Titanic trivia

Here are some facts you may not have known about the Titanic.

White Star Line was the company that built the RMS Titanic, and was owned by American tycoon, J.P. Morgan.

The cost to build the ocean liner Titanic was $7.5 million (approx. $400 million today).

It took 3,000 men two years to build the Titanic. Three million rivets held its massive hull together.

The price of a first-class ticket was the equivalent to $50,000 in today’s economy.

Though the ship had four smoke stacks only three were operational. The fourth was built for the sake of appearance.

On the day of the disaster, the Titanic received six ice warnings – which were all ignored by the wireless operator because he was preoccupied transmitting passenger messages.

Though the ship had fewer lifeboats than required, the first one to be lowered into the water carried 28 people – three dozen fewer than it could have held. Overall, 472 lifeboat seats were not used.

There were 2,223 passengers and crew members on the ship. Only 705 people survived.

Most of the fatalities were the result of hypothermia. The water was –2°C, a temperature at which humans die within 15 minutes.

Birton Millvina Dean was only nine weeks old when she boarded the Titanic. She died in 2009 at the age of 97.

Two of the most prominent passengers on the ship were American Molly Brown, the wife of a mining magnate, and John Jacob Astor IV, a real estate developer from one of wealthiest families in the U.S.

The White Star Line chartered four Canadian vessels to help recover victims. Many of them were laid to rest in Halifax, N.S. Of the 328 bodies recovered, 209 were returned to Halifax.

Several ships received Titanic’s distress signal but the only land-based location that received it was a wireless station in Cape Race, Nfld.