The Story Behind the Construction of the Titanic The construction of the Titanic needed an army of workers & the resources of a purpose-built town complete with an array of specially built docks & facilities to construct it. The sheer size of Titanic and her sister ships posed a major engineering challenge for Harland and Wolff; no shipbuilder had ever before attempted to construct vessels this large. The ships were constructed on Queens Island, now known as the Titanic Quarter, in Belfast Harbour. Harland and Wolff had to demolish three existing slipways and build two new ones, the biggest ever constructed up to that time, to accommodate the giant ships. Their construction was facilitated by an enormous gantry built by Sir William Arrol & Co., a Scottish firm responsible for the building of the Forth Bridge and Londons Tower Bridge. The Arrol Gantry stood 228 feet (69 m) high, was 270 feet (82 m) wide and 840 feet (260 m) long, and weighed more than 6,000 tons. It accommodated a number of mobile cranes. A separate floating crane, capable of lifting 200 tons, was brought in from Germany. The construction of Titanic and Olympic took place virtually in parallel, with Olympics hull laid down first on 16 December 1908 and Titanics on 31 March 1909. Both ships took about 26 months to build and followed much the same construction process. They were designed essentially as an enormous floating box girder, with the keel acting as a backbone and the frames of the hull forming the ribs. At the base of the ships, a double bottom 5 feet 3 inches (1.60 m) deep supported 300 frames, each between 24 inches (61 cm) and 36 inches (91 cm) apart and measuring up to about 66 feet (20 m) long. They terminated at the bridge deck (B Deck) and were covered with steel plates which formed the outer skin of the ships. The 2,000 hull plates were single pieces of rolled steel, mostly up to 6 feet (1.8 m) wide and 30 feet (9.1 m) long and weighing between 2.5 and 3 tons. Their thickness varied from 1 inch (2.5 cm) to 1.5 inches (3.8 cm). The plates were laid in a clinkered (overlapping) fashion from the keel to the bilge. Above that point they were laid in the in and out fashion, where strake plating was applied in bands (the in strakes) with the gaps covered by the out strakes, overlapping on the edges. Steel welding was still in its infancy so the structure had to be held together with over three million iron and steel rivets which by themselves weighed over 1,200 tons. They were fitted using hydraulic machines or were hammered in by hand. The work of constructing the ships was difficult and dangerous. For the 15,000 men who worked at Harland and Wolff at the time,[68] safety precautions were rudimentary at best; a lot of the work was dangerous and was carried out without any safety equipment like hard hats or hand guards on machinery. As a result, deaths and injuries were to be expected. During Titanics construction, 246 injuries were recorded, 28 of them severe, such as arms severed by machines or legs crushed under falling pieces of steel. Six people died on the ship herself while she was being constructed and fitted out and another two died in the shipyard workshops and sheds. Just before the launch a worker was killed when a piece of wood fell on him. Titanic was launched at 12:15 pm on 31 May 1911 in the presence of Lord Pirrie, J. Pierpoint Morgan and J. Bruce Ismay and 100,000 onlookers. 22 tons of soap and tallow were spread on the slipway to lubricate the ships passage into the River Lagan. In keeping with the White Star Lines traditional policy, the ship was not formally named or christened with champagne. The ship was towed to a fitting-out berth where, over the course of the next year, her engines, funnels and superstructure were installed and her interior was fitted out. Although Titanic was virtually identical to the classs lead ship Olympic, a few changes were made to differentiate the two ships. The most noticeable of these was that Titanic (and the third vessel in class Britannic) had a steel screen with sliding windows installed along the forward half of the A Deck promenade. This was installed as a last minute change at the personal request of Bruce Ismay, and was intended to provide additional shelter to first class passengers. These changes made Titanic marginally heavier than her sister, and thus she could claim to be the largest ship afloat. The work took longer than expected due to design changes ordered by Ismay and a temporary pause in work occasioned by the need to repair Olympic, which had been in a collision in September 1911. Had Titanic been finished earlier, she might well have missed her collision with an iceberg.
Posted on: Fri, 21 Feb 2014 13:32:15 +0000
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