The Truth About The Titanic Analysis

In his memoir, “The Truth About the Titanic,” survivor Colonel Archibald Gracie made note of “the pleasure and comfort which all of us enjoyed upon this floating palace…with its extraordinary provisions for such purposes.” Indeed, the $7.5 million Titanic was the floating equivalent of a four-star luxury hotel, equipped with intricate Edwardian gadgetry and posh conveniences. Beyond that, the 46, 328-ton liner—whose 882 feet 9 inch length, the New York Times calculated, was the equivalent of more than four city blocks—also represented the cutting edge in transportation technology and design. “She was the latest thing in the art of shipbuilding,” White Star chairman and managing director J. Bruce Ismay testified in a U.S. Senate inquiry into the Titanic’s demise. “Absolutely no money was spared in her construction.”

The Titanic—like its sister ship, the Olympic—was designed to compete with the Cunard liners Lusitania and Mauretania, which had set the speed standard for crossing the Atlantic a few years before. To that end, the Titanic incorporated the latest advances in power plant and propulsion systems. The ship was equipped with a state-of-art power plant and propulsion

As Gracie recounted in his book, “The Truth About the Titanic,” the ship was equipped with 14 wooden lifeboats, each 30 feet long and designed to carry 65 escapees; two 25-foot-long wooden “cutters,” each capable of seating 40 people; and four 25-and-a-half-foot-long Engelhardt “surf-boats” with collapsible canvas sides that could carry 47 people. According to Gracie, flaws in the design of the collapsible boats made it difficult to remove the canvas cover and cut the boat loose from its tethering; at one point, it was necessary for him to lend his penknife to crew members so that they could release the boats. “Some means should have been available for doing this without delay,” he later