Titanic's Influence Still Strong at 100

On Wednesday, April 10, 1912, the Titanic's maiden voyage began from Southampton, England, bound for New York City.

Robert Ballard discovered the Titanic's remains in 1985 with the aid of remotely operated vehicles that transmitted pictures from the ocean's floor.

By Mark Trainer | Staff Writer | 03 April 2012 

Washington — Why does a boat that sank 100 years ago hold such a fascination for so many people? The RMS Titanic went under the North Atlantic after colliding with an iceberg on April 15, 1912, taking 1,514 lives. Writers, filmmakers and songwriters have continually been inspired to return to the sunken ship. 

The most important legacy of the tragedy may be in the changes to maritime safety it brought about and the technology that’s been employed to study the disaster in the century since.

Among the most painful aspects of the Titanic story is how ill prepared the enormous ship was for the disaster that befell her. Although the ship was equipped with more lifeboats than the laws of the time required, the maximum capacity of the lifeboats could only accommodate about half of the passengers.

Icebergs like the one with which the Titanic collided were not uncommon in the North Atlantic during the time of year the Titanic was sailing. In fact, other ships in the region radioed warning messages to the Titanic for more than two days before the disaster. But those messages were not immediately conveyed to the Titanic’s captain because the radio operators worked limited hours, and they were instructed to give highest priority to transmitting messages to and from passengers.

Following the disaster, the U.S. Senate and the British Board of Trade initiated investigations, which issued similar recommendations that led to laws requiring every ship to carry enough lifeboats for its entire capacity and that wireless equipment be manned 24 hours a day, with priority given to navigational and safety transmissions. The Titanic’s sinking also brought about the International Ice Patrol, which reports on the movement of icebergs in the Atlantic and Arctic oceans. The International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea, a treaty that unified these new safety regulations, arose in response to the tragedy.

In 1985, ocean explorer Robert Ballard led a team that discovered the wreck of the Titanic 3,700 meters below the surface. Ballard had been working for years on the technology that made the find possible, developing deep sea robots called ROVs (remotely operated vehicles) to maneuver through undersea wrecks and return video to the surface. Ballard has credited the development of fiber-optic cable with allowing him to capture high-definition images of parts of the Earth that had until recent decades been entirely inaccessible.

In recent years, groundbreaking metallurgy work has been able to combine modern-day research with historical documentation about the construction of the Titanic. Tim Foecke at the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology and Jennifer Hooper McCarty of Johns Hopkins University found that the front and rear sections of the Titanic used second-best-quality rivets with a higher percentage of impurities that made the heads of the rivets more likely to shear off.

Any one of the advances made in science and safety in the years since the disaster might not have been enough to save her, but 100 years later we are still learning from the Titanic.