The Sinking of the Britannic: An Animated Introduction to the Titanic’s Forgotten Sister Ship

We all know about the Titan­ic. Less often do we hear about the Bri­tan­nic—the sis­ter pas­sen­ger lin­er that the British turned into a hos­pi­tal ship dur­ing World War I. Launched in 1914, two years after the Titan­ic sank in the North Atlantic Ocean, the Bri­tan­nic fea­tured a num­ber of safe­ty improve­ments. It had enhanced water­tight com­part­ments, an increased num­ber of lifeboats, and improved ven­ti­la­tion and escape routes. Those refine­ments paid div­i­dends when the Bri­tan­nic struck a Ger­man naval mine in 1916, then sank near the Greek island of Kea. Of the 1,066 peo­ple on board, most man­aged to escape on lifeboats and only 30 peo­ple ulti­mate­ly lost their lives. (An esti­mat­ed 1,500 peo­ple died on the Titan­ic.) The ani­ma­tion above tells the tale of the Bri­tan­nic in an hour, rough­ly the same time that the ship took to slip into the sea.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!