The RMS¹ Titanic was a British ocean liner that sank after striking an iceberg in the North Atlantic Ocean on 15 April 1912.

The Titanic was 882 feet long (nearly 3 football fields) and 175 feet high (about 11 stories if it were a building.) The Titanic and her sister ship, the Olympic, were the largest ships in the world at the time.

The Titanic was meant to be the ultimate luxury in ocean travel and was a technological marvel of its time. It had a swimming pool, a spa, cafes, restaurants, a Marconi (radio) service for passengers to communicate with loved ones back on land, and an exercise room available for first-class passengers. Its internal construction, featured sixteen compartments designed to prevent widespread flooding in the case of a hull breach: this innovative design allowed for the flooding of four compartments without an impact on the ship and led to the Titanic being considered “unsinkable.”

Many famous people: actors, athletes, and rich businessmen were traveling on the Titanic in the first-class accommodations that featured sumptuous rooms, fine dining, and full-service from the staff. They were traveling for pleasure or for business and could afford to spend thousands of dollars to travel.

However, most of the passengers were in much less luxurious quarters called steerage (third class); most of these featured rooms with bunk beds that slept up to six, and dining was in a mess hall (like eating lunch at school.) These were mostly poor immigrants who were traveling to America to build better lives. Steerage passengers were kept strictly apart from the first and second-class passengers; gates blocked most hallways leading to the upper decks where the wealthy played.

The Titanic was just over half-way through its journey when, at 11:42 pm on April 12^th it struck an iceberg. The glancing hit with the iceberg, reported to be 50 to 100 feet high and 200 to 400 feet long, tore a hole in the side of the Titanic, just under the water line. This impact caused the seams on the hull to buckle, creating holes that compromised five compartments in the front of the ship, one more than was considered survivable. The designer of the ship, Thomas Andrews, who had sailed on this first voyage as a passenger told the Captain, Edward Smith, that the ship would sink in three hours.

Over the next two and a half hours the Titanic sent out a series of distress calls to other ships to help rescue their passengers and started loading lifeboats as the ship sank. At 2:20 in the morning on April 15^th the Titanic broke in half and sank beneath the waves.

The nearest ship, the RMS Carpathia, was four hours away, when they arrived at 4:00 am, they found only around 700 survivors of the greatest ship ever built, huddling together in wooden lifeboats in freezing temperatures. Due to a series of mistakes and bad decisions over 1,500 of the ships 2,200 passengers perished in the disaster. Only about 700 made it safely to shore in New York.

The Titanic was able to carry forty-eight lifeboats that could each carry around sixty-five passengers – over 3,000 spaces for passengers and crew. However, due to the belief that the ship was unsinkable it went to sea with only twenty lifeboats, which could hold about 1,200 passengers, not nearly enough for the number of people on board the ship.

The fist lifeboats launched were not fully loaded, reducing the number of seats available even further. This happened due to several reasons:

• The crew believed that the system was untested and that the launch system would not be able to handle the load – this was false.

• The passengers believed that they were safer staying on board the ship and refused to board the boats.

• The passengers did not want to leave the warmth and comfort of the ship for the open ocean.

• The crew was unfamiliar with the launch process and a couple of boats were damaged.

• Although the Marconi (radio) operators had received several messages about dangerous conditions ahead many of these messages were not passed on to the Captain or ignored.

• The Marconi was service provided for passenger use – they did not want to interrupt passenger messages to deal with safety warnings. At one point one of the operators rebuked another vessel’s operator for clogging the airwaves with warnings.

• From accounts of the disaster, the owner of the ship, Jay Bruce Ismay, confiscated at least one of the warnings. It is likely that he influenced the Captain to disregard the warnings.

Beyond the warnings from other ships, it was obvious that they were in dangerous waters. Experienced sailors and passengers later reported that icebergs and ice flows had been visible for a while and that they were surprised at the speed they were maintaining.

This could have been due to the influence of Mr. Ismay, the fact that warnings had not been passed on, or simple belief in the ship’s invulnerability.

This mistake was compounded by the fact that the clear, calm weather made it difficult to spot icebergs. That lack of motion on the water meant that no waves were breaking against the ice, which was one of the the most common signs of danger. With the lack of visibility and the speed of the ship by the time the iceberg was spotted there was only about one minute to change the ship's course before impact.

There are also reports that there was a fire below decks, in the boiler rooms. This was not uncommon for the time, however, if the fire was getting worse, the Captain may have been rushing to reach shore before it became a danger.

Once the ship began to sink the water went over the top of the walls between compartments, allowing more and more compartments to flood. Later ships using this technology built the walls higher so that breached compartments would not flood secure ones.

The gates that closed steerage (third class) off from the upper decks were typically locked to keep the lower-class passengers from traveling out of their area. While the official procedures called for these gates to be unlocked in an emergency, it was forgotten during the disaster. Many steerage passengers were trapped below decks.