Today marks the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the RMS Titanic! Probably one of the most widely discussed and most written about ships ever built for peacetime! Movies have been made about this ship and many stories about its short life, its passengers and its eventual demise still fascinate many around the world today!
Simply because of its fascination with so many, I decided to dig up some interesting facts about this ship – and make no mistake, there is so much truth and fiction tied up in millions of articles, photographs and personal effects, it boggles the mind.
It cost 7.5 million Dollars to build. It was built in Belfast where 2 builders were killed during its building and it took 20 horses to transport the main anchor.
The ship could carry 3547 souls. On its maiden voyage only 2223 were on board. It was 260.1 metres long and used 825 tonnes of coal daily in the engine room. There were approx. 10,000 light bulbs on board. Of the 2223 on board, 1343 were passengers and 885 crew members.
Interesting one crew member, John Coffey, jumped ship in County Cork, final port before heading across the Atlantic, as he had a ‘foreboding’ what something about the ship was not right!
There was 14,000 gallons of drinking water, 40,000 fresh eggs and 1,000 bottles of wine on board when she set sail.
The ship could carry 64 life boats, but only 20 were on the maiden voyage. Each boat could carry 65 persons yet the first boat only had 28 passengers.In the end, there were only 705 survivors!
The Titanic received 6 warnings of icebergs. The ship took 160 minutes to sink after hitting the iceberg and the water temperature was -2C.
The radio operator on board was Jack Phillips, aged 25years. The radio was one of the most modern Marconi Corp. 1.5 kw spark gap radio’s with a range of approx 1000 miles. The antennas were located on masts 15 m higher than the smoke stacks between masts to prevent corrosion from the smoke. The transmitting frequencies ranged from between 250 m or 1.2 kHz to 600 m. 500 kHz eventually became the standard shipping emergency frequency.
“CQD” was the emergency call as suggested by Morse when the Morse code was formulated. However, on the latter part of the sinking, the “SOS” code was also used for the first time which to today is still the standard distress call apart from all the other like Mayday, Securité etc.
The position of RMS Titanic when she went down was approx. 41.46 N and 50.14 W.
There is a very interesting audio clip on the BBC depicting the final 45 minutes of the sinking and can be heard on :-
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00q89fy
Obviously much has changed since then and today with Compass/Sarsat and many other communication systems, ships can communicate far better and more effectively than 100 years ago.
Reporting for Hamnet, this is Francois Botha, ZS6BUU.
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