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Final

Many of you are aware of the fateful maiden voyage of the Titanic. The Titanic was a luxurious ship built for comfort and safety, not for speed. It was also known as the unsinkable ship. As we all know the ship was not unsinkable. The building of the Titanic was a complex and difficult task. It was so hard it took eleven thousand three hundred employees three years to build it. During the building of the Titanic eight people died and two hundred forty accidents occurred. The reason it took so many people to build it was because it was eight hundred eighty-two feet long, about the size of three football fields, and ninety two feet wide. It also had twenty-nine huge boilers, four smoke stacks, and three anchors. The central propeller was sixteen and a half feet in diameter and the hull was one to two inches thick. Finally, on April 10th, 1912 the Titanic was ready to set sail from Southampton with E.J. Smith as captain. The Titanic was so large and extravagant that people had to use maps to get around it. Many of the people who were on the ship were wealthy and famous. These people included John Jacob Astor, the richest man on the ship, Benjamin Guggenheim, Isador and Ida Straus, and Molly Brown, who later became known as The Unsinkable Molly Brown. This is because she rowed her and the other passengers on lifeboat number six to safety. She was the only women claimed to have done so. With two thousand two hundred passengers, the Titanic left with forty thousand eggs, thirty-six thousand apples, thirty-six thousand oranges, seventy-five thousand pounds of meat, eighty thousand pounds of potatoes, and seven hundred fifty quarts of ice cream. There was large difference in menus between all the classes. The first class menu was much longer and had many more options then second and third class menus. First class tickets were two thousand five-hundred dollars, which is about fifty-seven thousand two-hundred dollars today. To keep the ship running, firemen, also known as coal shovelers, had to shovel coal into boilers 16 and feet high. They had to shovel very heavy coal for very long intervals. Per one day, total, all of them had to shovel 825 tons of coal. As such a back-breaking job that these men did, they only got paid a measly twenty-seven dollars a month. If all had gone as planned they would have arrived in New York in six days. (Ring bell three times) While watching from the crows nest, Fredrick Fleet saw the ice burg and rang the warning bell. Captain E. J. Smith was initially not that worried because that had been the sixth warning that day. Then, (pause) the unthinkable happened. At 1:00 A.M., Sunday April 14th, 1912, the Titanic hit the ice burg and began to sink. The life boats could hold sixty people, but the first few boats left with only about eight people per boat. There were only 20 life boats, enough for one thousand two-hundred passengers of the two thousand two-hundred on board. Women and children were told to go first because the men were supposed to be tougher. The

women had to take care of the children. Some of the women and children died because they wouldnt leave their husbands. Five of the water compartments could be flooded before the ship couldnt float anymore. At 3:00 A.M. the Titanic was fully sunk. Only seven hundred and four people of the two-thousand two hundred people who were on the ship escaped and survived on the life boats, and only one person survived the freezing water. Not until 1985, a team of scientists found the wreckage of the ship two miles underwater. On the 1st of July, 1985, a team of underwater scientists was led by Jean Jarry. They went out to find the wreckage of the Titanic. With the high tech equipment, and a two and a half mile cable, they found it and studied it for many years and more to come. The disaster of the Titanic was so devastating that many of the survivors never said a word about it. This unfortunate event has been told again and again through generations, in hopes that nothing like this happens again. Someday, technology will bring us to lifting the big giant out of the ocean. But for now, the Titanic sits in its cold, dark grave at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.

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