During Titanic‘s construction, 246 injuries were recorded, 28 of them “severe”, such as arms severed by machines or legs crushed under falling pieces of steel. As a result, deaths and injuries were to be expected. For the 15,000 men who worked at Harland and Wolff at the time, safety precautions were rudimentary at best a lot of the work was dangerous and was carried out without any safety equipment like hard hats or hand guards on machinery. The work of constructing the ships was difficult and dangerous. A wireless aerial was slung between the masts. The ships’ lifeboats were carried on the Boat Deck, the uppermost deck. Standing above the decks were four funnels, though only three were functional – the last one was a dummy, installed for aesthetic purposes – and two masts, each 155 feet (47 m) high, which supported derricks for loading cargo. They accommodated the officers’ quarters, gymnasium, public rooms and first-class cabins, plus the bridge and wheelhouse. Eleven vertically closing watertight doors could seal off the compartments in the event of an emergency. The ships’ exposed decking was made of pine and teak, while interior ceilings were covered in painted granulated cork to combat condensation. The superstructure consisted of two decks, the Promenade Deck and Boat Deck, which were about 500 feet (150 m) long. The interiors of the Olympic-class ships were subdivided into sixteen primary compartments divided by fifteen bulkheads which extended well above the waterline. They were fitted using hydraulic machines or were hammered in by hand. Above that point they were laid in the “in and out” fashion, where strake plating was applied in bands (the “in strakes”) with the gaps covered by the “out strakes”, overlapping on the edges. Steel welding was still in its infancy so the structure had to be held together with over three million iron and steel rivets which by themselves weighed over 1,200 tons. The 2,000 hull plates were single pieces of rolled steel, mostly up to 6 feet (1.8 m) wide and 30 feet (9.1 m) long and weighing between 2.5 and 3 tons. Their thickness varied from 1.5 inches (3.8 cm) to 1 inch (2.5 cm). The plates were laid in a clinkered (overlapping) fashion from the keel to the bilge. ![]() They terminated at the bridge deck (B Deck) and were covered with steel plates which formed the outer skin of the ships. At the base of the ships, a double bottom 5 feet 3 inches (1.60 m) deep supported 300 frames, each between 24 inches (61 cm) and 36 inches (91 cm) apart and measuring up to about 66 feet (20 m) long. They were designed essentially as an enormous floating box girder, with the keel acting as a backbone and the frames of the hull forming the ribs. ![]() The construction of Titanic and Olympic took place virtually in parallel, with Olympic‘s hull laid down first on 16 December 1908 and Titanic‘s on 31 March 1909. Both ships took about 26 months to build and followed much the same construction process. A separate floating crane, capable of lifting 200 tons, was brought in from Germany. It accommodated a number of mobile cranes. ![]() The Arrol Gantry stood 228 feet (69 m) high, was 270 feet (82 m) wide and 840 feet (260 m) long, and weighed more than 6,000 tons. Their construction was facilitated by an enormous gantry built by Sir William Arrol & Co., a Scottish firm responsible for the building of the Forth Bridge and London’s Tower Bridge. Harland and Wolff had to demolish three existing slipways and build two newslipways, the biggest ever constructed up to that time, to accommodate the giant ships. ![]() The ships were constructed on Queen’s Island, now known as the Titanic Quarter, in Belfast Harbour. The sheer size of Titanic and her sister ships posed a major engineering challenge for Harland and Wolff no shipbuilder had ever before attempted to construct vessels of this size.
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