Sinking position of RMS Titanic

A ship two-thirds the length of the Eiffel Tower

The RMS Titanic was 269 metres long — the largest passenger ship ever built when she launched at the Harland and Wolff shipyard in Belfast on 31 May 1911.

She displaced 52 310 tonnes. She had four funnels (the fourth was a non-functional dummy added for visual balance and ventilation), nine decks, and capacity for 3 547 passengers and crew. She had 16 watertight compartments designed to allow the ship to float with any two compartments flooded — even the first four (a scenario considered virtually impossible).

On her maiden voyage from Southampton to New York, she struck an iceberg at 23:40 on 14 April 1912 that opened a series of seam- failures along 90 metres of her starboard side, flooding the first six compartments.

Two more than her design could survive.

Not enough lifeboats

The Titanic carried 20 lifeboats with a combined capacity of 1 178 people. There were 2 224 people on board.

The shortage was not an oversight.

British Board of Trade regulations, last updated in 1894, required lifeboat capacity based on ship tonnage, with a maximum requirement for ships above 10 000 tonnes. The Titanic, at 46 328 register tonnes, was four times the size of any ship the regulations had been designed for. The Titanic actually carried 20 lifeboats — four more than her legal minimum.

The broader scandal was the regulatory framework, not the ship's operators. Post-Titanic, the SOLAS convention (Safety of Life at Sea, 1914) was established and made lifeboat-for-everyone a universal maritime requirement.

The Californian ten kilometres away

The most haunting fact of the disaster is that another passenger ship, the SS Californian, was stationary in the ice field roughly 10 to 30 kilometres north of the Titanic during the entire sinking.

The Californian's radio operator had gone to bed at 23:30, ten minutes before the iceberg strike. Her bridge officers saw the distress rockets the Titanic fired — eight rockets between 00:45 and 01:50 — but did not understand them as distress signals. They woke the captain twice and were told to continue observing without intervention.

By the time the Californian's radio operator came back on duty at 05:30, the Titanic had been on the seabed for over three hours.

Found seventy-three years later

The wreck of the Titanic was found on 1 September 1985 by a joint French-American expedition led by the oceanographer Robert Ballard of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

The wreck lies in two pieces — the ship broke in half at the surface, then both halves sank — 3 800 metres below the surface, about 600 kilometres southeast of Newfoundland.

Ballard's primary mission, classified at the time, was actually to locate two US Navy nuclear submarines (the Thresher and the Scorpion) that had sunk in the same general area in the 1960s. Once those investigations were complete, the US Navy gave Ballard the remaining 12 days of his expedition window to look for the Titanic, which he had been requesting permission to find for a decade.