RMS Titanic was the second of a trio of superliners intended to dominate the transatlantic travel business.[1]Her older sister was RMS Olympic. After Titanic's sinking, her younger sister HMHS Britannic (originally RMS Gigantic) was built. Owned by the White Star Line and built at the Harland and Wolff shipyard in Belfast, Ireland, United Kingdom, Titanic was the largest passenger steamship in the world at the time of her launching. During Titanic's maiden voyage (from Southampton to New York), she struck an iceberg at 11:40 PM (ship's time) on Sunday evening April 14, 1912, and sank two hours and forty minutes later at 2:20 AM Monday morning.

1,523 people perished in the accident, (according to the US Senate investigation), ranking it as one of the worst peacetime maritime disasters in history and by far the most famous. Titanic's design used some of the most advanced technology available at the time and the ship was popularly believed to be "unsinkable". It was a great shock that, despite the advanced technology and experienced crew, Titanic sank with a great loss of life. The media frenzy about Titanic's famous victims, the legends about what happened on board the ship, the resulting changes to maritime law, and the discovery of the wreck in 1985 by a team led by Robert Ballard and Jean-Louis Michel have made Titanic persistently famous in the years since.