survivability by Boarding with a Spouse

Port of Embarkation

As depicted in Figure 33, the closer along the sea route a passenger’s boarding port was to the second-last port, Cherbourg, the more likely they were to be saved. Furthermore, most children who embarked at Cherbourg survived, however only half of those who boarded in Southampton survived and none who boarded in Queenstown survived.

The passengers who boarded in Belfast, whom of which all were lost in the disaster, were the H&W Guarantee Group and an American businessman.

Figure 33—Passenger Survivability by Port of Boarding

Survivability varied significantly relative to the nationality held by passengers, as portrayed in Figure 34. No African, Southern or Eastern European children boarded, so are not included in this section.

Male adults were unlikely to survive across all nationalities, aside from Western Europeans; a slim majority of them anomalously survived. Asia-Pacifikas, Africans and Northern Europeans were the only passengers in this group with survival rates higher than or equal to 20%.

A high percentage of female adults were saved regardless of nationality, aside from Northern and Eastern Europeans who had comparatively lower survival rates.

Children had varying but mostly positive survivability. They were all likely to live aside from those who were American or British; they only had half a chance of surviving.

Figure 34—Passenger Survivability by Region of Nationality

Figure 35 depicts passenger survival rates in accordance with the number of adult companions they travelled with.

It can be observed that male adults had a slump in survivability in those who boarded with 4-5 and 8-9 adults and a slight increase in those who travelled with seven.

The survival rate of female adults takes the form of a gaussian bell curve within those who embarked with 0-5 adult companions, peaking at a staggering 95%. Those who boarded with 8 adults however all survived. There were no female adult passengers recorded that travelled with 6 or 7 Adult Companions, so a dotted line joins those points in Figure 35.

Children generally had half a chance of being saved, aside from those who boarded with three adults who all survived, or those who travelled with five and were all lost.

Figure 35—Passenger Survivability by Number of Adult Travel Companions

As shown in Figure 36, the presence of passengers boarding with young adults decreased their chances of being saved; The more they embarked with, the less probable it was that they would survive. In particular, all children and male adults who travelled with two or more young people did not survive. Female adults who voyaged with two young adults had half a chance at surviving, but none of those with three or more lived.

Figure 36—Passenger Survivability by Number of Young Adult Travel Companions

As depicted in Figure 37 for the most part, the more children passengers travelled with, the lower their survival rate. If an adult travelled with one child however, their likelihood of being saved increased; this pattern was particularly significant in male adults.

Figure 37—Passenger Survivability by Number of Child Travel Companions

Allocated Cabin

Due to a lack of available data, only first-class passengers are analysed in this section. Of them, only male adults and young adults are represented. This is because almost all Female and Child passengers survived, thus leaving no survivability pattern. Throughout this section, ‘A-E’ represent decks (with A being one floor below the boat deck) and dotted lines separate different parts of the ship.

Figure 38 depicts the number of passengers and their survival rate by allocated cabin deck. It can be observed that the closer a passenger’s cabin was to the middle first-class deck (C-deck), the lower their chances of survival and the more densely packed they were. This observed pattern forms the basis of this survivability sub-analysis.

Figure 38—Passenger Survivability by Cabin Deck

Proximity to Ship Centreline

The Captain’s order to board women and children onto lifeboats first is one of the most well-known facts surrounding the Titanic disaster. After the Titanic had collided into the iceberg, Captain Smith placed Chief Officer Wilde (with Second Officer Lightoller assisting) and First Officer Murdoch in charge of launching the lifeboats; overseeing the port and starboard side respectively. (WilliamMurdoch.net, 2016)

Murdoch enforced his interpretation of the ‘women and children first’ evacuation order; that women and children should board as a priority with men filling any spare spaces. Lightoller however strictly enforced his interpretation of the order that only women and children could board. In addition, he and Wilde did not work well together, which furthermore added to the inefficiency of lifeboat allocation on the port side. (WilliamMurdoch.net, 2016)

Because of these differing boarding strategies, the survival of first-class men largely depended on which direction they chose at the top of the grand staircase during the evacuation, which could have been influenced by the side of their allocated cabin (i.e. port or starboard). This theory is supported by the pattern observed in Figure 39 whereby in three out of four decks, passengers were more likely to survive if they were allocated a starboard-side cabin.

Figure 39—Passenger Survivability by Cabin Proximity to Centreline

Proximity to Ship Centre

As observed in Figure 40, passengers were significantly more likely to survive if they were in inboard than outboard cabins on three out of four decks. This could have been because passengers in these rooms were fathers looking after their families; many outboard rooms were joint family rooms (Beveridge, 2008). A deck was omitted because there, all passenger cabins were positioned towards the centre of the ship.

Figure 40—Passenger Survivability by Cabin Proximity to Centre

Proximity to Amidships

Passengers were far more likely to be saved in the disaster if they were allocated a cabin towards the front of the ship, as shown in Figure 41 (Beveridge, 2008). D deck was excluded as only one first-class male adult was recorded as being in an astern cabin there.

Figure 41—Passenger Survivability by Cabin Proximity to Amidships

CONVERSION OF CATEGORICAL DATA

Comment and discuss, find related items.

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‘Astonishing’ 3D scans reveal Titanic shipwreck in extraordinary new detail

More than a century after the Titanic sank on its maiden voyage from England — a tragedy that continues to captivate scientists, Hollywood and the public — cutting-edge technology may be providing clues as to how the most luxurious passenger ship of its time met such a doomed end.

A massive underwater 3D scanning project, led by British deep-sea mapping company Magellan, this week revealed a “digital twin” of the vessel with stunning features of the wreckage some 3,800 meters deep in the North Atlantic Ocean.

“The volume of data that we acquired was enormous,” Magellan chief executive Richard Parkinson said in a statement, and “the results were astonishing.”

Parkinson called the effort an “unprecedented mapping and digitalization operation of the Titanic … one of the most famous yet inaccessible man-made objects.” It took place over six weeks in 2022 and faced bad weather and technical complications. But the scans that followed meant the ship could then be mapped in “extraordinary detail,” according to the company.

Its scientists observed the gaping hole where the grand staircase was once positioned — the staircase made famous in the 1997 blockbuster movie with Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet. They even found bottles of champagne and the serial number on a propeller.

The images released do not show any evidence of the more than 1,500 lives lost in the disaster.

Previous images of the ship — which hit an iceberg while on its way to New York City and was discovered by American oceanographer Robert Ballard and others in 1985 — have been limited by low light levels and poor water quality.

Magellan’s process generated over 715,000 still images that provided the data allowing its team to create a digital model of startling clarity. It shows the bow and stern section of the ship, which separated upon sinking, as well as the scene’s three-mile debris field.

A specialist ship was positioned in the Atlantic about 430 miles off the Canadian coast, with two submersibles — named Romeo and Juliet — deployed for hours below the surface to map every millimeter of the wreck.

The Titanic sinks

The wreck was not touched or disturbed in the process, the company said, and ended with a flower-laying ceremony in memory of those who died. Magellan is now working with media company Atlantic Productions to make a documentary about the project.

“I have been studying Titanic for 20 years, but this is a true game changer,” Titanic explorer and researcher Parks Stephenson said in a statement. “What we are seeing for the first time is an accurate and true depiction of the entire wreck and debris site. I’m seeing details that none of us have ever seen before.”

He hailed the work as the “beginning of a new chapter” for the next generation of Titanic study.

The scans will also give scientists and archaeologists a new level of access, said Helen Farr, maritime archaeologist at the University of Southampton. They will allow researchers to study the ship’s condition, document decay and better monitor the marine environment, Farr told The Washington Post.

“These 3D scans and images also tell the story of the human loss,” she added, with personal items such as shoes and crockery recovered from the seabed. “Living in Southampton, the port city from which RMS Titanic set sail in 1912, I know that these losses have not been forgotten. More than 720 of the 900 crew were from the city. A generation was lost in this disaster.”

Even before its ill-fated maiden voyage, the ship was famous around the world for its opulence and such extravagances as a gymnasium and swimming pool on board. Its passengers included members of America’s and Britain’s wealthiest or most famous families, as well as immigrants making their way to new lives.

The wreckage became a UNESCO protected heritage site in 2012, part of an effort to protect and preserve the remains. The ship’s iron continues to erode and rust, noted Titanic expert Leon Litvack, a researcher at Queen’s University Belfast — the city where the luxury liner was built.

“These scans are very evocative. … She was a formidable vessel,” he said.

Rare footage of 1986 Titanic dive provides haunting look at wreck

The deep sea’s low oxygen levels have helped keep the Titanic relatively well-preserved, Litvack said, and now advanced technology can help plumb more of its secrets. “This seemingly unsinkable ship perished in a matter of hours,” he told The Post.

The new images may trigger another surge of fascination.

Part of the Titanic’s enduring appeal is the sheer scale of the disaster and the mystery of what went so terribly wrong. Was it the iceberg, the ship’s speed, a lack of lifeboats, the failure of SOS messages to get out — or all of those factors? The “what ifs,” Litvack said, will continue to be debated for decades to come.

“It was more than just a shipwreck,” he added. “It will endure in the public mind.”

The Reagan Library Education Blog

The Titanic and the Passengers Who Boarded It: Research and Assignment Guide

The Titanic is one of the most famous ships in history: leaving England on April 10th, 1912, it was only on the water for three days before it collided with an iceberg and sank on April 15th, 1912. In this guide, we provide research and information on the ship, it’s passengers, and the fateful night it crashed, as well as a list of discussion questions and additional resources. To see a video lecture of this presentation from our Presidential Primary Sources distance learning series, click here.

Built between 1909 and 1911, the luxury British steamship Titanic was so big, they had to create a new workspace before they could even start to build it. Measuring 882 feet long, the length of two and a half football fields, it was intended to travel almost 3,000 miles from Southampton, England to New York City.

Known for its comfort instead of speed, the Titanic and its sister ships the Olympic and the Britannic were filled with an ornate interior like a large first class dining room, four elevators, a swimming pool and a grand staircase. Even the most modest third-class offerings were still noted for their comfort and beauty. It was built with 15 supposedly watertight compartments that could be closed from the bridge in case water came aboard during a hull breach. All of these exciting features gave the Titanic nicknames like the “Unsinkable Ship” and the “Wonder Ship.”

Over 900 people worked on the Titanic, including crew members, cooks and servers in the dining room, and the Captain himself, Captain Edward John Smith. Adding the number of passengers to the 900 workers, the Titanic was carrying around 2200 people when it left England. 

The passengers aboard the Titanic were placed into three classes: first, second and third. 

The first class was for the wealthy. Ladies wore laced corsets, expensive gowns, long gloves and satin shoes. Men were dressed in tuxedos or suits, top hats, and nicely polished shoes. People in first class would change several times a day. They would wear different clothes for breakfast, afternoon tea, exercising, or dinner, when they wore their fanciest clothing. One of the most famous first class passengers was “The Unsinkable” Molly Brown (pictured above), an American socialite who survived the Titanic sinking by bravely assisting other survivors into lifeboats and later helping to steer her own, Lifeboat No. 6. 

Second class women dressed in nice gowns and accessorized with bracelets and necklaces. Men would wear fine suits and leather shoes. Some of the most famous second-class passengers are the eight musicians who played uplifting music throughout the night to try and calm passengers as the ship sank.

Third class passengers might have been workers, or immigrants who were going from England to America for a new life. They would only have one or two outfits, and might wear some of the same clothes during the whole trip. Women would wear long skirts, high collared blouses and boots. Men would dress in britches, ironed shirts or ties. At two months old, Millvina Dean was the youngest survivor. She, along with her older brother and parents, boarded the ship as third-class passengers planning to emigrate to America from Britain. Millvina Dean died in 2009, and was the last living survivor of the Titanic . 

Throughout the voyage, warnings of icebergs had been coming through the wireless radio, but the final messages were not given to the bridge. On April 14, after four days at sea the Titanic collided with a jagged iceberg at 11:40 p.m. Because it was dark that night, and the lookouts in the crow’s nest didn’t have binoculars with them since they were locked up, they didn’t see the iceberg until it was too late. At first, they thought the boat had simply scraped the iceberg, but they soon realized the iceberg had actually slashed a 300-foot gash in the hull, filling the lower compartments with seawater.

The ship had the legally required number of lifeboats, but 20 boats wasn’t enough for all the passengers. One of the reasons for this is that they believed if something happened they could call another ship and move people a few at a time. But the other ships were too far away and didn’t arrive before the ship sank. Women and children were given first priority for the lifeboats, and the boats were being launched under-filled, some with only 20 or so passengers when they could actually3 fit 65. In the end only 706 passengers survived, picked up by the Carpathia . The other 1500 people were lost at sea as the Titanic went underwater at 2:20 a.m. 

For Students and educators:

Discussion Questions:

• Why was the Titanic given nicknames such as “The Wonder Ship?” 
• How would you have felt if you were on the Titanic ? 
• Have you and your family ever been on a long trip? Where did you go? What did you wear?
• Which of the three passengers’ stories talked about above stands out to you the most? Why? 
• Why didn’t the crew of the Titanic see the iceberg in the distance?

Assignments for Further Research:

• Look more into the distinctions between the three social classes aboard the Titanic . How did first class passengers spend their time on the Titanic versus how third class passengers spent theirs? Were first, second, or third class passengers more likely to survive? 
• Many notable and famous people were passengers on the Titanic. Look more into some of them and find out their stories, such as: what class did they belong to? What was their profession? Why were they onboard the ship?
• There were multiple ships on the water at the time of the Titanic sinking – the Carpathia, the Olympic, and the Californian, to name a few. Why were each of them unable to reach the Titanic in time? Was it because of their radio being turned off, the distance, or something else? 
• What impact did the Titanic crash have on current ship safety procedures such as lifeboats, drills, etc.?

Additional Resources:

Molly Brown and 11 Other Famous Titanic Passengers

Information on the Titanic from the History Channel

Information on the Titanic from Britannica

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If the missing titanic submersible is found, how could the passengers be rescued?

Rescuers have detected noises repeating every 30 minutes from around the last known location of the Titan submersible. Could this make a rescue more likely?

Editor's Note: The U.S. Coast Guard has confirmed that debris found near the Titanic's wreck are those of the lost Titan submersible, they said at a press conference on Thursday (June 22). All five men on board died when the Titan experienced a "catastrophic implosion." Read Live Science's coverage .

Periodic banging sounds detected at 30-minute intervals near the wreck of the Titanic may mean that the lost Titan submersible is intact with its crew alive inside, and it could even be recoverable, some experts say. 

A Canadian reconnaissance plane detected the "underwater noises" using sonobuoys, the U.S. Coast Guard (USCG) Northeast announced early Wednesday (June 21). The banging was detected every 30 minutes, and the noises were still being heard 4 hours later.

Rescuers are scrambling to locate the source of the pulses. Until it's found, it's impossible to know if the noises are coming from the Titanic's wreckage, something else below the ocean, or the lost vessel , which has been missing since the morning of June 18 with five people onboard. 

If the sounds are from the submersible, scientists say it rules out a number of possibilities as to how it disappeared and opens a narrow window for potential rescue. 

Related: Missing Titanic submersible: Banging sounds heard in search for lost sub Titan

"If the sounds are coming from the submersible and the source is what we think it might be, the catastrophic scenario of a housing implosion didn't happen," said Blair Thornton , a professor of Marine Autonomy at the University of Southampton in the U.K. 

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If the submersible is found, Thornton said, a remotely-operated underwater vehicle (ROV) could bring it to the surface.

"I think locating it accurately is the biggest challenge. If you can locate it accurately and get submersibles to it, these ROVs are extremely capable platforms … they do a lot of manipulation tasks on targets that are not necessarily designed to be manipulated," Thornton told Live Science.

Lost in the abyss

The OceanGate Titan submersible went missing roughly 1 hour and 45 minutes into its 2.5-hour descent to the Titanic wreckage in a deep-sea trench in the North Atlantic Ocean. The sub now likely has less than 24 hours of its emergency oxygen supply remaining.

Before the periodic noises were detected, scientists suggested that Titan had most likely imploded due to a fault in its carbon fiber and titanium hull, or in its viewpoint — whose manufacturer only certified as safe at depths of 4,265 feet (1,300 meters). The Titanic wreck sits about 12,500 feet (3,800 m) below the surface.

Frank Owen, a former commander of the Australian Navy and ex-director of its submarine escape and rescue project, told BBC News he was confident the noises were coming from within the Titan.

"If there was a 30-minute interval, it's very unlikely to be anything but human related," he said. “Onboard this craft is a retired French navy diver. He would know the protocol for trying to alert searching forces … on the hour and the half hour you bang like hell for three minutes.”

After being asked about the possibility that noises were made by human beings trapped inside a submersible deep below the Atlantic Ocean, John Mauger, a Rear Admiral in the US Coast Guard, told CBS News: "This is an incredibly complex site. You have to remember that it's the wreck site of the Titanic. There is a lot of metal and different objects in the water around the site."

"That's why it's so important that we've engaged experts from the navy that understand the science behind noise so they can classify or give us better information about what the source of that noise may be," he said.

Finding the Titan

The detection of the noises offers search and rescue teams some faint hope of finding the missing submersible, which could otherwise be lost among the Titanic's countless debris or carried miles from its initial diving site by powerful ocean currents.

"If a vehicle remains drifting in the water column, it could have drifted for several days by now, in which case we would expect it to be several tens of kilometres — or even further — away from the site," Thornton said. "So it does tell us that it's most likely stationary, and it could mean it's on the sea floor or or snagged on something." 

Thornton said the single sonobuoy detection has probably already helped rescue teams narrow down the search area to 0.2 square miles (1 square kilometers) or so. 

By deploying more sonobuoys (or arrays of underwater microphones called hydrophones) rescuers could use further noises to triangulate the sub's possible location to within 330 feet (100 m). ROV's tend to move at roughly human walking pace, so narrowing the search to a small area is essential. 

"This starts to really become the range where a submersible at the right depth using active sonar can search a space like that," Thornton said.

Could there be a rescue? 

If the Titan is found, attempting a rescue will still be a near-impossible challenge, and a record-breaking one at that. The deepest ocean rescue in history — the 1973 recovery of the Canadian submersible Pisces III and its two crew members off the coast of Ireland — took place at 1,575 feet (480 m) below the surface. That's eight times less than the greatest possible depth Titan could be resting at. 

— Stunning full-scale scan of Titanic reveals complete shipwreck for the 1st time

— The Titanic shipwreck is collapsing into rust, first visit in 14 years reveals

— Salvagers may cut open the Titanic and pull out its 'voice', judge rules

On Tuesday, a Deep Energy cable-laying vessel deployed an ROV in the search area, although whether it can descend all the way to the wreck is unclear. Other vessels with ROVs are currently en route. One of the most promising is the French research vessel L'Atalante, which has two ROVs capable of descending to the Titanic wreck's depth.

Ships and ROVs have successfully recovered vehicles from Titanic depths before, such as a U.S. fighter jet that was recovered from 12,400 feet (3,780m) below the South China Sea last year. An ROV wrapped the aircraft in a net and attached it to a hook connected to a ship on the surface, which winched it up.

Whether the Titan, if found, would need to be winched is also a matter of speculation — depending on whether the craft’s ballasts, which flood with water to fall and air to rise, remain intact.

"If it's snagged by something not too heavy, it may be possible for a remotely operated vehicle with manipulators (robot arms) to dislodge the obstruction. Then the submersible might be able to float to the surface if its weights can be jettisoned," Nicolai Roterman , a deep-sea ecologist and marine biologist at the University of Portsmouth in the U.K, told Live Science. "Another possibility would be trying to attach something buoyant to the submersible, but I'm not aware of that having been done at such depths before."

Ben Turner is a U.K. based staff writer at Live Science. He covers physics and astronomy, among other topics like tech and climate change. He graduated from University College London with a degree in particle physics before training as a journalist. When he's not writing, Ben enjoys reading literature, playing the guitar and embarrassing himself with chess.

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'Astonishing' digital scan of Titanic reveals wreck as never seen before

The passenger liner sank into the Atlantic during its maiden voyage from Southampton to New York, with about 1,500 people dying in the disaster.

News reporter @thejournojames

Wednesday 17 May 2023 17:46, UK

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The first-ever full-sized digital replica of the Titanic has been created - and experts say it could be used to unlock secrets of the world's most famous shipwreck.

Scientists have created what they have labelled a "digital twin" of the passenger liner, which sank into the Atlantic in 1912 after hitting an iceberg while on its maiden voyage from Southampton to New York .

About 1,500 people died in the sinking - which remains one of the biggest shipping disasters in world history.

The digital twin of the shipwreck was created using deep-sea mapping of the real Titanic, which lies 3,800m (12,500ft) down in the Atlantic.

It is so detailed that even the serial number on the blade of one of the ship's propellers can be made out in the 3D images.

And experts believe the digital replica could be used by scientists to work out new details about how the passenger liner sank.

'Game-changing'

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Parks Stephenson, a Titanic expert who has studied the ship for the last 20 years, described the project as a "true game-changer".

"What we are seeing for the first time is an accurate and true depiction of the entire wreck and debris site," he said.

"I'm seeing details that none of us have ever seen before and this allows me to build upon everything that we have learned to date and see the wreck in a new light.

"We've got actual data that engineers can take to examine the true mechanics behind the breakup and the sinking and thereby get even closer to the true story of the Titanic disaster.

"For the next generation of Titanic exploration, research and analysis, this is the beginning of a new chapter."

Read more: New Titanic footage shows wreck in 'highest-ever quality' Titanic wreckage to get extra protection

The digital twin was created by deepwater specialists Magellan using more than 715,000 images and full 4k video footage of the wreck, which were taken using two submersibles - named Romeo and Juliet.

The submersibles mapped every millimetre of the wreck - which split into two parts as it sank - in minute detail. They also mapped a three-mile debris field surrounding the wreck.

Previous optical images of the ship have been limited by the low light levels and the often poor water quality around the wreckage.

Titanic 'as never seen before'

Magellan's Gerhard Seiffert, who led the planning for the expedition, said the company's digital twin provides a "highly accurate photorealistic 3D model" of the wreck.

"This model will allow people to zoom out and to look at the entire thing for the first time," he said.

"So, by capturing this 3D model, what we're able to do is visualize the wreck in a completely new way, there's all kinds of amazing small little details that you can see.

"This is the Titanic as no one had ever seen it before."

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Richard Parkinson, founder of Magellan, described the results of his team's project as "astonishing".

"Over the course of the Titanic project the volume of data that we acquired was enormous - around 7150,000 images and some 16 terabytes of data," he said.

"We believe that this data is approximately ten times larger than any underwater 3D model that's ever been attempted before."

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Established 1963

Titanic at Cherbourg

Au revoir to the old world by ken marschall, information, titanic past and present.

What were the origins of this great ocean liner? Why was Titanic built? Why was she called unsinkable? Why did she sink? Why weren’t there enough lifeboats for everyone? Was third class prevented from getting into lifeboats? Who was at fault? What changed after the disaster? At the turn of the twentieth century Great Britain was pre-eminent; her largest shipping companies, Cunard and White Star, since the earliest days of transatlantic travel, battled for the

Titanic’s “Brittle” Steel?

Olympic and Titanic were built using Siemens-Martin formula steel plating throughout the shell and upper works. This type of steel was first used in the armed merchant cruisers, Teutonic and Majestic in 1889/90. This steel was high quality with good elastic properties, ideal for conventional riveting as well as the modern method (in 1912) of hydraulic riveting. Each plate was milled and rolled to exact tolerances and presented a huge material cost to both yard

Miss Louise Laroche

A Haitian French Family Which Traveled in Second Class Aboard Titanic Miss Louise Laroche was an Honour Member of the Titanic Historical Society from the beginning until her death in 1998. Since she could not speak English, correspondence over the years was thin. When a young man from France joined the Titanic Historical Society who spoke fluent English, Edward Kamuda asked Olivier Mendez if he would pay her a visit and her story was published

Ismay And The Titanic – by Paul Louden-Brown

Excerpted from “The White Star Line; An Illustrated History 1869-1934” J. Bruce Ismay at the time of the disaster, as chairman and managing director of the White Star Line, was held to blame for the loss of the Titanic by the American press; especially those controlled by William Randolph Hearst, a newspaper magnate and one of the richest and most powerful men in America. Ismay had met Hearst years before, when he was White Star’s

The White Star Line and The International Mercantile Marine Company

The White Star Line, the Oceanic Steam Navigation Company was, from 1902 until 1927, a wholly owned subsidiary of the International Mercantile Marine Company (IMMC). From its inception thirty years earlier up to the turn of the century, it was probably the most successful of the British transatlantic carriers. Thomas Ismay, the Line’s founder, was both conservative and innovative. During a period of competitive turbulence and rapid technological advances, White Star earned an enviable reputation

Our Thanks to the US Coast Guard and The International Ice Patrol

 U. S. Coast Guard International Ice Patrol Once Again Remembers Those Lost on Titanic  On a cold but sunny April 15th over the treacherous iceberg invested waters of the North Atlantic the men and women of U. S. Coast Guard Air Station Elizabeth City, North Carolina and the International Ice Patrol once again paused to remember the 1500 plus souls lost with the RMS Titanic. Ice Reconnaissance Detachment (ICERECDET) #5 deployed from Elizabeth City on

The Infamous “Titanic Menu”

The Titanic Historical Society published this article to its readers as a public service. Documentation is in the Society’s files. While in Denver in April, 1999 attending The Titanic Historical Society’s convention, a menu was shown on the television programme, “Antiques Roadshow,” whose owner in Boston claimed was an original from the Titanic worth $75,000.00. A few months later, an antique gallery in Texas had another that it was planning to auction online. That menu

Titanic Myths

The Titanic disaster is a classic tale and now has become a modern folk story, but like all folk stories our understanding of what really happened has been clouded by the way the disaster has been recounted over the years following that terrible night in April 1912. As soon as the waves of the North Atlantic closed over her stern the myths began. It was said that the builders and owners of Titanic claimed she was unsinkable.

Titanic, Olympic and Myths

The distribution of myths and misinformation about the Titanic, and their perpetuation is a situation we uncover ad infinitum. Thirty-five years of publishing in the Commutator, including Don Lynch’s survivor archives, Ken Marschall’s knowledge of Titanic’s structure, information from George Behe, Ray Lepien, Eric Sauder, Paul Louden-Brown and many more authors, make a lengthy list of talent. Books, reprints, new and old material that the THS or 7C’s Press offers are a convenient resource. It

Preservation Is An Ongoing Effort To Protect Artifacts

The sinking of Titanic was an event that shocked the world. Thousands of lives were touched by the tragedy. All that we know about Titanic comes from the accounts and the stories of the survivors, the rescuers and the people directly involved in the tragedy. There were countless acts of bravery and sacrifice that occurred that night. The stories of too many have been lost forever. Thankfully, many have been preserved through the continuing efforts

Memories of the Olympic

The whistle let out a long, booming blast, and a light outside drifted slowly by the porthole, showing that the Olympic was under way. But that’s all I saw, for these were the days of midnight sailings, and I was around nine years old. It had been decreed that I must go directly to bed, and so I was never able to join the crowds that lined the rails as the great White Star liner

I Heard Titanic’s Call

ALEC BAGOT was a Marconi operator on Olympic when the Titanic struck an iceberg. He was an old man when he finished the last draft of his book, Roaming Around so his memories are faulty and tainted by pop culture about the Titanic.It should also be noted that he lived a much fuller life then most who were involved in the drama on that fateful night of April 14-15, 1912. Bagot served in the First World War, became a wealthy businessman, chaired

To Hell and Back, The Maiden Voyage of Britannic

Simon Mills, a long time friend and member of the Titanic Historical Society has written a special chapter for his latest book “To Hell And Back, The Maiden Voyage of Britannic” exclusively for The Titanic Commutator. We will be offering you a taste of the article here and the complete article will appear in the February/May 2003 issue of The Titanic Commutator. Her first voyage was a far cry from that originally planned for the

When Is A Rocket Called A Distress Signal Or Just A Flash In The Sky?

In April 1912 when the Titanic hit an iceberg and sank, the subject of distress rockets was a prime news event. To this very day, due to the United States and British Enquiries ignoring the International Regulations regarding the display of signals of distress, there is confusion. Strange as it may seem, some people including a few “experts” of the Titanic story, don’t fully understand distress signals. Sadly,it seems, no one on the Titanic that

Titanic – The Legend Continues :  A state-of-the-art journey begins when passengers board the ship through an iceberg at the water’s edge. Once inside the real story unfolds as the great Titanic lives on — a towering symbol recreated in all her glorious splendor.You will relive the last hours of her fateful April 1912 voyage and emotionally connect to her passengers and crew through their words and stories. In the artifact galleries you will almost feel their presence in spirit where over 400 personal and private artifacts including some loaned from the Titanic Historical Society Collection are on display. There are no salvaged artifacts.Upon entry you will be handed a boarding pass bearing the name of a passenger. What happened to this person will be revealed on the Memorial Wall. Some of the highlights…

• Walk on an elegant replica of the Titanic’s Grand Staircase
• Touch the frozen surface of an ‘iceberg’
• Feel the North Atlantic chill of that clear, starry April night
• You will marvel at the world’s largest, exquisitely detailed Titanic model
• Stand on the mighty ship’s bridge and hear Captain Smith’s words
• View life onboard in a life-like First Class stateroom and a typical Third Class cabin.
• Explore world-class galleries containing rare historical artifacts
• Interactive displays include: Try to send an SOS transmission from the ship’s wireless room
• See an exclusive exhibit of Father Browne’s photos – the only known interior & exterior photos taken of Titanic.

THS Official Faceboook Page :  Welcome to the Titanic Historical Society (THS) Facebook. The Titanic Historical Society is not just a FB page, it is an organization, the first and original Titanic organization founded in 1963 by Edward Kamuda.

Visiting the Titanic Museum? Coming to Indian Orchard, Massachusetts? Lodging, food & drink, things to do… 

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Encyclopedia Titanica :  A unique resource for anyone interested in the Titanic. Detailed passenger and crew biographies, regularly updated passenger and crew listings, exclusive research articles and ongoing discussions about the Titanic.

The Titanic Research and Modeling Association : Dedicated to the research of Olympic class ships and other great liners of the past.

Nova Scotia Archives and Records Management, Halifax, NS , has launched a virtual exhibit and searchable database built around a very rare archival document–the Disposition of Bodies ex Titanic Recovered up to May 13, 1912 .

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An accompanying virtual exhibit features nearly 80 historical photographs and documents, most of them presented online for the first time. Together, the list and the exhibit provide a striking visual record detailing the aftermath of Titanic’s catastrophic end.

Agawam Historical Association :  Agawam is a town rich in history – from its founding in 1636, to its incorporation in 1855, to having the first Zip Code in the United States. Browse through the web site and discover things from French and Indian War veterans graves to the largest amusement park in New England.

Treasure Hunters Found the Indian Titanic’s $43 Million Fortune. Then, They Lost It All.

What began as a triumphant salvage operation turned into a bitter dispute with a brutal end.

A sunken treasure’s destiny, long disputed in courtrooms instead of the high seas, has finally been settled.

On May 8, the U.K. Supreme Court (UKSC) awarded the Republic of South Africa the rights to a World War II-era shipwreck, colloquially known as the “Indian Titanic,” and its treasure trove of silver bullion worth an estimated $43 million.

The decision concludes a bitter legal battle between South Africa and Argentum Exploration Ltd., a marine salvage company, over the sunken vessel that has captivated maritime treasure hunters for years. Now, with ownership finally decided, it wraps up a saga marked with legal strife, historical mysteries, and a massive fortune lying silently beneath the sea.

What Was the “Indian Titanic”?

On November 23, 1942, a day marked by significant WWII events including Operation Uranus and the sinking of the SS Benlomond , the lesser-known tragedy of the SS Tilawa also unfolded as it sank to the bottom of the ocean.

The SS Tilawa wasn’t a military vessel, but rather, a passenger cargo ship, hauling 222 crew members and 732 passengers, as well as four artillerymen and 6,000 tons of cargo, including the silver bullion.

Departing from Bombay (now Mumbai), the SS Tilawa was en route to Durban, South Africa, carrying bullion meant to be made into coin by the South African mint, but it never reached its destination. Instead, near the Seychelles Islands, the Tilawa was struck by two torpedoes, an hour apart, fired by the Imperial Japanese Navy’s I-29 submarine. The ship sunk after the second torpedo hit, taking with it 280 of its occupants. The rest of those aboard were adrift for two days before the HMS Birmingham arrived and rescued 674 survivors.

The SS Tilawa took on the nickname the “Indian Titanic,” in reference to the infamous 1912 sinking of the RMS Titanic , which resulted in approximately 1,500 deaths. According to tilawa1942 , the Tilawa is believed to be “the only passenger cargo liner attacked in the Indian Ocean during the Second World War.”

The Recovery of the Wreckage

In 2017, 75 years after the SS Tilawa sank, the ship’s precious silver cargo was finally retrieved. British race car driver Ross Hyett, who founded Argentum Exploration Ltd. in 2012 with the goal of uncovering wartime wrecks laden with sunken treasures, was instrumental in the recovery. That July, Hyett’s company enlisted the help of Advanced Maritime Services (AMS) to embark on the ambitious quest to find the Tilawa ’s remains.

It took AMS about two years to accurately locate the wreckage site of the Tilawa , according to a 2021 article in Baird Maritime . AMS then used a sophisticated, high-tech approach to carry out the salvage operation.

Enter the Seabed Worker . The Norwegian multipurpose sea vessel, which was previously used to locate the black boxes of Air France Flight 447 , plumbed the depths of the Indian Ocean to recover the silver bullion from the SS Tilawa . It took six months to pull 2,364 bars of silver from approximately 3,500 meters deep, according to Baird Maritime .

Retrieving the silver from the ocean’s depths was the easy part. Bringing the bounty back home was much more difficult, especially as the salvage crew navigated under the mistaken belief of rightful ownership. They thought that the silver bullion was insured by the British Government, since that’s what was advertised to investors back in 2012. So the Seabed Worker , and its companion vessel, the Pacific Askari , had to strategically navigate the route back to the U.K.

To bypass the Suez Canal and South African territory, the vessels took a detour through the Seychelles and around the Cape of Good Hope, arriving in Southampton on October 2, 2017. Baird Maritime details that the silver bars were temporarily submerged at sea near the Seychelles and just outside South Africa’s territorial waters for transshipment onto the Pacific Askari , a tactic used to avoid being seized within territorial boundaries.

Once the vessels arrived at Southampton, Argentum made its claim with the Receiver of Wreck, presumably assuming the hardest part was over. But the Republic of South Africa, which had been in negotiations with a different firm to salvage the silver from the wreckage, stepped forward to stake its own claim.

A Bitter Legal Battle

Argentum asserted its rights as the salvor of the SS Tilawa silver, arguing it was entitled to compensation for recovering the precious metal from the ocean floor. The UKSC press summary explains the claim:

“Under maritime law, it is possible to make a claim for voluntary salvage, which means a salvor can make a claim regardless of whether the owner of the property requested or consented to the salvage operation. In this case, Argentum had retrieved the Silver without any prior agreement with South Africa, so its claim was for voluntary salvage.”

South Africa maintained throughout legal proceedings in the High Court, Court of Appeals, and finally the Supreme Court, that it was exempt from being sued based on “the principle of state immunity.” Argentum, meanwhile, countered that South Africa did not qualify for immunity, arguing that an exception within the State Immunity Act 1978 should apply.

The High Court and Court of Appeals initially ruled in favor of Argentum, recognizing its claim, but the UKSC unanimously overturned these decisions, siding with South Africa by stating the silver was intended for the sovereign act of minting currency and dismissing the argument that the silver was “in use” during transit, clarifying that cargo in a ship’s hold is not actively serving any purpose.

The Forgotten Tragedy

Outside the confines of the courtroom, the case shines a light on what tilawa1942 calls “The Forgotten Tragedy,” drawing renewed interest to the tale of the “Indian Titanic.” Could it help unravel some of the ship’s enduring mysteries posed by the website, like whether or not Japan knew there was precious cargo aboard the SS Tilawa , or why the ship didn’t have an escort, and its route wasn’t patrolled for enemy attack?

As the 82nd anniversary of the Tilawa’ s sinking approaches, the remaining questions surrounding the ship’s fate may prove more profound than the legal battle over who is entitled to the silver that once lay in its wreckage.

Michael Natale is the news editor for Best Products , covering a wide range of topics like gifting, lifestyle, pop culture, and more. He has covered pop culture and commerce professionally for over a decade. His past journalistic writing can be found on sites such as Yahoo! and Comic Book Resources , his podcast appearances can be found wherever you get your podcasts, and his fiction can’t be found anywhere, because it’s not particularly good. 

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