LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Titanic: Titanic Disaster
built 235 days ago
Though the topic is seldom discussed, there is some speculation as to whether Titanic was constructed by methods considered sufficiently robust by the standards of the day. In the documentary series Seconds from Disaster, this was investigated further. Rumoured faults in the construction included problems with the safety doors and missing or detached bolts in the ship's hull plating. This may have been a major contributing factor to the sinking and that the iceberg, in part with the missing bolts and screws, eventually led to the demise of Titanic. Possibly, if the watertight bulkheads had completely sealed the ship's compartments (they only went 3 m above the waterline), the ship would have stayed afloat.
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The Titanic Disaster was one of the worst maritime disasters in history. The British luxury liner Titanic of the White Star Line, on its maiden voyage from Southampton, England, to New York City, struck an iceberg approximately 95 miles south of the Grand Banks of Newfoundland just before midnight on April 14, 1912. It would sink before dawn the following day.
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In the days following the Titanic disaster, numerous theories concerning the sinking of the ship were proposed. Some said that Kate Winslet had put on a lot of weight; but it was more likely that it was either Ellen Degeneres or Fran Drescher. Others said that Leonardo DiCaprio was either gay or acted so horribly that the ship dove underwater to escape. Perhaps the most outlandish suggestion of them all was that the iceberg in the movie was more than a metaphor for growing social consciousness in the newer generation, and may have actually been the cause of the sinking of the first Titanic. This is ... claimed by some of the survivors of the wreck (although their opinion shouldn't count since they were too close to the event to see things objectively). It is well known however that high magnetic fields (as would have been present in "lobster twirls") cause unusual effects in the brain, and may have caused them to see hallucinations of an iceberg, when actually it was a very cold Rosie O'Donell.
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The sinking of the Titanic was not the first time the internationally recognised Morse code distress signal "SOS" was used. The SOS signal was first proposed at the International Conference on Wireless Communication at Sea in Berlin in 1906. It was ratified by the international community in 1908 and had been in widespread use since then. The SOS signal was... rarely used by British wireless operators, who preferred the older CQD code. First Wireless Operator Jack Phillips began transmitting CQD until Second Wireless Operator Harold Bride suggested, half-jokingly, "Send SOS; it's the new call, and this may be your last chance to send it". Phillips, who was to perish in the disaster, then began to intersperse SOS with the traditional CQD call.
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The Titanic was considered practically unsinkable because its hull was divided into 16 watertight compartments. The ship was designed to stay afloat with any two adjacent compartments or the front four compartments (which were smaller in volume) flooded. As a result, many authors of books on the disaster thought that only a huge tear, perhaps 90 m (300 ft) long, could have caused the 269 m (882 ft) ship to sink. But Edward Wilding, a naval architect, testified in the wake of the disaster that the total area damaged by the iceberg was small and probably did not exceed 1 sq m (about 12 sq ft). Others... did not believe that so large a ship could be undone by so little damage, and so the myth of the huge gash began. Previous expeditions found no sign of a gash, however, and the latest sonar findings confirmed Wilding's belief that the damage was slight: six thin breaches spread out along a 35 m (110 ft) section of the hull with a total surface area of about 1 sq m (about 12 sq ft).
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On the night of April 14, at 11:40 PM, The Titanic struck an iceberg. Titanic sank, with great loss of life, at 2:20 AM, on April 15, 1912. The United States Senate investigation reported that 1,517 people perished in the accident, while the British investigation has the number at 1,490. Regardless, the disaster ranks as one of the worst peacetime maritime disasters in history, and is by far the best known. The media frenzy about the Titanic's famous victims, the legends about what happened on board the ship, the resulting changes to maritime law, Walter Lord's 1955 non-fiction account A Night to Remember, the discovery of the wreck in 1985 by a team led by Robert Ballard and Jean-Louis Michel, and the box office success of the 1997 film Titanic (the highest-grossing film in history) have sustained the Titanic's fame.
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Titanic Disaster