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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.
There was no criminal trial of the dead captain. The investigations were a Senate hearing and a Board of Trade wreck inquiry.
Both sat while bodies were still being recovered and while White Star’s officers were available as witnesses.
Agencies
- US Senate subcommittee — First public inquiry, 19 April–25 May 1912, chaired by Senator William Alden Smith.
- British Wreck Commissioner — Formal investigation under the Merchant Shipping Acts, Lord Mersey, 2 May–30 July 1912.
- Board of Trade — Set the 26 questions, supplied assessors and faced conflict-of-interest criticism for judging its own boatage rules.
- White Star / Marconi / Cunard — Company and wireless records, plus Carpathia’s rescue log, were compelled or volunteered as exhibits.
What followed
- Hold the witnesses
Smith boarded Carpathia’s arrival story and issued subpoenas so Ismay and officers could not leave the United States at once.
- Map the ice field
Both courts collected ice messages and other ships’ positions to show that the hazard was known on 14 April.
- Time the flooding
Andrews’s reported inspection, pump orders and the two-hour-forty-minute sink time were reconstructed from officers.
- Count the boats
Loading order, underfilled davits and the legal boatage table became the political core of both reports.
- Examine Californian
Captain Stanley Lord’s stopped ship and unread rockets were treated as a near-miss rescue, not as the cause of the wreck.
- Recommend statute
Continuous wireless, boats for all, rocket discipline and ice patrol moved from recommendation to 1912–14 law.
Turning points
- Carpathia at New York — The 18 April landing created a press crush and gave Smith a living witness list before memories hardened in Liverpool.
- Mersey’s speed finding — The 30 July report refused a design-defect escape hatch and pinned the casualty on navigation in ice.
- 1985 wreck images — The broken hull ended folk claims of a single intact dive and opened a second, archaeological file.
The investigations were fast, public and incomplete on steerage lives — and still sufficient to change Atlantic law.
Public-record encyclopedia. Not legal advice. Not a how-to. Graphic detail is withheld. Wars belong in a separate atlas.