The Titanic

jonniebgood1

Interior stairs on the Titanic.

The 100 year anniversary of the launch of the Titanic was last week. It brought positive attention on Ireland and was recognised as a great industrial achievement at the time.

The White Star Line-owned Titanic was launched into Belfast Lough on 31 May 1911 by Harland & Wolff, then the largest shipyard in the world. At 13 minutes past noon on Tuesday a flare was set off to mark the exact time of that launch a century on.

The passenger liner sank after hitting an iceberg on her maiden voyage from Southampton to New York in April 1912.

It took Harland & Wolff and its workforce three years to build the RMS Titanic and just 62 seconds to complete the launch. Millar said the most rewarding part of her Titanic Tours was conveying her personal connection to the ship.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/may/31/titanic-launch-centenary-marked-belfast

The fact that the Titanic was a feat of engineering is often overshadowed by the ship's terrible end. For many years after the sinking, the fate of the Titanic was a taboo subject in the city where she was built. John Andrews, the great-nephew of Thomas Andrews, chief designer of the Titanic, says the disaster was never spoken of in his family "because it was such a terrible tragedy. It wasn't talked about in Belfast either ... There was always this sense of shame."

http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2074763,00.html

Any views on the achievement? Or anyones grandpa on the ship or worked on it???

jonniebgood1

Some reports of the sinking from the time show what a worldwide event this was.





And in Belfast

jonniebgood1

Linking in loosely with the Titanic as it followed shortly after is the lesser known sinking of the 'Empress of Ireland'. I saw a program on it recently and was not familiar with it before this.

A tragedy almost equal to the Titanic's unfolded in the fog-shrouded St. Lawrence River in the spring of 1914, only a few months before the outbreak of the Great War.......
....
The ships sighted each other near 2:00 a.m. on May 29, until then a calm, clear night. On the bridge of the Empress of Ireland, Captain Henry Kendall guessed that the approaching ship was roughly eight miles away, giving him ample time to cross her bow before he set his course for more open water. When he judged he was safely beyond the collier's path, he did so. If he held his new course, the two ships should pass starboard side to starboard side, comfortably apart. Movements after he had executed this maneuver, a creeping bank of fog swallowed the Norwegian ship, then the Empress.

Although nothing like the Titanic in terms of size and elegance, the Empress of Ireland was the class of the Liverpool-Quebec City run that linked Canadian Pacific's steamships with its transcontinental railroad. Celebrities on board were few, notably the actor Laurence Irving, famous son of the legendary Henry, and his wife, the actress Mabel Hackney, returning from a successful Canadian tour. They and most of the other passengers, which included roughly 170 members of the Salvation Army heading to a big convention in London, were by this time of night sound asleep. So were most of the crew.
.....

Coming as it did so soon after the sinking of the Titanic, the loss of the Empress of Ireland underlined the difficulty of building a ship that couldn't sink, even of building a ship guaranteed to sink so slowly that rescue was inevitable. True, the Storstad was the worst imaginable ship that could collide with the liner. Her longitudinal bracing, designed to break through ice, made her a lethal weapon; the fact that she was fully loaded meant she punctured the Empress well below the waterline. (She penetrated the liner to a depth of at least 25 feet and left a gaping a hole at least 14 feet wide.) The Empress sank too fast for her safety features to be fully operational. She had enough lifeboats for all her passengers and crew but could not launch them in time. Many of her watertight doors, operated manually, could not be closed with the ship listing sharply and water rushing in.

But despite the scale of the tragedy, it never achieved anything like the Titanic's fame or enduring fascination. The Empress of Ireland was not a particularly famous or fashionable ship, and she sank so soon before the outbreak of the war that attention soon shifted to graver matters.
http://www.pbs.org/lostliners/empress.html

drumslate

I just love Titanic history, it is just soooo incredibly interesting

gobnaitolunacy

I used devour anything Titanic-related at one time, but in the wake of Cameron's movie have lost interest, big time.
A shame that it will be associated from that time onwards with Celine Dion's dire warbling. Even the Cobh/Queenstown event organisers fell for it and played this dirge over a PA system in a saccarine attempt at commemoration.

Had she driven straight into the 'berg instead of a sideways swipe and remained afloat, she would be a footnote in maritime history.
The near identical sisters, Olympic (nicknamed 'Old Reliable', the first to be constructed and rammed and sank a U boat in WW1) and Britannic (a career cut short by a German mine) are barely remembered.