TITANIC via iPhone

Oh, Titanic. A story that has always fascinated me in a tragic way. I'm telling you, it all started when I read this as a little girl. 

I remember going to this exhibit as a child and: 

A) Sticking my hand in water as cold as the Atlantic on that April night

B) Receiving a "boarding pass" at the start of the exhibit; being assigned a real passenger and learning about them throughout the exhibit, if only to find out their fate at the end. (Did they survive?)

C) Being able to touch a section of metal from the real Titanic

Technically, you're not supposed to take pictures in the exhibit but my friend Bridget was the brave one and snapped the three below of what a steerage room would've looked like, what the first class hallways would've looked like, and of course, the most magnificent part of all, the grand staircase. This exhibit was amazing because you could look at hundreds of artifacts painstakingly preserved, gathered from the shipwreck more than two miles below the surface of the Atlantic. It was heartbreaking to read that in a matter of a few decades, there won't be anything left at the site to bother saving, due to metal-eating bacteria. Soon the Titanic really will be gone, after all.

There are a few things I find fascinating about the Titanic. The first are an astounding number of small mistakes that led to the demise of the Titanic. First of all, the men in the crow's nest lost their binoculars, preventing them from detecting the icebergs earlier. The Captain also ignored repeated warnings about ice spotted by earlier ships due to pressure from the ship's influential men for the Captain to end his last voyage before retirement with a bang. End up in New York City a day earlier and astound everyone! Finally, the speed telegraph (a machine which was used to communicate speed commands from the Captain to the boiler rooms quickly and effectively) failed and read in the boiler rooms to proceed at a medium pace after the telegraph on the main deck had actually been set to halt everything. The ship was also designed with individual watertight compartments. Because the design allowed either three consecutive flooded compartments or five nonconsecutive compartments to flood and still stay afloat, the belief that she was unsinkable was born. Because of the way the iceberg scraped along the side of the ship, punching holes along the way, I believe five consecutive compartments were flooded. The Titanic was doomed. 

The second thing I find fascinating and truly inspiring about the Titanic is all the stories of heroism, from stranger to stranger. There's a book specifically filled with these stories in our school library and I plan on checking it out to read while I recover from my tonsillectomy on Wednesday. I'll be sure to share my favorite stories.

PS I know my mom would be horrified if I didn't mention the amazing story of Shackleton's Endurance. It truly is unbelievable.