Good morning, my friends. It was a wet, wet day yesterday. We received over half an inch of rain at our place. It was a good day to attend the Titanic Artifacts exhibit going on at the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry (OMSI). Matthew and I had originally planned a walk on one of the local trails, but the OMSI exhibit turned out to be a good substitute.

I have lots of pictures, as you might imagine, so let's just get right to it, shall we? I should say that the lighting was weird, and I was taking pictures with my phone. They aren't the best pictures, but I'm hopeful they'll give you a feel for the exhibit. Also, the exhibit was largely a look-at-pictures-and-read kind of display. I'll admit I'm not much into reading when I'm in a museum, and so I'm posting the placards that help to understand the pictures. You can decide how much reading you want to do.

When we entered the museum and showed our tickets, we were each handed a souvenir boarding pass.

Each one was for a real person who was on the ship. It's worth reading the "Passenger Fact" at the bottom of the one below.

Later in a one of the exhibit rooms, we were given the opportunity to scan the QR code included on the boarding pass (cropped off the images). This is what we learned about Major Peuchen.

The other boarding pass featured this gentleman and his family.

As for Mr. Ryerson, it seems his family survived, but he did not.

Entering the first room, we were greeted by this sign introducing the exhibit and explaining what we would be seeing.

There was a who's who of passengers on the ship, and its maiden voyage was followed by the public with excitement. Reading about what folks paid, even today, most ordinary people would be hard pressed to pay the passage for the voyage.

Here's a description and a look at how the first class passengers lived.

Only the first class cabins were shown, but if you were in "steerage" and most likely an immigrant, you would have had access to this "general room."

Dining in first class would have been elegant.

Here are the menus the different classes enjoyed, beginning with first class.

If you were dining in third class, this is the china you would have used.

Below are some random items. A decanter in the upper left, a tea saucer in the lower left, a bread bowl in the upper right, and a sterling silver spoon in the lower right.

The wood in the image below was a portion of a chair. I'm afraid I don't remember the significance of the plate, and the placard is unreadable in this image.

Here was a little Dutch boy with a wood shoe in the upper left...a souvenir, maybe? In the lower left is a child's tea cup that would have been a part of a toy tea service. In the upper right, a teacup, and in the lower right, the placard indicates that some of the immigrants on board had with them their own personal china.

Here's our ship's captain. This was to be his last voyage before retirement. I don't suppose he intended to retire to the bottom of the ocean.

Famous last words, if I ever read any.

If you were part of the crew, this might have been your cabin.

And this might have been your job.

This is a recreation of the boiler room.

You might have been shoveling basketball-sized chunks of coal like the one below.

I once watched a documentary about the two 747's colliding on a runway on the Spanish island of Tenerife back in 1977. The documentary pointed out that these kinds of disasters rarely result from just one error. It's a sequence of errors and coincidences that cause this kind of catastrophic loss of life. In the case of the Titanic, it started with poor decision making and too much speed in treacherous waters.

If the Titanic hadn't swerved to miss the iceberg and had, instead, hit it head-on, the ship might not have sunk. Here's what happened in the final moments before striking the iceberg. It's all worth reading, but the last full paragraph is the one to notice.

Amazingly, there was an actual huge chunk of ice as a part of the exhibit.

Lighting was weird in here, and this picture came out a deep blue. I had Matthew standing there for scale, but that ice is real. Try to imagine how cold the ocean would have been with big chunks of ice like this floating all around.

The Titanic's story was big news from the beginning of its voyage until the end.

Here's an image of some boys selling newspapers with the big headlines about the disaster.

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