The tragedy of the sinking of the Titanic in 1912 was compounded by the number of people who could have been saved had the ship been carrying all the lifeboats it had space for. Remarkably, although it was fitted with just 20 lifeboats, this complied with the legal minimum, which related to the ship's gross tonnage and not the number of passengers and crew aboard.
Nazi Propaganda Minister, Joseph Goebbels, decided in 1943 to use the Titanic tragedy to highlight the follies of Capitalism. He commissioned Herbert Selpin to realise his vision but the director struggled to keep quite his hate for Nazism and was imprisoned, where he died in a staged suicide, arranged by Goebbels. The film was never shown in Germany, which was probably just as well for the critics.
.jpg "Jinx Violet Jessop and her disastrous career")
On-board nurse and stewardess, Violet Jessop, had something of a disastrous career. Not only was she a survivor of the sinking of the Titanic, but she was also on board Titanic's sister ship, Britannic, when it sank. Unbelievably, she was also a passenger on the RMS Olympic during a collision. With a track record like that, she probably took to sleeping in a life jacket.
In a chilling coincidence, a novel named Futility predicted the sinking of RMS Titanic, fourteen years beforehand. While the fictional vessel was named Titan, both were British built, with too few lifeboats, struck icebergs in the North Atlantic during April at around midnight and sank. The author renamed it "The Wreck of the Titan after the disaster", making it the most ghoulish advertising campaign ever.
Few people can have turned a negative into a positive as comprehensively as Titanic's survivor Dorothy Gibson. The 23-year-old starlet boarded the ship when it called at France on its way to New York. Dorothy used her first-hand experience to script a screenplay for "Saved from the Titanic", which was released just a month after the tragedy, becoming the first dramatisation of the fateful tragedy.
Imagine a once-in-a-lifetime trip, halfway across the world, which is to be the showcase for a modern form of transport. Now imagine falling ill just before the trip and having to cancel. History does not tell us, but Reinhold Boyer, must have been disappointed at missing out – until, that is, the Titanic sank… But, shockingly, this was not the first time Reinhold had avoided death by disaster: over his lifetime he survived several fires, an earthquake, and a railway accident too!
The sinking of the luxurious passenger ship Titanic is one of the most famous naval disasters in history, but did some passengers foresee this tragic event? One rich couple, who were named Wanderbright, decided to leave the ship right before its departure, leaving their luggage their carefully-prepared cabin and their butler behind. It has never been clarified why they did so.
The tragic story of Titanic is known the world over, but did you know that the iconic ship used 600 tons of coal per day? To put that in perspective, it’s the equivalent of an Olympic-sized swimming pool filled to a depth of three feet! Besides, each portion of coal had to be trimmed, moved from the storage to the boilers, then into them and, when consumed, the ashes had to be removed and discarded. Ashes were up to 100Tn themselves! And it wasn't that easy to discard them, specially when the boilers floor was meters beneath the sea level.
More than a century after the demise of the “unsinkable” Titanic, controversy still surrounds Lifeboat 1 which has been dubbed alternately the “money boat” and the “millionaire boat”. The lifeboat was built to hold forty people but launched with just twelve on board: seven crew members and five First Class passengers. Needless to say, the five passengers were all very wealthy people and rumours soon spread that money had changed hands to secure their seats and to row away from survivors in the water. This has never been proven but the occupants were strongly criticised by a British Inquiry for “not making a concerted effort to rescue survivors”.
.jpg "Mum who discovers that her missing kids were Titanic")
Amongst the passengers on board the Titanic was someone known as "Louis M. Hoffman". In fact this was a pseudonym of Michel Navratil, who had kidnapped his two children after losing custody of them to his wife, Marcelle. Michel died onboard the Titanic but the children survived - and when their faces were printed in the paper, Marcelle finally found out where her children had got to!
Frank Browne was a trainee priest aboard the ill-fated Titanic. Browne, famous for photographing some of the ship's passengers, was given a ticket for the first leg of the voyage. He liked it so much he wanted to stay aboard, and actually had been offered free tickets for the extended trip. However, when he telegrammed his superior to ask for permission to continue to New York, he was ordered to disembark at Queenstown as initially agreed. Consequently, his poignant photographs were saved for posterity, as was he.
Deemed the largest vessel in service at the time, RMS Titanic weighed over 46,000 tons. Contributing to this hefty weight were 5 anchors; the largest of which weighed a whopping 16 tons alone and required 20 shire horses to transport it to Dudley Train Station from Netherton where the anchor had been constructed by Noah Hingley & Sons.
Eccentric Australian tycoon Clive Palmer is building a replica of the ocean liner Titanic - imaginatively named Titanic II. Before you get a sinking feeling, note that the replica will be redesigned to comply with current safety regulations, but will also feature the famous grand staircase, Turkish baths and Edwardian gym. Despite several delays, launch is now planned for 2018.
When, in 1912, RMS Titanic hit the iceberg that, famously, sealed its fate, it had on board the very latest radio equipment. Its inventor, Gugliemo Marconi, had received an offer of free passage for the maiden voyage but had, happily, chosen instead to take the Lusitania, a few days earlier, preferring that vessel’s stenographer to help him with his paperwork.
The sinking of the Titanic in 1912 tragically took hundreds of lives. However one man we can all be thankful wasn't killed on the iceburg-prone ship was chocolate extraordinaire, Milton Hershey. Hershey was due to take the ill-fated Titanic home from France however urgent business forced him to take an earlier vessel: the Amerika. Luckily this sub-plot never made its way into James Cameron's movie.
If you've always been fascinated by the Titanic you have a golden opportunity to visit the wreck of the ill-fated ship, when OceanGate sets off on an 8-day journey from Newfoundland in Canada. Visitors will be transported in a carbon-and-titanium submersible to the Titanic's final resting place, well over two miles below the stormy waters of the Atlantic. The trip costs around $100,000 per person, and you don't have much time to get the money together because tickets are selling fast.
Lifeboat drills were standard practice for ships when the Titanic set off on her maiden voyage across the Atlantic. On the morning of April 14, expecting to conduct the regular drill, the crew found it had been cancelled without explanation by Captain Smith. Only hours later, the ship collided with the iceberg that was to sink her with such calamitous loss of life.
.jpg "Thresher submarine")
You will be hard-pressed to find anyone who isn’t familiar with the RMS Titanic, the ship that sank to the bottom of the North Atlantic in 1912. What isn’t well-known, however, is the history of the discovery of the wreck in 1985 by Robert Ballard during a military classified expedition to locate the wrecks of the USS Thresher and Scorpion, two sunken nuclear submarines. The mission was covered up as if they wanted to find the Titanic.