COURSE: MIS 4433
INSTRUCTOR: Dr. Mike Estep
DATE: 3/14/2015
The sinking of the Titanic is now known to be a folk story and a romantic movie and so many people are unaware of what exactly happened that caused the ship to sink that night on April of 1912. So many people claimed that the builders of the Titanic claimed that the ship was ‘unsinkable’ but the actual statement made by the builders was that, the ship was ‘practically unsinkable’ which is pretty close.
The Titanic was the largest ship ever built in the world as at the time she was built. She was built to compete with the Lusitania and Mauretania which both held the ‘Blue Riband’ for the fastest Atlantic crossing ships. The Titanic was built to look like her sister ship, “The Olympic” in so many different ways. They were both built to travel at moderate speeds, carry a lot of people, and to have a lot of space to carry cargo. The upper part of the titanic was also built to look like the Olympic only that, the Titanic’s was enlarged and refined. There were no risks taken in building the engines as the engines were enlarged versions of the propulsion system first used experimentally in Laurentic in 1909. There was also no risk taken in the design of the inside of the ship as it was built to look like that of older white ships only larger. The Titanic’s long thin rudder with its high counter stern was, in fact, a copy of an 18th century steel sailing ship, a perfect example of the lack of technical development. This design compared with the modern rudder design of the Mauretania or Lusitania, Titanic's was a fraction of the size. Apparently no account was made for advances in scale and little thought given to how a ship 852 feet in length, might turn in an emergency or avoid a collision with an iceberg. This was Titanic's Achilles heel.
It was also said that the Titanic wanted to set a record on her maiden trip by arriving the shores of New York ahead of schedule and that speed played an important role in the Titanic which is not actually true. She went through the route the Olympic followed the previous year and she didn’t even have all her boilers on. She was sailing through the longer route in order to avoid the icebergs. An allegation was brought up that claimed that Bruce Ismay, chairman and managing director of