Titanic - The Artifact Exhibition

Panama City Beach, FL - On an evening in July, 1907 a couple of friends, J. Bruce Ismay and Lord James Pirrie, made plans over dinner to dominate the transatlantic travel business by building three very large and very fast ships to transport passengers. One of those ships would be named “Titanic”, a British Olympic class passenger steamship of unsurpassed luxury and the largest of its kind in the world at the time. It measured just short of three (3) football fields in length and was built to hold 2,435 passengers, 900 crew members and literally tons of food and rations. Titanic was built to be “unsinkable”, considering all of the new technology put into its construction.

The first warning came at 1:45 pm, the second at 9:30 pm and a third at 10:55 pm, and at 11:40 pm the unsinkable Titanic struck an iceberg and was completely under water by early morning April 15, 1912.

Imagine the excitement of boarding the Titanic for its maiden voyage with its captain, a retiring Edward J. Smith. Whether you were booked in first, second, or third class, you were in for the voyage of the century. The Titanic left port April 10, 1912 and just four (4) days into its voyage the captain began to get iceberg warnings. The first warning came at 1:45 pm, the second at 9:30 pm and a third at 10:55 pm, and at 11:40 pm the unsinkable Titanic struck an iceberg and was completely under water by early morning April 15, 1912 with 1523 passengers dead and only 705 surviving.

This summer re-live the voyage and sinking of the Titanic by walking among the more than 125 surviving artifacts at the Visual Arts Center of Northwest Florida. Come aboard ship and navigate through the exhibit as one of the passengers and feel what it was like to live aboard ship. Whether you travel as the richest on the ship, Colonel John Jacob Astor IV and his young (18 yr. old) bride in first class or as a third class passenger, you will be thoroughly amazed by the exhibit. And at the end of the exhibit you will learn if you survived the worst peacetime maritime disaster in history.

Titanic, the Artifact Exhibit is now sailing at the Visual Arts Center of Northwest Florida in Panama City, FL through September 3, 2007.