Mention the Titanic, and most people think of the disaster at sea. But the truth is, the first victims of the Titanic died while the ship was still being built.

The shipyard in Belfast, in what is now Northern Ireland, was a dangerous place. Piecing together a nearly nine-hundred-foot-long ship that weighed more than forty-six thousand tons was no small job. With thousands of men working at once, accidents were common.

Sometimes workers dropped tools or rivets—the heavy steel pins that held the ship together. Staging, or scaffolding, collapsed, and people fell. “He’s away to the other yard,” the men would say when they had to share the sad news of a worker who had died on the job.

Workers leave the Harland and Wolff shipyard at the end of a shift, 1911.

The first victim of the Titanic was an Irish teenager who fell from a ladder and fractured his skull on April 20, 1910. He’d been part of a riveting crew on the ship. On June 17, 1911, the Belfast News-Letter reported that forty-nine-year-old Robert Murphy fell to his death when some staging collapsed. His son, also a Titanic shipyard worker, had died in an accident just six months earlier. The following March, the same newspaper carried the story of a man who’d suffered severe injuries “working on a crane when he was crushed in the machinery.” There were 254 official accidents recorded during the building of the Titanic, including at least eight fatalities.

Believe it or not, that wasn’t a bad safety record for a shipyard. The Harland and Wolff shipyard in Belfast, where the Titanic was built, was one of the most modern in the world at that time and had a reputation for designing and building high-quality ships.

Harland and Wolff built ships for a company called the White Star Line, which transported passengers and cargo across the North Atlantic, between England and New York. In the early 1900s, two new ships built for that route, the Titanic and her sister ship, the Olympic, were designed at the Harland and Wolff drawing offices. The architects drew up plans in big rooms full of long tables and natural light. The goal was to lure wealthy passengers from other shipping companies to the White Star Line with a promise of luxury instead of speed.

The shipbuilding project launched in 1907. Because the Titanic and the Olympic were so big, two new slipways had to be built at the Belfast shipyard before construction of the ships could even start. The project required new machinery, too—a two-hundred-ton floating crane to lift engines, boilers, and funnels for the great ships. Then workers constructed a steel gantry, an enormous structure with cranes, elevators, and walkways. This scaffolding from which workers would build the Titanic and her sister ship could be seen from all over Belfast.

The building of the Titanic began with the laying of the ship’s keel in March 1909. That’s the backbone of the ship; the rest of the vessel would be built around it. Next came the frames, sticking up like ribs, and, eventually, steel plates to cover the ship’s skeleton. These were held together by rivets, and workers pounded in three million of them before the job was done.

If you were a young shipyard worker, you might have been part of one of these riveting teams. They were usually made up of three or four men and a boy. The young person’s job was to heat a rivet until it was red-hot, take it from the furnace with pincers, and rush it to the area where the other riveters were working. Then the boy—or sometimes another worker, called the holder-on—would put the heated rivet into the hole where the steel plates overlapped. Two men would work outside the hull with heavy hammers to pound the rivet into place. They’d take turns swinging so the pounding never let up. The third man was inside the hull, using an even heavier hammer to hold the rivet in place. With all that hammering, it was so noisy that workers couldn’t even hear themselves talk. The shipyard’s Belfast neighbors could always hear the bang and rattle of ships coming to life—clangs and creaks and the clash of steel on steel.

It took just over two years to build the Titanic’s hull, the main body of the ship. The work went quickly—so quickly that there were rumors a worker had somehow been trapped inside the hull.

Some even said they heard tapping coming from inside, but there’s no evidence that this rumor is true. It’s possible that what they heard was an inspector tapping with a hammer to test the rivets at the end of the day. But that story made some workers feel certain that something was going to go wrong with the Titanic.

Another rumor that fed that feeling had to do with the shipbuilder’s hull number, which was 390904. Someone apparently saw that number reflected in a mirror or in the water and thought it looked like the words “NO POPE.” Most people in Belfast were Catholic, so “NO POPE” seemed like a bad phrase to have associated with a new ship. Some shipbuilders decided it meant the Titanic was doomed.

But the Titanic’s construction continued. On May 31, 1911, it was time for the great ship to launch.

After the launch, the Titanic was towed to a deep-water wharf for the second phase of work. Now the ship’s interior had to be built. That work took more than three thousand men another ten months to complete. They installed the engines and boilers. They built the passenger cabins, installed all the plumbing and electricity, and painted the hull. When the ship was finally complete, it was something to brag about. And that’s exactly what the White Star Line did.

“The staircase is one of the principal features of the ship, and will be greatly admired as being without doubt the finest piece of workmanship of its kind afloat.”

—White Star Line publicity materials

The Titanic was a floating hotel. In addition to all the cabins and dining rooms, the ship had its own swimming pool, squash court, and gym. There were cafés, palm courts, a barbershop, a dark room for photographers, and a lending library, in case passengers wanted something to read on the voyage.

First-class accommodations were the fanciest, of course, but the Titanic’s third-class cabins were also nicer than usual on ships of that time. The White Star Line made it a point to talk about that when promoting its ship to immigrants who were crossing the ocean to settle in America, promising that the third-class general room, where people gathered to visit and play music, would be “one of the liveliest rooms on the ship.”

“In these vessels the interval between the old life and the new is spent under the happiest possible conditions.”

—White Star Line publicity materials

Twenty-nine coal-fired boilers supplied steam to the massive ship’s engines. The Titanic had 159 furnaces and four funnels, or smokestacks. The ship’s passengers didn’t realize it, but only three of those funnels were actually carrying smoke. The fourth was just for show, to make the ship look more powerful and balanced. When all the work had been completed, the Titanic was a sight to behold.

SISTER SHIPS

The Titanic might be the most famous ship in history, but if it hadn’t hit that iceberg in the North Atlantic, you might not even know its name. That’s because the Titanic was just one of three big ships the White Star Line planned to build to compete with the Cunard Line, another shipping company that had already launched luxury ocean liners called the Lusitania and the Mauretania.

The Titanic and the Olympic were almost identical. They were built side by side at the shipyard in Belfast. But the Olympic launched first, on October 20, 1910, and got most of the attention at the time. The Olympic sailed from Southampton, England, to New York in June 1911, the same route the Titanic would take the following year. It had the same captain and the same shortage of lifeboats, but it didn’t hit an iceberg, so it’s the Titanic that we remember today.

The third ship the White Star Line had planned was going to be called the Gigantic, according to newspaper reports, but the name was changed to the Britannic later on. Work on that ship was delayed, but it finally launched in 1914. Before the ship even had a chance to carry passengers, though, World War I began. The Britannic was put into service as a hospital ship and ended up hitting a mine and sinking near Greece.

The Titanic’s maiden voyage had been scheduled for March 20, 1912, but that plan changed when its sister ship had an accident. The Olympic had been damaged when a British navy cruiser rammed into it in September 1911. The Titanic had to be moved from its work site so that crews could repair the Olympic. When the work was all done, the Titanic’s maiden voyage was rescheduled for April 10.

UNSINKABLE?

The idea that the Titanic was “unsinkable” is part of the mythology surrounding the shipwreck. In a famous movie about the disaster, a character looks up at the ship before it sails and says, “So this is the ship they say is unsinkable.” But really, most people weren’t talking about that at the time. They were more interested in the ship’s palm courts and fancy dining rooms.

The truth is, no one had promised that the Titanic was unsinkable. The White Star Line had advertised the Titanic as the “largest and finest” ship. One of its brochures for the Titanic and the Olympic did say the ships were “designed to be unsinkable.” Newspapers picked up on this.

BELFAST NEWS-LETTER

JANUARY 1, 1912

 

Each watertight door can be released by means of a powerful electric magnet controlled from the captain’s bridge, so that, in the event of accident, the movement of a switch instantly closes each door, practically making the vessel unsinkable.

After the Titanic sank, that “unsinkable” line in the White Star Line publicity materials took on a heavier weight, and everyone was talking about it. It made for a much more dramatic story when an “unsinkable” ship went down.