Titanic

The Titanic

The year is 1912 and you are on board the greatest and most luxurious ship

ever built. However, few of you are aware that the ship has just struck an iceberg [slam down book and slowly begin pushing it off edge of table, while

continue speaking] and is slowly sinking into the bottom of the North Atlantic. A lot

of you have already retired to your beds for the night. Some of you are out drinking,

smoking, just having a good time. And by the time you do realize the ship is sinking-

it's too late. Most of the lifeboats are already gone. [Push book off edge of table and

onto floor] And 2/3 of you just died.

In case you haven't figured it out yet, the ship I'm referring to is the RMS Titanic. [Show slide 1 of Titanic] And it just happens to be a coincidence but it did sink

86 years ago today. Now like most of you I first heard about the Titanic in elementary

school and on through high school so I didn't really know a lot about it. But then

after seeing the recent movie version I left the theater wanting to know more. Like

who were some of the people on board and why were the lifeboats only half full? So I

searched around the Internet, saw a couple of TV specials on it and this is just a fraction of what I found. And like me, I hope that maybe you can learn there is more to

the Titanic than just "big ship hits ice and sinks".

First of allÐ'--why were the lifeboats only l/2 full? [Show slide 2 of filled lifeboat]

The first lifeboat to go out had a capacity of 65 people but yet it left with only 12.

That means there were a total of over 400 empty seats on those lifeboats. Thus, that

many more people should have and could have been saved.

Well the crews excuse was that they feared the lifeboats would collapse. [Demonstrate with stick] You see, they were lowered down by a rope on either end to the

water and they feared that the weight of the passengers would buckle them and just

collapse.

However, I'm more apt to believe that the people just didn't want to get off. Why

would you want to get off an "unsinkable" ship? Plus a lot of people just didn't even

know anything was the matter. People just felt safe on the TitanicÐ'--this monstrous

ship. In fact, if you want to get an idea of about how big it was, go out to the faculty

office building which is three stories high and look straight up, the Titanic was between 3 and 4 times taller than that. So where would you feel safer, this huge monstrous ship, complete with elevators, swimming pool, gymnasium and even a hospital

with an operating room or this little wooden boat that's not even half the size of this

room?

[Show statistics slide 3] Another thing that I wondered about were the people on

board. Notice that 19 % of the men, 72% of the women, and 100% of the children

were saved. However, since most of the passengers were men,