Existing comment:
Building the Titanic:
The motivation to build Titanic arose from competition among American, British, and German steamship lines of the early twentieth century. Companies vied for lucrative transatlantic passenger traffic ranging from millionaire vacationers to streams of immigrants. Ships built for speed, size, luxury, and reliability enjoyed an edge.
At the time, the Irish city of Belfast dominated the shipbuilding industry. In 1861, Edward J. Harland and Gustav Wolff employed 150 men to build ships one at a time on Queen's Island in the River Lagan. They improved design by substituting iron decks for wooden ones and squaring hulls to increase capacity. Demand rose, and by the early 1900s more than 14,000 Harland and Wolff employees built the world's largest ships.
In 1907, the managing director of England's White Star Line, J. Bruce Ismay, asked Harland and Wolff chairman Lord William Pirrie to design ships that would dwarf all competition. They agreed on three identical vessels Olympic, Titanic, and Gigantic (renamed Britannic). The ships would measure 882.5 feet long, about sixteen feet more than the flight deck of the World War II aircraft carrier USS Lexington. At 46,000 tons, most of it iron and steel held in place by three million rivets, the ships would be a third larger than their biggest rivals. Each ship had 29 boilers designed to burn 825 tons of coal each day.
Titanic's keel was laid March 31, 1909. About 3,000 workers attached hull and deck plates and created the skeleton for hundreds of rooms. On May 31, 1911, Titanic, its interiors unfinished, sat ready for launch. A crowd of 100,000 gathered for its first journey. Signal flags spelling "Good Luck" bedecked the gantry as Titanic slid down greased skips into the River Lagan. The Belfast Newsletter proclaimed the dawn of "a new epoch in naval architecture." |