The RMS Titanic took to the seas as a source of wonder, an almost indescribable engineering feat, and statement of incredible luxury. Remember, passenger service across The Atlantic by air lay decades into the future. And now, early in the 20th century, came the great steam ships, with double magic–they were extremely fast, and extremely luxurious.
The highest level of opulence of course was limited to first-class passengers, but it was unprecedented.
“Two extraordinary first-class suites were constructed on B deck, one of them earmarked for J.P. Morgan. In addition to sumptuous state-room accommodations, these suites featured a spacious parlor and a promenade deck with half-timbered walls of the Elizabethan period; at the height of the season, the suites went for $4,350 one way (well over a hundred thousand in today’s money). On the same deck, a Parisian boulevard was added to the restaurant, giving the satisfying illusion of a French side-walk café.”
From: “The Titanic: End of a Dream” by Wyn Craig Wade
Truly it’s almost impossible, impossible to recreate the setting, the feeling of the times in which the first luxurious cities on water crossed the ocean. After all, that was then, and this is now, a very blasé time, when even the “incredible” almost bores us.
But it may have been the most incredible of all “thens,” back then, just a few decades into the scientific and industrial revolutions. It’s hard now to imagine growing up in towns in Europe, or the U.S., connected by slow horses and buggies to the next small town, but a decade or two later going to sleep on a train and waking up hundreds of miles away. And the same lad who rode the striking trajectory of the railroads, the electric light, the emerging automobile, could now contemplate crossing the ocean quickly and safely. Great new steamships, longer and taller than the eye could quite believe, made the slow and risky crossing by sailing ship seem like a thing of the past.
For a long time those with the need or the means to cross the Atlantic had often still hesitated to do so. As the English wit Samuel Johnson had said, the time crammed onto a ship’s hold crossing the sea was a bit like going to prison, but “with a chance to be drowned.” But that was all changing quickly in the first two decades of the twentieth century. The huge steamships were fast, so much bigger it seemed than waves and storms, and full of luxury. The week to ten days that a trip from Dublin to New York would take was barely enough time to sample all the restaurants in your floating hotel, to walk the promenades at all times of day and evening, to browse in the multiple libraries that the ship offered, or relax in the game rooms. Before you could be bored, you’d be on a new continent.
The Titanic, when it sailed on April 10, 1912, boasted a crew and staff of over 900, an army of employees, enough to staff one of the largest cities of the era. The scale of the ship echoed the scale of human aspiration in the new age. Anything was possible, limits were melting away when touched by the magic wand of science and industry.
The Titanic, one of the largest structures that man had ever built, could carry over 3,500 people. At 880 feet long and over 100 feet high, she was marketed by the owners as a super ship, a miracle of modern engineering. Dubbed by a Belfast Newspaper as “unsinkable,” Titanic was almost an Eighth Wonder of The World. First class passengers were wowed with mahogany lined rooms while steerage class passengers had dreams of new lives in America. Why wouldn’t you want to sail on something like that?