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Titanic
Titanic
Season 8
Airdate April 3, 2012
Curriculum Social Studies
Engineering & Tech

Titanic is the Engineering and Technology/Social Studies video of BrainPOP. It was made to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Titanic. It launched April 3, 2012.

Summary[]

Moby, Little Jimmy, the Rap-bot, the Jazz-bot, a Hill robot, and the Cycloids are watching a robot version of the movie Titanic. They all cry out oil. Tim walks in with a chef hat telling them to keep it down because a soufflé is cooking, and Tim finds out their having another Titanic crying party, and Jazz-Bot spits out a letter about the Titanic. Tim and Moby talk about the Titanic. At the end; the robots are too busy to listen since they are texting.

Appearances[]

Transcript[]

Quiz[]

FYI[]

Arts And Entertainment[]

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From 1998 to 2010, the most successful movie of all time was Titanic, about two young lovers and their adventures aboard the RMS Titanic. Written, produced, and directed by filmmaker James Cameron, it made $1.8 billion worldwide at the box office, was the top-grossing movie in America for 15 straight weeks, and won eleven Oscars, including Best Picture.

In the movie, Leonardo DiCaprio plays a starving young artist who wins a ticket aboard the ship in a poker game. Kate Winslet is a daughter of privilege engaged to marry a wealthy, obnoxious stockbroker. In spite of their differences, they fall in love.

The story is framed by the tale of a modern-day explorer (Bill Paxton) who hopes to find a priceless diamond amid the ship’s wreckage. Although most characters are fictional, a number of historical personages appear in the film, including Titanic’s real-life captain, builder, and officers.

Titanic cost $200 million to make, which was a record budget during the 1990s. It required the building of a tank that could hold 17 million gallons of water, a full-scale model of the ship, and a 160-foot tall crane that allowed Cameron to film dramatic, sweeping shots.

According to the stars, Cameron acted like a dictator on set, earning a reputation as “the scariest man in Hollywood.” In fact, one crew member grew so enraged that he poisoned Cameron’s soup! But it all paid off in the end—both when the film made ridiculous amounts of money, and when Cameron won the Best Director Oscar, shouting “I’m king of the world!” to an auditorium full of studio executives who doubted his vision (pictured).

It took 12 years for Titanic’s box office success to be surpassed—by Cameron’s next film, Avatar.

Myths[]

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Myth: When it sank, Titanic was attempting to set a record for fastest crossing of the Atlantic Ocean, and its high rate of speed meant it could not avoid the iceberg.

Fact: Titanic was never intended to set any kind of speed record. Its top speed was around 23 knots (27 mph), much slower than the Lusitania and the Mauretania, two ships built by the rival Cunard Line.

Myth:The iceberg ripped an enormous, 300-foot gash in Titanic’s hull.

Fact: It didn’t. As the iceberg scraped down Titanic’s starboard side, it buckled the steel plates that formed the hull, allowing water to leak in through the seams between the plates.

Myth: Titanic was advertised as “unsinkable.”

Fact: It was actually advertised as “practically unsinkable.”

Myth: J. Bruce Ismay, the chairman and managing director of the White Star Line, was a coward because he survived the Titanic disaster.

Fact: Ismay helped load several lifeboats, and only jumped into one as it was being loaded, and no other passengers were around. According to the official inquiry by the British Board of Trade, had Ismay not gotten into the lifeboat, “he would simply have added one more life, namely his own, to the number of those lost.” Although despised in America for saving himself at the expense of others, he was given a hero’s welcome when he returned to Britain.

Famous Faces[]

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One of the most noteworthy passengers on the Titanic was Margaret Brown, the wife of a wealthy Colorado mining magnate. Known as Maggie to her friends, she nevertheless went down in history as “The Unsinkable Molly Brown.”

She was born in Hannibal, MO to Irish immigrant parents in 1867, and married a struggling engineer named JJ Brown in Leadville, CO, in 1886. Soon, JJ’s expertise proved important in the extraction of a major mineral deposit, and the couple became extremely wealthy. They moved to Denver, where Maggie became a society wife, raising money for various causes and becoming fluent in French, German, and Russian. She even ran for the U.S. Senate in 1909! Although she and JJ had separated by this time, they remained close friends.

When Titanic sank, Margaret Brown was loaded into Lifeboat #6, which was commanded by Robert Hichens, one of the ship’s officers. According to all accounts, Hichens acted terribly. The women onboard wanted to row toward the scene of the sinking and look for survivors to pick up, but Hichens forbade it, claiming they’d only find “stiffs.”

Brown tried to grab the tiller from Hichens. He swore at her, and she threatened to throw him overboard. Afterward, he allowed Brown to take charge, and she encouraged the women onboard to row around the area looking for survivors. Unfortunately, they didn’t find any.

Nevertheless, Margaret Brown’s legend was cemented. She became famous, and used her name to promote causes she believed in, like education and literacy for children. She died in 1932, and a musical loosely based on her life story became a Broadway hit in 1960 and a successful movie in 1964.

Trivia[]

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    “RMS” stands for “Royal Mail Ship.” Since mail needs to be delivered on time, an “RMS” before a ship’s name was like a guarantee that it wouldn’t be delayed.
  • The Titanic was so big, it had its own daily newspaper! The Atlantic Daily Bulletin, printed on the ship, included news, sports, gossip, and of course, the menu for that day.
  • Each of Titanic’s two main engines were the size of a three-story house and consumed close to one million pounds of coal per day. 3,000 people labored for two years to build them.
  • Titanic’s chief baker, Charles John Joughin, was the last man to leave the ship. After the ship began to tilt downward, he climbed onto the outside of the rear railing, the part farthest from the water. Joughin’s perch was the last part of the ship to go under, and he stepped off it only at the last possible moment. Amazingly, he floated in the freezing water for hours before a lifeboat picked him up. He died of pneumonia… more than 40 years later, at the ripe old age of 78.
  • Among those lucky enough to make it to the Titanic’s lifeboats were two dogs, a Pomeranian and a Pekingese. Seven other dogs were lost at sea.
  • Almost a decade before the Titanic had even been designed, an American author named Morgan Robertson wrote a novel called Futility. In it, a British passenger ship called the Titan sinks after hitting an iceberg in the North Atlantic in April. Like its real-life counterpart, the novel’s ship is considered unsinkable, and lacks enough lifeboats for everyone onboard.

Did You Know?[]

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Did you know that the final resting spot of the Titanic remained a mystery for 70 years? For decades after the ship's 1912 sinking, teams of scientists and scavengers searched for it, only to return empty-handed.

Things changed when American oceanographer Robert Ballard joined the hunt. He helped develop imaging technology that let him conduct more sophisticated underwater investigations. Funded largely by the U.S. Navy, Dr. Ballard’s 1985 expedition set out to discover history’s most famous shipwreck. He had always been fascinated by the Titanic, calling it the "Mount Everest of my world."

The Navy, on the other hand, had its own motives for supporting Ballard's work. Years earlier, at the height of the Cold War, two U.S. nuclear submarines had disappeared. Naval intelligence hoped Ballard’s innovative equipment could finally track them down. The submarines were eventually found, giving Ballard some practice runs for his primary mission. This initial experience taught him how to find sunken craft by following their debris trails.

Ballard had also designed an unmanned submersible that he named Argo. Using a two-mile cable hooked up to monitors, Argo could transmit incredibly clear images of the ocean floor all the way up to the surface. It also carried cameras pointed in almost every direction. Meanwhile, powerful lamps drenched the ocean floor in light.

On the morning of September 1, 1985, the Argo's screens lit up with images of a giant boiler, half-buried in the sand. Ballard had found his Everest. He returned to the site a year later to document the wreckage using robotic subs. They photographed the hull, the liner's grand staircase, and even the majestic chandeliers still suspended in the ship's eerily silent halls.

Ballard refused to remove anything from the Titanic, claiming that would make him no better than a grave-robber. Those who followed him were not as respectful. Over the years, scavengers have stripped massive amounts of material from the sunken ship. Its iconic whistle even toured the world as part of a 1999 traveling exhibition!

In Depth[]

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Like many passenger ships of its day, the RMS Titanic’s hull was divided into separate compartments. Each compartment was supposed to be watertight: If there was a leak in one, the water would stay put. Only that compartment would flood, and the ship could stay afloat.

Titanic and her sister ships had sixteen such compartments, more than any other vessel. The steel doors between compartments would slam shut automatically in the event of a leak. For these reasons, the press reported that Titanic was “practically unsinkable.”

In reality, the compartments on passenger ships weren’t really watertight. They were open at the top, kind of like a giant ice cube tray. That may seem like an obvious design flaw: With no ceiling, wouldn’t any leak fill up one compartment and pour over the top of its walls to the next one?

It depended on the size and location of the leak. If one compartment sprang a leak, seawater would flood in, but only until it reached the level of the surrounding ocean. The extra weight would pull the ship down a bit, but the water would stay confined to one compartment.

In other words, ship designers relied on the vessel’s natural buoyancy (ability to float). They could leave out the compartment ceilings, which would have made it more difficult for passengers to move about the ship’s interior.

Titanic was designed to withstand the flooding of up to four compartments. Unfortunately, its fateful collision with the iceberg opened up the first five compartments. As the front of the ship sank lower, water poured over the top of each compartment and flooded the compartment behind it.

It was only a matter of time—less than three hours—before the ship took on enough water to sink.

FYI Comic[]

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