Swiss light artist Gerry Hofstetter creates a test projection on an iceberg in 2011. Hofstetter has plans to project pictures illustrating the sinking of the Titanic on a giant iceberg for the 100th anniversary of the catastrophe.
Mary Beth Crocker, left, and her husband, Tom Dearing, from Newport, Ky., pose for pictures in period costume after disembarking the MS Balmoral Titanic memorial cruise ship on April 9 during its first stop in Cobh, Ireland. With 1,309 passengers aboard, the MS Balmoral will follow the same route the Titanic did in 1912, complete with food and music from the era.
John Philip of Australia adjusts the life jacket of his sister, Ann Breust, on April 8 during a drill aboard a Titanic memorial cruise from Southampton, England, to New York.
Passengers on a Titanic memorial cruise, chartered by Miles Morgan Travel, dance to music from a Belgian string band on April 9 after the ship's departure from Cobh, Ireland. Due to rough weather, an April 10 floor show was canceled over concerns about the safety of the performers.
Actress Kate Winslet arrives at the 'Titanic 3D' UK film premiere on March 27 at the Royal Albert Hall in Kensington, West London. The 3-D version of the film has been released for the 100th anniversary of the Titanic's sinking and comes 15 years after 1997's "Titanic" was a huge box office hit.
Titanic 3D
An exterior view shows the Titanic Belfast building March 27 in Belfast, Northern Ireland. The six-story attraction opened March 31 and tells the story of the Titanic from the ship's construction in Belfast to her sinking in the Atlantic on her maiden voyage 100 years ago.
Titanic Belfast is a new visitor attraction that opens on March 31 in Belfast, Northern Ireland. The new six-story structure overlooks the slipways where the Titanic was built. The ill-fated passenger liner sank after hitting an iceberg in the Atlantic on the night of April 15, 1912, with the loss of 1,517 lives.
A tour guide talks to visitors at the Thompson Graving dock in the Titanic Quarter. The 880-foot-long graving dock, or dry dock, is where the Titanic was fitted out
The panels lining the walls of the Titanic Belfast atrium are the same size and texture as those fitted to the hull of the famous ship. Northern Ireland hopes the eye-catching center will kick-start its tourism economy and encourage travelers from all over to visit the province.
Visitors look down on a projection showing images of the wreck of the Titanic on the seabed at the Titanic Belfast museum.
A woman looks at 3D projections of the inside of the Titanic on display in the new $157 million Titanic Belfast attraction. The Titanic -- the world's largest, most luxurious ocean liner at the time it was built -- left this spot on April 2, 1912, on its maiden voyage from England to New York. Twelve days later, it struck an iceberg off the coast of Newfoundland and sank in the early hours of April 15.
Computer video projections of passengers are displayed in a re-creation of a second-class cabin at the Titanic Belfast.
A re-creation of a third-class cabin, complete with computer-video projections of passengers, is displayed at the Titanic Belfast.
A boy runs across an interactive projection of the Harland and Wolff Drawing Office at Titanic Belfast. The offices were where the plans for the Titanic, Olympic and Britannic were prepared.
The Titanic Belfast visitor center includes a replica of a Titanic lifeboat.
A model-like sculpture of the Titanic is on display at the Titanic Belfast. The new museum, with its four prow-like wings jutting skyward, stands by the River Lagan on the site of the old Harland and Wolff shipyard.
A visitor uses his phone to snap a photo of the slipway at Titanic Belfast.
A woman looks at the hull of a ship in one of the galleries of the new Titanic Belfast.
A projection shows images of the wreck of the Titanic on the seabed at the Titanic Belfast.
A compass design decorates the lobby of Titanic Belfast.
The world's biggest Titanic visitor attraction is set to open its doors 100 years after the doomed ocean liner was completed in the same shipyard.
A 1912 advertisement for the British luxury passenger liner Titanic, part of the White Star Line's fleet, announces an April 20, 1912, sailing. Ticket prices and berth descriptions are provided, but the ship never arrived in New York. The Titanic sank April 15, 1912, killing more than 1,500 passenger and crew members.
Workmen stand next to the screws of the RMS Titanic at a shipyard in Belfast, Northern Ireland, in this undated photo. The largest ship afloat at the time, the Titanic sank in the north Atlantic Ocean on April 15, 1912, after colliding with an iceberg during her maiden voyage from Southampton, England, to New York City.
The Titanic leaves Southampton, England, on her ill-fated maiden voyage on April 10, 1912.
A handout picture received from Southampton City Council on April 4, 2012, shows Titanic Captain Edward Smith with a dog.
A computer-generated image shows the first-class accommodations that were available aboard the Titanic. The display can be seen at the newly opened Titanic Belfast attraction in Belfast, Northern Ireland.
A replica of the grand staircase from the sunken Titanic is on exhibition April 2 at the Marina Bay Sands ArtScience Museum in Singapore. The exhibition features about 275 artifacts recovered from the Titanic.
The grand staircase between the boat deck and the promenade deck aboard the RMS Titanic in an undated photo. A replica of the Titanic's grand staircase was seen in James Cameron's 1997 movie, "Titanic."
A copy of the last message sent from the Titanic, which tells of passengers being put into lifeboats.
Survivors of the sinking of the RMS Titanic approach the RMS Carpathia in this April 15, 1912, photo. The Carpathia rescued hundreds of Titanic passengers.
Top 10 Reasons for Titanic Tragedy
The "unsinkable" Titanic was sunk by an iceberg, but there are other reasons why the tragedy that occurred 100 years ago this month was as tragic as it was. Even a century later, the case of the Titanic illustrates how technological failures often result from a succession of omissions, missteps and bad luck rather than one big mess-up.
"No one thing sent the Titanic to the bottom of the North Atlantic," Richard Corfield writes in a Physics World retrospective on the disaster that caused 1,514 deaths on April 14-15, 1912. "Rather, the ship was ensnared by a perfect storm of circumstances that conspired her to her doom. Such a chain is familiar to those who study disasters — it is called an 'event cascade.'"
The iceberg that the Titanic struck on its way from Southampton to New York is No. 1 on a top-10 list of circumstances. Here are nine other suggested circumstances from Corfield's article and other sources:
Climate caused more icebergs: Weather conditions in the North Atlantic were particularly conducive for corralling icebergs at the intersection of the Labrador Current and the Gulf Stream, due to warmer-than-usual waters in the Gulf Stream, Richard Norris of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography told Physics World. "Oceanographically, the upshot of that was that icebergs, sea ice and growlers were concentrated in the very position where the collision happened," Norris said.
Tides sent icebergs southward: Last month, astronomers at Texas State University at San Marcos noted that the sun, the moon and Earth were aligned in such a way that could have led to unusually high tides in January 1912. They speculated that the tides could have dislodged icebergs that were stuck in the Labrador Sea, sending more of them toward the waters traversed by the Titanic a couple of months later.
The ship was going too fast: Many Titanicologists have said that the ship's captain, Edward J. Smith, was aiming to better the crossing time of the Olympic, the Titanic's older sibling in the White Star fleet. For some, the fact that the Titanic was sailing full speed ahead despite concerns about icebergs was Smith's biggest misstep. "Simply put, Titanic was traveling way too fast in an area known to contain ice; that's the bottom line," says Mark Nichol, webmaster for the Titanic and Other White Star Ships website.
Iceberg warnings went unheeded: The Titanic received multiple warnings about icefields in the North Atlantic over the wireless, but Corfield notes that the last and most specific warning was not passed along by senior radio operator Jack Phillips to Captain Smith, apparently because it didn't carry the prefix "MSG" (Masters' Service Gram). That would have required a personal acknowledgment from the captain. "Phillips interpreted it as non-urgent and returned to sending passenger messages to the receiver on shore at Cape Race, Newfoundland, before it went out of range," Corfield writes.
The binoculars were locked up: Corfield also says binoculars that could have been used by lookouts on the night of the collision were locked up aboard the ship — and the key was held by David Blair, an officer who was bumped from the crew before the ship's departure from Southampton. Some historians have speculated that the fatal iceberg might have been spotted earlier if the binoculars were in use, but others say it wouldn't have made a difference.
The steersman took a wrong turn: Did the Titanic's steersman turn the ship toward the iceberg, dooming the ship? That's the claim made in 2010 by Louise Patten, who said the story was passed down from her grandfather, the most senior ship officer to survive the disaster. After the iceberg was spotted, the command was issued to turn "hard a starboard," but as the command was passed down the line, it was misinterpreted as meaning "make the ship turn right" rather than "push the tiller right to make the ship head left," Patten said. She said the error was quickly discovered, but not quickly enough to avert the collision. She also speculated that if the ship had stopped where it was hit, seawater would not have pushed into one interior compartment after another as it did, and the ship might not have sunk as quickly.
Reverse thrust reduced the ship's maneuverability: Just before impact, first officer William McMaster Murdoch is said to have telegraphed the engine room to put the ship's engines into reverse. That would cause the left and right propeller to turn backward, but because of the configuration of the stern, the central propeller could only be halted, not reversed. Corfield said "the fact that the steering propeller was not rotating severely diminished the turning ability of the ship. It is one of the many bitter ironies of the Titanic tragedy that the ship might well have avoided the iceberg if Murdoch had not told the engine room to reduce and then reverse thrust."
The iron rivets were too weak: Metallurgists Tim Foecke and Jennifer Hooper McCarty looked into the materials used for the building of the Titanic at its Belfast shipyard and found that the steel plates toward the bow and the stern were held together with low-grade iron rivets. Those rivets may have been used because higher-grade rivets were in short supply, or because the better rivets couldn't be inserted in those areas using the shipyard's crane-mounted hydraulic equipment. The metallurgists said those low-grade rivets would have ripped apart more easily during the collision, causing the ship to sink more quickly that it would have if stronger rivets had been used. Other researchers have contested that claim, however.
There were too few lifeboats: Perhaps the biggest tragedy is that there were not enough lifeboats to accommodate all of the Titanic's more than 2,200 passengers and crew members. The lifeboats could accommodate only about 1,200 people — which was still in excess of the 1,060-person capacity that was the legal requirement for that time. "It seems that in 1912, in a way not dissimilar to our own box-ticking, responsibility-avoiding culture today, lack of effective oversight on the part of the authorities caused the consequences of the disaster to be much worse than they might have been," Corfield wrote.
Do these 10 causes cover everything, or are there still more factors I'm forgetting? Are there some lessons still unlearned from the Titanic tragedy? Feel free to weigh in with your reflections on the Titanic centennial in the comment space below.
Lifeboats that carried Titanic survivors are uploaded to the RMS Carpathia in the hours after the disaster.
The front page of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch on April 16, 1912, was devoted to the Titanic disaster. The paper gives the death toll as 1,302 and the number of survivors as 868. Later, official figures were corrected to 1,517 dead and 706 who survived. The main photograph is a montage, placing the Titanic against the Eads Bridge in St Louis, to give an idea of the ship's size.
Rescuers help Titanic radio operator Harold Bride off the Carpathia. Bride's S.O.S. call alerted rescuers to the Titanic's sinking. He stayed at his post until the captain released him as the boat deck started taking on water, according to Encyclopedia Titanica. He was washed overboard and made his way onto an overturned boat, but his feet were badly frozen and crushed. From the Carpathia, Bride continued to send messages and names of those saved to land.
Survivors of the Titanic disaster are greeted by their relatives upon their safe return to Southampton, England.
This handout picture received from Southampton City Council on April 4, 2012, shows a newsboy outside White Star Line offices in London after the news of the sinking of the Titanic hit in 1912.
Coffins for the recovered bodies from the Titanic are seen in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 1912.
Crew members who survived the sinking of the RMS Titanic are given dry clothing in New York on April 18, 1912.
This May 29, 1912, photograph shows Mrs. J.J. "Molly" Brown presenting an award to Capt. Arthur Henry Rostron for his service in the rescue of the passengers on Titanic.
A commemorative illustration in honor of those who died in the Titanic disaster.
\This 1998 image provided by RMS Titanic, Inc., shows a 17-ton portion of the hull of the RMS Titanic as it is lifted to the surface during an expedition to the site of the shipwreck. The piece, along with 5,500 other artifacts, will be sold at auction as a single collection.
One of two name boards from a lifeboat on the RMS Titanic is displayed at a 2006 auction at Christie's in New York City. Thousands of artifacts that have been recovered from the wreckage continue to be auctioned off to mark this year's 100th anniversary of the ship's sinking.
The pocket watch belonging to Titanic steward Sidney Sedunary, which has stopped at 1:50, roughly 30 minutes before the Titanic sank, is seen on display April 3, 2012, at the SeaCity Museum in Southampton, England. The watch was found in Sedunary's pocket when his body was recovered a few days after the ship sank.
The White Star Line logo is seen on a bowl recovered from the Titanic wreck site at the opening of a new exhibition called "The Titanic and Liverpool, the untold story" March 29, 2012, at the Merseyside Maritime Museum in Liverpool, England.
A locket belonging to Edward Herbert Keeping, a personal valet who died on the Titanic, is an item with direct ties to the Titanic being auctioned by rrauction.com. The locket was officially recorded by the provincial coroner of Nova Scotia before it was returned to Keeping's wife, and is contained in the record of bodies and effects: passengers and crew of S.S. Titanic in the public archives of Nova Scotia. Keeping’s wife replaced her daughter’s water damaged portrait with one of her husband's and the locket has remained in Keeping’s family continuously until the present.
Who gets the Titanic's Treasures?
Negotiations to decide the fate of a $189 million collection of artifacts from the Titanic are going into overtime.
Atlanta-based Premier Exhibitions, which is seeking to sell 5,500 items recovered from the shipwreck site over the past 25 years, said today that it's"in discussions with multiple parties" for the purchase of the collection. The legal rulings that paved the way for the sale require that the collection must be sold as a single lot — and that the buyer must make the artifacts available for public exhibition and research.
The deadline for sealed bids passed more than a week ago, and since then Premier Exhibitions has been weighing the offers.
"In order for the company to settle on the most appropriate bidder and maximize the ultimate value of the artifacts for shareholders, it conduct these negotiations and due diligence in confidence," Premier said in a statement. The company said it would "provide an additional update to shareholders as soon as practical," and would reschedule a news conference that had been planned for Wednesday to announce the winning bid.
Premier's subsidiary, RMS Titanic Inc., is the only company with legal permission to recover objects from the Titanic, which ran into an iceberg and sank on April 15, 1912, during its maiden trans-Atlantic voyage from Southampton to New York. More than 1,500 of the ship's 2,228 passengers and crew lost their lives in the disaster. The 100th anniversary of the tragedy is boosting interest in the Titanic to new heights.
In addition to the physical artifacts, RMS Titanic has been collecting data andhigh-resolution imagery of the wreck site, two miles beneath the Atlantic surface. Its most recent expedition took place in 2010. The archaeological assets, including underwater video and 3-D mapping, are among the property being sold.
"Titanic is slowly being consumed by iron-eating microbes on the sea floor and, at some point in the not-too-distant future, it will be only a memory," Mark Sellers, chairman of Premier and RMS Titanic, said back in January. "We are proud of what we have accomplished as salvor-in-possession of the wreck site and we believe we have faithfully honored the legacy of those who were lost. After all those efforts, we have determined that the time has come for us to transfer ownership of this collection to a steward who is able to continue our efforts and will preserve and honor her legacy."
Actually, three major Titanic auctions are taking place this month. In addition to the Premier Exhibitions sale, which is being managed by Guernsey's auction house, there's a Bonhams auction set for Sunday in New York, and anRR Auction online sale due to begin April 19. Last month, the highlight of a London auction was the sale of a first-class menu from the Titanic's last lunch for $120,000.
Ben Stansall / AFP - Getty Images
A wreath floats in berths 43/44, the place from which the RMS Titanic set sail on its ill-fated maiden voyage 100 years ago, during a ceremony at Southampton's docks on April 10, 2012.
It's not clear whether any more artifacts will ever be brought up from the Titanic site. Beginning on the 100th anniversary of the sinking, the remains of the Titanic will be covered by a 2001 U.N. convention on the protection of underwater cultural heritage. In a statement issued last week, UNESCO said parties to the convention can seize artifacts taken from the Titanic, and prevent exploration of the site that is "deemed unscientific or unethical."
Neither the United States nor Canada are parties to that convention. However, UNESCO said the protections specified in the convention are also reflected in an international agreement on Titanic salvage that was signed by those two countries as well as France and Britain.
One of the most outspoken critics of Titanic salvaging has been oceanographer Robert Ballard, who was one of the co-discoverers of the Titanic wreck site in 1985. He has long said that if he could do it all over again, he would not publicize the location of the wreck, and today on NPR's "Talk of the Nation," he said he now wishes he claimed the site for himself.
"When I found the Titanic, I went to the courts, and I said, 'Well, can I own the Titanic?' And they said, yes. It's an abandoned shipwreck. All you have to do is go down and retrieve one object of saucer or plate or something, come into the courts, and we'll make you the owner. But we'll make you the owner under one condition, that you remove it from the bottom of the ocean. ... I was opposed to that. I wished I'd gone and got that one cup and brought it up and said, 'I want to turn it into an underwater museum.' I'd rather take people there through the technologies we now have, and I really regret I didn't do that."
In retrospect, do you think that would have been the better course? Feel free to weigh in with your thoughts about the fate of Titanic artifacts in the comment space below.
A prop life vest, deck chair and bronze ship's bell appear on display April 6, 2012, in New York, along with other Titanic memorabilia to be auctioned off.
Titanic's Artefacts to be Auctioned
A pair of shoes recovered from the Titanic is seen April 2, 2012, at an exhibition at Marina Bay Sands ArtScience Museum in Singapore.
A child's shoes believed to be from the body of an unknown boy and recovered by the crew of the Mackay-Bennett, a cable-laying ship chartered by the White Star Line after the Titanic disaster, are seen Jan. 27, 2012, in the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
School children in Southampton, England, carry placards featuring each of the victims of the Titanic disaster through the city's center on April 10, 2012. The ill-fated ship set sail on her maiden voyage 100 years ago from Southampton. Reports state that a minute's silence was observed in the city, which had been home to more than 500 of the crew who perished in the disaster.
A wreath floats in berths 43/44 from where the RMS Titanic set sail on its ill-fated maiden voyage 100 years ago at a Southampton, England, dock during an April 10, 2012, ceremony where descendants of passengers who sailed on the Titanic paid tribute to those who lost their lives.
Deep Inside the Titanic (1999) Discovery Channel
Titanic Museum
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