The Titanic sank below an icy Atlantic 112 years ago.
But its story is as current as ever.
Certainly in auction rooms where the name of the White Star liner - arguably the most famous vessel in history - adds massive premiums to ordinary Edwardian items.
Titanic memorabilia is extremely valuable.
In the past few months a wrist watch and menu card made nearly £100,000 each at auction.
A violin case from the voyage is due to sell soon and is tipped for a £120,000 sale.
The memorial to Wallace Hartley, the Titanic's heroic band master.
The violin it once held has already set the record price for Titanic artefacts when it was sold for £1.1 million in 2013.
That makes it the most valuable item from the Titanic - so far.
Buy why does this story above all others continue to fascinate the general public and the collecting community in particular.
Here are 8 reasons why the Titanic fascinates collectors today:
1 - The Magnitude of the Tragedy
The sinking of RMS Titanic is not the deadliest maritime disaster in history.
At least two non-military shipping tragedies have claimed more lives.
But, the Titanic was a major event with a very large loss of life.
The known death toll is 1,513, making it a genuine mass-casualty event.
2 - The Irony of the Tragedy
The Titanic’s sinking caused major reform in maritime safety rules.
Yes, it wasn’t necessary for a passenger ship to have enough lifeboats to carry all its passengers to safety until the Titanic showed what happened when you didn’t have them.
And, new rules about radio communications were introduced too. Ships had to be able to man their telegaphs at all times after 1912.
If you ask most people about the Titanic they will tell you one thing: it was unsinkable.
And that’s a major part of the Titanic’s pull on us - it shows our hubris, our belief we can defeat nature, fate, death.
And we failed.
3 - The Timing of the Tragedy
At any time in history this disaster would have caused a stir, but the Titanic came at the perfect moment for a mass market media story.
Telegraph wires were stringing out across the industrialised nations, allowing news to spread quickly.
And photography was becoming a mass medium.
This wasn’t a story of faceless names, but of people whose pictures you could see on the front of the new mass circulation newspapers.
The Titanic was one of the first modern news events.
4 - The location of the tragedy
The Titanic met its end between the two great powers of its age: The United Kingdom (or the British Empire) and the growing economic powerhouse of the United States.
The Atlantic was the superhighway of the commercial world in 1912.
In the 1880s the US economy first surpassed the UK’s. And in the decades that followed it became an imperial power in its own right.
The First World War, two years after the Titanic disaster, probably put the seal on the switch.
Among those on board were many fleeing Europe for economic reasons, or to escape persecution. They saw a brighter future on the west coast of the Atlantic.
Some made it through and found it.
There’s great poignancy in the watch belonging to Sinai Kantor sold recently for nearly $100,000. Its Hebrew numerals tell us why Sinai was leaving Russia. He drowned, but his wife Miriam survived to make it to Brooklyn, New York.
Six Chinese passengers who survived had no such chance, as the US’s racist Chinese Exclusion Act immediately slammed America’s doors shut on them.
The Titanic’s journey from Southampton to New York puts it squarely in the story of the United States’ ascension to become the world’s greatest super power.
Sinai Kantor's watch is a witness to history in so many ways.
5 - A society on a boat
The telling and retelling of the Titanic tale has made the brutal social hierarchy of the tragedy all the more clear.
It's very clearly the single element that storytellers want to focus on.
It was apparent as soon as the bodies were identified:
Second and third class men, women and children died at a much higher rate than their first-class counterparts.
These social stories were a key element in movies like A Night to Remember, in which White Star crew are shown locking steerage passengers below deck and physically fighting them to keep them away from their betters - and safety.
In 1997’s Titanic, Leonardo DiCaprio’s Jack must cross a class chasm to woo Kate Winslet’s Rose, from first class.
The Titanic tells us a story of wealth, privilege, and matching poverty and suffering and shows us that in the final analysis we're all the same.
It’s a compelling lesson.
6 - Love stories, heroes, and villains
Historical events last in the popular memory if they tell us stories.
The Titanic does that in so many ways.
There are heroes: the band that played on under the direction of Wallace Hartley, whose violin is the most valuable Titanic artefact.
And although those who paid less for their tickets were less well treated, the “women-and-children” first ethos of the time also led many men to stay on board knowing they would not survive.
John Astor was probably the wealthiest man in the world when he boarded the ship, but he didn't make it onto a lifeboat.
Married couple Isa and Isidor Strauss refused to be parted, and their acceptance of their fate is a remarkable example of courage and love that was picked out in Titanic in 1997.
Villains too: how careful was Captain Smith’s piloting of his ship? Did he listen to warnings about ice?
And what was White Star playing at? The company’s chairman, J Bruce Ismay, survived and has been painted - quite probably unfairly - as a particular demon of the affair.
The Titanic's wreck is a site of pilgrimage.
7 - Mystery
Conspiracy theories aren’t as new as we might like to think.
How did the unsinkable ship sink?
And where was the wreck?
There’s room in the story of the Titanic to fill in gaps in a number of mischievous or malignant (and often antisemitic) ways.
The wreck of the Titanic was discovered in 1985 after many attempts and a lot of fantastical proposals to raise it.
Hopefully that has put to rest the idea that the whole thing was faked.
The scene is now protected.
What lies under the waves?
Perhaps we’ll never know, but it’s believed that there may be hundreds of millions of pounds worth of jewellery lying in safes on the seabed.
There's plenty of reason to still wonder what might be discovered and that fascinates us.
8 - Artefacts
For collectors to have something to buy we need artefacts.
A good supply of them. But a limited one.
And the Titanic seems to have hit the sweet spot.
The threads from the disaster stretch out across Edwardian society in several countries.
A big trans-Atlantic liner was a major operation: it had to be designed, built, crewed, marketed… There’s a lot of material.
And much of it is now collectible.
Each person on board is a story: they had a ticket, clothes, jewellery, letters, passports….
Salvage missions (they were controversial and have now stopped) bought up a lot of items.
A wreck at sea scatters debris over a wide area, rescue ships picked up all sorts of detritus.
Everything connected to the Titanic is collectible, like this movie-set carpet.
The event's long afterlife in popular culture - particularly the movies - has given a whole new area for collectors to follow.
There's a great range of Titanic collectibles to explore.
Buying Titanic collectibles today
Titanic memorabilia can be valuable. The supply of items is not going to increase, and the demand shows no signs of slowing so it seems likely that it will increase in value .
Wallace Hartley’s violin remains the most valuable item from the Titanic yet sold. But even that simple paper menu made $102,000 at auction.
There is an appetite for these items.
The value of every item on the Titanic is incalculable. Thanks to insurance claims we know that large amounts of jewellery went down with the ship. Even a work of art, La Circassienne au Bain, by Merry-Joseph Blondel, which would be worth over £1 million in today’s money even with no Titanic collection.
You can buy and sell Titanic memorabilia through reputable dealers.
Make sure you seek out certificated items.
The Titanic’s sinking was a chaotic, tragic night and produced a large number of potential collectibles.
It’s very easy to try to fake a connection to the disaster and turn an ordinary 1910s item into something worth much more.
