Although some would argue that Noah's Ark is the world's most famous ship, that status now seems firmly to belong to the Titanic, which set sail on 12 April 1912 on her maiden voyage from England and sank after hitting an iceberg in the Atlantic three days later, with the loss of 1,513 lives. The cost of the ship, the largest to be built at the time, which now rests in numerous sections 4 km below the surface, is put at $400 million in today's terms.
Today of course, few people use ships for inter-continental travel as such, but there is now a major cruise ship industry and many of the ships dwarf the Titanic.
It seems superfluous to add to the media coverage there will be over the next week, except to say that as transport historians it is all quite pleasing.
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