Four days into her maiden voyage from Southampton to New York, the 'unsinkable' Titanic grazed an iceberg that buckled steel plates along 300 feet of her starboard hull. Water flooded six of sixteen watertight compartments. Captain Edward Smith ordered lifeboats loaded, but there were seats for barely half the roughly 2,224 people aboard, foreshadowing the disaster to come in the early hours of April 15.
Lookout Frederick Fleet spotted the iceberg from the crow's nest and rang the warning bell three times, but the massive ship, traveling near 22 knots, couldn't turn fast enough. The collision itself felt minor to many passengers below deck — a shudder, a grinding sound — and few grasped the danger immediately.
Designer Thomas Andrews, aboard for the maiden voyage, inspected the damage and told Captain Smith the ship had perhaps two hours left. His calculation proved almost exactly right. The 'watertight' compartments weren't sealed at the top, so water simply cascaded from one to the next as the bow sank deeper, like water filling an ice-cube tray.
The ship carried only 20 lifeboats, enough for 1,178 people, less than half of everyone aboard, because contemporary regulations based capacity on ship tonnage rather than passenger count. The band famously kept playing as the situation grew dire. By the time the Titanic broke apart and slipped beneath the waves in the early hours of April 15, over 1,500 people were dead, making it one of the deadliest peacetime maritime disasters in history and prompting sweeping reforms in maritime safety law.