• 1911 – The RMS Titanic is launched in Belfast, Northern Ireland.

Titanic


Titanic departing Southampton on 10 April 1912

History
Name: RMS Titanic
Owner: White Star Line
Operator: White Star Line
Port of registry: Liverpool, England
Route: Southampton to New York City
Ordered: 17 September 1908
Builder: Harland and Wolff, Belfast
Cost: £1.5 million (£150 million in 2019)
Yard number: 401
Way number: 400
Laid down: 31 March 1909
Launched: 31 May 1911
Completed: 2 April 1912
Maiden voyage: 10 April 1912
In service: 1912
Out of service: 15 April 1912
Identification
UK official number: 131428
Code letters: HVMP
Wireless call sign: MGY
Fate: Struck an iceberg at 11:40 pm (ship's time) 14 April 1912 on her maiden voyage and sank 2 h 40 min later on 15 April 1912; 112 years ago
Status: Wreck

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Building and preparing the ship

Construction, launch and fitting-out


Construction in gantry, 1909–11


Launch, 1911 (unfinished superstructure)


Fitting-out, 1911–12

The sheer size of the Olympic class vessels posed a major engineering challenge for Harland and Wolff; no shipbuilder had ever before attempted to construct vessels this size. The ships were constructed on Queen's Island, now known as the Titanic Quarter, in Belfast Harbour. Harland and Wolff had to demolish three existing slipways and build two new ones, the largest ever constructed up to that time, to accommodate both ships. Their construction was facilitated by an enormous gantry built by Sir William Arrol & Co., a Scottish firm responsible for the building of the Forth Bridge and London's Tower Bridge. The Arrol Gantry stood 228 feet (69 m) high, was 270 feet (82 m) wide and 840 feet (260 m) long and weighed more than 6,000 tons. It accommodated a number of mobile cranes. A separate floating crane, capable of lifting 200 tons, was brought in from Germany.

The construction of Olympic and Titanic took place virtually in parallel, with Olympic's keel laid down first on 16 December 1908 and Titanic's on 31 March 1909. Both ships took about 26 months to build and followed much the same construction process. They were designed essentially as an enormous floating box girder, with the keel acting as a backbone and the frames of the hull forming the ribs. At the base of the ships, a double bottom 5 feet 3 inches (1.60 m) deep supported 300 frames, each between 24 inches (61 cm) and 36 inches (91 cm) apart and measuring up to about 66 feet (20 m) long. They terminated at the bridge deck (B Deck) and were covered with steel plates which formed the outer skin of the ships.

The 2,000 hull plates were single pieces of rolled steel plate, mostly up to 6 feet (1.8 m) wide and 30 feet (9.1 m) long and weighing between 2.5 and 3 tons. Their thickness varied from 1 inch (2.5 cm) to 1.5 inches (3.8 cm).[44] The plates were laid in a clinkered (overlapping) fashion from the keel to the bilge. Above that point they were laid in the "in and out" fashion, where strake plating was applied in bands {the "in strakes"} with the gaps covered by the "out strakes", overlapping on the edges. Commercial oxy-fuel and electric arc welding methods, ubiquitous in fabrication today, were still in their infancy; like most other iron and steel structures of the era, the hull was held together with over three million iron and steel rivets, which by themselves weighed over 1,200 tons. They were fitted using hydraulic machines or were hammered in by hand. In the 1990s some material scientists concluded that the steel plate used for the ship was subject to being especially brittle when cold, and that this brittleness exacerbated the impact damage and hastened the sinking. It is believed that, by the standards of the time, the steel plate's quality was good, not faulty, but that it was inferior to what would be used for shipbuilding purposes in later decades, owing to advances in the metallurgy of steelmaking. As for the rivets, considerable emphasis has also been placed on their quality and strength.

Two side anchors and a centre anchor were among the last items to be fitted on Titanic before it launched. The anchors were a challenge to make; the centre anchor was the largest ever forged by hand and weighed nearly 16 tons. Twenty Clydesdale draught horses were needed to haul the centre anchor by wagon from the Noah Hingley & Sons Ltd forge shop in Netherton, near Dudley, United Kingdom to the Dudley railway station two miles away. It was then shipped by rail to Fleetwood in Lancashire before boarding a ship to Belfast.

Constructing the ships was difficult and dangerous. Safety precautions were rudimentary at best for the 15,000 men who worked at Harland and Wolff at the time. Much of the work was carried out without safety equipment like hard hats or hand guards on machinery. 246 injuries were recorded during Titanic's construction, including 28 severe injuries, such as arms severed by machines or legs crushed under falling pieces of steel. Six people died on the ship during construction and fitting out, and another two died in the shipyard workshops and sheds. Just before the launch, a worker was killed when a piece of wood fell on him.

Titanic was launched at 12:15 pm on 31 May 1911 in the presence of Lord Pirrie, J. Pierpont Morgan, J. Bruce Ismay and 100,000 onlookers. Twenty-two tons of soap and tallow were spread on the slipway to lubricate the ship's passage into the River Lagan. In keeping with the White Star Line's traditional policy, the ship was not formally named or christened with champagne. The ship was towed to a fitting-out berth where, over the course of the next year, the engines, funnels and superstructure were installed and interior was fitted out.

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