It was Cameron’s movie that transformed the Titanic from a coterie phenomenon to a mass one. Since the late fifties there had been a core audience of Titanic buffs, sometimes dubbed ‘rivet counters’, who pored over deck plans and could rhyme off the launch times for all the lifeboats. But after Cameron’s blockbuster, it seemed as if everyone was a rivet counter. At school talks, eight-year-old boys would catch me up on the transverse bulkheads and the number of watertight compartments. Young girls knew all about the dogs on board. And at every book signing there was at least one person claiming that their great-grandparents were almost on the Titanic ––that they had booked tickets and then unaccountably changed their minds. Every Titanic historian I know reports hearing similar stories and it would take a thousand Titanic’s for them all to be true but I’ve stopped disabusing people of this notion. I find it touching that so many people wish to enshrine a connection to the Titanic, however apocryphal, in their family histories.
Hugh Brewster, on our enduring fascination with the mythology of the Titanic.
Source: The Wall Street Journal
