Just 20 minutes short of midnight, April 14, 1912, the great new White Star Liner Titanic, making her maiden voyage from Southampton to New York, had a rendezvous with ice in the calm, dark waters of the North Atlantic. She brushed the berg so gently that nearly all of the passengers slept through it (Tribute to the RMS Titanic). A look at the Titanic's catastrophic disaster at sea some 85 years ago, the world has been captivated by the "unsinkable" ship's history, from the birth of the idea to the aftermath of the crash and sinking. By the turn of the nineteenth century, the race to build the largest and fastest steamship was in full swing. The two leading se