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“A larger share of the answer to the question why the Titanic still arouses so much interest, however, may lie in the position that the Titanic held in the world of 1912. The Titanic was not simply a means of conveying people from a place they wished to leave to a place they wanted to be, as is the case with most modern ships. It was a floating symbol of status, almost a materialized article of social faith. Its owners had succeeded admirably in establishing it as a symbol of safety, luxury, exclusiveness, and social privilege. This world was smashed in an evening, indeed, in a matter of hours. The watertight compartments which the owners had puffed so extensively turned out to be worthless. The pride of twentieth-century technology floundered and plunged like the weakest seventeenth-century pink. Millionaires and immigrants from the third-class shared the common experience of death. Death, it was suddenly recognized, could strike down a Rothschild or a Guggenheim as quickly as it could a stoker. All in all, the sinking of the Titanic was a demonstration of man’s fate in microcosm.” — Jack Winocour