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“titanic,”
Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary
    U ntil an icy night a hundred years ago, the word “titanic” suggested good things. Godlike Titans ruled a golden age of Greek mythology. “
Titanic
” meant
big, powerful, extraordinary
.
    That changed on April 14-15, 1912, as the Royal Mail Ship
Titanic
, the world’s largest and most opulent oceangoing vessel, steamed westward on its maiden voyage. About 1,000 miles east of Boston, it struck an iceberg and disappeared in 2 hours and 40 minutes. More than 1,500 passengers and crew died, including some of the grandest celebrities of the day.
    A rescue ship,
Carpathia
, plucked 706 survivors from lifeboats. Their stories of the tragedy seemed impossible.
    Sink? How could it? At 882.5 feet from prow to stern rail, and 175 feet from keel to funnel tops,
Titanic
stretched as long as four city blocks and as high as a nine-story building. Fifteen steel bulkheads divided its interior into compartments advertised as watertight.
Titanic’
s builders figured it could stay afloat after any possible accident.
    Sink? In the previous 40 years of North Atlantic travel, only four passengers had died. Disasters had become obsolete.
    Sink? Even
Titanic’
s captain once announced he could envision no scenario in which a modern ship might go down.
    Shipbuilder
magazine had examined
Titanic
and pronounced it“virtually unsinkable.” Over time, the adverb evaporated.
    And yet sink it did, in a perfect storm of human error and hubris. Like the Titans themselves, the word was Greek. It meant extreme pride or arrogance. Never again after April 1912 would humanity feel so smug.
    Hubris inserted itself into
Titanic’
s story at the ship’s conception. That occurred over Napoleon brandy and Cuban cigars in the London home of Lord Pirrie on a summer night in 1907.
    Enjoying their drinks and smokes were J. Bruce Ismay, managing director of the White Star Line, and Lord Pirrie, chairman of the shipbuilding company Harland & Wolff. White Star had amassed a fortune ferrying emigrants to America as well as shuttling wealthy passengers across the Atlantic.
    But White Star had competition. Rivals sought to build faster, more comfortable ships. American and German lines fought for control against British counterparts, including Cunard. In 1906 and 1907, Cunard introduced
Lusitania
and
Mauretania
, two passenger ships that seemed the last word in speed and luxury.
    Ismay refused to be outdone. He wanted Harland & Wolff to build White Star a fleet of ships that would dwarf the competition. So, while relaxing after dinner, Lord Pirrie sketched the ships Ismay wanted.
    There would be three, all alike. They would be 120 feet longer and 12,000 tons heavier than Cunard’s biggest. They would have three-story engines fired by 29 coal-burning boilers. Their lines would be elegant, their capacity astounding, their safety beyond question. First to be built would be
Olympic
, followed by
Titanic
, then
Gigantic
(later renamed
Britannic
).
    More than 15,000 workers teemed through the Harland & Wolff gates in Belfast, Ireland, every morning to produce ships of iron and steel. They laid
Titanic’
s keel on March 31, 1909, next to that of its twin,
Olympic
. Over the next two years, about 3,000 workersdevoted themselves to
Titanic
. They riveted overlapping steel plates to shape the hull and prepared the shell for its decks.
    Thomas Andrews, Harland & Wolff’s chief designer, supervised construction. He felt proud of his work. On a night in 1910, Andrews brought his pregnant wife to the shipyard to show off his other children,
Olympic
and
Titanic
. Halley’s comet blazed overhead.
    Launch day, May 31, 1911, broke clear and bright. Lord Pirrie, Ismay, and American millionaire J. P. Morgan, who had acquired financial control of White Star, joined a crowd of about 100,000 to watch
Titanic
slide into the River Lagan on greased wooden skids. Support poles