Titanic fascination: Why the world remains enthralled by tale of doomed passenger liner

As people all over the world follow the urgent mission to locate the missing submersible that took a small group of people far below the water’s surface to see the wreck of the Titanic, many also acknowledge the public’s enduring fascination with the tale of the doomed ocean liner.

The RMS Titanic was a luxury steamship that sank in the early hours of April 15, 1912, off the coast of Newfoundland in the North Atlantic.

The ocean liner hit an iceberg during its maiden voyage from Southampton, England, to New York — and of the 2,240 passengers and crew on board, more than 1,500 lost their lives in the disaster. 

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“As befitting the first transatlantic crossing of the world’s most celebrated ship, many of these souls were high-ranking officials, wealthy industrialists, dignitaries and celebrities,” notes History.com.

Today, there mains tremendous interest in the Titanic’s tragic story of maritime technology and adventure ending in great loss of life.

The Titanic is shown departing from Southampton, England, on April 10, 1912. (AP File Photo)

“Thanks in large part to James Cameron’s astonishingly successful 1997 film, today there is a profusion of books, DVDs, documentaries, television dramas, websites, Facebook pages, YouTube clips, IMAX movies and 3D jigsaw puzzles” devoted to the ocean liner, wrote David Dyer, author of “The Midnight Watch,” a novel based on true events surrounding the Titanic’s sinking, on his website.

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“Google ‘Titanic’ and you get 84 million results,” Dyer of Australia also said. “The ship has given its name to restaurants, ice cubes, academic conferences, computer games, plumbers’ businesses … harbor cruises, calendars and costume shops.”

“It is a quiet and peaceful place — and a fitting place for the remains of this greatest of sea tragedies to rest.”

The wreckage of the Titanic was discovered in the 1980s, further fueling intense interest in the ship’s story.

On the morning of Sept. 1, 1985, oceanographer and underwater archaeologist Robert Ballard from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts — together with French explorer Jean-Louis Michel from the organization Ifremer — discovered the wreck of the Titanic “lying at a depth of roughly two and a half miles, and around 370 miles southeast of Mistaken Point, Newfoundland,” says Smithsonian Magazine’s website. 

Survivors of the Titanic disaster are shown in a crowded lifeboat. (General Photographic Agency/Getty Images)

“The Titanic lies now in 13,000 feet of water on a gently sloping Alpine-looking countryside overlooking a small canyon below,” Ballard said upon returning to the U.S. days later, the same publication said.

“Its bow faces north. The ship sits upright on its bottom with its mighty stacks pointed upward. There is no light at this great depth and little life can be found,” Ballard also said.

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“It is a quiet and peaceful place — and a fitting place for the remains of this greatest of sea tragedies to rest. Forever may it remain that way. And may God bless these now-found souls.”

“I thought to myself, ‘You have to help where you can,’ so I took hold of an oar and rowed and rowed. I was young then, and strong.”

There was something “almost supernatural” about the resulting photos and videos of the wreck, as if a photographer “had managed to capture images of a ghost for the first time,” Smithsonian Magazine noted.

Within a couple of years of the discovery, “wealthy tourists could pay thousands of dollars to descend to the site of the wreck” and see the Titanic. It was “an experience that many likened to stepping into another world,” the publication also said.

Still available to the world, too, are records of the stories from Titanic survivors. 

February 1912: The ill-fated White Star liner the RMS Titanic at Harland and Wolff’s shipyard, Belfast, Ireland. (Topical Press Agency/Getty Images)

“We were lowered. Most of the people in the boat were women and they were very frightened; nobody was saying anything,” survivor Marjorie Robb, who was 23 when she boarded the ill-fated vessel, told The Palm Beach Post in 2012 of being in a lifeboat.

“I thought to myself, ‘You have to help where you can,’ so I took hold of an oar and rowed and rowed. I was young then, and strong,” Robb, from Massachusetts, told the outlet.

“The fact that it was not some sinister human plot, but a placid juggernaut, a mere iceberg, that was the chief villain, is central to the dreadfulness of the loss.”

“We got a distance away and we could see the ship was listing very badly; people were in the water, gasping and yelling for help; one rocket after another was going up,” she added.

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“I can remember, to this day, the noise the ship made as it went under,” Robb also said. “You could actually feel the noise, the vibrations and the screams of the people, and the sounds of the ship.”

Also, the Titanic represented “the very pinnacle of maritime technological achievement,” wrote John Geiger for Canada’s The Globe and Mail in 2012. 

April 14, 1912: Survivors watch from the lifeboats as the ill-fated Titanic plunges beneath the waves. Original publication: Illustrated London News – pub. 1912, from a special supplement of “Graphic.” (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

“The fact that, on her maiden voyage, she could be sent to the ocean floor by a large chunk of ice savagely shook people’s faith in progress,” Geiger noted.

The Titanic was “loaded with state-of-the-art technology,” but “considered unsinkable,” he added. 

“It is that technological hubris that went down, too.”

“We control so much of our world, but at some fundamental level, human beings are vulnerable to the forces of nature.”

The passengers’ tragic end “evoked the sort of horror, on a mass scale, that a bear attack does at the individual level,” Geiger also wrote. 

He added, “We control so much of our world, but at some fundamental level, human beings are vulnerable to the forces of nature.”

He said further, “The fact that it was not some sinister human plot, but a placid juggernaut, a mere iceberg, that was the chief villain, is central to the dreadfulness of the loss.”

What were the dimensions of the Titanic? The RMS Titanic had an overall length of 882.75 feet. The breadth of the massive ship was 92.5 feet, and the depth of the construction was 59.6 feet. 

How many years did it take to construct the Titanic? The Titanic took three years to build. The ship was built at the Harland and Wolff shipyard in Belfast, Ireland. The construction began in 1909 and was completed in 1911. 

An illustration of the damage caused when the Titanic hit an iceberg on April 14, 1912. The cross-section of the vessel shows the various compartments which flooded after the accident. Original publication: The Graphic, April 27, 1912. (Getty Images)

How much did it cost to build? The White Star Line’s Titanic cost $7.5 million to build, or some $200 million with inflation.

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When did the Titanic sink — and how long did it take? After hitting an iceberg on the night of April 14, the “unsinkable” RMS Titanic sank in the early morning hours of April 15, 1912. It reportedly took two hours and 40 minutes to sink. 

The ship’s chief telegraphist, John George Phillips, and Captain Edward John Smith sent out distress signals – one reaching a British passenger liner, the Carpathia – but the liner was 58 nautical miles and over three hours away from the sinking ship, Britannica noted.

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How many iceberg warnings were sent to the Titanic? On April 14, the ship’s captain received seven iceberg warnings.

One of the transmitted messages was from the SS Amerika to the Hydrographic Office in Washington, D.C., reporting ice along the ship’s route, according to NASA.gov. “Had she but heeded the one warning that she transmitted she would probably have saved herself,” the Hydrographic Office wrote.

Sydney Borchers contributed reporting to this article. 

Deirdre Reilly is a senior editor in lifestyle with Fox News Digital.