On April 15, 1912, the unsinkable Titanic fell to the ocean floor. Today,
hundreds of recovered objects tell the story of that tragic night and
the souls that were lost to the sea. Here are 13 of the most fascinating.
Sitting on the ocean floor, 12,500 feet below the surface, the Titanic is very fragile. The metal of
the ship itself is being eaten away by deep-sea bacteria that leave behind crumbling rusticles.
"Stalactites of rust dangle from the ship,
so fragile they crumble into a cloud of dust if disturbed."
This makes the idea of raising the whole ship little more than a fantasy.
But pieces of the ship have made it to the surface. In 1998, salvage company RMS Titanic,
Inc. pulled up a 15-ton section of the wreck, covered with debris and sea life.
An attempt two years earlier failed when a cable snapped mid-recovery.
RMS Titanic, Inc. was granted sole rights to draw artifacts from the wreck site in 1994 but was
required to stabilize them and forbidden from selling anything. As a result, the Big Piece,
as it became known, was cleaned and covered with a protective coating before it went on exhibit in
Las Vegas. Today, it's on display in Titanic: The Artifact Exhibition at the Luxor Hotel & Casino.
The first-class plates and teacups recovered from the wreckage of the Titanic are beautiful,
made from fine china and decorated with gold and expensive blue cobalt.
It's easy to imagine a fancy lady and her industrialist husband dining off of these.
Second-class passengers aboard the Titanic were also doing all right in the world. However,
once cleaned of the deepwater muck, the second-class plates salvaged
from the wreck are far less ornate. Their blue floral pattern is nice,
to be sure, but doesn't compare to the delicate beauty of the first-class set.
Third-class passengers and crew members had no illusions about their place in the Titanic
hierarchy. They, too, ate off dedicated plates, but these were far from the fine,
hand-painted dinnerware of first-class passengers. Plates salvaged from the
Titanic reveal that third-class passengers and crew were served
on simple white sets stamped with the red logo of the White Star Line.
The menu for the final first-class meal served aboard the Titanic on April 14, 1912, survived in
the purse of Ruth Dodge, wife of California banker Dr. Washington Dodge. Dr. Dodge had been receiving
medical treatment in France and his small family was returning to America aboard the liner.
The Dodges would have been able to pick from a vast array of foods for
their luncheon. These included fussy Edwardian options like eggs Argenteuil,
which came with delicate asparagus tips, and bologna sausage. Hopefully, someone was
availing themselves of the extensive selection of cheese and a nice tankard of Munich lager,
as, unbeknownst to them, it would have been their last chance to indulge before the tragedy.
Ruth, Washington, and their four-year-old son, Washington Dodge Jr., all survived the sinking.
One of the most iconic images of the Titanic tragedy is the ship's band standing on deck,
playing tunes like the hymn "Nearer, my God, to thee" to keep everyone calm. Titanic
survivors confirmed that the band played nearly to the end, though some remembered
them playing a more cheerful waltz or newfangled ragtime to keep spirits up.
"Till the end, I heard them play, you know, 'Nearer, My God, to Thee.'"
Wallace Hartley played violin in the band, and his instrument survived. It was given to
Hartley by his fiancée, Maria Robinson, who watched her husband-to-be set off for a gig
on the Titanic ahead of their June 1914 wedding. Hartley died in the shipwreck,
but his body was recovered. An inventory of the effects found with him doesn't include the violin,
though Robinson later wrote that she was grateful to have received it. After Robinson died in 1939,
the instrument went through a series of owners until it was found in an attic in 2004.
Testing confirmed that it was indeed Hartley's violin. Seawater had left
salt deposits and two significant cracks in the body of the instrument. On October 19,
2013, it was auctioned for £900,000 to a private owner. Adjusted for inflation to
2023 values, the violin sold for the equivalent of more than $1.2 million.
In 1987, salvagers brought up a rose gold, silver,
and diamond bracelet bearing the name "Amy." The leather bag it was found in protected it from
seawater as well as the microorganisms that devoured other Titanic relics.
"The natural process of tanning a leather creates
an antibacterial situation so it prevents deterioration."
But who was Amy? It wasn't a common name at the time, at least amongst Titanic passengers. Records
indicate that there were only two women by that name on the voyage, although it could have been a
nickname for another passenger with a similar name. In Titanic: Women and Children First,
author Judith Gellar theorizes that the bracelet's owner may have been Amy Stanley, a third-class
passenger who survived the sinking. However, it would be an oddly fine bit of jewelry for
someone with a low-cost ticket, and Stanley isn't known to have mentioned a lost diamond bracelet.
To date, no one has been able to definitively identify the mysterious bracelet-bearing Amy.
The environment in which the Titanic currently lies is subject to strong deep water currents
and microbes that consume metal. So, it's remarkable that several delicate glass
perfume vials survived the trip from the ocean's surface to the sea floor, and back up again.
In the summer of 2000, a salvage crew recovered a small leather pouch from
the wreck. When they brought the bag into a shipboard laboratory, they smelled floral
perfume. They eventually found three bags containing perfume samples in the wreckage.
The satchels were labeled with the name of Adolphe Saalfeld, a German Jewish perfumer. Saalfeld,
a first-class passenger, was carrying 65 vials of sample scents intended for American clients.
Saalfeld survived, but his product went down with the ship. They have a second life,
however. The surviving scents formed the basis for the Titanic Legacy 1912 fragrance sold on QVC.
In 2017, a waterlogged letter sold for £126,000, or the equivalent of $160,000. Of course,
this was no ordinary bit of mail. Not only had the letter in question come from the Titanic,
but, remarkably, someone managed to fish the still-legible document from the ocean
and eventually delivered it to its intended recipient.
The actual content of the letter, dated just a day before the disaster, isn't especially interesting.
The writer, Alexander Oscar Holverson, was a businessman traveling home to New
York with his wife, Mary. Writing to his mother, Holverson commented on the grand size of the ship.
"He wrote, 'If all goes well, we will arrive in New York on Wednesday."
He also noted that the immensely rich John Jacob Astor IV deigned to sit on the deck
just like normal folk — at least, the ones who could spring for a first-class ticket.
Astor and Holverson both died in the disaster, but their wives survived.
"The whole world stood still that night.
Once the lights had gone, the ship had gone, the sound had gone… oh, it was dreadful."
When Holverson's remains were recovered, the letter was found on his body. Even
though it lacked postage and was damaged by seawater, it was delivered to his mother.
Though it may not be the most glamorous item recovered from the Titanic wreck,
one of the doomed ship's deck bells still carries plenty of historic weight. This humble bronze bell
was part of the lookout station on the forward part of the ship. This is where Lookout Frederick
Fleet would have first spotted the iceberg that would so critically damage the Titanic. He rang
the bell three times to alert the bridge crew of the looming danger, though calm waters and a dark,
moonless night meant that Fleet didn't spot the iceberg until it was dangerously close.
The bell and Fleet's shout of "Iceberg, right ahead!" couldn't avert disaster.
"When you're traveling at 21 or 22 knots, and you see iceberg,
dead ahead, there wasn't enough time to turn."
Fleet survived the Titanic's sinking and lived until 1965. His bell, however,
went down with the ship until it was recovered in the late 1980s.
The Titanic's Grand Staircase is the stuff of legend. It features prominently in director
James Cameron's 1997 mega-hit film, Titanic, and a recreation of the Grand Staircase has pride
of place in the Titanic: The Artifact Exhibition installation in Las Vegas.
But we don't know what the Grand Staircase really looked like.
Surviving photos are actually of the staircase from Titanic's sister ship,
the Olympic. Given the design similarities between the two vessels, it's probably close
enough. It certainly was for Cameron, who used the Olympic photos for his movie's set design. Yet,
given that the Grand Staircase was either damaged during the sinking or collapsed
into ruin at the shipwreck site, we can't say whether Cameron and his team got it right.
But there are pieces of the Grand Staircase that may have survived. Salvagers recovered a
bronze cherub statue like one that would have adorned a first-class staircase,
though some researchers suggest that this particular figure came from another,
smaller stairway. This carving may bear the marks of the ship's harrowing descent,
as its missing left foot may have popped off when the statue was wrenched from its post.
As a milliner, Marion Meanwell must have understood fashion. Sure, she was a third-class
passenger on the Titanic, but making hats was her business. She may have intended to
continue that work in the United States, given the stylish alligator-skin bag she was carrying,
which included a reference noting that Meanwell always paid her rent on time.
Unfortunately, she didn't survive the sinking. However, many decades later, salvagers recovered
her still-intact alligator purse from the Titanic debris field. When they opened it,
they discovered not only the landlord's endorsement but also her marriage license.
These fragile documents survived in part because the damaged ship
and its contents settled in the deep, dark ocean, far from light or oxygen.
Meanwell's high-quality bag, made of thick hide, also helped preserve its contents.
Recovered from the wreck site shortly after the liner went down, this unassuming key
carries a tag reading "Locker 14 F Deck." It was found on the remains of Sidney Sedunary,
a young third-class steward, and indicates that Sedunary would have
been on the F Deck at some point on the night of the Titanic disaster. Auctioneer
Andrew Aldridge went so far as to call Sedunary a hero, telling the BBC that:
"Without a doubt [he saved lives]. Here's a man who sacrificed his life to save others."
Although there's no eyewitness testimony to any particular acts of heroism on Sedunary's part,
there's no denying that this small locker key is a part of history. In 2016, the key sold for a
staggering £85,000. Adjusted for inflation, that comes out to about $140,889 in 2023.
Though there's scant evidence that sturdy suitcases or well-traveled valises did
much to help people in a practical sense on the night of the sinking,
these everyday objects have done much to preserve the history of the Titanic and
the people who booked passage on it. Take the suitcase of William Henry Allen, which helped to
preserve quite a few of his personal effects even though Allen, a toolmaker, died in the sinking.
Allen was quite stylish, owner of a polka-dot scarf and leather dress boots. His suitcase
also preserved about 150 documents, though the luggage had been submerged for many years.
Inside the suitcase, salvagers also found a wool vest owned by Allen, with its buttons still in
place despite passing through about two and a half miles of icy ocean water to the ocean floor.
In 1987, salvagers brought up a leather bag full of jewelry from the wreck site.
The night of the sinking, the bag was almost certainly one of many such
containers under the protection of the ship's pursers, crewmembers who were in
charge of handling money and safekeeping passengers' valuables. Pursers worked to
place the bags on lifeboats, but clearly, they didn't all make it to shore in 1912.
A century later, the jewels in this particular bag were part of a glittering exhibit of Titanic
valuables. They include a unique necklace made with gold nuggets. No one's sure who it belonged
to, but speculation has landed on Margaret Brown, otherwise known as the "Unsinkable Molly Brown."
"Here comes that vulgar Brown woman." "Quickly, get up before she sits with us."
Besides being the child of working-class immigrants who made it as a socialite and
philanthropist, she was the wife of mining magnate J.J. Brown, who could have given her the necklace.