For decades after the disaster, there was little doubt about what sank the Titanic. When the "unsinkable" ship, the largest, most luxurious ocean liner of its time, crashed into an iceberg on its maiden voyage in 1912, it took more than 1,500 of its 2,200 passengers to the bottom. As the ship slipped into the North Atlantic, so, too, did the secret of how and why it sank.
Two government investigations conducted immediately after the disaster agreed it was the iceberg, not any weakness in the ship itself, that caused the Titanic to sink. Both inquiries concluded the vessel had gone to the bottom intact. Blame for the incident fell on the ship's deceased captain, E. J. Smith, who was condemned for racing at 22 knots through a known ice field in the dark waters off the coast of Newfoundland. The case of the Titanic was considered closed.
But lingering questions about what might have sunk the seemingly indestructible ship never completely disappeared. In 1985, when oceanographer Robert Ballard, after years of searching, finally located the ship's remains 2.5 miles down on the ocean bottom, he discovered that it had, in fact, broken in two on the surface before sinking. His findings made the Titanic rise again in the public imagination. Why had it cracked, experts wondered? If the official inquiries were wrong, was the invincible Titanic weak? A few years after Ballard discovered the wreck, the first pieces of the ship were brought to the surface, raising even more eyebrows when they seemed to offer physical evidence that low-quality steel might have caused the disaster. In 1997, James Cameron's film Titanic, largely mirroring the scientific consensus at the time, seared Titanic's terrifying last moments, with its stern soaring high into the air before it cracked in two and disappeared, into popular memory.
