title: Telegram (software)

text: Telegram Messenger is a globally accessible freemium, cross-platform, encrypted, cloud-based and centralized instant messaging (IM) service. This application also provides optional end-to-end encrypted chats, popularly known as secret chat and video calling, VoIP, file sharing and several other features. It was launched for iOS on 14 August 2013 and Android on 20 October 2013. The servers of Telegram are distributed worldwide with five data centers in different parts of the world, while the operational center is based in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Various client apps are available for desktop and mobile platforms including official apps for Android, iOS, Windows, macOS, and Linux (although registration requires an iOS or Android device and a working phone number). There are also two official Telegram web twin apps, WebK and WebZ, and numerous unofficial clients that make use of Telegram's protocol. Telegram's official components are open source, with the exception of the server which is closed-sourced and proprietary.


title: Telegram (software)

text: Telegram provides optional end-to-end encrypted chats. Cloud chats and groups are encrypted between the client and the server, so that ISPs and other third-parties on the network can't access data. Users can send text and voice messages, make voice and video calls, and share an unlimited number of images, documents (2 GB per file), user locations, animated stickers, contacts, and audio files. Users can also follow channels.


title: Telegram (software)

text: In January 2021, Telegram surpassed 500 million monthly active users. It was the most downloaded app worldwide in January 2021 with 1 billion downloads globally as of late August 2021. Research suggests that the Telegram surge in January 2021 was driven partly by the deplatforming of Parler by big-tech firms.


title: Telegram (software)

text: In June 2022, Telegram surpassed 700 million monthly active users. The same month, Telegram Premium, an optional paid subscription with several extra features, was introduced.


title: Telegram (software)

text: Telegram has overtaken WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger to become the most popular instant messaging application in Belarus, Moldova, Jordan, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Cambodia, Ethiopia, Russia, and Ukraine.


title: Telegram (software)

text: Telegram was launched in 2013 by the brothers Nikolai and Pavel Durov. Previously, the pair founded the Russian social network VK, which they left in 2014, saying it had been taken over by government. Pavel Durov sold his remaining stake in VK and left Russia after resisting government pressure. Nikolai Durov created the MTProto protocol that is the basis for the messenger, while Pavel Durov provided financial support and infrastructure through his Digital Fortress fund. Telegram Messenger states that its end goal is not to bring profit, but it is not structured as a non-profit organization.


title: Telegram (software)

text: Telegram is registered as a company in the British Virgin Islands and as an LLC in Dubai. It does not disclose where it rents offices or which legal entities it uses to rent them, citing the need to "shelter the team from unnecessary influence" and protect users from governmental data requests. After Pavel Durov left Russia in 2014, he was said to be moving from country to country with a small group of computer programmers consisting of 15 core members. While a former employee of VK claimed that Telegram had employees in Saint Petersburg, Pavel Durov said that the Telegram team made Berlin, Germany its headquarters in 2014, but failed to obtain German residence permits for everyone on the team and moved to other jurisdictions in early 2015. Since 2017, the company has been based in Dubai. It has a complex corporate structure of shell companies to be ahead of government subpoenas.


title: Telegram (software)

text: Telegram apps receive monthly updates. Users can report apps' issues and recommend development ideas on the dedicated "Bugs and Suggestions" platform.


title: Telegram (software)

text: In October 2013, Telegram announced that it had 100,000 daily active users. On 24 March 2014, Telegram announced that it had reached 35 million monthly users and 15 million daily active users. In October 2014, South Korean governmental surveillance plans drove many of its citizens to switch to Telegram. In December 2014, Telegram announced that it had 50 million active users, generating 1 billion daily messages, and that it had 1 million new users signing up on its service every week, traffic doubled in five months with 2 billion daily messages. In September 2015, Telegram announced that the app had 60 million active users and delivered 12 billion daily messages.


title: Telegram (software)

text: In February 2016, Telegram announced that it had 100 million monthly active users, with 350,000 new users signing up every day, delivering 15 billion messages daily. In December 2017, Telegram reached 180 million monthly active users. In March 2018, Telegram reached 200 million monthly active users. On 14 March 2019, Pavel Durov claimed that "3 million new users signed up for Telegram within the last 24 hours." Durov did not specify what prompted this flood of new sign-ups, but the period matched a prolonged technical outage experienced by Facebook and its family of apps, including Instagram.


title: Telegram (software)

text: According to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the number of monthly Telegram users as of October 2019 is 300 million people worldwide.


title: Telegram (software)

text: On 24 April 2020, Telegram announced that it had reached 400 million monthly active users. On 8 January 2021, Durov announced in a blog post that Telegram had reached "about 500 million" monthly active users.


title: Telegram (software)

text: In August 2021, TechCrunch reported that India was Telegram's largest market with a 22% share of total installs coming from the region.


title: Telegram (software)

text: On 5 October 2021, Telegram gained over 70 million new users as a result of an outage which affected Facebook and its affiliates.


title: Telegram (software)

text: On 21 March 2022, Telegram usage share jumped to 63%, overtaking WhatsApp's usage share of 32% to become Russia's most popular messaging tool. On 19 June, Telegram announced that it had reached 700 million monthly active users.


title: Telegram (software)

text: Telegram accounts are tied to telephone numbers and are verified by SMS or phone call. In December 2022, an update introduced the ability to sign up without a SIM card, using an anonymous phone number purchased on the Fragment platform. Account creation requires an iOS or Android device regardless of the platform intended to be used. Users can add multiple devices to their account and receive messages on all of them. Connected devices can be removed individually or all at once. The associated number can be changed at any time and when doing so, the user's contacts will receive the new number automatically. In addition, a user can set up a username as an alias that allows them to send and receive messages without exposing their phone number. Telegram accounts can be deleted at any time and they are deleted automatically after six months of inactivity by default, which can optionally be changed from 1 month at the shortest up to 12 months at most with a range between. Users can replace exact "last seen" timestamps with broader messages such as "last seen recently".


title: Telegram (software)

text: The default method of authentication that Telegram uses for logins is SMS-based single-factor authentication. A one-time passcode that is sent via SMS to the user's phone number is required to log into the account by default. Users also have the option to create a password as a form of two-step verification.


title: Telegram (software)

text: Telegram allows groups, bots and channels with a verified social media or Wikipedia page to be verified but not user accounts.


title: Telegram (software)

text: Accounts of users who purchased Telegram's Premium subscription are marked with a star emoji, which the users can change to any emoji of their choice.


title: Telegram (software)

text: Telegram's default messages are cloud-based and can be accessed on any of the user's connected devices. Users can share photos, videos, audio messages and other files (up to 2 gigabytes per file). Users can send messages to other users individually or in groups of up to 200,000 members. Sent messages can be edited up to 48 hours after they have been sent and can be deleted at any time on both sides. Messages in all chats, including groups and channels, can be set to auto-delete after 24 hours, 7 days or a month, although this will only apply to messages sent after the auto-delete timer is enabled. People can react to messages, choosing from a range of emoji. A user can only send one reaction and tapping on any other reaction will switch to it. In groups, a list of people who reacted is available. Reactions are always on in personal chats but have to be enabled by the admin in groups and channels, fully or partially, with a smaller number of reactions chosen.


title: Telegram (software)

text: Telegram offers drafts which sync across user devices, such as when a user starts typing a message on one device and can later continue on another. The draft will persist in the editing area on any device until it is sent or removed. All chats, including groups and channels, can be sorted into custom folders set by the user. Users have the option to schedule messages in personal chats to be sent when the other side comes online. Users can also import chat history, including both messages and media, from WhatsApp, Line and Kakaotalk due to data portability, either making a new chat to hold the messages or adding them to an existing one.


title: Telegram (software)

text: The transmission of cloud messages to Telegram's servers is encrypted with the service's MTProto protocol, while 'Secret Chats' use end-to-end encryption based on the same protocol. According to Telegram's privacy policy, "all data is stored heavily encrypted and the encryption keys in each case are stored in several other data centers in different jurisdictions. This way local engineers or physical intruders cannot get access to users' data". Telegram's local message database is not encrypted by default. Some Telegram clients allow users to encrypt the local message database by setting a passphrase.


title: Telegram (software)

text: Telegram users can share their live location in a chat for either 15 minutes, one hour, or eight hours. If multiple users share their live location within a group, they are shown on an interactive map. Sharing the 'live location' can be stopped at any time.


title: Telegram (software)

text: Messages can also be sent with client-to-client encryption in so-called secret chats. These messages are encrypted with the service's MTProto protocol. Unlike Telegram's cloud-based messages, messages sent within a secret chat can be accessed only on the device upon which the secret chat was initiated and the device upon which the secret chat was accepted. Messages sent within secret chats can, in principle, be deleted at any time and can optionally self-destruct.


title: Telegram (software)

text: Secret chats have to be initiated and accepted via an invitation, upon which the encryption keys for the session are exchanged. Users in a secret chat can verify that no man-in-the-middle attack has occurred by comparing pictures that visualize their public key fingerprints.


title: Telegram (software)

text: According to Telegram, secret chats have supported perfect forward secrecy since December 2014. Encryption keys are periodically changed after a key has been used more than 100 times or has been in use for more than a week. Old encryption keys are destroyed.


title: Telegram (software)

text: In September 2015, Telegram added channels. Channels are a form of one-way messaging where admins are able to post messages but other users are not. Any user is able to create and subscribe to channels. Channels can be created for broadcasting messages to an unlimited number of subscribers. Channels can be publicly available with an alias and a permanent URL so anyone can join. Users who join a channel can see the entire message history. Users can join and leave channels at any time. Depending on a channel's settings, messages may be signed with the channel's name or with the username of the admin who posted them. Non-admin users are unable to see other users who've subscribed to the channel. The admin of the channel can view statistics about channel activity as each message has its own view counter, showing how many users have seen this message, including views from forwarded messages. As of May 2019, the creator of a channel can add a discussion group, a separate group where messages in the channel are automatically posted for subscribers to communicate. This enables comments for posts in the channel.


title: Telegram (software)

text: In December 2021, content protection features were introduced that allow admins of private channels and groups to disable screenshots, message forwarding and saving data in their communities.


title: Telegram (software)

text: In December 2019, Bloomberg News moved their messenger-based newsletter service from WhatsApp to Telegram after the former banned bulk and automated messaging. Other news services with official channels on the platform include the "Financial Times", "Business Insider" and "The New York Times".


title: Telegram (software)

text: Channels have also been used by governments and heads of state. Notable examples include Volodymyr Zelensky and Emmanuel Macron. In addition to that, channels have been used by journalists in oppressive regimes to establish independent news networks.


title: Telegram (software)

text: At the end of March 2017, Telegram introduced its own end-to-end encrypted voice calls. Connection is established as peer-to-peer whenever possible, otherwise the closest server to the client is used. According to Telegram, there is a neural network working to learn various technical parameters about a call to provide better quality of service for future uses.


title: Telegram (software)

text: Telegram added group voice chats in December 2020. Any group or channel admin can launch a chat, which will be open to all members and ongoing even if no one is currently using it. Admins can mute members by default or selectively as well as create invite links that will add people as muted by default. Members can use the Raise Hand button to signal their desire to speak. A push-to-talk option is available on mobile versions, as well as key shortcuts to mute and unmute oneself on Telegram Desktop. Admins of groups or channels have the option to join as their group or channel, hiding their personal account. Users can also record chats with a red dot shown as a warning during the recording period.


title: Telegram (software)

text: Telegram announced in April 2020 that they would include group video calls by the end of the year. On 15 August 2020, Telegram added video calling with end-to-end encryption. Picture-in-picture mode is also available, giving the ability to use the other functions of the app during the call. In June 2021, Telegram implemented group video calls across all of its clients. Users can stream video from their camera, share their screen or do both simultaneously. Group calls have support for selective screen sharing, split screen view and improved noise suppression. In July 2021, Telegram introduced the ability for up to 1000 people to watch the streamed video. Livestreams support unlimited participants and third-party streaming software such as OBS Studio and XSplit, supporting custom interfaces and overlays.


title: Telegram (software)

text: In June 2015, Telegram launched a platform for third-party developers to create bots. Bots are Telegram accounts operated by programs. They can respond to messages or mentions, can be invited into groups, and can be integrated with other programs. Bots can also accept online payments made with credit cards or Apple Pay. The Dutch website "Tweakers" reported that an invited bot can potentially read all group messages when the bot controller changes the access settings silently at a later point in time. Telegram pointed out that it considered implementing a feature that would announce such a status change within the relevant group. There are also inline bots, which can be used from any chat screen. To activate an inline bot, a user must type the bot's username and a query in the message field. The bot then will offer its content. The user can choose from that content and send it within a chat.


title: Telegram (software)

text: Bots can also handle transactions provided by Paymentwall, Yandex.Money, Stripe, Ravepay, Razorpay, QiWi and Google Pay for different countries.


title: Telegram (software)

text: Bots also power Telegram's gaming platform, which utilizes HTML5, so games are loaded on-demand as needed, like ordinary webpages. Games work on iPhones 4 and newer and on Android 4.4 devices and newer.


title: Telegram (software)

text: People can use Internet Of Things (IoT) services with two-ways interaction for IFTTT implemented within Telegram.


title: Telegram (software)

text: In April 2021, the Payments 2.0 upgrade enabled bot payments within any chat, using third-party services such as Sberbank, Tranzoo, Payme, CLICK, LiqPay and ECOMMPAY to process the credit card information.


title: Telegram (software)

text: In February 2018, Telegram launched their social login feature to its users, named Telegram Login. It features a website widget that could be embedded into websites, allowing users to sign into a third party website with their Telegram account. The gateway sends users' Telegram name, username, and profile picture to the website owner, while users' phone number remains hidden. The gateway is integrated with a bot, which is linked with the developer's specific website domain.


title: Telegram (software)

text: Comments.App, is a tool for commenting on pages, channel posts, it lets you add a comments widget to your website.


title: Telegram (software)

text: With the widget in place, Telegram users will be able to log in with just two taps and leave comments with text and photos, as well as like, dislike and reply to comments from others.


title: Telegram (software)

text: They can also subscribe to comments and get notifications from @DiscussBot. Widgets are configurable. Developers can change the color theme, use different colors for names, change the design to a dark theme, change the maximum number of comments on the page, change the height, assign moderators, and block user spam; the mode of filled and outlined icons is also supported.


title: Telegram (software)

text: In June 2021, an update introduced a new bot menu where users can browse and send commands while in a chat with a bot.


title: Telegram (software)

text: In April 2022, bots gained support for customized interfaces and inline page loading. Interfaces can be adjusted to match the app's theme even if it is changed while interacting


title: Telegram (software)

text: Instant View is a way to view web articles with zero page load time. With Instant View, Telegram users can read articles from mass media or blogs in a uniform and readable way. Instant View pages support text and media of any type and work even if the original website was not optimized for mobile devices.


title: Telegram (software)

text: On top of this, Instant View pages are extremely lightweight and cached on the Telegram servers, so they load instantly on pretty much any connection.


title: Telegram (software)

text: Telegraph is a publishing tool used to create formatted posts with photos and embedded media. It is designed in a minimalist style, the article pages do not contain any controls. Each article on the website is separate, there is no possibility to merge articles into groups or hierarchies. For each article, the author specifies a title and optionally a subtitle, usually used for the author's name. In addition, the title of the article indicates the date of the first publication, which the author of the article cannot influence.


title: Telegram (software)

text: Text formatting options are also minimal: two levels of headings, single-level lists, bold, italics, quotes, and hyperlinks are supported. Authors can upload images and videos to the page, with a limit of 5 MB. When an author adds links to YouTube, Vimeo, or Twitter, the service allows you to embed their content directly in the article.


title: Telegram (software)

text: When an article is first published, the URL is generated automatically from its title. Non-Latin characters are transliterated, spaces are replaced with hyphens, and the date of publication is added to the address. For example, an article titled "Telegraph (blog platform)" published on 17 November would receive the URL codice_1.


title: Telegram (software)

text: Telegram has more than 20,000 stickers. Stickers are cloud-based, high-resolution images intended to provide more expressive emoji. When typing in an emoji, the user is offered to send the respective sticker instead. Stickers come in collections called "packs", and multiple stickers can be offered for one emoji. Telegram comes with one default sticker pack, but users can install additional sticker packs provided by third-party contributors. Sticker sets installed from one client become automatically available to all other clients. Sticker images use WebP file format, which is better optimized to be transmitted over the internet. The Telegram clients also support animated emoji. In January 2022, video stickers were added, which use the WebM file format and do not feature any software requirements to create. In September 2022, Telegram has given free users access to dozens of reactions, even some that were only previously available to Premium subscribers. In order to accommodate the new reactions, the reaction panel has been expanded and redesigned.


title: Telegram (software)

text: In July 2018, Telegram introduced their online authorisation and identity management system, Telegram Passport, for platforms that require real-life identification. It asks users to upload their own official documents such as passport, identity card, driver license, etc. When an online service requires such identification documents and verification, it forwards the information to the platform with the user's permission. Telegram stated that it does not have access to the data, while the platform will only share the information to the authorised recipient. However, the service was criticised for being vulnerable to online brute force attacks.


title: Telegram (software)

text: Polls are available on Android, iOS, and desktop applications. Polls have the option to be anonymous or visible. A user can enter multiple options into the poll. Quiz mode can also be enabled where a user can select the right answer for their poll and leave it to the group to guess. Quiz bots can also be added to track correct answers and even provide a global leaderboard.


title: Telegram (software)

text: People Nearby can help users meet new friends by turning on phone GPS location and opting-in contacts and through Groups Nearby people can create a local group by adding location data to groups.


title: Telegram (software)

text: Telegram uses a custom build symmetric encryption scheme called MTProto. The protocol was developed by Nikolai Durov and other developers at Telegram and is based on 256-bit symmetric AES encryption, 2048-bit RSA encryption and Diffie–Hellman key exchange.


title: Telegram (software)

text: As with most instant messaging protocols, Telegram uses centralized servers. Telegram Messenger LLP has servers in a number of countries throughout the world to improve the response time of their service. Telegram's server-side software is closed-source and proprietary. Pavel Durov said that it would require a major architectural redesign of the server-side software to connect independent servers to the Telegram cloud.


title: Telegram (software)

text: For users who signed in from the European Economic Area (EEA) or United Kingdom, the General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) are supported by storing data only on servers in the Netherlands, and designating a London-based company as their responsible data controller.


title: Telegram (software)

text: Telegram has various client apps, some developed by Telegram Messenger LLP and some by the community. Most of them are free and open-source and released under the GNU General Public Licence or 3. The official clients support sending any file format extensions. The built-in media viewer supports common media formats - JPEG, PNG, WebP for images and H.264 and HEVC in videos in MP4 container and MP3, FLAC, Vorbis, Opus and AAC for audio.


title: Telegram (software)

text: In 2021, the Telegram team announced a direct build of its Android app. Telegram for Android is available directly from the Telegram website. It is automatically updated and will most likely get new versions faster than the apps in the Play Store and App Store. A distinctive feature of this version is the ability to view channels/groups on a specific topic without censorship, which cannot be viewed from an app distributed from Google Play or the Apple Store due to their policies.


title: Telegram (software)

text: Telegram has public APIs with which developers can access the same functionality as Telegram's official apps to build their own messaging applications. In February 2015, creators of the unofficial Whatsapp+ client released the Telegram Plus app, later renamed to Plus Messenger, after their original project got a cease-and-desist order from WhatsApp. In September 2015, Samsung released a messaging application based on these APIs.


title: Telegram (software)

text: Telegram also offers an API that allows developers to create bots, which are accounts controlled by programs. Such bots are used, among other things, to emulate and play old games in the app and inform users about vaccine availability for COVID-19.


title: Telegram (software)

text: In addition, Telegram offers functions for making payments directly within the platform, alongside an external service such as Stripe.


title: Telegram (software)

text: The company was initially supported by its CEO's personal funds after the sale of his stake in VK. In January 2018, it launched a private placement and collected $1.7 billion from investors such as Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia Capital and Benchmark. After the shutdown of the TON project, the company needed to repay the investors the money that was not spent on the development during 2018 and the beginning of 2019, when the project was active.


title: Telegram (software)

text: On 15 March 2021, Telegram conducted a five-year public bonds placement worth $1 billion. The funding was required to cover the debts amounting to $625.7 million, including $433 million to investors who bought futures for Gram tokens in 2018 and included purchasers such as David Yakobashvili. On 23 March, Telegram also sold additional bonds worth $150 million to the Abu Dhabi Mubadala Investment Company and Abu Dhabi Catalyst Partners. A day later, the Mubadala Investment Company stated that Russia's sovereign wealth fund participated in its deal undisclosed through the Russia-UAE joint investment platform to buy convertible bonds. A Telegram spokesperson stated: "RDIF is not in the list of investors we sold bonds to. We wouldn’t be open to any transaction with this fund" and "[t]he funds that did invest, including Mubadala, confirmed to us that RDIF was not among their LPs." According to the contract, the holders of the bonds will be provided with an option to convert them to shares at a 10% discount if the company conducts an open IPO. The company's CEO has stated that the move aimed to "enable Telegram to continue growing globally while sticking to its values and remaining independent". According to press reports, prior to the bonds placement, Durov had rejected an investment offer for a 5–10% stake in the company as well as several undisclosed ones, valuing the company in a $30–40 billion range.


title: Telegram (software)

text: Telegram has stated that the company will never serve advertisements in private chats. In late 2020, Durov announced that the company was working on its own ad platform, and will integrate non-targeted ads in public one-to-many channels, that already sell and display ads in the form of regular messages. Ads began to appear in channels with more than 1000 followers in October 2021.


title: Telegram (software)

text: In late 2020, Durov announced that Telegram will consider adding paid features aimed at enterprise clients. According to him, these features will require more bandwidth and the added cost will be covered by the feature prices, in addition to covering some of the costs incurred by regular users.


title: Telegram (software)

text: On 10 June 2022, Durov announced via his official channel that Telegram Premium would launch later the same month. The optional paid subscription gives users a doubled file upload limit from 2 GB to 4 GB, numerous increases in other limits such as the number of pinned chats and folders, access to extra stickers and reactions and some exclusive features. Accounts that purchase a Premium subscription are marked with a purple star next to the user's name by default, which can be changed to any emoji of the user's choice. Telegram Premium was launched on 19 June 2022 with regional pricing.


title: Telegram (software)

text: In 2017, in an attempt to monetize Telegram without advertising, the company began the development of a blockchain platform dubbed either "The Open Network" or "Telegram Open Network" (TON) and its native cryptocurrency "Gram". The project was announced in mid-December 2017 and its 132-page technical paper became available in January 2018. The codebase behind TON was developed by Pavel Durov's brother Nikolai Durov, the core developer of Telegram's MTProto protocol. In January 2018 a 23-page white paper and a detailed 132-page technical paper for TON blockchain became available.


title: Telegram (software)

text: Durov planned to power TON with the existing Telegram user base, and turn it into the largest blockchain and a platform for apps and services akin to a decentralized WeChat, Google Play, and App Store. Besides, the TON had the potential to become a decentralized alternative to Visa and MasterCard due to its ability to scale and support millions of transactions per second. In January and February 2018 the company ran a private sale of futures contracts for Grams, raising around $1.7 billion. No public offering took place.


title: Telegram (software)

text: The development of TON took place in a completely isolated manner, and the release was postponed several times. The test network was launched in January 2019. The launch of the TON main network was scheduled for 31 October. On October 30, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission obtained a temporary restrictive order to prevent the distribution of Grams to initial purchasers; the regulator considered the legal scheme employed by Telegram as an unregistered securities offering with initial buyers acting as underwriters.


title: Telegram (software)

text: The judge hearing the "Telegram v. SEC case", P. Kevin Castel, ultimately agreed with the SEC's argument and kept the restrictions on Gram distribution in force. The ban applied to non-U.S.-based purchasers as well, because Telegram couldn't prevent the re-sale of Grams to U.S. citizens on a secondary market, as the anonymity of users was one of the key features of TON. Following that, Durov announced the end of Telegram's active involvement with TON. On 26 June, the judge approved the settlement between Telegram and SEC. The company agreed to pay an $18.5 million penalty and return $1.22 billion to Gram purchasers. In March 2021, Telegram launched a bonds offering to cover the debt and fund further growth of the app.


title: Telegram (software)

text: Telegram has been used for illegal activities such as spreading hate messages, illegal pornography, contact between criminals and trading of illegal goods and services such as drugs, contraband and stolen personal data. According to "Wired", Telegram "exercises virtually no content moderation, except to take down illegal pornography and calls for violence."


title: Telegram (software)

text: In Iraq and home , Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps has used groups and channels for doxing citizens and warmongering propaganda.


title: Telegram (software)

text: In September 2015, in response to a question about the use of Telegram by Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS), Pavel Durov stated: "I think that privacy, ultimately, and our right for privacy is more important than our fear of bad things happening, like terrorism." Durov sarcastically suggested to ban words because terrorists use them for communication. ISIS recommended Telegram to its supporters and members and in October 2015 they were able to double the number of followers of their official channel to 9,000. In November 2015, Telegram announced that it had blocked 78 public channels operated by ISIS for spreading propaganda and mass communication. Telegram stated that it would block public channels and bots that are related to terrorism, but it would not honor "politically-motivated censorship" based on "local restrictions on freedom of speech" and that it allowed "peaceful expression of alternative opinions." ISIS's usage of Telegram reignited the encryption debate and encrypted messaging applications faced new scrutiny.


title: Telegram (software)

text: In August 2016, French anti-terrorism investigators asserted that the two ISIS-directed terrorists who murdered a priest in Saint-Étienne-du-Rouvray in Normandy, France, and videoed the murder, had communicated via Telegram and "used the app to coordinate their plans for the attack". ISIS's media wing subsequently posted a video on Telegram, showing the pair pledging allegiance. A CNN news report stated that Telegram had "become known as a preferred means of communication for the terror group ISIS and was used by the ISIS cell that plotted the Paris terror attacks in November" after the attacks. "Daily Mirror" called Telegram a "jihadi messaging app".


title: Telegram (software)

text: In June 2017, the Russian communications regulator Roskomnadzor hinted at the possibility of a blocking of Telegram in Russia due to its usage by terrorists.


title: Telegram (software)

text: In July 2017, Director General of Application and Informatics of the Indonesian Ministry of Communication and Informatics, Semuel Abrijani Pangerapan, said eleven Telegram DNS servers were blocked because many channels in the service "promoted radicalism, terrorism, hatred, bomb assembly, civil attack, disturbing images, and other propaganda contrary to Indonesian laws and regulations." In August 2017, Indonesia lifted the block after countermeasures against negative content were deployed in association with Telegram LLP.


title: Telegram (software)

text: In November 2019, Telegram participated in Europol's Internet Referral Action Day. As a result, Telegram expanded and strengthened its terrorist content detection and removal efforts. Over 43,000 terrorist-related bots and channels were removed from Telegram. According to U.S. officials, the crackdown on Telegram was especially effective and seems to be having lasting impact. According to Europol, Telegram has put forth considerable effort in removing abusers of its platform.


title: Telegram (software)

text: The Anti-Defamation League has called Telegram a white supremacist "safe haven" and a valuable tool for right-wing extremists. Miro Dittrich, a senior researcher for the Center for Monitoring, Analysis and Strategy (CeMAS), a German extremism monitoring agency, said: "Telegram has been critical for the far-right scene in Germany ever since the Identitarian movement migrated there in 2018, having been kicked off Facebook and Instagram."


title: Telegram (software)

text: The neo-Nazi white separatist paramilitary hate group "The Base" switched to Telegram after being blocked on most social media platforms, including Twitter, YouTube and Gab. After a number of arrests of "The Base" members in January 2020, a note appeared on its official Telegram account warning people to stop posting. In August 2019, white supremacist Christopher Cantwell posted anti-Semitic comments on Telegram.


title: Telegram (software)

text: The Anti-Defamation League notes that Telegram was founded by the same two Russian brothers who founded VKontakte (VK), which is known for its lack of moderation when it comes to white supremacy. While Telegram's terms of service prohibit the promotion of violence, they have allowed violent videos posted by mass shooters Brenton Tarrant (Christchurch, New Zealand) and Stephan Balliet (Halle, Germany), although other social media platforms had removed them. The League also points to the RapeWaffen Division channel, which openly advocates rape and murder as part of a race war.


title: Telegram (software)

text: Telegram has also been used by the alt-right organization Proud Boys to coordinate throughout the United States. In the United Kingdom, Telegram is one of the main platforms for far-right publication TR.news, maintained by Tommy Robinson, and Britain First, whose pages were blocked by major social media platforms. Weblinks related to these channels received more views on Telegram in 2018 and 2019 than some well-known mainstream news outlets, including "The Guardian" or the "Daily Mail". However, with a relatively small user base and no algorithmic timeline, such groups struggle to build a larger audience on Telegram.


title: Telegram (software)

text: In January 2021, Telegram said that it blocked "hundreds" of neo-Nazi and white supremacist channels with tens of thousands of followers for inciting violence. A 2021 Institute for Strategic Dialogue report on the far-right in Ireland found that messages from Irish far-right groups on the app increased from a total of 801 in 2019 to over 60,000 in 2020.


title: Telegram (software)

text: On 27 August 2021, the U.S. House of Representatives select committee investigating the 2021 United States Capitol attack demanded records from Telegram (alongside 14 other social media companies) going back to the spring of 2020.


title: Telegram (software)

text: In January 2022, the British anti-disinformation organization Logically reported that Holocaust denial, neo-Nazism and other forms of hate speech were flourishing on the Discord and Telegram groups for the German website Disclose.tv.


title: Telegram (software)

text: The app has been used for distribution of pornographic material, including child and teenage pornography. Telegram's internal reporting system has an option to report content that contains 'Child Abuse', including specific messages in groups and channels. The company has a verified channel called "Stop Child Abuse", where daily statistics on the number of groups and channels banned for sharing illegal materials are posted. It also provides an email address dedicated to reports of content related to child abuse.


title: Telegram (software)

text: In January 2021, North Macedonian media outlets reported that a now-banned Telegram group, with more than 7,000 members, titled "Public Room" ("Јавна соба") was used to share nude photos of women, often young teenage girls. Along with the shared photographs, anonymous accounts shared private information of the women, including phone numbers and social media profiles, encouraging members of the group to contact the women and ask for sexual favours. This was done without prior agreement or knowledge of the women, causing intense public backlash and demand for the group to be shut down. The President of North Macedonia Stevo Pendarovski, along with the Prime Minister of North Macedonia Zoran Zaev, demanded an immediate reaction from Telegram and threatened to completely restrict access to the app in the country if no actions were taken. The group was banned after reports from users and media, although no public statement was made.


title: Telegram (software)

text: The chairman of the public organization "Electronic Democracy" Volodymyr Flents on 11 May 2020 announced that a Telegram bot appeared on the Web, which sold the personal data of Ukrainian citizens. It is estimated that the bot contains data from 26 million Ukrainians registered in the Dіia application. However, subsequently, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Digital Transformation Mikhail Fedorov denied any data from the app being leaked. The criminal activity of 25 people has already been confirmed and copies of 30 databases were seized.


title: Telegram (software)

text: Telegram reportedly banned more than 350,000 bots and channels in 2020, including those that contained child abuse and terrorism-related content.


title: Telegram (software)

text: Channels have been used by celebrities such as Arnold Schwarzenegger and politicians: President of France Emmanuel Macron, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, President of Moldova Maia Sandu, President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, President of Uzbekistan Shavkat Mirziyoyev, Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen, Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and others.


title: Telegram (software)

text: Telegram's security model has received praise and notable criticism by cryptography experts. They criticized how, unless modified first, the default general security model stores all contacts, messages and media together with their decryption keys on its servers continuously. And that it does not enable end-to-end encryption for messages by default. Pavel Durov has argued that this is because it helps to avoid third-party unsecured backups, and to allow users to access messages and files from any device. Criticisms were also aimed at Telegram's use of a custom-designed encryption protocol. However, in December 2020, a study titled "Automated Symbolic Verification of Telegram’s MTProto 2.0" was published, confirming the security of the updated MTProto 2.0 and reviewing it while pointing out several theoretical vulnerabilities. The paper provides "fully automated proof of the soundness of MTProto 2.0’s authentication, normal chat, end-to-end encrypted chat, and re-keying mechanisms with respect to several security properties, including authentication, integrity, confidentiality and perfect forward secrecy" and "proves the formal correctness of MTProto 2.0". This partially addresses the concern about the lack of scrutiny while confirming the formal security of the protocol's latest version.


title: Telegram (software)

text: The desktop clients (excluding the macOS client) do not feature options for end-to-end encrypted messages. When the user assigns a local password in the desktop application, data is locally encrypted also. Telegram has defended the lack of ubiquitous end-to-end encryption by claiming the online-backups that do not use client-side encryption are "the most secure solution currently possible".


title: Telegram (software)

text: In May 2016, critics disputed claims by Telegram that it is "more secure than mass market messengers like WhatsApp and Line", as WhatsApp claims to apply end-to-end encryption to all of its traffic by default and uses the Signal Protocol, which has been "reviewed and endorsed by leading security experts", while Telegram does neither and stores all messages, media and contacts in their cloud. Since July 2016, Line has also applied end-to-end encryption to all of its messages by default, though it has also been criticized for being susceptible to replay attacks and the lack of forward secrecy between clients.


title: Telegram (software)

text: In 2013, an author on the Russian programming website Habr discovered a weakness in the first version of MTProto that would allow an attacker to mount a man-in-the-middle attack and prevent the victim from being alerted by a changed key fingerprint. The bug was fixed on the day of the publication with a $100,000 payout to the author and a statement on Telegram's official blog.


title: Telegram (software)

text: On 26 February 2014, the German consumer organization Stiftung Warentest evaluated several data-protection aspects of Telegram, along with other popular instant-messaging clients. Among the aspects considered were: the security of the data transmission, the service's terms of use, the accessibility of the source code, and the distribution of the app. Telegram was rated 'problematic' ("") overall. The organization was favorable to Telegram's secure chats and partially free code but criticized the mandatory transfer of contact data to Telegram's servers and the lack of an imprint or address on the service's website. It noted that while the message data is encrypted on the device, it could not analyse the transmission due to a lack of source code.


title: Telegram (software)

text: The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) listed Telegram on its "Secure Messaging Scorecard" in February 2015. Telegram's default chat function received a score of 4 out of 7 points on the scorecard. It received points for having communications encrypted in transit, having its code open to independent review, having the security design properly documented, and having completed a recent independent security audit. Telegram's default chat function missed points because the communications were not encrypted with keys the provider didn't have access to, users could not verify contacts' identities, and past messages were not secure if the encryption keys were stolen. Telegram's optional secret chat function, which provides end-to-end encryption, received a score of 7 out of 7 points on the scorecard. The EFF said that the results "should not be read as endorsements of individual tools or guarantees of their security", and that they were merely indications that the projects were "on the right track".


title: Telegram (software)

text: In December 2015, two researchers from Aarhus University published a report in which they demonstrated that MTProto 1.0 did not achieve indistinguishability under chosen-ciphertext attack (IND-CCA) or authenticated encryption. The researchers stressed that the attack was of a theoretical nature and they "did not see any way of turning the attack into a full plaintext-recovery attack". Nevertheless, they said they saw "no reason why [Telegram] should use a less secure encryption scheme when more secure (and at least as efficient) solutions exist". The Telegram team responded that the flaw does not affect message security and that "a future patch would address the concern". Telegram 4.6, released in December 2017, supports MTProto 2.0, which now satisfied the conditions for IND-CCA. MTProto 2.0 is seen by qualified cryptographers as a vast improvement to Telegram's security.


title: Telegram (software)

text: In April 2016, the accounts of several Russian opposition members were hijacked by intercepting the SMS messages used for login authorization. In response, Telegram recommended using the optional two-factor authentication feature. In May 2016, the Committee to Protect Journalists and Nate Cardozo, senior staff attorney at Electronic Frontier Foundation, recommended against using Telegram because of "its lack of end-to-end encryption [by default] and its use of non-standard MTProto encryption protocol, which has been publicly criticized by cryptography researchers, including Matthew Green".


title: Telegram (software)

text: On 2 August 2016, Reuters reported that Iranian hackers compromised more than a dozen Telegram accounts and identified the phone numbers of 15 million Iranian users, as well as the associated user IDs. Researchers said the hackers belonged to a group known as Rocket Kitten. Rocket Kitten's attacks were similar to ones attributed to Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. The attackers took advantage of a programming interface built into Telegram. According to Telegram, these mass checks are no longer possible because of limitations introduced into its API earlier in 2016.


title: Telegram (software)

text: Login SMS messages are known to have been intercepted in Iran, Russia and Germany, possibly in coordination with phone or telecom companies. Pavel Durov has said that Telegram users in "troubled countries" should enable two-factor authentication by creating passwords in order to prevent this.


title: Telegram (software)

text: In June 2017, Pavel Durov in an interview claimed that U.S. intelligence agencies tried to bribe the company's developers to weaken Telegram's encryption or install a backdoor during their visit to the U.S. in 2016.


title: Telegram (software)

text: In 2018, Telegram sent a message to all Iranian users stating that the Telegram Talai and Hotgram unofficial clients are not secure.


title: Telegram (software)

text: In March 2014, Telegram promised that "all code will be released eventually", including all the various client applications (Android, iOS, desktop, etc.) and the server-side code. As of May 2021, Telegram still hasn't published their server-side source code. In January 2021, Durov explained his rationale for not releasing server-side code, citing reasons such as inability for end-users to verify that the released code is the same code run on servers, and a government that wanted to acquire the server code and make a messaging app that would end competitors.


title: Telegram (software)

text: On 9 June 2019, The Intercept released leaked Telegram messages exchanged between current Brazilian Minister of Justice and former judge Sérgio Moro and federal prosecutors. The hypothesis is that either mobile devices were hacked by SIM swap or the targets’ computers were compromised. The Telegram team tweeted that it was either because the user had malware or they were not using two-step verification.


title: Telegram (software)

text: On 12 June 2019, Telegram confirmed that it suffered a denial-of-service attack which disrupted normal app functionality for approximately one hour. Pavel Durov tweeted that the IP addresses used in the attack mostly came from China.


title: Telegram (software)

text: In December 2019, multiple Russian businessmen suffered account takeovers that involved bypassing SMS single-factor authentication. Security company Group-IB suggested SS7 mobile signalling protocol weaknesses, illegal usage of surveillance equipment, or telecom insider attacks.


title: Telegram (software)

text: On 30 March 2020, an Elasticsearch database holding 42 million records containing user IDs and phone numbers of Iranian users was exposed online without a password. The accounts were extracted from not Telegram but an unofficial version of Telegram, in what appears to be a possibly government-sanctioned fork. It took 11 days for the database to be taken down, but the researchers say the data was accessed by other parties, including a hacker who reported the information to a specialized forum.


title: Telegram (software)

text: In September 2020, it was reported that Iran's RampantKitten ran a phishing and surveillance campaign against dissidents on Telegram. The attack relied on people downloading a malware-infected file from any source, at which point it would replace Telegram files on the device and 'clone' session data. David Wolpoff, a former Department of Defense contractor, has stated that the weak link in the attack was the device itself and not any of the affected apps: "There’s no way for a secure communication app to keep a user safe when the end devices are compromised."


title: Telegram (software)

text: In July 2021, researchers from Royal Holloway, University of London and ETH Zurich published an analysis of the MTProto protocol, concluding that the protocol could provide a "confidential and integrity-protected channel" for communication. They also found that attackers had the theoretical ability to reorder messages coming from the client to the server though the attacker would not be able to see the content of the messages. Several other theoretical vulnerabilities were reported as well, in response to which Telegram released a document stating that the MITM attack on the key exchange was impossible as well as detailing the changes made to the protocol to protect from it in the future. All issues were patched before the paper's publication with a security bounty paid out to the researchers.


title: Telegram (software)

text: In September 2021, a Russian researcher published details about a bug with the self-destruct feature that allowed the user to recover deleted photos from their own device. The bug was patched prior to publication and Telegram representatives offered a €1,000 bug bounty. The researcher did not sign the NDA that came with the offer and did not receive the award, opting to disclose the bug.


title: Telegram (software)

text: Telegram has organized two cryptography contests to challenge its own security. Third parties were asked to break the service's cryptography and disclose the information contained within a secret chat between two computer-controlled users. A reward of respectively and was offered. Both of these contests expired with no winners. Security researcher Moxie Marlinspike, founder of the competing Signal messenger, and commenters on "Hacker News" criticized the first contest for being rigged or framed in Telegram's favor and said that Telegram's statements on the value of these contests as proof of the cryptography's quality are misleading. This was because the cryptography contest could not be won even with completely broken algorithms such as MD2 (hash function) used as key stream extractor, and primitives such as the Dual EC DRBG that is known to be backdoored.


title: Telegram (software)

text: Telegram has been blocked temporarily or permanently by some governments including Iran, China, Vietnam and Pakistan. The Russian government blocked Telegram for several years before lifting the ban in 2020. The company's founder has said he wants the app to have an anti-censorship tool for Iran and China similar to the app's role in fighting censorship in Russia.


title: Telegram (software)

text: Telegram was the main subject surrounding the 2019 Puerto Rico riots that ended up in the resignation of then-Governor Ricardo Rosselló. Hundreds of pages of a group chat between Rosselló and members of his staff were leaked. The messages were considered vulgar, racist, and homophobic, with members of the chat discussing how they would use the media to target potential political opponents.


title: Telegram (software)

text: In September 2021, prior to the regional elections in Russia, Telegram suspended several bots spreading information about the election, including a bot run by the opposition party and critics of incumbent president Vladimir Putin's government, citing election silence as the reason, though a blog post by the company's CEO implied the company was following Apple and Google, which "dictate the rules of the game to developers". The blocking of the main Smart Voting bot was criticized by allies of Alexei Navalny, a Kremlin critic and former opposition leader. Navalny's spokeswoman Kira Yarmysh called the block and the deletion of the tactical voting app from app stores "censorship [...] imposed by private companies". In a later blog post, Durov directly stated that the block was a result of pressure from Google and Apple as refusal to comply with their policies would result "in an immediate shutdown of Telegram for millions of users". The post included a screenshot showing an internal email sent by the App Store to developers, demanding the takedown of content related to Navalny.


title: Telegram (software)

text: On November 24, following an order by the Delhi High Court, Telegram was ordered to disclose the admin names, phone numbers and IP addresses of channels accused of unauthorised sharing of national exam study materials. Telegram originally argued that its regional servers were located in Singapore and thus no data could be disclosed as the local laws prohibit it.


title: Titanic

text: RMS "Titanic" was a British passenger liner, operated by the White Star Line, which sank in the North Atlantic Ocean on 15 April 1912 after striking an iceberg during her maiden voyage from Southampton, England, to New York City, United States. Of the estimated 2,224 passengers and crew aboard, more than 1,500 died, making it the deadliest sinking of a single ship up to that time. It remains the deadliest peacetime sinking of a superliner or cruise ship. The disaster drew public attention, provided foundational material for the disaster film genre, and has inspired many artistic works.


title: Titanic

text: RMS "Titanic" was the largest ship afloat at the time she entered service and the second of three s operated by the White Star Line. She was built by the Harland and Wolff shipyard in Belfast. Thomas Andrews, the chief naval architect of the shipyard, died in the disaster. "Titanic" was under the command of Captain Edward Smith, who went down with the ship. The ocean liner carried some of the wealthiest people in the world, as well as hundreds of emigrants from Great Britain and Ireland, Scandinavia, and elsewhere throughout Europe, who were seeking a new life in the United States and Canada.


title: Titanic

text: The first-class accommodation was designed to be the pinnacle of comfort and luxury, with a gymnasium, swimming pool, libraries, high-class restaurants, and opulent cabins. A high-powered radiotelegraph transmitter was available for sending passenger "marconigrams" and for the ship's operational use. "Titanic" had advanced safety features, such as watertight compartments and remotely activated watertight doors, contributing to its reputation as "unsinkable".


title: Titanic

text: "Titanic" was equipped with 16 lifeboat davits, each capable of lowering three lifeboats, for a total of 48 boats; she carried only 20 lifeboats, four of which were collapsible and proved hard to launch while she was sinking (Collapsible A nearly swamped and was filled with a foot of water until rescue, Collapsible B completely overturned while launching). Together, the 20 lifeboats could hold 1,178 people—about half the number of passengers on board, and one third of the number of passengers the ship could have carried at full capacity (consistent with the maritime safety regulations of the era). When the ship sank, many of the lifeboats that had been lowered were only about half full.


title: Titanic

text: The name "Titanic" derives from the Titans of Greek mythology. Built in Belfast, Ireland, in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, RMS "Titanic" was the second of the three s—the first was and the third was . "Britannic" was originally to be called Gigantic and was to be over long. They were by far the largest vessels of the British shipping company White Star Line's fleet, which comprised 29 steamers and tenders in 1912. The three ships had their genesis in a discussion in mid-1907 between the White Star Line's chairman, J. Bruce Ismay, and the American financier J. P. Morgan, who controlled the White Star Line's parent corporation, the International Mercantile Marine Co. (IMM).


title: Titanic

text: The White Star Line faced an increasing challenge from its main rivals Cunard, which had recently launched and —the fastest passenger ships then in service—and the German lines Hamburg America and Norddeutscher Lloyd. Ismay preferred to compete on size rather than speed and proposed to commission a new class of liners that would be larger than anything that had gone before as well as being the last word in comfort and luxury. The company sought an upgrade in their fleet primarily in response to the Cunard giants but also to replace their oldest pair of passenger ships still in service, being of 1889 and of 1890. "Teutonic" was replaced by "Olympic" while "Majestic" was replaced by "Titanic". "Majestic" would be brought back into her old spot on White Star Line's New York service after "Titanic"s loss.


title: Titanic

text: The ships were constructed by the Belfast shipbuilders Harland and Wolff, who had a long-established relationship with the White Star Line dating back to 1867. Harland and Wolff were given a great deal of latitude in designing ships for the White Star Line; the usual approach was for the latter to sketch out a general concept which the former would take away and turn into a ship design. Cost considerations were relatively low on the agenda and Harland and Wolff was authorised to spend what it needed on the ships, plus a five percent profit margin. In the case of the "Olympic"-class ships, a cost of £3 million (approximately £ million in ) for the first two ships was agreed plus "extras to contract" and the usual five percent fee.


title: Titanic

text: Harland and Wolff put their leading designers to work designing the "Olympic"-class vessels. The design was overseen by Lord Pirrie, a director of both Harland and Wolff and the White Star Line; naval architect Thomas Andrews, the managing director of Harland and Wolff's design department; Edward Wilding, Andrews' deputy and responsible for calculating the ship's design, stability and trim; and Alexander Carlisle, the shipyard's chief draughtsman and general manager. Carlisle's responsibilities included the decorations, equipment and all general arrangements, including the implementation of an efficient lifeboat davit design.


title: Titanic

text: On 29 July 1908, Harland and Wolff presented the drawings to J. Bruce Ismay and other White Star Line executives. Ismay approved the design and signed three "letters of agreement" two days later, authorising the start of construction. At this point the first ship—which was later to become "Olympic"—had no name, but was referred to simply as "Number 400", as it was Harland and Wolff's four hundredth hull. "Titanic" was based on a revised version of the same design and was given the number 401.


title: Titanic

text: Her total height, measured from the base of the keel to the top of the bridge, was . She measured and and with a draught of , she displaced 52,310 tons.


title: Titanic

text: All three of the "Olympic"-class ships had ten decks (excluding the top of the officers' quarters), eight of which were for passenger use. From top to bottom, the decks were:


title: Titanic

text: "Titanic" was equipped with three main engines—two reciprocating four-cylinder, triple-expansion steam engines and one centrally placed low-pressure Parsons turbine—each driving a propeller. The two reciprocating engines had a combined output of . The output of the steam turbine was . The White Star Line had used the same combination of engines on an earlier liner, , where it had been a great success. It provided a good combination of performance and speed; reciprocating engines by themselves were not powerful enough to propel an "Olympic"-class liner at the desired speeds, while turbines were sufficiently powerful but caused uncomfortable vibrations, a problem that affected the all-turbine Cunard liners and . By combining reciprocating engines with a turbine, fuel usage could be reduced and motive power increased, while using the same amount of steam.


title: Titanic

text: The two reciprocating engines were each long and weighed 720 tons, with their bedplates contributing a further 195 tons. They were powered by steam produced in 29 boilers, 24 of which were double-ended and five single-ended, which contained a total of 159 furnaces. The boilers were in diameter and long, each weighing 91.5 tons and capable of holding 48.5 tons of water.


title: Titanic

text: They were heated by burning coal, 6,611 tons of which could be carried in "Titanic"s bunkers, with a further 1,092 tons in Hold 3. The furnaces required over 600 tons of coal a day to be shovelled into them by hand, requiring the services of 176 firemen working around the clock. 100 tons of ash a day had to be disposed of by ejecting it into the sea. The work was relentless, dirty and dangerous, and although firemen were paid relatively generously, there was a high suicide rate among those who worked in that capacity.


title: Titanic

text: Exhaust steam leaving the reciprocating engines was fed into the turbine, which was situated aft. From there it passed into a surface condenser, to increase the efficiency of the turbine and so that the steam could be condensed back into water and reused. The engines were attached directly to long shafts which drove the propellers. There were three, one for each engine; the outer (or wing) propellers were the largest, each carrying three blades of manganese-bronze alloy with a total diameter of . The middle propeller was slightly smaller at in diameter, and could be stopped but not reversed.


title: Titanic

text: "Titanic"s electrical plant was capable of producing more power than an average city power station of the time. Immediately aft of the turbine engine were four 400 kW steam-driven electric generators, used to provide electrical power to the ship, plus two 30 kW auxiliary generators for emergency use. Their location in the stern of the ship meant they remained operational until the last few minutes before the ship sank.


title: Titanic

text: "Titanic" lacked a searchlight in accordance with the ban on the use of searchlights in the merchant navy.


title: Titanic

text: The interiors of the "Olympic"-class ships were subdivided into 16 primary compartments divided by 15 bulkheads that extended above the waterline. Eleven vertically closing watertight doors could seal off the compartments in the event of an emergency. The ship's exposed decking was made of pine and teak, while interior ceilings were covered in painted granulated cork to combat condensation. Standing above the decks were four funnels, each painted buff with black tops; only three were functional—the aftmost one was a dummy, installed for aesthetic purposes and kitchen ventilation. Two masts, each high, supported derricks for working cargo.


title: Titanic

text: "Titanic"s rudder was so large—at high and long, weighing over 100 tons—that it required steering engines to move it. Two steam-powered steering engines were installed, though only one was used at any one time, with the other one kept in reserve. They were connected to the short tiller through stiff springs, to isolate the steering engines from any shocks in heavy seas or during fast changes of direction. As a last resort, the tiller could be moved by ropes connected to two steam capstans. The capstans were also used to raise and lower the ship's five anchors (one port, one starboard, one in the centreline and two kedging anchors).


title: Titanic

text: The ship was equipped with her own waterworks, capable of heating and pumping water to all parts of the vessel via a complex network of pipes and valves. The main water supply was taken aboard while "Titanic" was in port, but in an emergency, the ship could also distil fresh water from seawater, though this was not a straightforward process as the distillation plant quickly became clogged by salt deposits. A network of insulated ducts conveyed warm air, driven by electric fans, around the ship, and First Class cabins were fitted with additional electric heaters.


title: Titanic

text: "Titanic"s radiotelegraph equipment (then known as wireless telegraphy) was leased to the White Star Line by the Marconi International Marine Communication Company, which also supplied two of its employees, Jack Phillips and Harold Bride, as operators. The service maintained a 24-hour schedule, primarily sending and receiving passenger telegrams, but also handling navigation messages including weather reports and ice warnings.


title: Titanic

text: The radio room was located on the Boat Deck, in the officers' quarters. A soundproofed "Silent Room", next to the operating room, housed loud equipment, including the transmitter and a motor-generator used for producing alternating currents. The operators' living quarters were adjacent to the working office. The ship was equipped with a 'state of the art' 5 kilowatt rotary spark-gap transmitter, with the wireless telegraph call sign MGY, and communication was in Morse code. This transmitter was one of the first Marconi installations to use a rotary spark-gap, which gave "Titanic" a distinctive musical tone that could be readily distinguished from other signals. The transmitter was one of the most powerful in the world and guaranteed to broadcast over a radius of . An elevated T-antenna that spanned the length of the ship was used for transmitting and receiving. The normal operating frequency was 500 kHz (600 m wavelength); however, the equipment could also operate on the "short" wavelength of 1,000 kHz (300 m wavelength) that was employed by smaller vessels with shorter antennas.


title: Titanic

text: The passenger facilities aboard "Titanic" aimed to meet the highest standards of luxury. According to "Titanic"s general arrangement plans, the ship could accommodate 833 First Class Passengers, 614 in Second Class and 1,006 in Third Class, for a total passenger capacity of 2,453. In addition, her capacity for crew members exceeded 900, as most documents of her original configuration have stated that her full carrying capacity for both passengers and crew was approximately 3,547. Her interior design was a departure from that of other passenger liners, which had typically been decorated in the rather heavy style of a manor house or an English country house.


title: Titanic

text: "Titanic" was laid out in a much lighter style similar to that of contemporary high-class hotels—the Ritz Hotel was a reference point—with First Class cabins finished in the Empire style. A variety of other decorative styles, ranging from the Renaissance to Louis XV, were used to decorate cabins and public rooms in First and Second Class areas of the ship. The aim was to convey an impression that the passengers were in a floating hotel rather than a ship; as one passenger recalled, on entering the ship's interior a passenger would "at once lose the feeling that we are on board ship, and seem instead to be entering the hall of some great house on shore".


title: Titanic

text: Among the more novel features available to first-class passengers was a deep saltwater swimming pool, a gymnasium, a squash court, and a Turkish bath which comprised electric bath, steam room, cool room, massage room, and hot room. First-class common rooms were impressive in scope and lavishly decorated. They included a Lounge in the style of the Palace of Versailles, an enormous Reception Room, a men's Smoking Room, and a Reading and Writing Room. There was an À la Carte Restaurant in the style of the Ritz Hotel which was run as a concession by the famous Italian restaurateur Gaspare Gatti. A "Café Parisien" decorated in the style of a French sidewalk café, complete with ivy-covered trellises and wicker furniture, was run as an annex to the restaurant. For an extra cost, first-class passengers could enjoy the finest French "haute cuisine" in the most luxurious of surroundings. There was also a "Verandah Café" where tea and light refreshments were served, that offered grand views of the ocean. At long by wide, the Dining Saloon on D Deck, designed by Charles Fitzroy Doll, was the largest room afloat and could seat almost 600 passengers at a time.


title: Titanic

text: Third Class (commonly referred to as Steerage) accommodations aboard "Titanic" were not as luxurious as First or Second Class, but even so, were better than on many other ships of the time. They reflected the improved standards which the White Star Line had adopted for trans-Atlantic immigrant and lower-class travel. On most other North Atlantic passenger ships at the time, Third Class accommodations consisted of little more than open dormitories in the forward end of the vessels, in which hundreds of people were confined, often without adequate food or toilet facilities.


title: Titanic

text: The White Star Line had long since broken that mould. As seen aboard "Titanic", all White Star Line passenger ships divided their Third Class accommodations into two sections, always at opposite ends of the vessel from one another. The established arrangement was that single men were quartered in the forward areas, while single women, married couples and families were quartered aft. In addition, while other ships provided only open berth sleeping arrangements, White Star Line vessels provided their Third Class passengers with private, small but comfortable cabins capable of accommodating two, four, six, eight and ten passengers.


title: Titanic

text: Third Class accommodations also included their own dining rooms, as well as public gathering areas including adequate open deck space, which aboard "Titanic" comprised the Poop Deck at the stern, the forward and aft well decks, and a large open space on D Deck which could be used as a social hall. This was supplemented by the addition of a smoking room for men and a General Room on C Deck which women could use for reading and writing. Although they were not as glamorous in design as spaces seen in upper-class accommodations, they were still far above average for the period.


title: Titanic

text: Leisure facilities were provided for all three classes to pass the time. As well as making use of the indoor amenities such as the library, smoking rooms, and gymnasium, it was also customary for passengers to socialise on the open deck, promenading or relaxing in hired deck chairs or wooden benches. A passenger list was published before the sailing to inform the public which members of the great and good were on board, and it was not uncommon for ambitious mothers to use the list to identify rich bachelors to whom they could introduce their marriageable daughters during the voyage.


title: Titanic

text: One of "Titanic"s most distinctive features was her First Class staircase, known as the Grand Staircase or Grand Stairway. Built of solid English oak with a sweeping curve, the staircase descended through seven decks of the ship, between the Boat Deck to E deck, before terminating in a simplified single flight on F Deck. It was capped with a dome of wrought iron and glass that admitted natural light to the stairwell. Each landing off the staircase gave access to ornate entrance halls panelled in the William & Mary style and lit by ormolu and crystal light fixtures.


title: Titanic

text: At the uppermost landing was a large carved wooden panel containing a clock, with figures of "Honour and Glory Crowning Time" flanking the clock face. The Grand Staircase was destroyed during the sinking and is now just a void in the ship which modern explorers have used to access the lower decks. During the filming of James Cameron's "Titanic" in 1997, his replica of the Grand Staircase was ripped from its foundations by the force of the inrushing water on the set. It has been suggested that during the real event, the entire Grand Staircase was ejected upwards through the dome.


title: Titanic

text: Although "Titanic" was primarily a passenger liner, she also carried a substantial amount of cargo. Her designation as a Royal Mail Ship (RMS) indicated that she carried mail under contract with the Royal Mail (and also for the United States Post Office Department). For the storage of letters, parcels and specie (bullion, coins and other valuables), of space in her holds was allocated. The Sea Post Office on G Deck was manned by five postal clerks (three Americans and two Britons), who worked 13 hours a day, seven days a week, sorting up to 60,000 items daily.


title: Titanic

text: The ship's passengers brought with them a huge amount of baggage; another was taken up by first- and second-class baggage. In addition, there was a considerable quantity of regular cargo, ranging from furniture to foodstuffs, and a 1912 Renault Type CE Coupe de Ville motor car. Despite later myths, the cargo on "Titanic"s maiden voyage was fairly mundane; there was no gold, exotic minerals or diamonds, and one of the more famous items lost in the shipwreck, a jewelled copy of the "Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam", was valued at only £405 (£ today). According to the claims for compensation filed with Commissioner Gilchrist, following the conclusion of the Senate Inquiry, the single most highly valued item of luggage or cargo was a large neoclassical oil painting entitled "La Circassienne au Bain" by French artist Merry-Joseph Blondel. The painting's owner, first-class passenger Mauritz Håkan Björnström-Steffansson, filed a claim for $100,000 ($2.4 million equivalent in 2014) in compensation for the loss of the artwork.


title: Titanic

text: "Titanic" was equipped with eight electric cranes, four electric winches and three steam winches to lift cargo and baggage in and out of the holds. It is estimated that the ship used some 415 tons of coal whilst in Southampton, simply generating steam to operate the cargo winches and provide heat and light.


title: Titanic

text: Like "Olympic", "Titanic" carried a total of 20 lifeboats: 14 standard wooden Harland and Wolff lifeboats with a capacity of 65 people each and four Engelhardt "collapsible" (wooden bottom, collapsible canvas sides) lifeboats (identified as A to D) with a capacity of 47 people each. In addition, she had two emergency cutters with a capacity of 40 people each. "Olympic" carried at least two collapsible boats on either side of her number one funnel. All of the lifeboats were stowed securely on the boat deck and, except for collapsible lifeboats A and B, connected to davits by ropes. Those on the starboard side were odd-numbered 1–15 from bow to stern, while those on the port side were even-numbered 2–16 from bow to stern.


title: Titanic

text: Both cutters were kept swung out, hanging from the davits, ready for immediate use, while collapsible lifeboats C and D were stowed on the boat deck (connected to davits) immediately inboard of boats 1 and 2 respectively. A and B were stored on the roof of the officers' quarters, on either side of number 1 funnel. There were no davits to lower them and their weight would make them difficult to launch by hand. Each boat carried (among other things) food, water, blankets, and a spare life belt. Lifeline ropes on the boats' sides enabled them to save additional people from the water if necessary.


title: Titanic

text: "Titanic" had 16 sets of davits, each able to handle four lifeboats as Carlisle had planned. This gave "Titanic" the ability to carry up to 64 wooden lifeboats which would have been enough for 4,000 people—considerably more than her actual capacity. However, the White Star Line decided that only 16 wooden lifeboats and four collapsibles would be carried, which could accommodate 1,178 people, only one-third of "Titanic" total capacity. At the time, the Board of Trade's regulations required British vessels over 10,000 tons to only carry 16 lifeboats with a capacity of 990 occupants.


title: Titanic

text: Therefore, the White Star Line actually provided more lifeboat accommodation than was legally required. At the time, lifeboats were intended to ferry survivors from a sinking ship to a rescuing ship—not keep afloat the whole population or power them to shore. Had responded to "Titanic" distress calls, the lifeboats might have been able to ferry all passengers to safety as planned.


title: Titanic

text: The sheer size of "Titanic" and her sister ships posed a major engineering challenge for Harland and Wolff; no shipbuilder had ever before attempted to construct vessels this size. The ships were constructed on Queen's Island, now known as the Titanic Quarter, in Belfast Harbour. Harland and Wolff had to demolish three existing slipways and build two new ones, the largest ever constructed up to that time, to accommodate both ships. Their construction was facilitated by an enormous gantry built by Sir William Arrol & Co., a Scottish firm responsible for the building of the Forth Bridge and London's Tower Bridge. The Arrol Gantry stood high, was wide and long, and weighed more than 6,000 tons. It accommodated a number of mobile cranes. A separate floating crane, capable of lifting 200 tons, was brought in from Germany.


title: Titanic

text: The construction of "Olympic" and "Titanic" took place virtually in parallel, with "Olympic"s keel laid down first on 16 December 1908 and "Titanic"s on 31 March 1909. Both ships took about 26 months to build and followed much the same construction process. They were designed essentially as an enormous floating box girder, with the keel acting as a backbone and the frames of the hull forming the ribs. At the base of the ships, a double bottom deep supported 300 frames, each between and apart and measuring up to about long. They terminated at the bridge deck (B Deck) and were covered with steel plates which formed the outer skin of the ships.


title: Titanic

text: The 2,000 hull plates were single pieces of rolled steel plate, mostly up to wide and long and weighing between 2.5 and 3 tons. Their thickness varied from to . The plates were laid in a clinkered (overlapping) fashion from the keel to the bilge. Above that point they were laid in the "in and out" fashion, where strake plating was applied in bands (the "in strakes") with the gaps covered by the "out strakes", overlapping on the edges. Commercial oxy-fuel and electric arc welding methods, ubiquitous in fabrication today, were still in their infancy; like most other iron and steel structures of the era, the hull was held together with over three million iron and steel rivets, which by themselves weighed over 1,200 tons. They were fitted using hydraulic machines or were hammered in by hand. In the 1990s some material scientists concluded that the steel plate used for the ship was subject to being especially brittle when cold, and that this brittleness exacerbated the impact damage and hastened the sinking. It is believed that, by the standards of the time, the steel plate's quality was good, not faulty, but that it was inferior to what would be used for shipbuilding purposes in later decades, owing to advances in the metallurgy of steelmaking. As for the rivets, considerable emphasis has also been placed on their quality and strength.


title: Titanic

text: Among the last items to be fitted on "Titanic" before the ship's launch were her two side anchors and one centre anchor. The anchors themselves were a challenge to make, with the centre anchor being the largest ever forged by hand and weighing nearly 16 tons. Twenty Clydesdale draught horses were needed to haul the centre anchor by wagon from the Noah Hingley & Sons Ltd forge shop in Netherton, near Dudley, United Kingdom to the Dudley railway station two miles away. From there it was shipped by rail to Fleetwood in Lancashire before being loaded aboard a ship and sent to Belfast.


title: Titanic

text: The work of constructing the ships was difficult and dangerous. For the 15,000 men who worked at Harland and Wolff at the time, safety precautions were rudimentary at best; a lot of the work was carried out without equipment like hard hats or hand guards on machinery. As a result, during "Titanic"s construction, 246 injuries were recorded, 28 of them "severe", such as arms severed by machines or legs crushed under falling pieces of steel. Six people died on the ship herself while she was being constructed and fitted out, and another two died in the shipyard workshops and sheds. Just before the launch a worker was killed when a piece of wood fell on him.


title: Titanic

text: "Titanic" was launched at 12:15 pm on 31 May 1911 in the presence of Lord Pirrie, J. Pierpont Morgan, J. Bruce Ismay and 100,000 onlookers. Twenty-two tons of soap and tallow were spread on the slipway to lubricate the ship's passage into the River Lagan. In keeping with the White Star Line's traditional policy, the ship was not formally named or christened with champagne. The ship was towed to a fitting-out berth where, over the course of the next year, her engines, funnels and superstructure were installed and her interior was fitted out.


title: Titanic

text: Although "Titanic" was virtually identical to the class's lead ship "Olympic", a few changes were made to distinguish both ships. The most noticeable exterior difference was that "Titanic" (and the third vessel in class, ) had a steel screen with sliding windows installed along the forward half of the A Deck promenade. This was installed as a last minute change at the personal request of Bruce Ismay, and was intended to provide additional shelter to First Class passengers. Extensive changes were made to B Deck on "Titanic" as the promenade space in this deck, which had proven unpopular on "Olympic", was converted into additional First Class cabins, including two opulent parlour suites with their own private promenade spaces. The "À la Carte" restaurant was also enlarged and the "Café Parisien", an entirely new feature which did not exist on "Olympic", was added. These changes made "Titanic" slightly heavier than her sister, and thus she could claim to be the largest ship afloat. The work took longer than expected due to design changes requested by Ismay and a temporary pause in work occasioned by the need to repair "Olympic", which had been in a collision in September 1911. Had "Titanic" been finished earlier, she might well have missed her collision with an iceberg.


title: Titanic

text: "Titanic"s sea trials began at 6 am on Tuesday, 2 April 1912, just two days after her fitting out was finished and eight days before she was due to leave Southampton on her maiden voyage. The trials were delayed for a day due to bad weather, but by Monday morning it was clear and fair. Aboard were 78 stokers, greasers and firemen, and 41 members of crew. No domestic staff appear to have been aboard. Representatives of various companies travelled on "Titanic" sea trials, Thomas Andrews and Edward Wilding of Harland and Wolff and Harold A. Sanderson of IMM. Bruce Ismay and Lord Pirrie were too ill to attend. Jack Phillips and Harold Bride served as radio operators and performed fine-tuning of the Marconi equipment. Francis Carruthers, a surveyor from the Board of Trade, was also present to see that everything worked and that the ship was fit to carry passengers.


title: Titanic

text: The sea trials consisted of a number of tests of her handling characteristics, carried out first in Belfast Lough and then in the open waters of the Irish Sea. Over the course of about 12 hours, "Titanic" was driven at different speeds, her turning ability was tested and a "crash stop" was performed in which the engines were reversed full ahead to full astern, bringing her to a stop in or 3 minutes and 15 seconds. The ship covered a distance of about , averaging and reaching a maximum speed of just under .


title: Titanic

text: On returning to Belfast at about 7 pm, the surveyor signed an "Agreement and Account of Voyages and Crew", valid for 12 months, which declared the ship seaworthy. An hour later, "Titanic" departed Belfast to head to Southampton, a voyage of about . After a journey lasting about 28 hours, she arrived about midnight on 4 April and was towed to the port's Berth 44, ready for the arrival of her passengers and the remainder of her crew.


title: Titanic

text: Both "Olympic" and "Titanic" registered Liverpool as their home port. The offices of the White Star Line, as well as Cunard, were in Liverpool, and up until the introduction of the "Olympic", most British ocean liners for both Cunard and White Star, such as "Lusitania" and "Mauretania", sailed from Liverpool followed by a port of call in Queenstown, Ireland. Since the company's founding in 1845, a vast majority of their operations had taken place from Liverpool. However, in 1907 White Star Line established another service from Southampton on England's south coast, which became known as White Star's "Express Service". Southampton had many advantages over Liverpool, the first being its proximity to London.


title: Titanic

text: In addition, Southampton, being on the south coast, allowed ships to easily cross the English Channel and make a port of call on the northern coast of France, usually at Cherbourg. This allowed British ships to pick up clientele from continental Europe before recrossing the channel and picking up passengers at Queenstown. The "Southampton-Cherbourg-New York run" would become so popular that most British ocean liners began using the port after World War I. Out of respect for Liverpool, ships continued to be registered there until the early 1960s. "Queen Elizabeth 2" was one of the first ships registered in Southampton when introduced into service by Cunard in 1969.


title: Titanic

text: "Titanic"s maiden voyage was intended to be the first of many trans-Atlantic crossings between Southampton and New York via Cherbourg and Queenstown on westbound runs, returning via Plymouth in England while eastbound. Indeed, her entire schedule of voyages through to December 1912 still exists. When the route was established, four ships were assigned to the service. In addition to "Teutonic" and "Majestic", and the brand new sailed the route. When the "Olympic" entered service in June 1911, she replaced "Teutonic", which after completing her last run on the service in late April was transferred to the Dominion Line's Canadian service. The following August, "Adriatic" was transferred to White Star Line's main Liverpool-New York service, and in November, "Majestic" was withdrawn from service impending the arrival of "Titanic" in the coming months, and was mothballed as a reserve ship.


title: Titanic

text: White Star Line's initial plans for "Olympic" and "Titanic" on the Southampton run followed the same routine as their predecessors had done before them. Each would sail once every three weeks from Southampton and New York, usually leaving at noon each Wednesday from Southampton and each Saturday from New York, thus enabling the White Star Line to offer weekly sailings in each direction. Special trains were scheduled from London and Paris to convey passengers to Southampton and Cherbourg respectively. The deep-water dock at Southampton, then known as the ""White Star Dock", had been specially constructed to accommodate the new "Olympic"-class liners, and had opened in 1911.


title: Titanic

text: "Titanic" had around 885 crew members on board for her maiden voyage. Like other vessels of her time, she did not have a permanent crew, and the vast majority of crew members were casual workers who only came aboard the ship a few hours before she sailed from Southampton. The process of signing up recruits had begun on 23 March and some had been sent to Belfast, where they served as a skeleton crew during "Titanic"s sea trials and passage to England at the start of April.


title: Titanic

text: Captain Edward John Smith, the most senior of the White Star Line's captains, was transferred from "Olympic" to take command of "Titanic". Henry Tingle Wilde also came across from "Olympic" to take the post of chief mate. "Titanic"s previously designated chief mate and first officer, William McMaster Murdoch and Charles Lightoller, were bumped down to the ranks of first and second officer respectively. The original second officer, David Blair, was dropped altogether. The third officer was Herbert Pitman MBE, the only deck officer who was not a member of the Royal Naval Reserve. Pitman was the second to last surviving officer.


title: Titanic

text: "Titanic"s crew were divided into three principal departments: Deck, with 66 crew; Engine, with 325; and Victualling, with 494. The vast majority of the crew were thus not seamen but were either engineers, firemen, or stokers, responsible for looking after the engines, or stewards and galley staff, responsible for the passengers. Of these, over 97% were male; just 23 of the crew were female, mainly stewardesses. The rest represented a great variety of professions—bakers, chefs, butchers, fishmongers, dishwashers, stewards, gymnasium instructors, laundrymen, waiters, bed-makers, cleaners, and even a printer, who produced a daily newspaper for passengers called the "Atlantic Daily Bulletin" with the latest news received by the ship's wireless operators.


title: Titanic

text: Most of the crew signed on in Southampton on 6 April; in all, 699 of the crew came from there, and 40% were natives of the town. A few specialist staff were self-employed or were subcontractors. These included the five postal clerks, who worked for the Royal Mail and the United States Post Office Department, the staff of the First Class "A La Carte" Restaurant and the Café Parisien, the radio operators (who were employed by Marconi) and the eight musicians, who were employed by an agency and travelled as second-class passengers. Crew pay varied greatly, from Captain Smith's £105 a month (equivalent to £ today) to the £3 10"s" (£ today) that stewardesses earned. The lower-paid victualling staff could, however, supplement their wages substantially through tips from passengers.


title: Titanic

text: "Titanic"s passengers numbered approximately 1,317 people: 324 in First Class, 284 in Second Class, and 709 in Third Class. Of these, 869 (66%) were male and 447 (34%) female. There were 107 children aboard, the largest number of whom were in Third Class. The ship was considerably under capacity on her maiden voyage, as she could accommodate 2,453 passengers—833 First Class, 614 Second Class, and 1,006 Third Class.


title: Titanic

text: Usually, a high prestige vessel like "Titanic" could expect to be fully booked on its maiden voyage. However, a national coal strike in the UK had caused considerable disruption to shipping schedules in the spring of 1912, causing many crossings to be cancelled. Many would-be passengers chose to postpone their travel plans until the strike was over. The strike had finished a few days before "Titanic" sailed; however, that was too late to have much of an effect. "Titanic" was able to sail on the scheduled date only because coal was transferred from other vessels which were tied up at Southampton, such as and , as well as coal "Olympic" had brought back from a previous voyage to New York, which had been stored at the White Star Dock.


title: Titanic

text: Some of the most prominent people of the day booked a passage aboard "Titanic", travelling in First Class. Among them (with those who perished marked with a dagger†) were the American millionaire John Jacob Astor IV† and his wife Madeleine Force Astor (with John Jacob Astor VI in utero), industrialist Benjamin Guggenheim†, painter and sculptor Francis Davis Millet†, Macy's owner Isidor Straus† and his wife Ida†, Denver millionairess Margaret "Molly" Brown, Sir Cosmo Duff Gordon and his wife, couturière Lucy (Lady Duff-Gordon), Lieut. Col. Arthur Peuchen, writer and historian Archibald Gracie, cricketer and businessman John B. Thayer† with his wife Marian and son Jack, George Dunton Widener† with his wife Eleanor and son Harry†, Noël Leslie, Countess of Rothes, Mr.† and Mrs. Charles M. Hays, Mr. and Mrs. Henry S. Harper, Mr.† and Mrs. Walter D. Douglas, Mr.† and Mrs. George D. Wick, Mr.† and Mrs. Henry B. Harris, Mr.† and Mrs. Arthur L. Ryerson, Mr.† and Mrs.† Hudson J. C. Allison, Mr. and Mrs. Dickinson Bishop, noted architect Edward Austin Kent†, brewery heir Harry Molson†, tennis players Karl Behr and Dick Williams, author and socialite Helen Churchill Candee, future lawyer and suffragette Elsie Bowerman and her mother Edith, journalist and social reformer William Thomas Stead†, journalist and fashion buyer Edith Rosenbaum, Philadelphia and New York socialite Edith Corse Evans†, wealthy divorcée Charlotte Drake Cardeza, French sculptor , author Jacques Futrelle† with his wife May, silent film actress Dorothy Gibson with her mother Pauline, President of the Swiss Bankverein Col. Alfons Simonius-Blumer, James A. Hughes's daughter Eloise, banker Robert Williams Daniel, the chairman of the Holland America Line , Arthur Wellington Ross's son John H. Ross, Washington Roebling's nephew Washington A. Roebling II, Andrew Saks's daughter Leila Saks Meyer with her husband Edgar Joseph Meyer† (son of Marc Eugene Meyer), William A. Clark's nephew Walter M. Clark with his wife Virginia, great-great-grandson of soap manufacturer Andrew Pears Thomas C. Pears with wife, John S. Pillsbury's honeymooning grandson John P. Snyder and wife Nelle, Dorothy Parker's New York manufacturer uncle Martin Rothschild with his wife, Elizabeth, among others.


title: Titanic

text: "Titanic"s owner J. P. Morgan was scheduled to travel on the maiden voyage but cancelled at the last minute. Also aboard the ship were the White Star Line's managing director J. Bruce Ismay and "Titanic"s designer Thomas Andrews†, who was on board to observe any problems and assess the general performance of the new ship.


title: Titanic

text: The exact number of people aboard is not known, as not all of those who had booked tickets made it to the ship; about 50 people cancelled for various reasons, and not all of those who boarded stayed aboard for the entire journey. Fares varied depending on class and season. Third Class fares from London, Southampton, or Queenstown cost £7 5"s" (equivalent to £ today) while the cheapest First Class fares cost £23 (£ today). The most expensive First Class suites were to have cost up to £870 in high season (£ today).


title: Titanic

text: "Titanic"s maiden voyage began on Wednesday, 10 April 1912. Following the embarkation of the crew, the passengers began arriving at 9:30 am, when the London and South Western Railway's boat train from London Waterloo station reached Southampton Terminus railway station on the quayside, alongside "Titanic"s berth. The large number of Third Class passengers meant they were the first to board, with First and Second Class passengers following up to an hour before departure. Stewards showed them to their cabins, and First Class passengers were personally greeted by Captain Smith. Third Class passengers were inspected for ailments and physical impairments that might lead to their being refused entry to the United States – a prospect the White Star Line wished to avoid, as it would have to carry anyone who failed the examination back across the Atlantic. In all, 920 passengers boarded "Titanic" at Southampton – 179 First Class, 247 Second Class, and 494 Third Class. Additional passengers were to be picked up at Cherbourg and Queenstown.