Chronology

1907

1907 July 31

Titanic's keel is laid and construction commences.

1910 October 20

Olympic is launched.

1911 May 31

Titanic is successfully launched and becomes the largest moving object ever constructed. Olympic departs Harland & Wolff for Southampton to prepare for her maiden voyage.

1910 June 14

Olympic leaves her maiden voyage to New York.

1910 July

A tentative date is set for Titanic's maiden voyage, March 20, 1912.

1911 September 20

Olympic collides wit the Royal Navy cruiser Hawke. Titanic's maiden voyage is delayed while workers and supplies at the Harland & Wolff shipyard are diverted to repair Olympic.

1911 October 11

White Star announces new date for Titanic's maiden voyage, April 10, 1912.

1912 January

Titanic's lifeboats are installed, twenty in all. This is far short of what would be needed to save all her passengers, but four boats more than required by the outdated Board of Trade regulations.

1912 March 25

Titanic's lifeboats are tested, swung out, lowered, and hoisted back into position.

1912 March 31

Aside from a few small details, the fitting out of Titanic is complete, and she is ready for her sea trials.

1912 April 2

6:00am: Sea trials begin. All equipment tested, including wireless. Speed and handling trials are conducted.

2:00pm : Titanic leaves Belfast for Southampton.

8:00pm : Titanic leaves Belfast for Southampton.

1912 April 3

Titanic arrives at Southampton just after midnight. For the next week, the crew is recruited, cargo loaded, and food is taken aboard.

1912 April 10

Southampton

7:30pm :Crew boards Titanic.

9:30 to 11:00am : Second - and third- lass passengers embark.

11:30am : First class boat train arrives from London. First-class passengers board and are escorted to their cabins.

Noon: Titanic casts off and turns downstream into the River Test. Suction caused by Titanic's passing snaps the ropes of the liner New York, which is moored at their pier, and she is pulled toward Titanic. Quick action narrowly averts a collision by only four feet.

Cherboug

6:30pm : After a quick cross-channel passage, Titanic arrives in Cherbourg, France. By 8;00pm, all Cherbourg passengers have embarked, and Titanic sails for Queenstown, Ireland.

1912 April 11

Queenstown

11:30am : Titanic arrives in Queenstown, where 120 additional passengers embark, mostly Irish emigrants bound for a new life in America. The Titanic now has over 2,200 passengers and crew on board.

1:30pm : The anchor is raised - Titanic begins her first crossing to New York.

1912 April 12-13

Numerous Ice Warnings received from other ships.

1912 April 14

Several additional warnings received about "large quantities of ... ice," approximately 250 miles directly ahead of Titanic.

5:30pm : Captain Smith orders ship's course altered slightly south, perhaps in an attempt to avoid ice.

10:00pm : The watch changes, and the bridge is left in charge of First Officer William Murdoch

11:40pm : Lookouts see an iceberg directly in Titanic's path about five hundred yards. Three sharp clangs are immediately rung on the crow's nest bell, and the bridge is informed by telephone, "Iceberg right ahead." Murdoch immediately calls "hard-a-starboard" to the helmsman and orders the engines full astern. Titanic begins to veer to port, but the iceberg strikes the starboard bow and brushes along the side of the ship. The impact seems to many people as simply a slight shudder.

11:50pm : Within ten minutes after impact wit the iceberg, water rises to fourteen feet above the keel in the forward compartments.

Midnight : The mail room, twenty-four feet above the keel, begins to flood. After his own quick inspection, Captain Smith asks Thomas Andrews, the ship's designer, for his assessment. Andrews estimates that the ship can only stay afloat for one to one and a half hours. Captain Smith orders the wireless operator to send the call for assistance.

1912 April 15

12:05am: Seawater has now reached the squash courts, thirty-two feet above the keel. The order is given to uncover the lifeboats and prepare them for launching.

12:15 am: By now, several ships have heard Titanic's distress calls and signal that they are on their way to assist. These include Titanic's sister ship Olympic and the Cunard Liner Carpathia. The ship's orchestra gathers in the first class lounge and begins to play lively ragtime tunes to help keep the passengers calm.

12:20am: Water floods the seaman's quarters on E - Deck forward, some forty-eight feet above the keel.

12:25am : The order is given to begin loading the lifeboats with women and children. However, many boats launched in the early stages of the sinking are lowered less than half full because passengers do not believe that Titanic is in serious trouble.

12:45am : Boat 7, the first to leave the doomed liner, is safely lowered. Although it has a capacity of sixty-five people, it departs with only twenty-eight aboard. The first distress rocket is fired. Eight will be fired altogether.

12:55am: The first port side boat, No.6, is loaded and lowered by Second Officer Lightoller. It has only twenty-eight people aboard, including Margaret Brown, colourful wife of Denver mining magnate, who will soon become known as "the unsinkable Molly Brown"

Boat No. 5 on the starboard side is lowered with forty-one aboard.

1:00am : Starboard Boat No 3 is launched with only thirty-two aboard, including eleven members of the crew.

1:10am : Starboard No. 1 leaves Titanic with only twelve aboard, including Sir Cosmo and Lady Duff-Gordon and seven crew, although it has a capacity for forty. Portside No 8 is loaded and lowered away, carrying only thirty-nine people.

1:15am : The water now reaches Titanic's name on her bow, and she takes on a distinct list to port. People begin to realise the danger, and the boats begin to leave more fully loaded.

1:20am - 1:30am : Boats 10, 12, 14 and 16 are lowered in quick succession. Panic begins to spread among some passengers. During the launching of Boat 14, Fifth Officer Lowe fires his gun into the air several times to keep people from jumping into the boat. Boats 16 leaves the ship with over fifty occupants.

1:30am: Boat no. 9 departs with fifty-six passengers and crew, nearly its full capacity of sixty-five. Titanic has now developed a noticeable list to starboard.

Titanic's distress calls become more desperate: "We are sinking fast" and "Women and children in boats. Cannot last much longer."

1:35am : Boat No. 11 is loaded and sent away.

1:40am : Boat No. 13 is launched with sixty-four occupants, mostly second and third class women and children.

Just moments after Boat 13 departs, Boat 15 begins its descent to the water. After reaching the water, Boat 13 begins to drift aft, and Boat 15 nearly crushes it. Only at the last moment are the ropes to Boat 13 released so it can be rowed away. Since most of the forward boats have been launched passengers congregate near the stern. The forward well deck is now awash.

1: 45am : Boats No. 2 is lowered and rows away with only twenty-five people aboard.

1:50am Millionaire John Jacob Astor places his wife in Boat No. 4 and then asks Second Officer Lightoller if he can accompany her because she is pregnant. Refused permission to enter the lifeboat, Mr. Astor steps back onto the deck of Titanic.

2:00 am : Collapsible C (an emergency lifeboat with canvas sides) is lowered with J Bruce Ismay, president of the White Star Line, aboard.

2:05am : Collapsible D, the last life boat to be successfully launched, reaches the ocean after the descent of only a few feet. The water is now nearly up to the Promenade Deck. After Titanic sinks, Collapsible D is tied together with Boats 4, 10, 12 and 14. Survivors are then distributed from Boat 14 to other boats so Fifth Officer Lowe can return to the wreck site and attempt to rescue anyone in the water. Boats 12 is subsequently overloaded with seventy people, many rescued from Collapsible D. Titanic's forecastle disappears under water, and the pace of the sinking quickens.

2:10 am Captain Smith releases wireless operators Phillips and Bride from their duties.

2:17am Phillips send his last SOS. Titanic's bridge plunges under allowing Collapsibles A and B to float free. Titanic's forward funnel falls to starboard, washing Collapsible B, turned upside down, clear of the ship.

2:18am: Everything moveable in the ship crashes toward the bow as Titanic reaches an angle of 45 to 50 degrees. Her lights blink once then go out forever as she breaks in two. The bow section sinks, and the stern begins to right itself.

2:20am : The stern slowly fills with water and sinks. Over 1,500 people are left on board to die in the icy waters.

3:30am Rockets are fired from the rescue ship Carpathia and sighted by lifeboats.

4:10 am: The first boat, No. 2, is picked up by the Carpathia.

8:30am: Survivors from the last boat, No 12 are brought aboard Carpathia. Second Officer Lightoller is the last survivor to come aboard.

8:50 am Carpathia begins her journey to New York carrying 705 survivors. Other ships are left behind to search for further survivors. Bruce Ismay wires news of the disaster to White Star's offices in New York.

1912 April 17

The cable ship MacKay-Bennett, hired by the White Star Line to search for bodies at the disaster site, leaves Halifax and eventually recovered 306 bodies.

1912 April 18

9:00 pm : Carpathia arrives in New York. Before docking at the Cunard pier, she steams upriver to the White Star piers to unload Titanic's lifeboats. She then returns to Cunard's Pier 54 to disembark the survivors.

1912 April 19 - April 25

The United States Senate holds an inquiry into the disaster, headed by Senator William Alden Smith. Eighty-two witnesses are called, among them White Star president J. Bruce Ismay, who is vilified by the US newspapers for having survived when so many others died.

1912 April 22

Character by White Star, the Mina departs Halifax to assist the Mackay-Bennett in her search for victims. After a week-long search, only seventeen additional bodies are recovered.

1912 April 24

White Star is forced to cancel the sailing of Olympic from Southampton when 285 crew members desert. They refuse to work on a ship that does not carry enough lifeboats for all aboard.

1912 May 2 - July 3

The British Board of Trade Inquiry is held in London. Of the 25,622 questions asked and the ninety-six witnesses who appear, only three witnesses are passengers, and Second Officer Lightoller endures 1,600 questions alone. The final judgment recommends "more watertight compartments in oceangoing ships, the provision of lifeboats for all on board, as well as a better lookout."

1912 May 6

White Star sends out the Montmagny from Sorel, Quebec, to help search for bodies. She recovers four.

1912 May 15

In a last, desperate attempt to locate further victims, White Star hires the Algerina, which find only one body. In total, only 328 out of over 1,500 victims are recovered by ships sent out by White Star.

1912

The Astor, Guggenheim, and Widener families consult Merritt and Chapman Wrecking Company with an eye toward raising the Titanic. The plan is considered impossible and abandoned.

1913 April

As a direct result of the Titanic disaster, the International Ice Patrol is formed, which to this day monitors ice conditions in the north Atlantic.

1914 February

Titanic's second sister ship, Britannic, is launched by Harland and Wolff.

1916 November 21

In service as a hospital ship during World War One, Britannic strikes a mine and sinks off the coast off the coast of Greece.

1935

After twenty-four years of service, Olympic is retired and sold for scrap. She has crossed the Atlantic five hundred times and steamed half a million miles.

1955 November

Walter Lord's best-selling book, A Night to Remember, is published.

1963

The Titanic Historical Society is founded in Indian Orchard, Massachusetts.

1985 September 1

The wreck of the Titanic is located at a depth of 12,460 feet by a joint Franco-American team headed by Robert D. Ballard.

1986

Robert Ballard and his team explore the wreck by submarine

1987

Legislation is introduced in the US congress to make the wreck of Titanic an international memorial. A French expedition to the wreck site recovered the first artifacts. In four subsequent expeditions, over three thousand artifacts are removed from the site.

1996

An attempt to raise a piece of Titanic's hull ends in failure.

1997

The eight-fifth anniversary is dubbed "The Year of the Titanic" with the release of a Broadway musical, a blockbuster James Cameron movie, a touring exhibition of artifacts, and many books and magazine articles.

 

Chronology

The Making of History
| Owners | A Grand Design | Construction | Sister Ships - Olympic and Britannic |
| Strict Segregation | Outdated Lifeboat regulations | The Aura of Invincibility |

| Launch | Specifications |

Leaving for the New World
| Southampton | Southampton - The New York and a Near Miss | Cherbourg | Queenstown | Provisions |

Passenger Lists
| First Class | Second Class | Third Class | Alphabtical list | Crew | The Band |

Lifeboat Lists
| Lifeboats 1- 3 | Lifeboats 4 - 6 | Lifeboats 7-9 | Lifeboats 10-12 | Lifeboats 13 -16 | Collapsibles |

Aftermath
| American Inquiry |
| Causes - An extract from February 1995 Edition of Popular Mechanic |

Remembrance

Facts and Figures
| Harland and Wolff's 101 Answers to the most asked questions about the RMS Titanic |

History Evidence Acknowledgements Links HTML editors Review