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Building Titanic
Harland and Wolff employed thousands of men, with over 15,000 working on Titanic alone. The men worked six days a week with a half an hour for lunch each day. Many jobs involved working with steel including welders, riveters, platers and plumbers. Carpenters worked with wood to design things like cabinets and staircases, while architects designed the ship in their offices.
Titanic was built in a graving or dry dock. This is a large enclosed dock with all of the water taken out so that workers can easily move around the outside of a ship. Harland and Wolff had three of them - Hamilton, Alexandra and Thompson. Thompson Dock was the largest and was designed to accommodate Titanic. You can still visit it today.
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Titanic Dock Today
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The architect of Titanic and its sister ships Olympic and Britannic was Alexander Carlisle. The designer was born in Ballymena and is generally thought to have been responsible for much of the internal design of the ships. Having retired in 1910, Thomas Andrews took over from Carlisle.
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Nearly every structural part of the ship as well as many of their fixtures and fittings was designed and made on-site.
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Alexander Carlisle
Thomas Andrews
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Work begins.
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The first step in building the biggest ship in the was to construct the strongest hull. Steel plates covered the structure to create the hull, or outer shell. The plates were held together using steel rivets. Over 3 million rivets were used in the building of the Titanic. Four person teams used long hammers to beat the rivets into place. They were paid based on how many rivets they fitted making this very competitive work between the different teams.
Rivet
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A record of 12,000 rivets hammered in one week was set in 1909. The noise from the shipyard was deafening as thousand of men hammered steel and rivets into place all day every day for months.
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Workers adding rivets to bind the steel plates together.Loading...
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Titanic was constructed with sixteen watertight compartments. Each compartment had doors that were designed to close automatically if the water level rose above a certain height. The doors could also be electronically closed from the bridge. Titanic was able to stay afloat if any two compartments or the first four became flooded.Loading...
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There were twenty-four double ended boilers and five single ended boilers which were housed in six boiler rooms. Each boiler was the height of a three storey house and contained three or six furnaces to burn the coal that heated water flowing through a network of pipes.
The steam that was created powered the engines, generated electricity, supplied the refrigeration plant and heated the ships’ public rooms and second and third class cabins. Smoke and waste gasses were expelled through three funnels.
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The Boilers on board Titanic
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Titanic’s four funnels were constructed away from the site and were then transported to the shipyard for putting on the Titanic. Only three of the funnels were used to expel smoke and waste gasses. The fourth was added to make the ship look more powerful.
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The ship was propped up in a dry dock while the propellors were fitted and the outside painted. Meanwhile, inside the ship, thousands of workers toiled around the clock to equip and furnish Titanic. Titanic had three propellers which were powered by steam. The rotation of the propellers powered the ship through the sea.
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Titanic’s Giant Propellors