Interesting Facts

1. The Titanic was the length of four city blocks. Ads for the ship depicted it next to the tallest buildings of the time, and rising above all of them.

2. When reports that the Titanic was in trouble reached New York City, White Star Line Vice President P.A.S. Franklin announced, "We place absolute confidence in the Titanic. We believe the boat is unsinkable." Unfortunately, by the time he had spoken these words, the ship had already spent the night on the bottom of the sea!

3. According to rules passed by the British Office of Trade, the Titanic had more than the required number of lifeboats, even though it only had enough for half of the passengers.

4. An inquiry into the disaster conducted by the British Board of Trade concluded that third-class passengers were not unduly denied access to lifeboats. No surviving third-class passengers, however, were called upon to testify!

5. Ticket scalpers in Moscow have been getting as much as $25 a ticket from Russians dying to see the James Cameron Titanic film.

6. First-class suites on the Titanic went for as much as 870 pounds for a one-way trip. It would have taken one of the stewards working on board almost two years to make this much money!

7. John Jacob Astor offered several priests and ministers $1,000 to perform a wedding ceremony uniting him to Madeleine Force. Many refused, believing Astor was morally obligated to remain faithful to his first wife.

8. There are a number of legends concerning Astor's behavior on the Titanic. One of the best - and most improbable - is that he went to the bar and said "I know I asked for ice, but this is ridiculous!"

9. Gossip fueled by Guggenheim's daughter Peggy, indicates that Guggenheim made the trip with a secret lover - his attractive blonde secretary!

10. The Duff-Gordons signed on aboard the Titanic under the assumed name of Morgan and arranged to sleep in seperate cabins. To this day, no one has figured out why. Were they pretending to be an unmarried couple who were pretending to be married? Trés chic !

11. When news of the Titanic disaster reached New York, flags all up and down Wall Street flew at half mast in honor of the many rich investors on board who had hit bottom.

12. First-class decks were equipped with three electric elevators. Second class had only one. Third-class passengers took the stairs.

13. As a witness in the American inquiry into the disaster, Colonel Archibald Gracie expressed annoyance that the collapsible boats were so hard to get to. They were stowed on the roof of the officers quarters and tied with ropes. They had to be cut loose and then lowered to the deck on makeshift rams made of oars. By the time they were ready to go, it was too late to load them properly.

14. Some passengers chose to spend their final moments playing cards. Believing that things were hopeless, they helped themselves to liquor from the bar and played their last hands until the tables they played on had tilted too much with the sinking ship to hold their cards.

15. Male second-class passengers had the lowest survival rate of all the groups on board, including the crew. Only 14 lived of 154 - a mere 12 percent.

16. White Star Line provided the Titanic with a multi-lingual interpreter for easing communication difficulties among the passengers and crew - a German known as Herr Muller.

17. All of the children from first- and second-class were saved. Out of a total of 109 children on board the Titanic, 52 were lost. All of these were booked as third-class passengers.

18. The Titanic only had enough lifeboats to hold 1,178 of its 2,200-plus people on board. As precious as lifeboat space was, it wasn't utilized efficiently. Only a few more than 700 people survived the disaster. If the lifeboats had been filled, more than 400 additional people could have been saved.

19. Captain Smith has been calculated to have sailed over 2 million miles before embarking on his final journey aboard the Titanic.

20. Captain Smith and Bruce Ismay had plans to run the Titanic at full speed for the first time ever on Monday, the day after the ship sank.

21. As the Titanic sank, the order was given for a total of eight rockets to be fired as distress signals. The signals were spotted by the ship Californian, but the ship made no effort to come to Titanic's assistance. This callous disregard for a sinking ship remains a mystery, but one explanation may be that the captain of the Californian was worried about running into icebergs himself!

22. At one point, the captain checked the angle the ship had listed on a device called a commutator, which measures the ship's angle to the sea. He is reported to have said "Oh God!"

23. As Second Officer Charles Lightoller jumped from the ship, one of the funnels toppled over from the deck into the water. Although the funnel probably killed anyone it fell on, it may have made the difference between life and death for Lightoller. It stirred up a big wave that washed him away from the sinking ship and toward the collapsible boat where he stayed the night.

24. In Queestown, Ireland, where the Titanic picked up passengers, one of the stokers climbed to the top of one of the funnels from inside and looked out over the top, where his blackened face could be seen from below. A couple of the passengers thought this weird sight was a bad omen. One woman didn't undress for bed that night in order to be ready in case something went wrong.

25. Some people have all the luck. Not only did stewardess Violet Jessop and fireman (look at vocabulary) John Priest survive the sinking of the Titanic, they were on board the big T's sister ship Olympic when it was crippled by a collision with the navy ship Hawk in 1911, and aboard the other sister ship, Britannic, when it was sunk in the Aegean in 1916.