March 1, 2006

The Titanic Report

History of Shipbuilding

By Dr. Frank J. Collazo

Introduction: The scope of the reports encompass the history of shipbuilding, the Titanic Ship’s design and operational considerations, the voyage and number of passengers survived during the voyage, the impact of the collision with the iceberg, recovering the wreck, and postmortem actions by the government of the USA and Britain.

History of Shipbuilding: The origin of travel on water dates back to a very early period in human history, men beginning with the log, the inflated skin, the dug-out canoe, and upwards through various methods of flotation; while the paddle, the oar, and finally the sail served as means of propulsion. This was for inland water travel, and many centuries passed before adventurous mariners dreamed of the navigation of the sea.

Egyptian Boats: The paintings and sculptures of early Egypt show us boats built of sawn planks, regularly constructed and moved both by oars and sails. At a later period we read of the Phoenicians, the most daring and enterprising of ancient navigators, who braved the dangers of the open sea and are said by Herodotus to have circumnavigated Africa as early as 604 B. C. Starting from the Red Sea, they followed the east coast, rounded the Cape, and sailed north along the west coast to the Mediterranean, reaching Egypt again in the third year of this enterprise.

Carthaginians and Romans: The Carthaginians and Romans come next in the history of shipbuilding, confining themselves chiefly to the Mediterranean and using oars as the principal means of propulsion. Their galleys ranged from one to five banks of oars. The Roman vessels in the first Punic war were over 100 feet long and had 300 rowers, while they carried 120 soldiers. They did not use sails until about the beginning of the fourteenth century B. C.

Portugal: Portugal was the first nation to engage in voyages of discovery, using vessels of small size in these adventurous journeys. Spain, which soon became her rival in this field, built larger ships and long held the lead. Yet the ships with which Columbus made the discovery of America were of a size and character in which few sailors of the present day would care to venture far from land.

England: England was later in coming into the field of adventurous navigation, being surpassed not only by the Portuguese and Spanish, but also by the Dutch in ventures to far lands.

Shipbuilding in America: Europe long held the precedence in shipbuilding and enterprise in navigation, but the shores of America had not long been settled before the venturous colonists had ships upon the seas. The first of these was built at the mouth of the Kennebec River in Maine. This was a staunch little two- masts vessel, which was named the Virginia, supposed to have been about sixty feet long and seventeen feet in beam. Next in time came the Restless, built in 1614 or 1615 at New York, by Adrian Blok, a Dutch captain whose ships had been burned while lying at Manhattan Island. This vessel, thirty-eight feet long and of eleven feet beam, was employed for several years in exploring the Atlantic coast.

With the advent of the nineteenth century a new ideal in naval architecture arose, that of the ship moved by steam- power instead of wind-power, and fitted to combat with the seas alike in storm and calm, with little heed as to whether the wind was fair or foul. The steamship appeared and grew in size and power until such giants of the wave, as the Titanic and Olympic were set afloat. To the development of this modern class of ships our attention must now be turned.

The advent of steam navigation came early in the nineteenth century, though interesting steps in this direction were taken earlier. No sooner was the steam engine developed than men began to speculate on it as a moving power on sea and land. Early among these were several Americans, Oliver Evans, one of the first to project steam railway travel, and James Ramsey and John Fitch, steamboat inventors of early date. There were several experimenters in Europe also, but the first to produce a practical steamboat was Robert Fulton, a native of Pennsylvania, whose successful boat; the Clermont, made its maiden trip up the Hudson in 1807. A crude affair was the Clermont with a top speed of about seven miles an hour; but it was the dwarf from which the giant steamers of to day have grown.

Boats of this type quickly made their way over the American rivers and before 1820 regular lines of steamboats were running between England and Ireland. In 1817 James Watt, the inventor of the practical steam engine, crossed from England to Belgium in a steamer. But these short voyages were far surpassed by an American enterprise, that of the first ocean steamship, the Savannah, which crossed the Atlantic from Savannah to Liverpool in 1819.

Twelve years passed before this enterprise was repeated, the next steam voyage being in 1831 when the Royal William crossed from Quebec to England. She used coal for fuel, having utilized her entire hold to store enough for the voyage. The Savannah had burned pitch pine under her engines, for in America wood was long used as fuel for steam-making purposes. Steam engines in those days were not very economical, needing four or five times as much fuel for the same power as the engines of recent date.

It was not until 1838 that the problem was solved. On April 23d of that year a most significant event took place. Two steamships dropped anchor in the harbor of New York, the Sirius and the Great Western. Both of these had made the entire voyage under steam, the Sirius, in eighteen and a half and the Great Western in fourteen and a half days, measuring from Queenstown. The Sirius had taken on board 450 tons of coal, but all this was burned by the time Sandy Hook was reached, and she had to burn her spare spars and forty-three barrels of rosin to make her way up the bay. The Great Western, on the contrary, had coal to spare.

Two innovations in shipbuilding were soon introduced. These were the building of iron instead of wooden ships and the replacing of the paddle wheel by the screw propeller. The famous Swede, John Ericsson, first successfully introduced the screw propeller in 1835. His propeller was tried in a small vessel, forty-five feet long and eight wide, which was driven at the rate of ten miles an hour, and towed a large packet ship at fair speed. Ericsson, not being appreciated in England, came to America to experiment. Other inventors were also at work in the same line.

Their experiments attracted the attention of Isambard Brunel, one of the greatest engineers of the period, who was then engaged in building a large paddle-wheel steamer, the Great Britain. Appreciating the new idea, he had the engines of the new ship changed and a screw propeller introduced. This ship, a great one for the time, 322 feet long and of 3443 tons, made her first voyage from Liverpool to New York in 1845, her average speed being 12 1/4 knots an hour, the length of the voyage 14 days and 21 hours.

The first fleet of the Cunard Line comprised four vessels, the Britannia, Acadia, Caledonia and Columbia. The Unicorn, sent out by this company as a pioneer, entered Boston harbor on June 2, 1840, being the first steamship from Europe to reach that port. Regular trips began with the Britannia, which left Liverpool on July 4, 1840. For a number of years later this line enjoyed a practical monopoly of the steam carrying trade between England and the United States. Then other companies came into the field, chief among them being the Collins Line, started in 1849, and of short duration, and the Inman Line, instituted in 1850.

But no special change in shipbuilding was introduced until 1870, when the Oceanic Company, now known as the White Star Line, built the Britannic and Germanic. These were the largest of its early ships. They were 468 feet long and 35 feet wide, constituting a new type of extreme length as compared with their width.

Speed and economy in power also became features of importance, the tubular boiler and the compound engine being introduced. These have developed into the cylindrical, multi-tubular boiler and the triple expansion engine, in which a greater percentage of the power of the steam is utilized and four or five times the work obtained from coal over that of the old system. The side-wheel was continued in use in the older ships until this period, but after 1870 it disappeared.

The Olympic and Titanic engines were a combination of the turbine and reciprocating types. In regard to the driving power, one of the recent introductions is that of the multiple propellers. The twin screw was first applied in the City of New York, of the Inman line, and enabled her to make in 1890 an average speed of a little over six days from New York to Queenstown. The best record up to October 1891 was that of the Teutonic, of five days, sixteen hours, and thirty minutes. Triple-screw propellers have since then been introduced in some of the greater ships, and the record speed has been cut down to the four days and ten hours of the Lusitanian in 1908 and the four days, six hours and forty-one minutes of the Mauritania in 1910.

The Titanic was not built especially for speed, but in every other way she was the master product of the shipbuilders' art. Progress through the centuries has been steady, and perhaps the twentieth century will prepare a vessel that will be unsinkable as well as magnificent. Until the fatal accident the Titanic and Olympic were considered the last words on ship- building; but much may still remain to be spoken.

The Great Ocean Liners

Queen Elizabeth 2: The Queen Elizabeth 2 cruises down the Hudson River toward New York Harbor and the Atlantic Ocean with the New York City skyline in the background. Beginning in the early 1900s, luxury ocean liners offered ocean passage for set fares along different ocean routes. Today only the Queen Elizabeth 2 offers passenger service across the Atlantic Ocean. Most ocean liners have become part of the cruise ship industry.

The Titanic was not the only ocean liner to meet a tragic end. The Lusitanian’s service ended when a torpedo struck the ship from a German U-boat in 1915. World War I (1914-1918) and World War II (1939-1945) claimed many of the great ocean liners. Great Britain requisitioned Cunard’s prize liner Mauritania in 1914 to transport troops between England and the Mediterranean. Cunard’s Queen Mary, 310 m (1,018 ft) long and capable of over 30 knots, and its sister ship Queen Elizabeth were both stripped down, painted gray, and used as troop transports in World War II. The elegant French ocean liner Normandie met a similar fate. The state-of-the-art ship measured 314 m (1,029 ft), made 30 knots, and showcased some of the most celebrated art "nouveau décor" in the world.

The Normandie was laid up in New York when World War II erupted in Europe in 1939. The United States government requisitioned the luxury liner to serve as a troop ship. The Normandie caught fire while being converted to a utilitarian troop transport, and the ship capsized from the water pumped onto it by firefighters.

Titanic Competing with Lusitania and Mauretania, Cunard Liners: Titanic, the largest vessel in the world when she entered service in 1912 was neither the finest nor the most technically advanced of her day. Size, seldom an indication that something is better, was the only record she held. The ships that Titanic, and her slightly older sister Olympic, were designed to compete with were the Cunard liners Lusitanian and Mauritania, which entered service in 1907. Designed and built as record breakers, both held the coveted 'Blue Riband' for the fastest Atlantic crossing. They were built principally from lessons learned from advances in warship construction, but most importantly both were powered by steam turbines driving quadruple screws, each fitted with a large balanced rudder, making them faster than the competition and easier to maneuver.

This was a giant leap forward in marine engineering, comparable to the advances made in 1969 with the introduction of the Concorde supersonic aircraft. Titanic and Olympic should best be described as the 747s of their day. As huge people carriers, traveling at moderate speed, with space for large cargoes, they posed a great commercial threat to the smaller and more expensive-to-operate Cunarders.

Operational Considerations:

Third class ticket from UK to New York was $ 36.25.

Passengers Loading: 2228 passengers and crew departed Queenstown (now Cobh) the last port of call before New York.

This figure comprised 1343 passengers and 885 crew.

First Class: 329. Second Class: 285. Third Class: 710. Crew: 899

The SS Carpathia rescued 705 persons.

Titanic had a passenger capacity of 3547 fully loaded.

The Titanic carried in addition to the lifeboats 3560 life belts (jackets) and 49 life buoys.

14,000 gallons of pure drinking water were used each 24 hours.

Twenty lifeboats total were fitted as follows:

14 wood lifeboats each 30'0" long by 9'1" by 4'0" deep with a capacity of 65 persons each.

Wood cutters 25'2" long by 7'2" by 3'0" deep with a capacity of 40 persons each.

4 Engelhard collapsible boats 27'5" by 8'0" by 3'0" deep with a capacity of 47 persons each.

All lifeboats were fitted with Murray’s disengaging gear to simultaneously free both ends.

The lifeboats were stowed on hinged wood chocks on the Boat Deck.

Titanic had a Turkish bath, gymnasium and a squash court.

The Veranda Cafe had real palm trees.

Titanic Nicknames: The Titanic was known as:

• The Millionaire's Special
• The Wonder Ship
• The Unsinkable Ship
• The Last Word in Luxury

System Design Characteristics and Titanic Design Specifications:

• Length overall: 882.5 feet
• Gross tonnage: 46,329 tons
• Beam: 92.5 feet
• Net tonnage: 24,900 tons
• Depth: 59.5 feet
• Triple screw propulsion

Power: 29 Boilers. Two four-cylinder triple expansion reciprocating engines each producing 16000 hp for outer two propellers. One low pressure turbine producing 18000 hp for the center propeller. Total 50,000 hp

Propulsion: Two bronze triple blade side propellers. One bronze quadruple blade central propeller.

Speed: 23 knots

Other Significant Parameters:

The two outer propellers had a diameter of 23' 6" while the centre or turbine one was 17' 0" in diameter.

Titanic had the first ever swimming pool built into a vessel.

The hull shell plating on Titanic was 1" thick.

The anchors weighed 31 tons total.

Over three million rivets were used in the construction of Titanic.

The rudder weighed 101 tons and was made from six separate parts.

The launch process consumed 23 tons of tallow and soft soap.

The actual launch took 62 seconds to complete.

Overall length was 882' 8".

Breadth was 92' 0".

Titanic had 15 main bulkheads.

Titanic has two steam reciprocating engines and one turbine engine.

The total horsepower was 51,000.

Coal consumption on normal service was 825 tons per day.

Reciprocating engine revolutions were 77 per minute.

Turbine revolutions were 127 per minute.

Titanic had 24 double-ended boilers and 5 single ended boilers.

Boilers had 159 furnaces total.

Steam pressure was 215 psi.

Titanic had three propellers.

Titanic was equipped with eighteen compasses.

Titanic had twelve watertight doors.

The doors would close automatically if water should reach them.

The doors could also be controlled electrically from the bridge.

The time required to fully close the doors was between 25 and 30 seconds.

Titanic had three electric elevators for passenger use.

Steam whistles were fitted to the two forward funnels.

No 4 funnels or the aft most one was a dummy.

Titanic did not have its name painted on the ship while it was on the slipway.

Olympic and Titanic cost £3 million for the pair.

Titanic has part of the Prom Deck plated in to allow better passenger comfort.

The Unsinkable Ship: Although it may not be very comforting, the truth is there is no such thing as an unsinkable ship. No matter how sophisticated the safety features or how impressive the size; all ships are vulnerable given the wrong circumstances.

"You can have all the safety in the world and it's not going to help you if you hit a bomb," points out Dr. Robert Ballard, who recently explored the wreck of the ocean liner Britannic, which sank during World War I off the coast of Greece, the victim of either a bomb or a torpedo. The sinking of Britannic was especially tragic -- not only because it followed so closely the sinking of its sister ship, Titanic, in 1912, but because extensive safety improvements had been made to the ship to avoid just such a repeat disaster.

While bombings are no longer a daily threat for most ships, danger still lurks in the form of fires, groundings, collisions and worse. So engineers, designers and human systems analysts are continually devising new ways to keep ships where they belong -- on, not under, the water. Surprisingly, structural safety design has changed very little since the days of the pre-World War I luxury liners. Modern day cruise ships have more or less the same safety features that the Britannic had. What has changed, however, is the execution of those designs.

For example, both the Britannic and the Titanic had reinforced steel hulls. But recent research suggests the steel might have been of poor quality, making it dangerously brittle under stress. Today, materials engineers use computers to model the stresses on ship hulls and formulate steel able to withstand those stresses.

Watertight compartments, or hull divisions, are another safety feature from the days of the Britannic that have carried over to modern cruise ships. If a puncture occurs, the idea is to contain and isolate the incoming water -- and keep the ship afloat until help can arrive. The concept was proved sound when the Olympic, yet another sister ship to Titanic and Britannic, received a 34-foot gash in its hull from a collision at sea. With one of its compartments filled with water, the ship was able to limp back to port.

"Those were such good innovations that we stay with them," explains Dr. Owen F. Hughes, a naval architect at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute. "We would never do away with them." The newly completed 51,000-ton cruise liner, Carnival Destiny, has 18 watertight compartments. Two can be filled with water and the ship will still float.

This concept of containment has recently been expanded and applied to fire, the most common cause of disaster at sea. "We now require structural fire protection," explains Commander Van Haverbeke of the United States Coast Guard. "The vessel needs to be both subdivided and built of non-combustible material, so if a fire does start in a certain area, the spread is limited." In the days of the Titanic and Britannic, few fire regulations existed at all.

Even the best safety innovations can't keep a ship afloat if the features are used incorrectly -- or not at all. Evidence from Dr. Ballard's recent exploration of the Britannic wreck suggests that when disaster struck the ship in the form of a mine or torpedo, the doors that divided the hull into watertight compartments were, for some reason, left open. Also left open were the lower portholes, further defeating the integrity of the hull. Whether closed doors and portholes would have saved the Britannic from sinking is anybody's guess, but as Ballard points out, "You can have all sorts of safety technology, but if some idiot turns the doggone stuff off, so much for design."

From capsizing to groundings of large oil tankers, human error is almost always the culprit behind the worst accidents at sea. In 1987, Britain's Herald of Free Enterprise ferry left port with one of its cargo doors wide open. The ship, known as a "ro-ro," was designed to roll vehicles on one end of the ship and off the other, thereby minimizing time in port. Ironically, the Herald of Free Enterprise was chock-full of sophisticated safety equipment, but none of it addressed the simple possibility of someone forgetting to close the bow door. Water surging across the cargo deck ended up capsizing the ferry in shallow water.

To reduce these types of accidents, the U.S. Coast Guard and other international agencies have begun to focus more and more on the human element in ship safety.

Ship Limitations: The "ro-ro" ferry design is extremely efficient for channel crossings, but is not well suited for transit in heavy seas. This became abundantly clear in 1994, when a huge wave ripped the bow door right off the Estonia near the coast of Finland. The ferry capsized, and eight hundred and thirty-four passengers were killed. As a result, "ro-ro" ferries are no longer used in heavy weather, and many companies have welded their bow doors permanently shut.

Not Enough Life Boats: When the Titanic sank after hitting an iceberg, there weren't enough lifeboats for the number of people on board. The Titanic was originally designed to carry 42 lifeboats; the ship carried only 20 lifeboats (four more than were required at the time by British regulations) for the 2,228 passengers and crew. (That number could supposedly hold 1,178 people.) The original designer of the Titanic had proposed 50 lifeboats, but the British owners of the White Star Line had decided against it. If it had been under US Government regulation at the time, 42 lifeboats, enough to accommodate 2,367 persons would have been required for a ship that size.

By the time the Britannic set sail, two years later, ships were required to carry enough lifeboats to accommodate all on board. This addition helped save the lives of most of those aboard the Britannic. According to Dr. Hughes, lifeboat technology has continued to evolve. "Lifeboats are much easier to launch now. And they've doubled the capacity. So if a ship is heeling and you can only launch boats on one side, you still have enough." New types of evacuation slides are also beginning to be deployed.

If disaster does strike, the chances of help arriving in time to minimize casualties are better today than ever before. Advanced communications and navigation technology allow the Coast Guard and other rescue agencies to pinpoint ships in distress quickly and accurately.

Voyage/Survivors: On 10 April 1912, the Titanic commenced her maiden voyage from Southampton, England, to New York, with 2,227 passengers and crew aboard. At 11:40 p.m. on the night of 14 April, traveling at a speed of 20.5 knots, she struck an iceberg on her starboard bow. The greatest marine disaster in the history of the world when the Titanic, of the White Star Line, the biggest and finest of steamships, shattered herself against an iceberg and sank with 1500 of her passengers and crew in less than four hours. Out of nearly 2200 persons that she carried only 675 were saved and most of these are women and children.

Cunarder Carpathia picked them up from small boats, a sea strewn with the wreckage of the lost ship and the bodies of drowned men and women. At 2:20 a.m. she sank, approximately 13.5 miles east-southeast of the position from which her distress call was transmitted. Lost at sea were 1,522 people, including passengers and crew. The Cunard Liner, Carpathia, rescued the 705 survivors, afloat in the ship’s twenty lifeboats, within hours.

Titanic Impact: Titanic was designed with a series of transverse bulkheads, separating her into 16 "water-tight" compartments. Unfortunately, these bulkheads, while extending above the water line, were not capped with watertight decks. The designers considered a breach between two compartments a worse case scenario, and in fact designed her to float with any four compartments flooded. When Titanic tried to turn and avoid the berg, she struck a glancing blow, damaging the hull and allowing seawater to invade 5 compartments. With the weight of this amount of seawater, the bow was pulled so low that the water began to spill over into adjacent compartments, like an ice-cube tray. Eventually, she foundered.

In order to relate to the Titanic and Archimedes’s principle (see note #1), some specific information about the Titanic must be known. First, the hull was designed to displace (push away) 66,000 tons of water. Its gross weight was 46,328 tons. Therefore, the Titanic had 19,672 tons (66,000 tons Ð 46,328 tons) of extra displacement capacity. If Titanic lost more than 19,672 tons of displacement capacity, her gross weight would exceed her buoyant force and Titanic would sink. The hull was divided into 16
compartments separated by 15 watertight bulkheads. For my purposes in the classroom, I make what I believe to be a reasonable generalization: that each compartment of the hull has the same displacement capacity: 4,125 tons (66,000 tons/16 compartments).

Titanic's impact with an iceberg caused the rippling and springing of the joints between plates. Rivet heads ripped off would not cause massive flooding, rather the long leaking that is recorded to have happened in her forward compartments. Science tells us that in order for steel of this quality to fracture due to cold and impact would mean the steel being brought down to below the temperature of liquid nitrogen. As the water in Titanic's ballast tanks had not frozen on the night she struck the iceberg, it's safe to say the steel was above the freezing point of ordinary seawater. The ship's shell plating was in remarkable condition, but the rivets had "let go." That is to say, sprung -- allowing the plates to come apart. the rivets were heated so they could be riveted into place by hand or by hydraulic riveter. The steel would have to be capable of easy heating, malleable, and perhaps weaker by design.

Titanic’s Brittle Steel: Olympic and Titanic were built using Siemens-Martin formula steel plating throughout the shell and upper works. This type of steel was first used in the armed merchant cruisers, Teutonic and Majestic in 1889/90. This steel was high quality with good elastic properties, ideal for conventional riveting as well as the modern method (in 1912) of hydraulic riveting. Each plate was milled and rolled to exact tolerances and presented a huge material cost to both yard and ship owner.

The excellent properties of this steel and resistance to corrosion made it the natural choice for the new sisters. Yard workers at the time referred to this steel as "battleship quality." The shells themselves were generally 6 feet wide and 30 feet long weighing between 2 1/2 and 3 1/2 tons depending on thickness. The double bottom plating was 1- 1/2 inches thick and hydraulically riveted up to the bilge. Some of the largest plates were 6 feet wide and 36 feet long and weighed 4 1/2 tons. The strength was entirely provided by the ship's shell plating and rivets. Hydraulic riveting was used for much of the 3 million rivets, in some places the hull quadruply riveted.

Casualties: Only 705 people were rescued; 1523 drowned or froze to death in the icy water. Ironically, most of those who drowned were Americans. Assuming that each lifeboat could hold 65 people, how many lifeboats did they need? Unfortunately, the 20 lifeboats on board were launched in panic before they were filled to capacity, so the number of people rescued was even fewer than could have been accommodated. Only 705 of 2,227 people on board survived. Table I illustrates the distribution of the survivors:

Table I - Survivors Distribution

Type of Accommodations	Women and Children	Men	Total
First Class	94%	31%	60%
Second Class	81%	10%	44%
Steerage	47%	14%	25%
Crew	87%	22%	24%

Analysis: These figures tell you about the policy of saving women and children first, how social standing and wealth influenced who was rescued, and the tradition that the crew usually went down with the ship. Many of the poorest people were not aware of the seriousness of the damage to the Titanic until shortly before it sank.

Last Song: Music plays a central role in the mystique of the Titanic’s last moments.

Those in the lifeboats heard the band playing as the ship slipped beneath the waves.

Reports differed as to the Titanic’s last song. Mrs. A. A. Dick claimed she saw the band lined up on deck playing "Nearer My God to Thee." Another passenger said they were playing "autumn," an Episcopalian hymn. This image of the brave orchestra playing until the end fired the public's imagination, which had an insatiable appetite for eyewitness accounts of the final moments of the Titanic.

Joseph Conrad, a writer of that period, dismissed the controversy over the last song as sentimental fluff. He called it "music to get drowned by." "It would have been finer if the band of the Titanic had been quietly saved," he stated, "instead of being drowned while playing whatever the tune they were playing, poor devils." The sinking of the Titanic generated its own songs, including:

• "It Was Sad When the Great Ship Went Down"
• "Just as the Ship Went Down," by Edith M. Lessing
• "The Band Played 'Nearer My God, to Thee' as the Ship Went Down"
• “The Wreck in the Titanic”

Post Mortem Phase of the Titanic Disaster: After the loss of Titanic, her sister Olympic was fitted with an inner skin. As a consequence of the disaster the US Coastguard established the International Ice Patrol. Dr Robert Ballard of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute found the wreck in September 1985. The ship is resting in primarily two sections approximately one mile apart.

The Titanic Design and Concept: The Titanic was a White Star Line steamship carrying the British flag. Harland and Wolff of Belfast, Ireland built the Titanic at a reported cost of $7.5 million.

British Report Rcommendations dated this 30th day of July, 1912

General:

1. That every man taking a lookout in such ships should undergo a sight test at reasonable intervals.

2. That in all such ships a police system should be organized so as to secure obedience to orders, and proper control and guidance of all on board in times of emergency.

3. That in all such ships there should be an installation of wireless telegraphy, and that such installation should be worked with a sufficient number of trained operators to secure a continuous service by night and day. In this connection regard should be had to the resolutions of the International Conference on Wireless Telegraphy recently held under the presidency of Sir H. Babington Smith. That where practicable a silent chamber for "receiving" messages should form part of the installation.

4. That instruction should be given in all Steamship Companies' regulations that when ice is reported in or near the track, the ship should proceed in the dark hours at a moderate speed or alter her course so as to go well clear of the danger zone.

5. That the attention of Masters of vessels should be drawn by the Board of Trade to the effect that under the Meantime Conventions Act, 1911, it is a misdemeanor not to go to the relief of a vessel in distress when possible to do so.

6. That the same protection as to the safety of life in the event of casualties, which is afforded to emigrant ships by means of supervision and inspection, should be extended to all foreign-going passenger ships.

7. That (unless already done) steps should be taken to call an International Conference to consider and as far as possible to agree upon a common line of conduct in respect of (a) the subdivision of ships, (b) the provision and working of life-saving appliances, (c) the installation of wireless telegraphy and the method of working the same, (d) the reduction of speed or the alteration of course in the vicinity of ice, and (e) the use of searchlights.

Water Tight Sub Divisions:

1. That the newly appointed Bulkhead Committee should enquire and report, among other matters, on the desirability and practicability of providing ships with (a) a double skin carried up above the waterline, or, as an alternative with (b) a longitudinal, vertical, watertight bulkhead on each side of the ship, extending as far forward and aft as convenient, or (c) with a combination of (a) and (b). Any one of the three (a), (b) or (c) to be in addition to watertight transverse bulkheads.

2. That the Committee should also inquire and report as to the desirability and practicability of fitting ships with (a) a deck or decks at a convenient distance or distances above the waterline which shall be watertight throughout a part or the whole of the ship's length, and should in this connection report upon (b) the means by which the necessary openings in such deck or decks should be made watertight, whether by watertight doors or watertight trunks or by any other and what means.

3. That the Committee should consider and report generally on the practicability of increasing the protection given by sub-division; the object being to secure that the ship shall remain afloat with the greatest practicable proportion of her length in free communication with the sea.

4. That when the Committee has reported upon the matters before mentioned, the Board of Trade should take the report into their consideration and to the extent to which they approve of it should seek. Statutory powers to enforce it in all newly built ships, but with a discretion to relax the requirements in special cases where it may seem right to them to do so.

5. That the Board of Trade should be empowered by the Legislature to require the production of the designs and specifications of all ships in their early stages of construction and to direct such amendments of the same as may be thought necessary and practicable for the safety of life at sea in ships.

Lifeboats and Rafts:

1. That the provision of life boat and raft accommodation on board such ships should be based on the number of persons intended to be carried in the ship and not upon tonnage.

2. That the question of such accommodation should be treated independently of the question of the sub-division of the ship into watertight compartments.

3. That the accommodation should be sufficient for all persons on board with, however, the qualification that in special cases where, in the opinion of the Board of Trade, such provision is impracticable, the requirements may be modified as the Board may think right.

4. That all boats should be fitted with a protective, continuous fender to lessen the risk of damage when being lowered in a seaway.

5. That the Board of Trade should be empowered to direct that one or more of the hosts be fitted with some form of mechanical propulsion.

6. That there should be a Board of Trade regulation requiring all boat equipment (under sections 5 and 6, page 15 of the Rules, dated February, 1902, made by the Board of Trade under section 427 Merchant Shipping Act, 1894) to be in the boats as soon as the ship leaves harbor. The sections quoted above should be amended so as to provide also that all boats and rafts should carry lamps and pyrotechnic lights for purposes of signaling. All boats should be provided with compasses and provisions and should be very distinctly marked in such a way as to indicate plainly the number of adult persons each boat can carry when being lowered.

7. That the Board of Trade inspection of boats and life-saving appliances should be of a more searching character than hitherto.

Manning the Boats and Boat Drills:

1. That in cases where the deck hands are not sufficient to man the boats enough, other members of the crew should be men trained in boat work to make up the deficiency. These men should be required to pass a test in boat work.

2. That in view of the necessity of having on board men trained in boat work, steps should be taken to encourage the training of boys for the Merchant Service.

3. That the operation of Section 115 and Section 134 (a) of the Merchant Shipping Act, 1894, should be examined, with a view to amending the same so as to secure greater continuity of service than hitherto.

4. That the men who are to man the boats should have more frequent drills than hitherto. That in all ships a boat drill; a fire drill and a watertight door drill should be held as soon as possible after leaving the original port of departure and at convenient intervals of not less than once a week during the voyage. Such drills to be recorded in the official log.

5. That the Board of Trade should be satisfied in each case before the ship leaves port that a scheme has been devised and communicated to each officer of the ship for securing an efficient working of the boats.

The Titanic ship was designed to be unsinkable but used rivets technology to hold the steel plates together. The following is a summary of factual operational considerations, system design considerations, and actions taken by the USA and British governments after the 14 April 1912:

The Grave of the Titanic

The story of the Titanic and the iceberg has grown into a legend of the sea. It took her discovery in 1985 to begin to find the truth behind the myth. One of the things that make the Titanic so fascinating is that she represented the best of technology when she set sail on her ill-fated voyage in 1912, and it took the best of technology in the form of sonar, satellite tracking, and deep-dive technology to locate her grave 73 years later. In the early 1900's, waterborne transportation was the norm; today, satellites are taken for granted by our society. But we tend to forget the immense effort that these two technologies require to operate to their maximum potential. Until recently, the technology did not exist to locate, photograph, and explore this ship that rested two and a half miles down on the ocean floor.

On April 10, 1912, the RMS Titanic set sail from Southampton on her maiden voyage to New York. At that time, she was the largest and most luxurious ship ever built. At 11:40 PM on April 14, 1912, she struck an iceberg about 400 miles off Newfoundland, Canada. Although her crew had been warned about icebergs several times that evening by other ships navigating through that region, she was traveling at near top speed of about 20.5 knots when one grazed her side.

Less than three hours later, the Titanic plunged to the bottom of the sea, taking more than 1500 people with her. Only a fraction of her passengers were saved. The world was stunned to learn of the fate of the unsinkable Titanic. It carried some of the richest, most powerful industrialists of her day. Together, their personal fortunes were worth $600 million in 1912! In addition to wealthy and the middle class passengers, she carried poor emigrants from Europe and the Middle East seeking economic and social freedom in the New World.

Wreckage Found: Dr. Robert Ballard, an oceanographer and marine biologist with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution found the remains of the Titanic in 1985. When he located the Titanic, he saw that, as some survivors reported, the ship had broken apart. He believed the weight of the water-filled bow raised the stern out of the water and snapped the ship in two just before it sank. Debris falling out of the ship was strewn over a 1/2 mile across the sea floor. The bow and the stern were found nearly 2000ft. apart.

Keeping her location a secret, Bob Ballard used GPS to find the Titanic again when he returned the next year. He hoped to prevent treasure seekers from finding her and plundering the ship for booty such as coffee cups inscribed with RMS Titanic. On this second expedition, he visited the ship several times by submarine. On his last descent, he left a plaque honoring the 1500 victims and asking that subsequent explorers leave their grave undisturbed.

Tracking the Route

She started from Southampton, England, and stopped at Cherbourg, France and Queenstown, Ireland to pick up passengers. Her destination was New York. She sank 1000 miles due east of Boston, Massachusetts, and 375 miles southeast of St. John's, Newfoundland.

Search Equipment: The marriage of Argo and Jason began aboard the research vessel Knorr, the ship that discovered Titanic. Within two years Argo/Jason was ready to enter the deep and remain there for extended periods, adding greatly to man's knowledge of the undersea world. The remotely operated system involving two components eventually became known as Argo/Jason. Argo was to be the eyes of the system and Jason the hands. The system would be able to search out objects or natural features at extreme depths, analyzing and recording them for as long as the surface operators wished. In the case of lost objects, Argo/Jason could either recover them or direct their recovery by other means.

A Long Last Look at Titanic: The R.M.S. Titanic struck an iceberg on April 14, 1912. For 73 years all efforts to find the ship failed: The Titanic rested in dark silence 3 km (2 mi) below on the floor of the North Atlantic Ocean. Then on September 1, 1985, a team led by American deep-sea explorer Robert Ballard, using a camera aboard a robot submersible, found the ship. In 1986, aboard Alvin, a three-person submersible, they visited the ship several times. In this December 1986 National Geographic article, Ballard described the moment he first saw the Titanic.

1998 Titanic - Expedition Recovers Hull Section From Ocean Floor: After two previous failed attempts, a salvage crew successfully recovered a large section of the outer hull of the British luxury liner Titanic on August 10, 1998, raising the massive piece nearly 4 km (nearly 2.5 mi) from the Atlantic Ocean floor. The hull plate, which includes portholes and is from the Titanic's first-class section, was located about 16 km (about 10 mi) from the rest of the shipwreck site. Known as the Big Piece, the hull plate measures 7 m by 4 m (23 ft by 14 ft) and weighs approximately 20 metric tons.

The RMS Titanic, Inc., which owns salvage rights to the ship, said the recovery operation was part of an investigation to determine precisely how the Titanic broke apart and sank after it collided with an iceberg in the North Atlantic on April 14, 1912. More than 1500 passengers and crew were killed when the supposedly unsinkable ship went down. An expedition to the Titanic in 1996 led some experts to believe that a series of small gashes, rather than one long giant gash, sank the vessel. Engineers involved in the recovery operation have suggested that characteristics of the Titanic's steel and the quality of the rivets holding the ship's hull sections together may also have played a role in how the ship broke apart.

The salvage crew raised the hull section using floats filled with diesel fuel, which is lighter than water. In 1996 the same piece was raised to within 60 m (200 ft) of the ocean surface, but it was lost in stormy weather. Another effort to raise the hull section on August 9, 1998, one day before the successful lift, also failed. A spokesman for RMS Titanic said the piece would be preserved and placed on public display along with other artifacts collected from the Titanic.

Problems Encountered During the Dives for the Search of the Titanic: Institution decided to more than double Alvin's depth range from 6,000 to 13,000 feet. Alvin, a three-person submersible platform, seemed the perfect deep platform to begin experimenting with robotic vehicles, first as extensions of manned submersibles, and ultimately as their replacement.

As they searched, the crew began the two-and-a-half-hour dead fall toward the bottom; and they discovered the sonar was not working. The outside pressure was quickly doubling and then doubling again; it would eventually reach 5,000 pounds per square inch. Had it rendered the sonar useless, the mission had to be aborted? Without the sonar, they have to rely upon the surface navigator aboard Atlantis II to guide us blind to Titanic's side.

Then, another cruncher. A crewmember noticed salt water leaking into one of the two battery packs that powered the small sub. It showed up on the instrument panel as a slow leak, but as the level of seawater in the battery tub rose, the leak caused the crew's concern, for the protective oil in which the batteries are bathed was being replaced by short-circuiting seawater. Alvin's batteries eventually could consume them. The alarms inside Alvin become shrill as more and more seawater enters the battery pack, and the electrical situation got worse. A crewmember was about to pull the plug. Swinging the sub to the right, Ralph eases Alvin forward until an endless slab of black steel rising out of the bottom stops him.

Seawater was continuing to short-circuit our batteries, and the crew was already thinking about returning to the surface. Fortunately the trouble, which proved to be a saltwater leak in Jayson's (crew member) tether, was quickly repaired, and the robot was soon ready to dive again. But the incident proved the point that when something goes wrong at 12,500 feet, you don't just get out and fix it. The only answer is to build systems that don't risk human life.

The tracking system was working properly; the navigator on the surface knows where he is, where we are, and where Titanic lies, but the navigator was having problems. The crew did not know what they were, only that his directions echoed down to us on the underwater acoustic telephone indicated the crew was lost.

Divers Hazards and Safety Measures: Hazards associated with recreational diving stem chiefly from breathing air under pressure, though a few marine animals also pose hazards. Most hazards can be avoided if divers follow the safety procedures taught in certification courses and do not attempt dives beyond their ability and experience.

Pressure Related Injury: The single largest risk scuba divers face is pressure-related injury. Decompression sickness, also called the "bends" (see note #2) is an injury that occurs when a diver ascends too quickly or dives too deeply for too long. Throughout a dive, the body absorbs nitrogen (an element of air) from breathing compressed air. The deeper a diver desc