The Fascinating Engineering of the Titanic: How the Great Ocean Liner Was Built

When many of us first learned of the RMS Titanic, it was presented first as one of history’s greatest ironies: the “unsinkable” ocean liner that went down on its maiden voyage. Of course, there’s a great deal more to the story, as anyone who becomes obsessed with the ill-fated ship (James Cameron being just one notable example) understands full well. Even apart from the many human experiences surrounding it, some of them told by the wreck’s survivors and preserved on film, the mechanical aspects of the Titanic hold out considerable fascination for anyone with an engineer’s cast of mind. Put aside, for the moment, the matter of the sinking, and consider just what went into making it one of the most glorious creations of man launched into the ocean to date — or rather, one of the three most glorious.

The Titanic was one of a trio of similar White Star Line ships completed in the early nineteen-tens. In the video above, Bill Hammack, known on YouTube as Engineerguy, tells the story of not just the Titanic, but also the Olympic and the HMHS Britannic. An engineering professor at the University of Illinois, he found in the campus library issues of the journal The Engineer published between 1909 and 1911 that contain detailed photographs of the construction of both the Titanic and Olympic, sister ships that were built side-by-side.

One element highlighted that we may not much consider today is the sheer scale of the things: each was held together by three million rivets, could contain 1.5 million gallons of ballast water, weighed 52,000 tons when fully fitted, required 23 tons of lubricant to slide from the dock into the water, and burned 650 tons of coal per day on a transatlantic crossing.

Alas, size alone wasn’t enough to prevent disaster. “Less than a year after the launch of these two giant ships, one suffered a collision that ripped a gaping hole in its side,” says Hammack. “That ship was of course, the Olympic.” Its sudden encounter with a passing warship necessitated patching with wood before it could return home for a full repair, but thereafter it remained in service for nearly a quarter-century. Its less lucky sibling ended up at the bottom of the ocean after running into trouble of its own: a mine and a torpedo spelled the end for the Britannic in 1916. As for the Titanic, we all know about its fateful encounter with the iceberg, and maybe we’ve even heard discussions of how its designers could have mitigated the impact: more or taller bulkheads, a double hull rather than just a double bottom, greater lifeboat capacity. As for whether and how those solutions would have worked, perhaps Hammack could still shoot a follow-up explaining it all to us.

Related Content:

The First Full 3D Scan of the Titanic, Made of More Than 700,000 Images Capturing the Wreck’s Every Detail

See the First 8K Footage of the Titanic, the Highest-Quality Video of the Shipwreck Yet

The Titanic: Rare Footage of the Ship Before Disaster Strikes (1911–1912)

Titanic Survivor Interviews: What It Was Like to Flee the Sinking Luxury Liner

The Sinking of the Britannic: An Animated Introduction to the Titanic’s Forgotten Sister Ship

How a 16th-Century Explorer’s Sailing Ship Worked: An Animated Video Takes You on a Comprehensive Tour

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.