Tell about RMS Titanic ?

Numerous people held tickets for the journey, but did not actually sail, including Milton S. Hershey, founder of the chocolate firm, Guglielmo Marconi, and Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt, who died on the RMS Lusitania three years later.

The Titanic was a luxury British steamship that sank in the early hours of April 15, 1912 after striking an iceberg, leading to the deaths of more than 1,500 passengers and crew.

The last remaining survivor of the disaster, Millvina Dean, died on May 31, 2009, aged 97. She was two months old at the time. The iceberg was around 100 feet tall and came from a glacier in Greenland.

The luxury steamship RMS Titanic 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.

The iceberg was spotted at 11.40pm on April 14, 1912, by lookout Frederick Fleet, who proclaimed: “Iceberg! Right ahead!” Fleet survived the disaster and was a lookout on the RMS Oceanic during the Twenties, before serving in the Second World War. Pranksters placed a pair of binoculars on his grave in 2012 with a note saying: “Sorry they’re 100 years too late”.

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, and her story has entered the public consciousness as a cautionary tale about the perils of human hubris.

The Royal Mail Steamer Titanic was the product of intense competition among rival shipping lines in the first half of the 20th century.

The iceberg was around 100 feet tall and came from a glacier in Greenland. Just 37 seconds elapsed between the sighting of the iceberg and the collision.

First Officer William McMaster Murdoch ordered the ship to turn, but it was too large to do so in time. It has been suggested that the ship would not have sunk if it hit the iceberg head-on. Murdoch went down with the ship; a memorial to him is found in his hometown of Dalbeattie, Kirkcudbrightshire, Scotland.

Edward Smith, the ship’s captain, also went down with the vessel. His last words were: “Well boys, you've done your duty and done it well. I ask no more of you. I release you. You know the rule of the sea. It's every man for himself now, and God bless you.” A statue of him can be seen in Lichfield, Staffordshire.

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.

The ship received six warnings about icebergs during the voyage. A lifeboat drill, scheduled for April 14, was cancelled for unknown reasons.

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.

The ship broke in two at around 2.20am on April 15, and sunk, sending all remaining passengers into the ocean. The temperature would have been -2°C – few would have survived longer than 15 minutes in the water, while around one in five would have died within two minutes from cold shock.

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.

Charles Joughin, however, the ship’s baker, reportedly trod 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.

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.

Twenty-six of those on board were honeymooning couples.Musicians played for two hours and five minutes as the ship sank.

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.

The SS Californian was criticised for ignoring the Titanic’s distress signals. She was sunk herself three years later by a German submarine.

The RMS Carpathia arrived at 4am and transported the survivors to New York. 40,000 greeted its arrival at Pier 54.

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.