Facts+about+the+ship



The designers had great hopes and were very ambitious when they created the Titanic. Lord Pirrie was the designer who worked with Alexander Carlisle, General Manager, and an architect from White Star named Thomas Andrews. As a team they created the most luxurious and magnificent ship of that time. To learn more aobut these men, click on their pictures.


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The Titanic was designed to achieve a top speed of 24 knots (nautical miles per hour), which converts to 27.6 miles per hour and 44.4 kilometers per hour. The sea trials were cut short, so no maximum speed test was performed. On her maiden voyage, prior to striking the iceberg, the Titanic reached the speed of 22.5 knots (25.9 mph/41.7 Km/h).

Note: The U.S. Senate report made the following conclusion: > "The speed of the Titanic was gradually increased after leaving Queenstown. The first day's run was 464 miles, the second day's run was 519 miles, the third day's run was 546 miles. Just prior to the collision the ship was making her maximum speed of the voyage - not less than 21 knots, or 24 1/4 miles per hour."

The ship was designed with steel and riveting. What is riveting? Riveting is a permanent mechanical fastener that as used to hold plates into one and was almost as strong as welding. Solid rivets are used in applications where reliability and safety count. A typical applications for solid rivets can be found within the structure of a ship. Hundreds of thousands of solid rivents are used to assemble the frame of a ship This method was used for safety in case the ships were hulled.



The Titanic ship was designed to be unsinkable. Since the Titanic was deemed unsinkable, the sufficient number of life boats was not needed. If they place the correct number of lifeboats on the Titantic then their presence may reflect the ship was unsafe. The regulation at that time required ships to carry at least 16 lifeboats regardless of the number of passengers on the ship.





In the early 1900's there was fierce competition between transatlantic shipping companies for the lucrative businness of passenger's transportation. The two big players were The White Star Line and Cunard. Cunard had already set the bar in terms of speed with liners like the Mauretania and Lusitania. They were setting speed records for the Southhampton to New York Crossing. White Star decided to fight back, not in terms of speed, but by building the highest standards of luxury and bulding a ship bigger than anything on the seas. This way, they could take more fare paying passengers per run and could charge top dollar for the large suites designed to take families and staff. Their ship would become the prominent way of transportation for the rich and famous.

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Belfast, a small town at the mouth of the river Lagan in northern Ireland had, by the early 1800s, become a major port at the beating heart of the region's thriving industry. By the time it had been granted city status in 1888, Belfast had emerged as one of the world's great shipbuilding centres. Here the Titanic was built.

Belfast had been largely built on the success of the city's linen and cotton industries, but it was the success of its shipyard that was to position it as a global industrial giant. Commercial shipbuilding had been a feature of Belfast since the late 18th century, but it was the establishment of Harland and Wolff at the Queen's Island shipyard in the east of the city in 1861 that saw it really take off.

The manager of Robert Hickson's small Belfast shipyard on Queen's Island, Edward Harland had bought the yard in 1858. Gustav Wolff, whose uncle was extremely well connected in the Hamburg merchant community, had previously been employed as a personal assistant by Hickson. Harland quickly made him a partner in the new firm, and Harland and Wolff was officially formed in 1861. Between them, the two men exploited their wealthy contacts to ensure a steady stream of orders and make the firm a success. The most crucial partnership was established with the White Star Line, whose entire fleet of ocean liners was manufactured by Harland and Wolff.

By the early 1900s, Harland and Wolff employed thousands of men in a shipyard covering some 300 acres. Jobs there included welders, riveters, platers, plumbers, painters, carpenters, designers and naval architects. A crucial role in the success of the shipyard was played by the nearby Belfast College of Technology. It provided vocational teaching to the firm's apprentices, producing highly skilled workers and enabling progress for all those who worked in the yard.

As work began on the three 'Olympic Class' liners commissioned by the White Star Line, Harland and Wolff employed 15,000 people. More than 4,000 of them worked on the construction of the first two of these leviathans, Olympic and Titanic, producing not only the design, structure and mechanics of the ships but also their ornate and luxurious fixtures and fittings.

The launching of the hull of Titanic from the Queen's Island slipways was a momentous occasion attended by an estimated 100,000 people, reflecting the pride the city of Belfast had in its most celebrated construction to date. Many more impressive vessels would leave the yard in the coming years and decades before the decline of the shipbuilding industry began in the 1950s, but in many ways the building of Titanic marked the zenith of the great shipbuilding era in Belfast.

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