Titanic Facts

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1 FACTS: Did You Know? Titanic’s ‘home port’ (her Port of Registry) was Liverpool, however her loss at sea meant that she never did visit the city. That said, Southampton was the port she was intended to sail to and from.

2 FACTS: Did You Know? The Titanic was initially known as the SS Titanic (‘SS’ meaning Screw Steamer, i.e. driven by propellers or screws, also standing for ‘Steamship’), only becoming officially recognised as the RMS Titanic after first carrying the Royal Mail. ‘RMS’ refers to Royal Mail Ship or Royal Mail Steamer.

3 FACTS: Did You Know? There was an unwritten expectation in shipyards at the time of ‘one death for every £100,000 spent’, so at a build cost of £1.5, the Titanic’s toll was less than the 15 deaths that might have been expected.

4 FACTS : Did You Know? The Titanic is not the worst maritime disaster in history. On 30 January 1945, in the final year of the Second World War, the German flagship MV Wilhelm Gustloff was torpedoed off the coast of Poland with the loss of more than 9,000 people, many of whom were refugees.

5 FACTS : Did You Know? Due to access difficulties in using a pneumatic riveting machine to construct the curved sections of the hull, these steel plates needed to be joined together using wrought iron rivets rather than the stronger steel rivets that were used elsewhere (iron rivets were easier to hammer into place). As shipbuilding moved to using steel instead of iron plates in the construction of hulls, this practice was widespread. However, forensic tests undertaken in 1996 by Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore revealed that, in the case of the Titanic, these iron rivets would fail with just a 5mm movement between the steel plates they were meant to secure.

6 FACTS : Did You Know? In the book Shipbuilders To The World, the company history of Harland & Wolff, it is stated that Alexander Carlisle resigned from the company due to disagreements with Pirrie. These disagreements may have been based upon Pirrie’s secretive (and some have said, questionable) financial and business affairs, or over disputes about aspects of the design of the Olympic-class ships, such as the plans for the lifeboats.