At the turn of the 20th century, White Star Line and Cunard, two British shipping companies, were in aggressive competition with each other. The two continuously one-upped each other, building bigger and better ships. In 1907, Cunard’s ship Mauretania began service, and set a world record for the fastest transatlantic trip in history. But the company began to fall behind when, in 1915, their famed Lusitania was sunk by a German U-boat in the midst of World War I.

On the other side of the competition, White Star Line began work on three ships, each of them measuring 882 feet in length and 92.5 feet wide – which would make them the largest ships in the history of the world. The second of those ships was constructed between 1909 and 1911, and became the largest movable manmade object ever created. This ship, of course, was Titanic.

From the beginning, Titanic was one of the wonders of the world. It was simply immense, by any measures. It was a state-of-the-art ship expected to set numerous speed records, mainly due to its 29 boilers powering two engines, each measuring more than five stories tall. But the engineers’ greatest creations in the ship were the watertight compartments. Individual bulkheads throughout the ship were considered impossible to be flooded, due to the electric watertight doors that could be individually controlled by the captain. The ship also had a double-hulled bottom, which ensured that if any portion of the underside of the ship was damaged, the second layer would remain intact and keep the ship afloat until help could arrive.

In 1911, Shipbuilder magazine proclaimed Titanic to be “practically unsinkable.”

Just a year later, Titanic was ready for its journey. On April 10, 1912, thousands of people showed up for Titanic’s official launch. Going off without a hitch, the ship made quick stops in Cherbourg, France and Queenstown, Ireland, before finally setting sail for New York with 2,240 people on board – including both passengers and crew. People of all kinds were on the ship, ranging from rich, famous first-class passengers to poor third-class passengers, many of whom were on the ship to reunite with another family member who had left for New York years earlier.

Also on board were builder Thomas Andrews, White Star Line managing director J. Bruce Ismay, and captain Edward J. Smith. The captain of the Titanic was one of the most experienced ship captains in the world. He had spent the last 25 years working for White Star, and the final trip of his career would be to guide this massive ship across the ocean, before retiring. He was known as one of the most talented captains in the world, so it was a no-brainer to assign him to the Titanic for one last go around.

On Friday, April 12, just two days after departing from Europe, Titanic already began receiving iceberg warnings. Sunday, April 14, she received two more warnings of ice. At 7:00 that night, Titanic reeled in six iceberg warnings, all showing a enormous belt of ice field, stretching from west of north Greenland, all the way down into the Atlantic. After receiving these warnings and mapping them out, Captain Smith changed the Titanic’s course to go 10 miles south, but due to his confidence that he was averting them, he failed to put any other crew members on lookout, nor did he slow the ship’s incredible speed.

In the middle of the night at the time, the only light available to ships was the moon. Because of that, icebergs are normally recognized at night by the waves crashing against their side, or the way they block out a large portion of the sky with blackness. However, on this strange spring night, there was no moon out, and the sea was eerily calm. There was no wind at all. The iceberg was as hidden as the moon.

At 11:40 PM, when the ship was just moments away from hitting the iceberg directly with its bow, lookout Fred Fleet recognized the iceberg, rings the alarm, and alerted the bridge. Attempting to go around the obstacle, Captain Smith veered the ship sharply to the left, yet still did not slow down. Titanic’s turn just missed, and sideswiped the iceberg, cutting a large gash in the side of the ship. Rivets in the steel gave way, allowing the seams between plates to open up. The steel bent inward, allowing water to begin pouring into the ship. Titanic immediately shut off the engines, and called for help. But the crew was not nervous. After all, the ship was engineered so water could not move from room to room.

But the engineers didn’t plan on one thing. Once the ship was torn open, water could easily transfer throughout the compartments. If water was only pouring into multiple compartments of the ship, it could easily overflow and fill the ship up room by room.

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Only 20 lifeboats were placed on the Titanic, which was a lot, considering law only required 16 on the decks. These 20 boats were able to hold almost 1,200 people. – more than one thousand seats short.

Titanic’s crew was quick to act. They immediately got all passengers on decks and started filling the lifeboats with women and children. There are discrepancies according to survivors regarding how the lifeboats were filled. Some crewmembers allowed men on the lifeboats when there were no women or children around, but others did not allow any men on board at all. At 12:45 AM on April 15, just over an hour after the ship struck the iceberg, the first lifeboat was launched into the ocean – with 37 empty seats. Over the next hour, numerous other lifeboats were released, with 33 empty seats on one, 28 on another, and 37 empty seats on a fourth boat. At 2:05 AM, the final two lifeboats were still on board the ship, with 1,500 people stranded on board, among them Captain Smith, who had gone to the bridge to stay with his ship till the end.

Less than 15 minutes later, the inconsistencies of the story begin. Some say Titanic’s stern rose as high as 30 degrees out of the water, broke off from the bow, and sank on its own. Others say the stern rose just a bit, then went down together with the front of the ship. But regardless, those in the lifeboats began to hear horrible, excruciating screams, mixed with glass breaking and the ship cracking violently. They witnessed foam and other materials pouring out the sides of Titanic. At 2:20 AM, the stern rose one final time, slowly sank under the ocean, and left 1,500 bodies with life jackets floating in the ice-cold water, screaming for help, swimming for their lives.

Minutes later, the screams ended as those in water froze to death. The survivors in the lifeboats were simply left with the darkness and silence of a chilling night in the Atlantic.

In September 1985, a French and American expedition finally found the wreck of the Titanic, after decades of attempts to locate the missing ship. Although numerous researchers used submarine and camera technology to view the gargantuan ship, very few questioned how the ship went down, despite survivors each telling different stories about the ship’s demise. However, the generally accepted theory was consistent with the belief that Titanic’s stern rose high into the air, broke off, and then sank.

But in 2005, the History channel sponsored an expedition to examine the wreck of the Titanic. Led by expedition leaders John Chatterton and Richie Kohler and naval architect Roger Long, the goal of the search was to determine more information about the ship’s sinking, including what happened, how it happened, and over what time period. Partaking in just three dives, due to a hurricane in the Atlantic that week, the dive team uses MIR submersibles to both reach and film their journey 2,000 feet below the surface. These submersibles would be launched off of Keldysh, a Russian scientific research vessel.

When the crew found the stern, they were amazed at how unrecognizable it was. The top of the poop deck was “peeled back like a tin can.” But through all the damage, the double hull at the bottom was still intact, more than 90 years later. The strength and durability of the bottom of the ship was apparent, as Titanic’s engineers had hoped. But instead of simply submerging to the bow, then the stern, the crew wanted to travel on the ocean floor between the two, in order to find any debris or other evidence that might exist between the front and back of the ship.

Amazingly, they found the two parts were separated by about 800 meters. But what was more stunning was a trail of coal that stretched from the stern of the ship to the bow, with giant Titanic boilers nearby. They believed it suggested that after hitting the iceberg, Titanic must have traveled a significant distance with a hole in the bottom of the ship, where the boiler room stood. In fact, years after the disaster, crewmembers testified that there was indeed water in boiler room four, coming in through the floors. Because they were on the bottom of the ship, the only way this could have happened is if there was damage to the double hull that was built along the underside of Titanic.

On the third and final dive, rather than examining the wreckage some more, the crew did something drastic and risky. They decided to examine east of the wreckage, where they believe the iceberg used to stand. If they found nothing, it would be a waste of both money and an entire expedition. But if they could find evidence to support Long’s theory, they could end the debate once and for all.

Long’s theory, the grounding theory, suggested that there was additional damage to the bottom of the ship, which was the cause of it sinking – not the side damage. But he was not quite sure how to prove that.

As they traveled to the east, the crew noticed a large piece of steel slowly enter their field of vision. When they moved closer to examine, they found a massive piece of Titanic’s double-bottom hull, still together. The crew continued around the perimeter of the hull, and realized what they had found: a complete cross-section of Titanic’s bottom, spanning the entire width of the ship. It included both end bilge keels (the small pieces that jutted out of the bottom for balance) and the middle keel of the ship, a flat line that runs the entire length of the boat.

The other MIR submersible the crew was using that day coincidentally found a second cross-section of the bottom, complete as well. It was a few hundred meters away, but in its entirety, just like the first. After videoing and photographing both cross-sections, they reconvened on the Keldysh and began analyzing what they’ve found.

Months go by without any finding, but marine architect Ken Marshall finally made an enormous discovery. He created architectural drawings of the two pieces the researchers found, and determined that the edges of the two fit together perfectly: they used to be connected before the Titanic sunk. When merged together, the two pieces make up for 70 feet of Titanic’s bottom, and were located just behind the third funnel of Titanic – exactly where the ship is said to have broke apart.

Roger Long immediately began to put the story together. Original reports claimed the ship rose to a 30-degree angle, as previously mentioned. They believed the weight of the ship caused the ship to crack in two and separate. However, Long did not believe the angle was that large, because those who survived the plunge into the icy ocean said they didn’t realize the ship was about to sink – it went down suddenly. If the angle was truly that high, everyone on board would have been prepared for the ship’s downfall.

Long also explained that when the ship rose, it was technically being bent. When this happened, the top of the ship elongated and pulled apart, while the bottom was constricted and pushed together. If the stern was broken at a high angle, it would have been ripped apart cleanly at the top, and mangled at the bottom. However, the discovery of the bow and stern show the exact opposite: the top part of the ship was crushed, mangled, and completely destroyed, while the bottom of the ship was snapped apart cleanly, with almost no destruction. With this evidence, it is almost impossible for the ship to have broken cleanly from the top, especially at such a high angle.

The crew determined that, unlike the legends and assumptions that have existed for 100 years now, the ship only rose about ten to eleven degrees in the air before breaking up. First, the ship started cracking from the top, but stopped when it reached the double-bottom hull. The ship then was, almost literally, hanging by a thread – the hull was the only thing holding the two sides together, because of its strength and durability that allowed it to still exist today on the ocean floor. After cracking from the middle, water started gushing into the center of the ship and began weighing the structure down from the middle. When it did that, it pulled the two parts of the ship back together, crushing the top floors against each other, mangling them enough to completely destroy the structure. When that happened, it turned the double-bottom hull in the opposite direction, snapping it from the bottom of the ship.

As the ship began to go down, the force of the ocean pulling the ship toward the bottom ripped the hull from the underside of the ship, allowing it to float miles away from the site of the wreck.

On that dark, fateful night in 1912, many crewmembers thought the ship had more time. Most assumed it was going under, but believed they had closer to four or five hours – they didn’t expect Titanic to sink in half the time. But the evidence found by this dive team shows that Titanic didn’t truly sink the way everyone has assumed for more than a century. It shows that the first, simplest explanation is not always the correct one, as the famous theory of Occam’s Razor suggests.

Titanic’s remains will soon be gone. Parts of her will remain forever, such as the metal motors and the beautiful bronze propellers that lay at the stern. However, in just a few decades, the Titanic will become, as Long explained, “just a giant orange stadium on the bottom of the ocean.”