THE HISTORY OF THE TITANIC

Three years for construction, five days for the shipwreck. This is the story of the Titanic, the British ocean liner, produced by the Belfast shipyards, the highest expression of early 20th century naval technology, which sank on the morning of April 15, 1912.

Commander Edward John Smith, with 40 years of career behind him and on his last voyage, had declared before setting sail that he could not imagine any type of accident for the RMS Titanic: it left on 10 April 1912 from Southampton in the direction of New York for the maiden voyage, on the night between 14 and 15 April the Titanic collided with an iceberg, off the Canadian island of Newfoundland.
In the shipwreck, which occurred in the early hours of April 15, about 1,500 of the 2,223 people on board, including passengers and crewmen, lost their lives; at 2.20 in the morning, the ocean liner broke into two sections and sank. Only 705 people managed to escape, also due to the shortage of lifeboats, the last survivor died in 2009.

The story of the sinking of the Titanic was told in the 1997 film of the same name by director James Cameron with Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, as Jack and Rose, the protagonists of the film version. The film was a blockbuster and won 11 Academy Awards.



There were several reconstructions of the incident: among the documentaries on the incident, one from 2017, by the journalist Senan Molony, for the British broadcaster Channel 4, proposed a new theory on the sinking of the ocean liner.
According to the author of the documentary, the main cause of the sinking was a fire on board, which broke out in the boiler area before departure and not due to the iceberg against which the ship collided in the Atlantic Ocean. . From some photographs of the wreck, in fact, signs of flames emerge, which had developed near the boilers of the ocean liner when she was still in the port of Belfast, where she was built. An attempt had been made to turn them off but without success. The fire would have weakened the structure and caused the body to collapse upon impact with the iceberg.

After more than a hundred years, at the bottom of the sea today the Titanic is in danger of disappearing forever. The alarm was recently raised by the OceanGate group of underwater researchers that the wreck of the ship that sank in 1912 "is deteriorating rapidly". The researchers decided to film the Titanic for the next few years in order to follow step by step the evolution of the wreck of the most famous ocean liner in history.
With OceanGate it is also possible to participate in an underwater tour to discover the wreck, 3,800 meters below sea level. The cost of the ticket is about 150 thousand dollars.