On May 31, 1991, some 100,000 people in Belfast attended the launch of a massive luxury steamship made for White Star Line, a lead British shipping company in the early 20th century. The RMS Titanic was — by far — more sophisticated and luxurious than any ship in existence during its time. Built to accommodate over 2400 passengers, the Titanic’s first transatlantic crossing was planned for 1912.
Alas, as you know, things didn’t go according to plan. Only 4 days after departing England, on its maiden voyage to New York, the Titanic struck an iceberg and sank to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. It was one of the deadliest peacetime maritime disasters in modern history, killing more than 1,500 people. Both Captain Edward Smith and the Titanic’s architect, Thomas Andrews, lost their lives, along with too many staff and passengers to name. The tragedy inspired countless books, articles, and films — including the 1997 classic Titanic, starring Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio.
“There is no danger that Titanic will sink. The boat is unsinkable and nothing but inconvenience will be suffered by the passengers.”
Phillip Franklin, White Star Line vice-president, 1912
The Unsinkable Ship
Many historians claim Titanic was inherently doomed by its design, even though it was widely lauded as state-of-the-art. It was one of White Star Line’s three Olympic-class ocean liners built by the Harland & Wolff shipyard, along with Olympic (1911) and Britannic (1915). These ships featured a double bottom and 15 watertight bulkhead compartments, equipped with electric watertight doors that could be operated individually or simultaneously by a switch on the bridge. It was these watertight bulkheads that inspired Shipbuilder magazine to deem the ship “practically unsinkable” in a special issue devoted to the Olympic liners.
But the watertight compartment design contained a crucial flaw that ultimately sealed Titanic’s fate on that night in April 1912: while the individual bulkheads were indeed watertight, the walls between them only extended a few feet above the water line. Water could freely pour from one overfull compartment into another, especially if the ship began to list or pitch forward.
Then there were the lifeboats. With merely 16 boats (plus four Engelhardt “collapsibles”), Titanic had lifeboat spaces for only 1,178 people — yet the ship carried up to 2,435 passengers plus approximately 900 crew members, for a total capacity of more than 3,000 people. So even if the lifeboats had launched at full capacity during Titanic’s emergency evacuation, which they didn’t: two-thirds of the people on board still had no hope of securing a lifeboat seat. And while those supply levels are unthinkably inadequate by today’s standards, they actually exceeded the British Board of Trade’s minimum requirements in 1912.
Over the decades, other theories have emerged to explain the tragically fascinating tale of Titanic. Were the ship’s steel plates too brittle for the near-freezing Atlantic waters? Did the impact cause rivets to pop? Did the expansion joints fail? Like the truth of what happened on Amelia Earheart’s final known flight, we might never know precisely why it sank.
The Legacy
While the catastrophe’s technical details might always elude us, Titanic’s demise is so deeply embedded in popular culture it’s reached a near-mythic status. To some, it’s a morality lesson on the dangers of human hubris: Titanic’s creators practically dared nature to call their bluff when they allowed themselves to believe they’d built an “unsinkable” ship. That overconfidence led directly to the public’s electrifying shock over news of the Titanic’s sinking — and, with the era’s slow and unreliable communication methods, misinformation abounded. Newspapers initially reported that the ship had collided with an iceberg, but remained afloat and was being towed to port with everyone on board.
It took hours for accurate accounts to become widely available. Even then, people struggled to accept the truth. It seemed impossible that this paragon of modern technology could sink, taking 1,500 souls down with it and leaving that maiden voyage forever incomplete.
109 years later, Titanic’s story still fascinates people of all ages and types because it weaves a tale of ambition, human ingenuity, and risk. The first attempted transatlantic crossing of the world’s most celebrated ship left an unforgettable legacy. A century has passed, yet Titantic hasn’t lost its prominence in our shared histories, our cultural narratives, our human mythology.
That doesn’t mean, though, that there were no important technical lessons taken away from this tragedy. Aside from the broad impact Titantic’s story had on humanity, the disaster also led to three important lessons for the shipbuilding industry:
- Naval architects haven’t learned to design genuinely unsinkable ships. (And probably never will.)
- Even if every ship on the water was unsinkable, the number of lifeboat seats must be greater than, or equal to, the ship’s total capacity. A ship should never launch without sufficient lifeboats for everyone on board.
- Passenger steamships need transatlantic sailing routes that travel far enough south to avoid the path of any floating icebergs.
From these takeaways, the International Ice Patrol was formed and stricter regulations were introduced through the International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea. Both are still in place today. And while the Titanic is now approximately 370 miles off the coast of Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada and 12,600 feet underwater (nearly 2.5 miles beneath the surface of the ocean) — its story changed the shipbuilding industry forever.
Building The Next Iconic Ship
Shipbuilding companies have evolved into sophisticated operations that would be unrecognizable to White Star Line’s executives in 1912. The advanced tools and materials of today’s shipbuilders allow teams to build secure, technologically-advanced ships. The industry learned the right lesson: build better ships. And better ships meant safer ships, more cost-effective ships, lower-emission-producing ships. Stories like Titanic’s are almost nonexistent now, even with routine transatlantic crossings.
By 2025, the shipbuilding industry is expected to be worth over $175 billion USD. But in order to hit that prediction, shipbuilders will be focusing their energy on key priorities: production efficiency, ship safety, cost effectiveness, energy conservation, and environmental protection. However, of these priorities — production efficiency is the one that acts as a foundational pillar, supporting your efforts in all the other areas. In fact, production efficiency starts before the production stage. With the help of effective production planning, shipbuilders can reduce costs while improving their production efficiency, product quality, and time to market.
Another secret weapon used by some of the world’s best shipbuilders? Seamless integration of engineering design data with manufacturing information. After all, it’s common sense that manual operations can lead to errors and delayed delivery to the shipyard. But with today’s integration powers: engineering changes can be quickly identified, thoroughly reviewed to confirm all requirements are met, then efficiently communicated to manufacturing. An integrated system minimizes the amount of errors or reworks that cause production bottlenecks and put project schedules at risk. More importantly, though, it helps shipbuilders build bigger, safer, and more energy-efficient ships.
It would take an entirely separate post to list all of the numerous technology advances accessible by today’s shipbuilding industry to build world-class ships. At CoLab, for instance, we’ve collaborated with ship design teams to create an agile review process, track issues in real time, reduce human errors, and gain better visibility. Our shipbuilding customers are world-class design leaders — some are even located in Newfoundland and Labrador, less than 400 miles from the Titanic’s final resting place.
Ship historian John Maxtone-Graham has compared Titanic’s story to the Challenger space shuttle disaster of 1986. In that case, the world reeled as it grappled with the reality that an invention so sophisticated and significant could simply explode into oblivion, along with its crew. Like Titanic, the Challenger tragedy triggered a sudden widespread collapse in humanity’s confidence. It revealed how, despite our hubris and our belief in the infallibility of technology, we are always vulnerable to human error and frailty.
Even though it was a tragic, catastrophic disaster — the Titantic is an icon. Engineers, and humans in general, have worked hard to find valuable lessons in the events of April 15, 1912. Today’s ships are more resilient because shipbuilders learned from the mistakes of the past, and because innovators have never stopped building better tools to build better ships. That’s what’s so humbling about what we do at CoLab: we see how our work is powering the great ships of tomorrow and letting the next generation of naval engineers run wild with imagination.
With just over a century gone since the Titanic’s sinking, the world is due for shipbuilding’s next iconic achievement. What are we waiting for? Let’s get building.
Related reading: Genoa sets the new shipbuilding production drawing review standard with CoLab.
Written by Ned Nadima and edited by Meagan Campbell.
