Ships That Made History · Episode 5
Titanic
The biggest ship in the world, with a grand staircase, a swimming pool and an electric camel. The iceberg, the band that kept playing, and the little Carpathia racing through the ice to the rescue. Plus the safety rules that came after, and the night in 1985 when the wreck was found.
Now playing
Loading episodes…
Click any section or line to jump there in the audio.
Carol Just after midnight. April 15th, 1912. The North Atlantic.
Shannon On a small passenger ship called the Carpathia, the wireless operator is getting ready for bed. He's already unlacing his boots. But he still has his headphones on, listening for one last message.
Carol And he hears a call for help.
Shannon It's from the biggest ship in the world. She's hit an iceberg, fifty-eight miles away. And she's sinking.
Carol Welcome to Ships That Made History. One ship, one story.
Shannon Last time, the Bounty, the mutiny, and the hidden island. This time, the most famous ship ever built.
Carol Episode five. Titanic.
Carol So let's start with the ship herself.
Shannon She was built in Belfast, in Ireland, by a shipyard called Harland and Wolff, for the White Star Line. And when she was finished, in 1912, she was the largest ship afloat.
Carol How big are we talking?
Shannon Almost nine hundred feet long. That's almost as long as three football fields. And from the bottom of the hull to the top of the funnels, she was taller than a fifteen-story building.
Carol Four funnels.
Shannon Four big funnels. And here's a fun secret. Only three of them carried smoke from the boilers. The fourth mostly helped air out the ship, including the kitchens. And people loved the look of four funnels. It made her look even faster and grander.
Carol (laughs) Ships with style.
Shannon Ships with style.
Carol And inside?
Shannon Inside, she was like a grand hotel. A sweeping staircase under a big glass dome. A swimming pool, which was one of the first ever on a ship. A gym with an electric horse and an electric camel you could ride for exercise.
Carol An electric camel!
Shannon An electric camel. There was a squash court, a Turkish bath, a French café, and restaurants. And even in third class, a lot of passengers had cleaner, more comfortable cabins than they'd ever had at home.
Carol And people said she was unsinkable.
Shannon That's how people remember it. An engineering magazine said she was practically unsinkable, because of her watertight compartments. And the idea stuck.
Carol So, her first voyage.
Shannon She left Southampton, in England, at noon on April 10th, 1912. And she nearly had an accident before she even got out of the harbor.
Carol Already?
Shannon As the Titanic passed, the pull of the water from her huge hull snapped the ropes on another ship, the New York, and swung it right toward her. Tugboats grabbed the New York, and the Titanic stopped her engines. They missed each other by just a few feet.
Carol Close call.
Shannon Close call. Then she stopped in Cherbourg, in France, and Queenstown, in Ireland, to pick up more passengers. And then she headed out across the Atlantic for New York, with more than two thousand people on board.
Carol Who was in charge?
Shannon Captain Edward Smith. One of the most respected captains in the world. It's often said he was planning to retire soon.
Carol And then, the night of April 14th.
Shannon A clear, calm, freezing night. No moon. The sea was as flat as glass. Up in the crow's nest, a lookout named Frederick Fleet was watching ahead.
Carol And he saw it.
Shannon At about twenty to midnight, he saw a dark shape right in front of the ship. He rang the bell three times, and called down to the bridge. Iceberg, right ahead!
Carol And they tried to turn.
Shannon They did. And they almost made it. The ship swung to one side, and the iceberg scraped along her right side, below the waterline.
Carol Did people feel it?
Shannon Many barely noticed. Some people felt a shudder. Some passengers went up on deck and found chunks of ice lying there, and played with them.
Carol But down below?
Shannon Down below, the iceberg had opened up the hull along a long stretch of the side. Water was pouring into too many of the compartments. And the ship's designer, Thomas Andrews, who was on board, worked it out quickly. She was going to sink.
Carol What was it like on board?
Shannon At first, a lot of people couldn't believe it. The ship felt so solid. But the crew began loading the lifeboats, women and children first.
Carol And there weren't enough boats.
Shannon There weren't enough boats. In those days, the rules didn't require enough lifeboat seats for everyone on board. And so there was a lot of quiet courage that night.
Carol Like the band.
Shannon Like the band. Eight musicians, led by a violinist named Wallace Hartley. They gathered on deck and played cheerful music, to keep people calm while the boats were loaded. And they kept playing almost to the very end.
Carol And the radio men.
Shannon The two wireless operators, Jack Phillips and Harold Bride, stayed at their post, sending out calls for help, until the power was almost gone.
Carol And in the end?
Shannon At twenty past two in the morning, the Titanic went down. About fifteen hundred people lost their lives. About seven hundred people were in the lifeboats, out on the dark, freezing ocean.
Carol Waiting.
Shannon Waiting. And hoping that someone had heard.
Carol Which brings us back to the Carpathia.
Shannon Back to the Carpathia. The wireless operator, Harold Cottam, ran to the bridge, and then straight to the captain's cabin, and woke him up. Captain Arthur Rostron.
Carol And what did he do?
Shannon Everything. He turned the ship around right away. He shut off the heat and hot water all over the ship, so every bit of steam could go to the engines. And he pushed that little ship harder than anyone thought she could go.
Carol Through the ice.
Shannon Through the ice, in the dark. He put extra lookouts all over the ship, and they steered around one iceberg after another.
Carol And on board?
Shannon He got everything ready. Blankets, hot soup and coffee, doctors ready in each dining room, and rope ladders and slings hung over the side to lift people aboard.
Carol And they got there.
Shannon They got there around four in the morning. By then the Titanic was gone. But as the sun came up, they could see the lifeboats scattered across the water, among the icebergs.
Carol And they took them all on board.
Shannon Every lifeboat they could find. Over the next few hours, the Carpathia picked up more than seven hundred survivors. Everyone who was saved that night was saved by the Carpathia.
Carol What a captain.
Shannon What a captain. The United States Congress later gave Captain Rostron a gold medal.
Carol And there were heroes in the lifeboats, too.
Shannon There were. Like Margaret Brown, from Denver. In her lifeboat, she took an oar, and got the other women rowing to keep warm.
Carol The unsinkable Molly Brown.
Shannon That nickname came years later. She never actually went by Molly. And on the Carpathia, she helped care for the survivors, and raised money for the ones who had lost everything. Before they even got to New York.
Carol So, after the Titanic, what changed?
Shannon A lot. And this is the part of the story that saved so many lives afterward.
Carol Like the lifeboats.
Shannon Like the lifeboats. New rules said every ship had to carry enough lifeboat seats for every single person on board. And ships had to practice lifeboat drills.
Carol And the radio.
Shannon Ships had to keep someone listening to the radio day and night, so a call for help would never be missed again.
Carol And the ice.
Shannon And the ice. The nations that sailed the Atlantic set up the International Ice Patrol, to track icebergs in the shipping lanes and warn ships about them. It's still running today, more than a hundred years later.
Carol And for a long time, nobody knew where the Titanic was.
Shannon More than seventy years. She was two and a half miles down, at the bottom of the Atlantic. Far too deep for anyone to reach.
Carol And then?
Shannon And then, in 1985, an American oceanographer named Robert Ballard, working with a French team, went looking with an underwater camera sled. And on September 1st, 1985, in the middle of the night, a giant boiler appeared on their screens.
Carol They found her.
Shannon They found her. The front of the ship was sitting upright on the sea floor, and the back half lay a short way off. At first everyone cheered. Then they remembered what had happened there, and the whole room went quiet.
Carol So where can you go to see the Titanic's story today?
Shannon The best place is Belfast, where she was built. There's a big museum called Titanic Belfast, right next to the slipway where she was launched. The building is shaped like the bows of ships.
Carol And here in America?
Shannon There are Titanic museums in Branson, Missouri, and Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, built to look like the ship, with a copy of that grand staircase you can walk up.
Carol And the movie.
Shannon And the movie. The 1997 film won eleven Oscars, and brought the story to a whole new generation.
Carol That's the Titanic. The biggest ship in the world, an electric camel, a band that kept playing, and a little ship that raced through the ice to the rescue.
Shannon And a disaster that made the sea safer for everyone who came after.
Carol Next time, our last episode. A ship crushed in the Antarctic ice, and an explorer who refused to give up until every one of his men was safe.
Shannon The Endurance. That's next time, on Ships That Made History.