On April 10th, 1912, the Titanic, the newest luxury-liner addition to Britain’s White Star Fleet, departed on her maiden voyage from Southampton to New York. At that time, she was the largest and most luxurious ship ever built. The Titanic was over 850 feet long and carried 1290 passengers and a crew of 903. The ship cost over $8 million to build and was thought to be unsinkable. Just before midnight on April 14th the ship struck an iceberg approximately 400 miles off Newfoundland, Canada. Less than three hours later, it sank to the bottom of the sea, taking approximately 1500 people with her (the exact number of passengers and crew members who perished seems to be unresolved). Only a small fraction of the people were rescued - 705. This high number of fatalities was certainly due in part to the fact that the Titanic carried only twenty lifeboats.

The sinking of the Titanic shocked the world, as the ship carried some of the richest and most powerful industrialists of the day. Together, their personal fortunes were worth about $600 million in 1912! In addition to the upper and middle class passengers, the Titanic also carried poor emigrants from Europe and the Middle East seeking new economic and social freedom in America.

The remarkable story of the Titanic and the iceberg she (the female gender is always used for ships, boats etc) hit has grown into a legend of the sea. It took her discovery in 1985 to separate fact from fiction. One of the things that makes this ship so fascinating is that the Titanic represented the cutting-edge of technology when she set sail from her ill-fated voyage in 1912, and it took the cutting edge technology of modern times in the form of sonar, satellite tracking, and deep-dive technology to locate her grave over 70 years later. Until recently, the technology did not exist to locate, photograph, and explore this majestic vessel that rests two and a half miles down on the floor of the ocean

The remains of the Titanic were discovered in 1985 by Dr. Robert Ballard, an oceanographer and marine biologist with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. When he located the Titanic, he saw, just as some survivors had reported, that the ship had broken apart. It is now believed that the weight of the water-filled bow raised the stern out of the water and snapped the ship in two just before it sank. Indeed, the bow and stern were found some 2000 feet apart on the seabed. Keeping the final resting place of the Titanic a secret, Ballard used GPS to find the ship again when he returned the next year. He had hoped to prevent treasure hunters from finding her and plundering the ship for priceless valuables. On this second expedition, he used a submarine to visit the ship several times, and left a plaque honouring the 1500+ victims and asking subsequent explorers to leave the grave undisturbed. The film ‘Titanic’ was released in 1997 and become one of the most popular films of all times.