From The History of TRANSPORTATION: Oceanic navigation
 

The Titanic disaster cannot truly be understood without appreciating the context within which it took place. That context was the Atlantic Ferry, a highly traveled route across the North Atlantic that was hotly contested by European and American shipping concerns as early as mid-19th century. To capture portions of this lucrative market, shipbuilders constructed ocean liners that grew larger, faster, and more opulent with each generation. They also created the "steerage," a category of passengers whose accommodations were less luxurious than the first-class category but who were numerous enough to help the floating palaces pay for themselves. It was this mixture of speed, size, luxury, and souls that created a catastrophe of such gargantuan proportions when the Titanic  went down.

The Atlantic Ferry is described in the Britannica article The History of TRANSPORTATION, an extract from which is presented below.

The first Atlantic crossings.

Oceanic steam navigation was initiated by an American coastal packet first intended entirely for sails but refitted during construction with an auxiliary engine. Built in the port of New York for the Savannah Steam Ship Company in 1818, the Savannah was 98.5 feet long with a 25.8-foot beam, a depth of 14.2 feet, and a displacement of 320 tons. Owing to a depression in trade, the owners sold the boat in Europe where economically constructed American ships were the least expensive on the market and were widely seen as the most advanced in design. Unable to secure either passengers or cargo, the Savannah became the first ship to employ steam in crossing an ocean. At 5:00 in the morning on May 24, 1819, it set sail from Savannah. After taking on coal at Kinsale in Ireland, it reached Liverpool on July 20, after 27 days and 11 hours; the engine was used to power the paddle wheels for 85 hours. Subsequently the voyage continued to Stockholm and St. Petersburg, but at neither place was a buyer found; it thus returned to Savannah, under sail because coal was so costly, using steam only to navigate the lower river to reach the dock at Savannah itself.

The next voyage across the Atlantic under steam power was made by a Canadian ship, the Royal William, which was built as a steamer with only minor auxiliary sails, to be used in the navigation of the Gulf of St. Lawrence. The owners, among them the merchant Samuel Cunard, of Halifax, N.S., decided to sell the ship in England. The voyage from Quebec to the Isle of Wight took 17 days. Soon thereafter, the Royal William was sold to the government. The ability to navigate the North Atlantic was demonstrated by this voyage, but the inability to carry any load beyond fuel still left the Atlantic challenge unmet.
 

The "Atlantic Ferry."

At this point the contributions of Isambard Kingdom Brunel to sea transportation began. Brunel was the chief engineer of the Great Western Railway between Bristol and London, which was nearing completion in the late 1830s. A man who thrived on challenges, Brunel could see no reason his company should stop in Bristol just because the land gave out there. The Great Western Railway Company set up a Great Western Steamship Company in 1836, and the ship designed by Brunel, the Great Western, set sail for New York City on April 8, 1838. Thus began a flow of shipping that earned in the second half of the 19th century the sobriquet "the Atlantic Ferry" because of its scale and great continuity.
 
The Great Western Steamship Company, though the first major company organized, did not earn the pride of place one might have expected. Its next ship, the Great Britain of 1843, was the first with an all-iron hull; it has survived, in the dry dock in which it was constructed in Bristol's Floating Dock, to this day. It was Cunard's steamboat company, however, that won the British government contract to establish a mail line across the North Atlantic. In 1840 the Cunard Line launched four paddle steamers with auxiliary sails--the Britannia, Acadia, Columbia, and Caledonia--which with their long line of successors became the leaders in a drive for speed and safety on the North Atlantic. From 1840 until the outbreak of the American Civil War the competition lay largely between the British lines and the American lines. During the war American shipping was greatly reduced as Confederate raiders, mostly constructed in Britain, either sank Union ships or drove them to operate under other registries For a short period in the 1860s the United States went from being the world's largest merchant marine power to merely an importing shipping nation.

By the mid-1860s Britain had abandoned the paddle steamer for the Atlantic run, but the recently organized Compagnie Transatlantique (known as the French Line in the United States) in 1865 launched the Napoléon III, which was the last paddle steamer built for the Atlantic Ferry. Early in the history of steam navigation the Swedish engineer John Ericsson had attempted unsuccessfully to interest the British Admiralty in the screw propeller he had invented. The U.S. Navy did adopt the propeller, however, and Ericsson moved to the United States. While there he also did pioneering work on the ironclad warship, which was introduced by the Union navy during the Civil War.

During the last third of the 19th century, competition for the North Atlantic passenger run was fierce. Steamship companies built longer ships carrying more powerful engines. Given the relatively large space available on a ship, the steam could be pressed to do more work through the use of double- and triple-expansion engines. That speed appealed greatly to the first-class passengers, who were willing to pay premium fares for a fast voyage. At the same time, the enlarged ships had increased space in the steerage, which the German lines in particular saw as a saleable item. Central Europeans were anxious to emigrate to avoid the repression that took place after the collapse of the liberal revolutions of 1848, establishment of the Russian pogroms, and conscription in militarized Germany, Austria, and Russia. Because steamships were becoming increasingly fast, it was possible to sell little more than bed space in steerage, leaving emigrants to carry their own food, bedding, and other necessities. Without appreciating this fact, it is hard to explain why a speed race led as well to a great rise in the capacity for immigration to the United States and Canada.

Steamship transportation was dominated by Britain in the latter half of the 19th century. The early efforts there had been subsidized mail contracts such as that given to Cunard in 1840. Efforts by Americans to start a steamship line across the Atlantic were not notably successful. One exception was the Collins Line, which in 1847 owned the four finest ships then afloat--the Arctic, Atlantic, Baltic, and Pacific--and in 1851 the Blue Riband (always a metaphorical rank rather than an actual trophy) given for the speediest crossing of the New York-Liverpool route passed from Cunard's Acadia to the Collins Pacific, with the winning averaging 13 knots. The Collins Line, however, did not survive long. Collision removed the Arctic from the line in 1854, and other losses followed. The contest was then mostly among British companies.

Most ships on the Atlantic were still wooden-hulled, so that the newer side-lever steam engines were too powerful for the bottoms in which they were installed, making maintenance a constant problem. Eventually the solution was found in iron-hulled ships. The size of ships was rapidly increased, especially those of Brunel. Under his aegis in 1858 a gigantic increase was made with the launching of the Great Eastern, with an overall length of 692 feet, displacing 32,160 tons, and driven by a propeller and two paddle wheels, as well as auxiliary sails. Its iron hull set a standard for most subsequent liners, but its size was too great to be successful in the shipping market of the 1860s.

German ships of this period tended to be moderately slow and mostly carried both passengers and freight. In the late 1890s the directors of the North German Lloyd Steamship Company entered the high-class passenger trade by construction of a Blue Riband-class liner. Two ships were ordered--the 1,749-passenger Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse (655 feet long overall; 23,760 tons), with twin screws, and the Kaiser Friedrich, which was returned to the builders having failed to meet requirements. When the Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse won the Blue Riband on the eastbound leg of its third voyage in the fall of 1897, a real race broke out. North German Lloyd handled 28 percent of the passengers who landed in New York City in 1898, so Cunard ordered two superliners, which represented the first steamers to be longer than the Great Eastern.
 

Passenger liners in the 20th century.

The upper limits of speed possible with piston-engined ships had been reached, and failure in the machinery was likely to cause severe damage to the engine. In 1894 Charles A. Parsons designed the yacht Turbinia, using a steam turbine engine with only rotating parts in place of reciprocating engines. It proved a success, and in the late 1890s, when competition intensified in the Atlantic Ferry, the question arose as to whether reciprocating or turbine engines were the best for speedy operation. Before Cunard's giant ships were built, two others of identical size at 650 feet (Caronia and Carmania) were fitted, respectively, with quadruple-expansion piston engines and a steam-turbine engine so that a test comparison could be made; the turbine-powered Carmania was nearly a knot faster. Cunard's giant ships, the Lusitania and the Mauretania, were launched in 1906. The Lusitania was sunk by a German submarine in 1915 with a great loss of life. The Mauretania won the Blue Riband in 1907 and held it until 1929. It was perhaps the most popular ship ever launched until it was finally withdrawn in 1934.

The British White Star Line, which competed directly with Cunard, also had commissioned two giant liners. The Olympic of 1911, displacing 45,324 tons, was then the largest ship ever built. The Titanic of 1912 displaced 46,329 tons, so vast as to seem unsinkable. The Titanic operated at only 21 knots, compared with the Mauretania's 27 knots, but its maiden voyage in 1912 was much anticipated. The ship collided with an iceberg off the Newfoundland coast and sank within hours, with a loss of about 1,500 lives.

World War I completely disorganized the Atlantic Ferry and in 1918 removed German competition. At that time Germany had three superliners, but all were taken as war reparations. The Vaterland became the U.S. Line's Leviathan; the Imperator became the Cunard Line's Barengaria; and the Bismarck became the White Star Line's Majestic. That war severely cut traffic, although ships were used for troop transport. By eliminating German competition and seizing their great ships, the Western Allies returned to competing among themselves.

During the prosperous years of the 1920s, tourist travel grew rapidly, calling forth a new wave of construction, beginning with the French Line's Île de France in 1927 and gaining fiercer competition when the Germans returned to the race with the launching on successive days in 1928 of the Europa and the Bremen. But by the end of 1929 the Great Depression had begun; it made transatlantic passage a luxury that fewer and fewer could afford and rendered immigration to the United States impractical.

Because the international competition in transatlantic shipping reached full stride only with the return of German ships in 1928, major decisions as to construction were made just as the Great Depression was beginning. Since the beginning of the century the "1,000-foot" ship had been discussed among shipowners and builders. A new Oceanic was planned in the late 1920s but abandoned in 1929 because its engines seemed impractical. In 1930 the French Line planned a quadruple-screw liner of 981.5 feet, which would represent another--and, as it turned out, the final--ratchet in the expansion of the passenger liner. What came of that undertaking was the most interesting, and by wide agreement the most beautiful, large ship ever built. The Normandie was the first large ship to be built according to the 1929 Convention for Safety of Life at Sea and was designed so the forward end of the promenade deck served as a breakwater, permitting it to maintain a high speed even in rough weather. The French Line had established a policy with the Île de France of encouraging tourist travel through luxurious accommodations (changing from third class, which was little more than steerage with private cabins, to tourist class, which was simple but comfortable). The Normandie offered seven accommodation classes in a total of 1,975 berths; the crew numbered 1,345. The ship popularized a design style, Moderne, that emulated the new, nonhistorical art and architecture. The bow was designed with the U-shape favoured by the designer Yourkevitch. Turboelectric propelling machines of 160,000 shaft horsepower allowed a speed of 32.1 knots in trials in 1935. In 1937 it was fitted with four-bladed propellers, permitting a 3-day, 22-hour and 7-minute crossing, which won the Blue Riband from the Europa.

To compete with the Normandie, in 1930 Cunard built the Queen Mary, which was launched in 1934. At 975 feet, it was Britain's first entry in the 1,000-foot category. The ship was never so elegant as its French rival and was a bit slower, but its luck was much better. The Normandie burned at the dock in New York in February 1942 while being refitted as a troopship. The Queen Mary was the epitome of the Atlantic liner before being retired to Long Beach, Calif., to serve as a hotel.

During World War II civilian transportation by sea was largely suspended, whereas military transport was vastly expanded. Great numbers of "Liberty" and "Victory" ships were constructed, and at the close of the war surplus ships were returned to peacetime purposes. A sister ship of the Queen Mary, the Queen Elizabeth (at 83,673 tons the largest passenger ship ever built), was launched in 1938, but the interior had not been fitted out before the war came in 1939. First used as a troopship during the war, it was completed as a luxury liner after 1945 and operated with the Queen Mary until the 1960s, when the jet airplane stole most of the trade from the Atlantic Ferry.

Experience with the two Cunard liners in the years immediately 1945 suggested the value in having two giant ships, of approximately the same size and with a speed that allowed a transatlantic run of four days or less, so that one ship might sail from New York another from Europe weekly. This competition began when U.S. Lines launched the 53,329-ton United States. Though lighter than the Queen Elizabeth, greater use of aluminum in the superstructure and more efficient steam turbine engines allowed it to carry essentially the same number of passengers. The great advantage lay in its speed of 35.59 knots, which captured the Blue Riband from the Queen Mary in 1952, an honour the latter had held for 14 years.

The end of the Atlantic Ferry.

The very rapid growth of air traffic in the 10 years after 1945 called forth a number of different planes to deal with extended routes and enlarging markets. In large part this expansion could take place because there was a market for used aircraft. As airlines strove to fly faster and with lengthened stages, more people switched from trains or ships to planes. By 1953 the DC-7 was put in service with a stage of up to 3,000 miles and a speed reaching 300 miles per hour. By 1957 the number of passengers crossing the Atlantic by air was greater than by sea. Once jet planes came into service at the end of the 1950s, flying the Atlantic accelerated to the point that little more than a decade of steamship service remained before the end of the Atlantic Ferry.