A Shipshape Ship

Naval Architect Thomas Andrew

Construction of the Titanic was overseen by the shipbuilding company, Harland and Wolff, who put their leading designers to work designing the Olympic class vessel. The design was led by Lord Pirrie, a director of both Harland and Wolff and the White Star Line; naval architect Thomas Andrews, the managing director of Harland and Wolff's design department; Edward Wilding, Andrews' deputy and responsible for calculating the ship's design, stability and trim; and Alexander Carlisle, the shipyard's chief draughtsman and general manager. On July 29, 1908, Harland and Wolff presented the drawings to J. Bruce Ismay and other White Star Line executives. Ismay approved the design and authorized the start of construction.

The sheer size of Titanic and her sister ships posed a major engineering challenge for Harland and Wolff; no shipbuilder had ever before attempted to construct vessels this size. The ships were constructed on Queen's Island, now known as the Titanic Quarter, in Belfast, Ireland. The construction of Olympic and Titanic took place virtually in parallel, with Titanic’s hull laid down on March 31, 1909. Both ships took about 26 months to build and followed much the same construction process.

The Titanic under construction in a Belfast, Ireland gantry.

The work of constructing the ships was difficult and dangerous. For the 15,000 men who worked at Harland and Wolff at the time, safety precautions were rudimentary at best; a lot of the work was dangerous and was carried out without any safety equipment like hard hats or hand guards on machinery. As a result, deaths and injuries were to be expected. During Titanic's construction, 246 injuries were recorded, 28 of them "severe," arms severed by machines or legs crushed under falling pieces of steel. Six people died on the ship itself while under construction, another two died in the shipyard workshops and sheds.

Titanic was launched at 12:15 p.m. on May 31, 1911 in the presence of Lord Pirrie, J. P. Morgan, J. Bruce Ismay and 100,000 onlookers. The ship was towed to a fitting-out berth where, over the course of the next year, her engines, funnels and superstructure were installed and her interior was fitted out.

 In keeping with the White Star Line's traditional policy, the ship was not formally named or christened with champagne.

The Titanic lacked for nothing when it came to the latest nautical amenities and technologies. This included the presence and usage of the wireless telegraph. Though the telegraph revolutionized communications with its capacity for wireless messaging, its more primitive forms proved to be a somewhat ineffective means of emergency contact.   

The Guglielmo Marconi telegraph, operated on commercial ships by professionals trained by the Marconi company, utilized spark plug technology to send electromagnetic impulses from antennae that could be received by other telegraphs within a typical range of about 250-400 miles during the day and up to 2,000 miles at night.

The Marconi telegraph room on the Olympic,
 a sister ship of the Titanic and Briitanic

The telegraph aboard the Titanic was housed in three interconnected rooms: the “silent room,” which contained the noisy mechanical portions in soundproofed walls, the operation room, in which the messages were drafted, sent, and received, and an adjacent cabin for the telegraph operators.

In addition to communication with other ships, the telegraph was for personal communications of the upper class passengers aboard the Titanic and other commercial liners. The telegraph’s inability to send or receive messages to and from individual ships and simplistic, short text capacity made the many running lines of personal and navigational messages somewhat chaotic.

Communication issues were compounded with code typing errors that made some urgent signals from the Titanic appear to be personal messages in the headings, and unlabeled responses would provide inadequate amounts of information or not reach their intended recipients, creating a web of frantic miscommunications. The RMS Carpathia likely received the information needed for the rescue from communications with land-based telegraphs in America that had received the Titanic’s messages.

As he had done for the other ships he had overseen, naval architect Thomas Andrews familiarized himself with every detail of the Titanic, in order to ensure that it was in optimal working order. Andrews's suggestions that the ship have 46 lifeboats (instead of the 20 it ended up with) as well as a double hull and watertight bulkheads, were overruled.

Andrews headed a group of Harland and Wolff workers who went on the maiden voyages of the ships built by the company, to observe ship operations and spot any necessary improvements. The Titanic was no exception, so Andrews and the rest of his Harland and Wolff group travelled from Belfast to Southampton on Titanic for the beginning of her maiden voyage on April 10, 1912. During the voyage, Andrews took notes on various improvements he felt were needed, primarily cosmetic changes to various facilities. However, on April 14, Andrews remarked to a friend that Titanic was "as nearly perfect as human brains can make her."

The SS Titanic in Numbers

$175 million to build
882 feet, 9 inches long
92 feet, 6 inches wide
46,328 GRT in tonnage
9 decks
3327 in total capacity 
2435 passengers, 892 crew
28 mph/24 knots: maximum speed
24 mph/21 knots: cruising speed

May 31, 1911                  April 2, 1912                       April 10                       April 15

              Launch Date                 Completion Date            Maiden Voyage          Sinking