Less than half of the second-class passengers survived, and a whopping 75% of the third-class passengers perished in the ocean. The first-class passengers fared the best: 203 out of 325 of them survived. Of the over 2,000 souls who set off with the Titanic, around 710 made it to New York aboard the RMS Carpathia. Getty Images John Jacob Astor IV Grim Consequences For instance, they lowered the first boat into the ocean carrying 28 people it had room for 65. Very few, if any, of them actually had any idea how many people could fit on each lifeboat, so the crew launched most of them while they were still greatly under capacity. Since no one ever expected the ship to sink, no one trained the crew what to do in an emergency. Not only was the Titanic ill-equipped for a disaster, but the crew was also similarly unprepared. The lifeboats were only there to transfer people to rescue ships in the event of an engine malfunction or some other inconvenient mishap. In fact, many believed that most large ships couldn’t really sink at all. The Titanic wasn’t the only ship people believed to be unsinkable it’s just the one that finally proved the maxim false. In fact, the 20 lifeboats that the ship held actually exceeded the legal minimum. However, we should note that this was not abnormal for ships of the era. The Titanic infamously carried too few lifeboats. It was also required that ships maintain a 24-hour radio watch.Titanic (1997), Twentieth Century Fox The Lifeboats An International Ice Patrol was established to monitor icebergs in the North Atlantic shipping lanes. Rules were adopted requiring that every ship have lifeboat space for each person on board, and that lifeboat drills be held.

In the disaster’s aftermath, the first International Convention for Safety of Life at Sea was held in 1913. It was later discovered that the Leyland liner Californian had been less than 20 miles away at the time of the accident but had failed to hear the Titanic‘s distress signals because its radio operator was off duty.Īnnouncement of details of the tragedy led to outrage on both sides of the Atlantic. The survivors in the lifeboats were brought aboard, and a handful of others were pulled out of the water. One hour and 20 minutes after Titanic went down, the Cunard liner Carpathia arrived. A number of notable American and British citizens died in the tragedy, including the noted British journalist William Thomas Stead and heirs to the Straus, Astor and Guggenheim fortunes.

Most of the 700 or so survivors were women and children. On its first journey across the highly competitive Atlantic ferry route, the ship carried some 2,200 passengers and crew.īecause of a shortage of lifeboats and the lack of satisfactory emergency procedures, more than 1,500 people went down in the sinking ship or froze to death in the icy North Atlantic waters. While leaving port, the ship came within a couple of feet of the steamer New York but passed safely by, causing a general sigh of relief from the passengers massed on the Titanic‘s decks. Because four of these compartments could be flooded without causing a critical loss of buoyancy, the Titanic was considered unsinkable. It spanned 883 feet from stern to bow, and its hull was divided into 16 compartments that were presumed to be watertight. The Titanic was designed by the Irish shipbuilder William Pirrie and built in Belfast, and was thought to be the world’s fastest ship.

On April 10, the RMS Titanic, one of the largest and most luxurious ocean liners ever built, departed Southampton, England, on its maiden voyage across the Atlantic Ocean. WATCH: Titanic's Final Moments: Missing Pieces on HISTORY Vault The massive ship, which carried 2,200 passengers and crew, had struck an iceberg two and half hours before. on April 15, 1912, the British ocean liner Titanic sinks into the North Atlantic Ocean about 400 miles south of Newfoundland, Canada.

Titanic watertight compartments