That One Hundred Year Old Sinking Feeling

So for those of you who didn’t get enough of all the Titanic stuff leading up to the

centennial of its sinking on April 15, this is for you. The National Geographic Museum in Washington DC is hosting an exhibit developed in cooperation with filmmaker James Cameron called, Titanic: 100 Year Obsession. Cameron himself seems to have carried that very obsession for at least twenty of those hundred years, including numerous dives to explore the wreckage. There are no actual Titanic artifacts in this exhibit, but some of the material from Cameron’s movie and explorations and other material make for an engaging visit. You can see photos of the exhibit at the Huffington Post here.

RMS Titanic in 1912

One of the highlights is a beautifully executed eighteen foot model of the ship, which took Fine Art Models of Royal Oaks Michigan seven years to make; the Titanic itself was built in three. An elevated platform allows viewers to look down on the top deck of the model. Considering that there were over 2,000 passengers and crew, I found myself thinking that it really didn’t look like there were enough lifeboats, just looking at the ones positioned on the top deck.  And speaking of lifeboats, there is one of the full-sized replica lifeboats used in the movie that does give visitors some idea of their size. In the early stages of the disaster, the crewmen loading the boats were not allowing men, only women and children into the boats, and there was some thinking that the boats were just going to ferry the passengers to another ship they thought they had seen nearby. It meant that the life boats leaving the ship early in the disaster had lots of empty seats.

Further along is the fifteen foot model that James Cameron used to depict the rusting hulk of the Titanic as it looks now, sitting two miles at the bottom of the Atlantic. In a dark room with large backlit photos of the site of the wreckage, one gets some sense of the watery graveyard that it represents. Bacteria now eating away at the steel may turn the entire ship into a pile of rust in another couple of decades.

There are several screens in the exhibit showing video clips including one with Robert Ballard, who with a small group of French scientists found the wreck in 1985.

The exhibit doesn’t go into it, but one of the more recent theories dealing with the disaster has to do with the temperatures on the night of the collision having caused a cold-weather mirage which prevented the lookouts from seeing the iceberg until they were right on top of it. It might also explain why the California, or another ship that some on the Titanic claimed they saw, may have been much farther away than it seemed or why the captain of the California claimed the ship he saw was much smaller than the Titanic or why the ships were unable to communicate by signal lamp or why the flares the Titanic set off went unnoticed. No doubt there are more theories to come.

I think one of the reasons that the Titanic disaster is so compelling besides the sheer scale, is the idea that existed when it was built that due to the advances in design and technology, it was “virtually unsinkable.”  In our current day and age we find ourselves relying more and more on advanced technology that we trust won’t fail and will keep us safe. The events of April 1912 are sobering reminder that what we expect, doesn’t always hold up.

The exhibit runs through September 9, 2012. For more all-things Titanic, check out NatGeo’s dedicated website and for other DC area Titanic-related locations, click here.