She was built as the greatest ship of this or any age. Bigger, mightier, stronger, she was named Titanic and she was unsinkable. The RMS Titanic went down on her maiden voyage in 1912, with the loss of over 1500 lives. So arrogant were the builders and operators of the gigantic vessel that they proclaimed "God himself could not sink this ship". God didn't have to - all it took was a mammoth iceberg that buckled and ripped the double-steel, compartmented hull, causing the ice cold waters of the North Atlantic to flood in and sink her in just a matter of hours.
As the band played "Nearer my God to Thee" and the ship slid below the icy, black waters, her passing seemed to mirror that of the golden age before World War 1. Tom Shales, a Washington writer, said "The ship was not only a ship, but a time capsule and it could be said she took the glittery, self- indulgent golden age with her to the grave."But the simple, inescapable fact of the Titanic tragedy is that it need never have happened if the White Star Line, her owners, had equipped her with enough lifeboats. They were left off in the utter belief that she could not sink.
The Titanic began life as the largest moving object on earth in the drawing offices of the great Harland and Wolff shipyards in Belfast, Northern Ireland; she was conceived at a time when trans-Atlantic liner traffic was at its peak between Britain and Europe and the New World. It was to be built for luxury and speed, but not safety.
Nevertheless, the engineers had come up with a "revolutionary" design which would keep the ship afloat no matter what maritime accident befell it. The design was a series of watertight compartments, sixteen in all, running the length of the hull. The bulkheads separating them were also supposedly stronger and more efficient than those in use on any other ship, naval or merchant.
The makers boasted that up to two compartments could be flooded without the ship listing seriously. Not only the finest engineers, but the finest shipwrights, carpenters, tradesmen and designers were employed to make her the most luxurious vessel afloat. Everything about her was breathtaking and superlative. She was 900 feet long with four funnels, each 22 feet in diameter. From top to bottom she was the height of an eleven-storey building and she weighed 46, 000 tons. The rudder was as tall as a large mansion; the engines could produce 50, 000 horsepower to move the ship at 23 knots; and there was enough electricity to power a small town.
For the first-class passengers there was unparalleled luxury. There was the first swimming pool aboard a ship - a great novelty - and a special crane which loaded and unloaded cars so the mobile millionaire could take his luxury limousine with him on a voyage. They could avail themselves of Arabian-style Turkish baths, a gym, a squash court, a lounge modelled after a room at Versailles, a Parisian cafe and a palm court.
There were sumptuous suites and cabins for 735 first-class passengers and cabins for a further 1650 passengers in second and third classes.
The White Star Line was proud to hype the Titanic as the greatest ship ever. Her passenger list for the maiden voyage from Southampton to New York read like a veritable "who's who" of the rich and famous of the day: there was the financier Benjamin Guggenheim, for whom the famous art museum was named in New York in a gesture to his Philanthropy; Isador Straus, part owner of Macys department store, the American painter Francis Millet and the man who built the Brooklyn Bridge.
The Titanic had cost 4 million to construct - equivalent today to 100 million - and she steamed under British and American flags from Southampton on her maiden voyage on 10th April 1912. On her decks were twenty lifeboats - four more than required under British Board of Trade regulations, but still woefully few for the passengers on board. Sixteen lifeboats, it was later calculated, would hold just one quarter of the passengers and crew aboard.
Five days out at sea, the crew of the Titanic reported nothing extraordinary in the bitterly cold weather as the ship ploughed on towards the Grand Banks of Newfoundland. At night on the 14th the sea was glassy calm, but there had been sightings of icebergs in the area. They did not perturb Captain Smith, whose ship sliced through the starry night at 21.5 knots per hour.
Then, in the crows nest, a lookout suddenly shouted at 11.40pm "Iceberg, right ahead!" and accompanied his shout with a warning bell that rang three times. Thirty seconds later the liner and the iceberg met in a collision that jolted the great ship, hurling ice on to the teak decks to the delight of first-class passengers who emerged moments later enthralled by the sight of the chunks of icecap littering them.
They did not know that the collision was, for the majority of them, their death knell. One of the survivors said later "So the crash came and it sounded like this to me, like tearing a strip off a piece of calico, nothing more. Later it grew in intensity, as though someone had drawn a giant finger along the side of the ship."
The iceberg had risen some 90 feet out of the water and its massive submerged bulk had ripped a huge rent in the starboard section of the vessel, rupturing the watertight compartments in which so much faith had been placed. The behemoth was now taking on water at a phenomenal rate - 16,000 cubic feet of slate grey, cold Atlantic in the first forty minutes alone.
The first five compartments were completely flooded, With water slopping over into compartment 6, then compartment 7 and so on, filling them up one by one until the ship eventually sank.
On the bridge the unthinkable was slowly beginning to come home to Captain Smith, who at first could not believe his ears when his officers told him of the catastrophe taking place below. At almost exactly mid- night he ordered the passengers to take to the boats while a message was flashed out that she was sinking.
Many human dramas occurred that have gone into legend; Ida Straus refused the offer of a place in a lifeboat and died in her beloved husbands arms as the liner sank beneath the waves. The chairman of the White Star Line showed no such courage and jumped into a lifeboat, thereafter forever condemned to live a life of disgrace.
Mining tycoon Guggenheim and his valet Victor Giglio dressed in evening clothes and prepared to meet their Maker like gentlemen. Ten millionaires died and valuables, including diamonds valued at 4 million, were consigned to the deep along with their owners.
Confusion reigned on the boat deck, not aided by the fact that the crew- men had never performed a proper boat drill during her sea trials. There were collapsible rafts as well as lifeboats but these were not assembled in time, or were stored in inaccessible places.
As the ship began to list dramatically distress rockets were fired into the darkness, the last faint hopes of a captain grasping for any salvation for his doomed passengers and crew. He didn't think anyone would see them - but people did - the crewman aboard the passenger liner California, which was only nineteen miles away.
But due to incredible blunders the crew misread the distress flares as belonging to another vessel and sat in blissful ignorance in the icefield until way after five the next morning, long after the Titanic had slipped to her icy grave. It was later learned that the California's skipper assumed that the rockets had been a false alarm. The greatest tragedy on board that night befell the 670 immigrants in third class, or steerage, who were trapped below decks in doors kept locked by order of the US Immigration Department. By the time they had battered their way to the outside most of the lifeboats had slipped from their davits.
In two hours and thirty-five minutes the Titanic was almost at a 90 degree angle in the water, her lights twinkling and refracting on the water, casting an eerie, phosphorescent glow across the smooth sea.
Five minutes later she went under, creating a huge vortex on the surface that dragged down people and debris with it in a giant whirlpool. There was an agonizing hissing and massive air bubbles as the boilers exploded on the ships slow decent through 13, 000 feet of water.
The Carpathia was steaming now towards the wreck site and arrived an hour later to pick up the pitifully few survivors. Two thousand two hundred and twenty-seven people were on board the ship when it left Southampton: just 705 survived.
For seventy-three years she lay undisturbed in her watery grave, a testimony to mans folly. The Titanic became a byword for doomed ventures of heroism, cowardice, excitement and adventure. Historical societies were formed, as were survivors associations and salvage merchants dreamed of raising her and her spoils within.
It was widely assumed that she would still be in one piece on the ocean floor when in July 1986 American oceanographer Dr Robert Ballard led an undersea team which found her. But, in the eerie, cold light, it was seen that she had broken up into three pieces - crushed by the water pressure on her descent.
In a 1600-metre debris field Ballard found the bow section, buckled under its own weight, embedded 600 metres from the stern section. In the middle was the collapsed remains of the Titanic's middle.
In the debris field itself are the artefacts of a lost age; an entire kitchen of copper implements, wine bottles with their corks still in them, coffee cups with the emblem of the White Star Line unfaded through the years, bathtubs, bedsprings, toilets, doorknobs, chandeliers, stoves and ceramic dolls heads that were once owned by little children who are now pensioners or long since dead.
One of the most poignant images his high-tech cameras captured was of a broken lifeboat davit, hanging limply on the edge of the ship, a silent testimony to a night that we would never forget. A night, in fact, to remember.