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Quick answers
When and where did Titanic sink?
The ship struck an iceberg at about 23:40 on 14 April 1912 and sank at about 02:20 on 15 April in the North Atlantic. The British Wreck Commissioner’s report placed the loss at 41°46′N, 50°14′W.
How many people died?
Lord Mersey’s court recorded 1,490 lives lost. Other 1912 tallies ran higher; modern compilers often cite about 1,500 of roughly 2,200 aboard. About 710 people reached Carpathia. Figures still differ because crew and steerage lists were incomplete.
What did the official inquiries conclude?
Both the United States Senate inquiry and the British Wreck Commissioner found that the ship was driven too fast in an ice region, that lookout and wireless practice were inadequate, and that lifeboat capacity and loading failed the people on board. The British report dated 30 July 1912 blamed the collision on excessive speed.
Why were there too few lifeboats?
Board of Trade rules then scaled boatage to gross tonnage, not to the number of souls. Titanic’s twenty boats were legal. After 1912 the rule of boats for all became the political and then the treaty standard under SOLAS.
Was the ship officially called unsinkable?
No classification society certified Titanic as unsinkable. Trade-press and White Star publicity stressed watertight subdivision. The word stuck in English headlines after the wreck and became a lesson about marketing, not a hidden design stamp.
When was the wreck found?
On 1 September 1985 a joint expedition of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and IFREMER located the wreck in two main pieces at about 3,800 metres. The United States later passed the RMS Titanic Memorial Act 1986 to treat the site as a memorial.
Titanic’s legal afterlife is larger than its two-hour sinking. Merchant shipping still cites 1912 as the reason boats, drills and radio are not optional.
Cultural afterlife is larger still: the wreck is a template for class disaster in English fiction and film.
Law & institutions
- United States Radio Act 1912 — Required licensed operators and a continuous watch on passenger ships, a direct reply to Californian’s silent set.
- SOLAS 1914 — First international safety-of-life convention: lifeboats, drills, watertight standards and radio. War delayed full effect; later SOLAS texts kept the frame.
- International Ice Patrol 1914 — Atlantic states funded ice reconnaissance, later a United States Coast Guard mission that still publishes seasonal bulletins.
- RMS Titanic Memorial Act 1986 — United States law treating the wreck as a memorial and restricting salvage practice; later agreements added international courtesy rules.
Culture
- A Night to Remember — Walter Lord’s 1955 oral-history book and the 1958 film set the documentary English tone against later romance epics.
- Cameron, 1997 — The Hollywood film returned the wreck to mass youth memory and funded further submersible visits, blurring archive and spectacle.
- Memorials and lists — Belfast, Southampton, Halifax and New York keep named memorials. Halifax’s Fairview Lawn cemetery holds many recovered unidentified dead.
- Class parable — English teaching often uses the boat deck as a diagram of Edwardian inequality, sometimes at the expense of the ice-and-speed finding.
Money & scale
- Hull and business loss — White Star’s insured hull and the Olympic-class programme took a commercial blow; the line later merged into Cunard’s orbit.
- Limitation of liability — Limitation actions in the United States capped many claims against the owner, a pattern later industrial disasters would repeat.
- Exhibition and salvage markets — Late-century artefact tours and film rights created a heritage economy that courts and UNESCO now police as much as they celebrate.
The lasting impact is a treaty family and a story English-speaking culture never stopped retelling.
Public-record encyclopedia. Not legal advice. Not a how-to. Graphic detail is withheld. Wars belong in a separate atlas.