Titanic: The Artifact Exhibition

When you think of the Titanic, thoughts of Celine Dion’s “My Heart will Go On” and a Leonardo Di Caprio and Kate Winslet-style romance might come to mind. But while the story of that romance is fiction, Alexandra Klingelhofer knows the real stories behind the famous shipwreck. As vice president of collections for Premier Exhibitions and RMS Titanic Inc., Klingelhofer oversees exhibits like Titanic: The Artifact Exhibition, which is currently playing at Telus World of Science and will be until February 26.

Along with recreations of some of the rooms in the Titanic, the exhibit features actual artifacts recovered from the wreck site over the course of about twenty-five years. Klingelhofer says that since 1987, there have been seven different expeditions to the wreck site where RMS Titanic Inc. has uncovered over 5,500 artifacts.

Removing objects from a 1912 shipwreck isn’t easy. The objects need to be handled carefully and since the site is four kilometres below the ocean surface, it’s dark, dangerous and impossible to see without the right equipment. RMS Titanic Inc. has used a remotely operated vehicle (ROV), which Klingelhofer says is essentially a little robot with arms that are controlled from the ship. “There’s a fibre optic cable that goes from the ship all the way down to the ocean floor and the ROV operates with its own lighting system because it’s [normally] pitch black down there,” explains Klingelhofer. The robot arms lift artifacts into a basket and then they are brought up to the surface.

A submarine has also been used to recover items from the Titanic. And in 2010, RMS Titanic Inc. was able to see a much broader picture of the site using sonar, acoustic and optical technology. “No one had actually looked at the site as an entirely, it was only piecemeal because that’s all that the technology allowed for. But in 2010, we were able to map the site using sonar. So, we can cover a three by five mile area … get more or less the correct size for it and identify the two parts of the ship and all the parts that have come part when the ship came apart,” says Klingelhofer. 

At Titanic: The Artifact Exhibition you can see recreations of different rooms within the ship. Artistic drawings garnered from the ship company that built the Titanic, Harland and Wolff — an Irish company which still exists and focuses mainly on off-shore construction — helped designers of the exhibit to accurately recreate the size and style of rooms, like the first- and third-class cabins.

A recreation of the a third class cabin from Titanic: The Artifact Exhibition.

But there’s also the personal side behind the tragedy. By looking at the different objects left behind, anthropologists can piece together the stories of the people who owned them, according to Klingelhofer. And many of the items were found in leather suitcases, which means that postcards, pieces of clothing, jewellery and even a collection of perfume vials were recovered in pristine condition at the bottom of the sea floor, an unusual situation when it comes to artifacts nearly 100 years old.

Klingelhofer says that everything tells a story, even recovered plates. Plates made of a special surface of gold and cobalt blue would probably only have been used in the first-class stateroom while the plain white third-class china helps show the division between society on the Titanic.

A recreation of a first class cabin featured at Titanic: The Artifact Exhibition.

Sometimes, even just a piece of paper can tell a huge amount about one of the passengers. George Rosenshine was a man who died on the ship and excavators came across his receipts. Based on his documents, he was an importer and exporter of exotic items like ostrich features with his brothers in New York. He’d been travelling around the world for a year collecting items for his business.

But the personal stories of passengers on the Titanic are weaved through the exhibit in an even more concrete way. Prior to entering the exhibit, you’re given a boarding pass, which includes the name and a short history of someone who actually boarded the ship. “At the end of the exhibition, you’re presented with a memorial wall, which will tell you who perished and who survived, providing you with an immediate emotional link to that person. And it’s really a moving moment for a lot of people,” says Klingelhofer.