Stephen J. Spignesi

On the night of April 14–15, 1912, the unthinkable happened: On its maiden voyage, the Titanic, the largest passenger ship ever built at that time, hit an iceberg in the North Atlantic and sank. More than 1,500 of the 2,200-plus people on board were killed, including some of the wealthiest and most well-known people in the world.

From the very beginning, even before she was launched, the Titanic was an object of fascination. At the Harland and Wolff shipyards in Belfast where she was built, workers marveled at the size of the ship. In Southampton, England, the first stop on her maiden voyage, thousands of people came to the docks to see the largest moving object ever constructed by man.

Far fewer passengers and non-passengers would have drowned during the Titanic’s sinking if the ship had carried enough lifeboats. The Titanic had the capacity to carry 48 lifeboats, which would have provided enough lifeboat seats for all her passengers. However, to cut costs and to keep the decks from being too crowded, the White Star Line decided to carry only 20 lifeboats on board.

The Titanic had ten decks, each with its own purpose. Where do you want to go aboard the Titanic? The Grand Staircase? The Turkish baths? You’d need to know how to find your way around the Titanic’s many decks to find what you were looking for. This table lists the ten decks on the Titanic, starting with the uppermost deck (called the Boat deck because most of the lifeboats were stored there) and ending with the Tank Top deck, the lowest deck in the ship.

The majority of the 700-plus steerage passengers on the Titanic were emigrants. Only 25 percent of the Titanic’s third-class passengers survived, and of that 25 percent, only a fraction were men. By contrast, about 97 percent of first-class women survived the sinking of the Titanic. The term steerage originally referred to the part of the ship below-decks where the steering apparatus was located.

If you were aboard the Titanic when the ship sank, what would be your chances of surviving? The exact number of survivors and passengers who died when the Titanic sank is difficult to reckon. Thus, the numbers in this table should be looked at as illustrative — not definitive. If you were a passenger, your chances of surviving depended greatly on the type of ticket you bought — a first-class, second-class, or third-class ticket.

The Titanic carried many immigrants headed from Europe to America. These immigrants, mostly third-class passengers in steerage, died in far greater numbers than the first- and second-class passengers on the upper decks. The American dream was alive and well among the hopeful emigrating steerage passengers. Leaving their homelands with essentially everything they owned and the clothes on their back was the biggest decision of their lives.

The story of the Titanic’s demise is achingly dramatic and keeps audiences and readers spellbound even a century later. The Titanic disaster wasn’t the greatest maritime disaster in history, but it’s by far the most famous. Following are some reasons that the story still resonates: The first-class passengers included some of the richest people in the world.

The events surrounding the construction, voyage, and sinking of the Titanic — and the people involved in those events — have been a source of fascination for a century. Here are some of the key dates in the Titanic story, starting before its conception and ending with centennial celebrations in 2012. 1898 Morgan Robertson publishes a seemingly prophetic novella called Futility (later renamed The Wreck of the Titan).