Titanic's Sisters
Today, Titanic’s sisters. The University of Houston presents this series about the machines that make our civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity created them.
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We’ve heard so much about the ill-fated Titanic, on the way to New York and grazing an iceberg when its captain should have been far more cautious. But Titanic was just the second of a set of triplets – three so-called Olympic-Class ocean liners built for the White Star Line in nineteen eleven, twelve, and fifteen. So I think it’s time that we got to know her sisters.
The older Olympic was the almost-identical sister of the Titanic. They timed her maiden voyage to New York with Titanic’s launching. She was then the largest ship afloat. Yet, she had her troubles – rammed by a British cruiser on her fifth voyage, and had to lay up for repairs. A lost propeller blade laid her up again, until just before Titanic’s maiden voyage.
Olympic arriving in New York
When Titanic went down, Olympic was returning from New York and heard her distress call. But she was too far away to help. After that, the White Star line immediately equipped her with enough lifeboats for all its passengers. But collapsible ones, some of which were rotten and wouldn’t open.
Still more improvements, and Olympic took to the sea again. Then World War I began, and they converted her to a camouflaged troop ship. She carried over two-hundred thousand troops during the war. Then returned to civilian service until 1935.
But we remember the ill-fated Titanic and forget her proud sister, the Olympic. What then of the third sister, the Britannic? She was built to surpass her sisters. Significantly larger. And she would certainly have, built in, all the safety features that Titanic lacked and Olympic had to retrofit.
But, like the Titanic, Britannic’s history was to be short-lived. Well not as short-lived as the Titanic’s. But let us trace her odd history: They launched her just before war broke out. And war intervened before her outfitting had been done. They immediately converted her into a hospital ship. And she served in that role for only a year. Returning wounded from the Aegean Sea.
Britannic as a hospital ship
Then she returned to be refitted once again as a passenger liner. But, three months later, she was again haled back into service as a hospital ship. Three months later, she struck a mine in the Aegean Sea. She sank faster than Titanic had. Yet most of those on board survived.
Like the Titanic, divers have found Britannic’s remains. Oddly, one of its interesting survivors was an elaborate pipe organ that never got to be installed. It now graces a Swiss museum.
Britannic’s never-installed pipe organ
But of the three sisters, only Olympic got to die a natural death. They auctioned off her elegant furnishings, then converted the rest of her to scrap metal – fated to live again in some new machine that we will never know.
I’m John Lienhard, at the University of Houston, where we’re interested in the way inventive minds work.
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Some sources:
Olympic-class ocean liner - Wikipedia
MaritimeQuest - HMHS Britannic (1914) Builder's Data
All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
This Episode first aired November 2, 2026.