Titanic Facts: Dimensions, Cost, Design

Titanic Facts

Dimensions: At 882 feet, 9 inches long, Titanic stretched nearly four city blocks. She was 92 feet wide and 11 stories tall. Titanic was the largest ship built prior to 1912 and the largest moving object built by man.

Cost: $7.5 million. Today it would cost about $400 million to build Titanic.

Tickets: A first-class ticket for a parlor suite on Titanic cost $4,350, which would be approximately $50,000 today.

Capacity: Equipped to carry 3,547 passengers, the ship carried 2,228 on its maiden voyage.

Weight: 46,328 tons

Maximum speed: 24 to 25 knots (28 to 29 miles per hour) Titanic was traveling at 22 knots when it struck the iceberg.

Hull: The ship was built of 2,000 1-inch thick steel plates, held together by more than 3 million rivets. Titanic was designed with 16 watertight compartments so that if the first four compartments flooded, the ship would remain afloat.

Design: J. Bruce Ismay designed Titanic for the White Star Line. Built at Harland & Wolffs shipyard in Belfast, Ireland, the ship took two years to construct.

Ship Dcor: The style of dcor included Louis XIV, Empire Italian Renaissance, Georgian,

Regence, Queen Anne and Old Dutch. It took 10 months to decorate Titanic.

Staircase: One of the most lavish areas on Titanic was the first-class Grand Staircase, which was styled in late 17th century William and Mary with a contemporary Louis XIV balustrade, paneled in oak and lit by a glass skylight. Charles Wilson carved the Honour and Glory Crowning Time panels on the Grand Staircase.

Eerie: In the 1898 novel Futility, published 14 years before the sinking of the Titanic, Morgan Robertson penned a fictitious tale about a ship named Titan, which rams an iceberg and sinks with many victims. Uncanny similarities between the book and the Titanic calamity include the month (April), the length of the ship (Titanic 882.5 feet, Titan 800 feet), and the number of passengers on board (Titanic 2,200; Titan 2000).

*Information compiled from Titanic Trivia by David Downs and Ken Beck, Titanic: Legacy of the Worlds Greatest Ocean Liner by Susan Wels, and other sources.