Romance, rivets and remembering Titanic

May 16, 2012 - PRLog -- The romantic, tragic and eerily haunting story of the Titanic has received blanket coverage this year as people on both sides of the Atlantic marked the 100th anniversary of the sinking.

The human stories of love, loss and bravery still resonate across the years but has the feat of engineering which gave birth to the steel ship which rolled down the Belfast slipway been forgotten?

It took 45,000 tons of steel, 3,000 men, three million rivets and three years to build the ship. Those men worked six days a week at Harland and Wolff’s shipyard to create the luxury liner which was, for a short time at least, the biggest and best vessel afloat.

Titanic, which commenced her maiden voyage from Southampton on April 10 1912, was the biggest moving object on the face of the earth.  

The statistics are themselves “titanic”; the rivets alone weighed 1,200 tons and the three huge anchors 31 tons. She was 882 feet, 9 inches long and boasted a revolutionary double steel hull and powered by 29 boilers fed by a staggering 159 furnaces.  Each of Titanic’s four funnels was 22 feet in diameter and 62 feet high. One was just for show and only included for aesthetic reasons!

With vital statistics like that it is unsurprising that the building alone cost £1.5 million even before a single crystal chandelier had been installed. The ship was equipped with every luxury and glamorous passengers were able to indulge their every whim. Their short time aboard Titanic, their romances and liaisons have given the writers and fact and fiction plenty of story lines since the disaster.

One of the most engaging and romantic was the tale of a countess and a sailor who met on lifeboat number 8.  Both Lucy Noel Martha, Countess of Rothes and Able Seaman Thomas Jones survived the sinking and endless hours in the freezing conditions. As a mark of respect for his bravery the countess sent the sailor an engraved watch and he gave her the boat’s number in recognition of her courage under “terrifying conditions”. Their friendship lasted and, despite their very different backgrounds, they corresponded for the rest of their lives.

For a few short years during her construction Titanic was the pride and joy of the White Star Line but then the vessel’s name became synonymous with tragedy. One place where the ship will always be associated with excellence and remembered with pride is Belfast.  

To mark the 100th anniversary of the ship’s launch an iconic museum has opened as part of a regeneration project in Belfast. Titanic Belfast offers a world class visitor experience and fascinating details of the background, architecture and construction of the liner. It has nine galleries covering every aspect of the story. For more details go to www.titanicbelfast.com

Visit : http://www.ajwoodsengineering.co.uk