'The Ship of Dreams'
1. At the time of her launch, the Royal Mail Steamer Titanic was the largest man-made moving object on Earth.2. The Titanic cost $7.5 million to build.
3. The White Star Line's Titanic and her sister ship Olympic were designed to compete with the famous Cunard liners Lusitania and Mauretania.
4. More than 15,000 men worked on the ship during its construction in Belfast, Northern Ireland.
5. The Titanic's wake was so huge that, at its launch, it sucked in another ship and almost caused a collision.
6. The Titanic featured an onboard swimming pool, a gymnasium, a squash court, and a Turkish bath and two separate libraries - one for first-class passengers, and one for second class.
7. The top speed of the Titanic was 23 knots (more than 26 miles per hour).
8. The Titanic originally was designed to carry 64 lifeboats. To save from cluttering decks, the ship ended up carrying 20 on her maiden voyage.
9. Only 706 passengers and crew would survive the disaster.
Premonitions of doom
10. Passenger and fashion writer Edith Rosenbaum cabled her secretary in Paris that she had "a premonition of trouble" about the Titanic. (She survived.)11. Governess Elizabeth Shutes was so unnerved by the smell of the night air on April 14 that she could not fall asleep. She told fellow passengers that the smell reminded her of the air inside an ice cave she had visited. (She survived.)
12. William Edward Minahan, a doctor from Fond du Lac, Wis., had his fortune read shortly before the voyage. The fortune teller predicted his death aboard the ship. She was right.
13. The plot of Morgan Robertson's novel "Futility" bears an uncanny resemblance to the Titanic disaster. The novel tells the story of the Titan, the largest ship ever built, billed as "unsinkable," which strikes an iceberg in April and sinks. In the book, more than half the passengers die in the North Atlantic because of a lifeboat shortage. The book was published 14 years before the Titanic sank.
Wisconsin on deck
14. Capt. Edward G. Crosby, a Milwaukee veteran of the Civil War, founded a steamship company on Lake Michigan but became famous for refusing to put enough lifeboats for all the passengers on his steamers. Aboard the Titanic, he was unable to find a place on a lifeboat, and he sank with the ship.15. Danish immigrant Claus Peter Hansen and his wife, Jennie, operated a barbershop in Racine. He went into the Atlantic waters after the collision. Jennie made it into a lifeboat and lived until 1952.
16. Louise Kink Pope was 4 years old when she went on board the Titanic. She and her mother, Luise, were loaded into a lifeboat, but her father was told to remain on deck. Instead, he jumped into the lifeboat as it was being lowered. The family survived and Pope died in Milwaukee at age 84 in 1992.
17. Ida "Daisy" Minahan, sister to William (See No. 12), caught one of the last departing lifeboats, along with Minahan's wife, Lillian.
18. In one of the most obvious "Titanic" movie goofs, Leonardo DiCaprio's character, Jack Dawson, claims to have gone ice fishing on Lake Wissota near Chippewa Falls. Unfortunately for scriptwriter James Cameron, Lake Wissota is a man-made reservoir that didn't exist until 1917.
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