Titanic: The Artifact Exhibition part 2

 One more group of pictures from our visit to Titanic: The Artifact Exhibition. If you missed the previous post, check back to see more.

Big model of the ship, along with an odd disclosure agreement about video recording, of you. So don't be surprised if you see yourself in an advertisement for this place, they won't owe you anything. Do all museums have this kind of thing?

Info text. Sounds like someone officially "owns" the wreckage, however that works. But they sound like good people, so that's um... good.

Blueprints for the Titanic? Cool. Those were not on board the ship itself, but still nice to see them preserved.

Menu. Great, now I'm hungry. It's not like food has changed over the last hundred years. This stuff all sounds like it would have been tasty.

Another menu. That other one was probably First Class since this one seems a little more simple. Probably prepared by the same top-level chefs, so still tasty.

Shoes. They specifically mention they were recovered from a suitcase, so you don't have to think that somebody was wearing them during that night. That would have been awful to think.

A little alarming to see a swastika on this towel, but 1910 was a long time before World War II and the Nazis, at the time, it was considered to be a good luck symbol.

Here's a story about the ship Carpathia that rescued the survivors. They had to navigate around a sea full of icebergs at top speed to get there. Most people focus on the tragedy and forget that there's some heroic events to be included.

Everybody knows the story how the musicians played while the ship was sinking. It's such a sweet thing to imagine, I can hardly keep it together while writing about it.

Newspapers of the day, reporting on the tragedy. How do you even begin to describe this?

Shocked to read this story about another ship that saw icebergs and stopped for the night, and they even warned the Titanic. What if's... right?

Morse code. Somehow seeing this, in this museum, and knowing that the only Morse Code I know is the SOS... It would be cool to learn the rest of this, but then would you even have someone else you could use it with?

Due to the nature of salt in the sea water, it was technically colder in the water, than the iceberg was. It's hard to imagine something being colder than ice, but... science.

Not quite sure how it's possible, but there was a massive hunk of ice for you to touch, in the museum. I want to use the word "cool" to be clever here, but that's not cool. Yikes, was that cool to do?

There were some artifacts that come from survivors. Here's a pocketwatch somebody had previously engraved RMS Titanic, Annie Carlton. She continued to serve on other ships, which is oddly nice to hear.

They said the satin bookmark was found inside this dictionary. What page was it on? Why am I curious about such a lame thing?

I am a big fan of electric heaters. Good to know they had them a hundred years ago.

Here's the side of a bench. Another example of them paying attention to the artistry when a simple bench design would have been fine.

The curator thought this was among the most impressive pieces recovered, due to the absolute perfect condition they were in. Who doesn't like a nice-looking plate?

As a ship going from one place to another, it looks like the Titanic had plain old cargo on board.

The movie showed there were cars on board. So here's a back end of a car to remind you about that popular scene.

Huge metal room wall to show how big the boiler engines were. Heavy metal. How does ship floating work?

6,000 Tons of coal! They were able to recover um... tons... of coal and our friend tells us it's the only thing they've salvaged that they offer to sell to the public.

That's an impressive picture of what the engines looked like. I took a picture, of a picture. Pictures are good to have in a museum, nothing wrong with that.

This is way over my head with the science and engineering, but still it's cool to see. It's a nice distraction from the tragedy to marvel at how impressive the ship was.

There was a tour group which was blocking our wandering, and another curator took us through the Employee Only door to bypass them. We later snuck back to catch what we missed earlier. That was kind of neat to do.

The tragedy of the Titanic had a recent addition when the submersible Titan was lost with it's five passengers, as it went down to explore the wreckage. Aboard was this expert known as "Mr. Titanic", who likely contributed greatly to this museum.

Here's the highlight of the museum, what's known as "The Little Piece" of the hull that was brought up. That's part of the actual ship, right in front of us!

This thing is far from "Little." You can see the rivet holes where they stretched and popped out. Being right next to this is... I'm not sure what's the right word to you. It's something.

When you see it underneath, you know why they call this The Little Piece. The upper part known as The Big Piece is currently in The Luxor Hotel in Las Vegas. When they were pulling it up, it started to bend and they decided to cut it off rather than risk ruining the whole thing.

The Little Piece was velvet-roped, but there's a piece of the hull in this case that you can reach in and touch. My friends did it, but I was not about to jump through that tiny hole myself. Although the thought of the comedy episode involving them retrieving a small plastic pony that fell inside was amusing.

Out into the gift shop! Is a Polar Bear kind of an insensitive thing? At least there's not a plushie iceberg.

Gift shop stuff. I'm a fan of gift shops, too.

"...Equally Bouyant"? Yikes! This shirt showed large buildings and the Titanic standing upright next to them, just as tall.

Vintage hats in the gift shop were neat to see. 

111th Anniversary collector coin. Sure, 111 is a number. Do they do one of these every year?

Got half a million dollars? Buy yourself a 55 pound piece of coal! I tried to Google the price of coal which said it was $37.32 per short ton, or 2000 pounds. So a reguar 55-lb. piece would only cost you about 1 dollar. To be fair, you're actually paying them for the effort to get this off of the ocean floor, from the Titanic. It's not just regular coal. Sorry for nerd-ing out for a moment.

Snow Globe. Like a lot of merchandise here, maybe inappropriate. I think that's a tiny piece of Titanic coal in the base of it. There were a few items here that had tiny pieces of coal.

Remember the movie? The gift shop does!

Neat Boarding Pass keychain, but do you really want one of these boarding passes?

There was a room in the museum where they re-created the Grand Staircase, for paid photo ops. They did not allow un-paid pictures in that room. So instead I got a picture at the gift shop place where you would get those pictures printed. They didn't say no pictures of this!

Super-yikes, ice cube trays with ships and icebergs. Like I said, a lot of this merchandise is rather cheeky. Try not to be too serious about it.

The replica tea sets looked nice. It might be a nice thing to have, if you needed some of this.

Here's Captain Edward John Smith. I don't know what to say here, but there he is. I hope you are resting well. And thus ends our tour of the Titanic: The Artifacts Exhibition Museum in Orlando, Florida.