50 Amazing Facts About Titanic | Amazing Facts 4U
- The Titanic was in fact the largest man-made moving object on Earth when it entered service.
- The Titanic measured 269 meters (882 feet) in length and more than 15,000 men worked on the ship during its construction in Belfast, Northern Ireland.
- There were 246 injuries and two deaths recorded during the ship’s 26-month construction in Belfast. Twenty horses were in fact required to carry the main anchor.
- Amazingly more than 3 million rivets were used to build the Titanic.
- Not many people know that SS Naronic, a ship owned by the same company that owned Titanic had in fact disappeared on the same route without a trace in 1893.
- Amazingly a book was published about an unsinkable 800-foot cruise liner ship that hit an iceberg in the North Atlantic on an April night killing most of its passengers due to an inadequate number of lifeboats. The ship was called ‘The Titan’. The book was written in 1898 about 14 years before the actual Titanic sank.
- 100,000 people in fact turned up to see the ship’s launch on May 31, 1911.
- A first-class ticket on the Titanic cost an amazing $4,375 in 1912 (almost $100,000 today).
- First-class meals aboard the Titanic in fact consisted of up to 13 courses, each with a different accompanying wine pairing, and was meant to last for 4 to 5 hours.
- First-class passengers were given a music book containing 352 songs. Amazingly musicians on board knew them all, in case requests were made.
- 26 of those on board were honeymooning couples.
- The amazing fact is Titanic required 600 tons of coal a day for its operation hand shoveled into its furnaces by a team of 176 men. Almost 100 tons of ash was ejected into the sea each day.
- Only 16 wooden lifeboats and 4 collapsible boats were in fact carried, enough to accommodate 1,178 people, about 1/3 rd of Titanic’s total capacity.
- The Titanic had its own newspaper daily named ‘The Atlantic Daily Bulletin’ printing news, advertisements, stock prices, horse-racing results, society gossip, and the day’s menu.
- Although most passengers had to share bathrooms (only the two promenade suites in first class had private bathrooms), amazingly third class had only two bathtubs for more than 700 passengers.
- The iceberg that hit the Titanic was around 100 feet tall coming from a glacier in Greenland. Just 37 seconds in fact elapsed between the actual sighting of the iceberg and the collision with the Titanic.
- The amazing fact is if only four of the Titanic’s watertight compartments had been breached Titanic wouldn’t have sunk staying afloat but unfortunately the iceberg sliced through six.
- The Titanic sank 2 hours and 40 minutes after hitting the iceberg.
- Women were allowed to board lifeboats first. Of the 711 passengers of the Titanic that were rescued, only 58 were men.
- In all, 328 bodies were found out of 1502 who perished, but 119 of these were badly damaged and thus were buried at sea.
- All the musicians on board kept on playing for more than two hours as the ship sank and all went down.
- Titanic’s first lifeboat with a capacity for 40 people was lowered with only 12 people on board. Later into the cold night, they refused to return to try and rescue other passengers.
- Charles Lightoller, the Second Officer confessed years afterward that binoculars were indeed on board, in a locked box for which no one seemed to have a key. It’s amazing that had binoculars been employed, disaster may have been averted.
- Not a single engineer made it off the Titanic. They stayed till their last breath and kept the power on to facilitate the escape of passengers.
- A priest onboard the titanic refused a place on a lifeboat twice and stayed behind to hear confessions and give absolution to the people left on the ship.
- John Jacob Astor IV was the richest passenger on board going down with the ship. He had a net worth of around $ 85m (About $2 bn today).
- Amazingly a woman named Violet Constance Jessop survived the sinking of the Titanic. Interestingly, she was fortunate enough to survive the sinking of its sister ship, the Britannic, and a collision on its third sister ship, the Olympic.
- The original founders/owners of Macy’s, a famous New York store, died on the Titanic and were the old couple depicted in the Titanic movie, who went to sleep as the ship went down.
- Millionaire Ben Guggenheim refused a lifeboat on the Titanic, and entrusted a survivor to pass on a message to his wife, “No woman shall be left aboard this ship because Ben Guggenheim is a coward.”
- Charles Joughin, the ship’s baker was in very cold water for two hours before being rescued with little ill-effects. He claimed he had not felt the cold due to the amount of whiskey he had drunk. In the movie Titanic, he is depicted as the character who drinks from a flask and rides the ship down into the ocean with Jack and Rose.
- It’s amazing that the Japanese who survived the Titanic crash were labeled a coward in his country for not dying with the other passengers.
- William Edward Minahan, a doctor from Fond du Lac, Wis., had his fortune read shortly before the voyage. The fortune teller predicted his death aboard the ship. She was right.
- There is a conspiracy theory going around that the Titanic never sunk. Instead, it was her sister ship, the Olympic that sank, and it was all done to claim insurance.
- When the Titanic began sending out distress signals, the Californian, rather than the Carpathia, was the closest ship about 10 miles away yet the Californian did not respond until it was much too late. The crew members on the Californian saw mysterious lights in the sky which were the distress flares sent up from the Titanic and woke up their captain to tell him about it. Unfortunately, the captain issued no orders.
- Titanic survivors were heavily charged $1 per word to send telegrams from the Carpathia, the rescuing ship. One man used his last dollar to send the word ‘Safe’ to his mother.
- On April 15, 1912, a day later, a steward unaware of the Titanic sinking spotted an iceberg smeared with red paint and snapped a photo of it.
- Amazingly the first movie about the Titanic was released just a month after its sinking starring one of its survivors named Gibson. Shooting began just five days after the Titanic sank. It was a hugely successful silent movie. However, all reels of the movie were destroyed in a fire in 1914.
- Two years after the Titanic tragedy, the ship Empress Of Ireland sank in the Gulf of St. Lawrence and lost 68.5% of all its passengers (0.5% more than Titanic). It’s amazing that the event was hardly noticed because of WWI.
- In 1943, the Nazis also made a film called “Titanic” just to discredit the British. Royal Air Force bombed the theater it was to be premiered in.
- In 1945, the Royal Air Force accidentally sunk a ship full of holocaust victims. The ship had been used in the Nazi Propaganda film “Titanic”.
- The amazing fact is about three times more people died in that ship sink than in the actual Titanic.
- They built a ship almost as big as the Titanic with a double hull fifty years earlier. It hit some rocks and didn’t sink because of the double hull. They didn’t even have to inform the passengers about the damage.
- An amazing fact is when Robert Ballard (Professor of Oceanography) announced he was planning a mission to find the Titanic, it was actually a cover or a classified mission to search for lost nuclear submarines. They finished the job early so the team spent the extra time at sea looking for the Titanic and actually went on to found it.
- The wreck of the Titanic was discovered in 1985 which lies 370 miles off the coast of Newfoundland, around 12,500 feet below the surface.
- The marine dive specialists Deep Ocean Expeditions used to offer trips to the wreck using a Mir submersible chartered from the Russian Academy of Sciences with berths costing $59,000. Service was stopped in 2012.
- The cost to construct the Titanic in 1910-1912 was $ 7.5 million which was about $120 million in 1997 dollars. Amazingly the movie cost $200 million to make.
- The ship exterior set for the Titanic shooting was constructed in a tank on a beach south of Rosarito, Baja California, Mexico. The entire set was mounted on hydraulic jacks and could be tilted as required.
- In the scene where the water comes crashing into the Grand Staircase room, the filmmakers only had one shot at it because the entire set and furnishings were going to be destroyed in the shot.
- James Cameron’s 1997 Titanic film has grossed more than $2bn and won 11 Oscars.
- The last remaining survivor of the disaster, Millvina Dean, died on May 31, 2009, aged 97. She was just two months old at the time of disaster.
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