CorpComms Magazine

To mark the 99th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic, in which more than 1,500 passengers died, real-time tweets of the tragedy were posted by the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

At 2:20am on 15 April 1912, RMS Titanic, the largest passenger steam ship in the world at that time sank after colliding with an iceberg near Newfoundland. And so on the same day 99 years on at 11:55pm, the time that the ship hit the iceberg on 14 April 1912, the tweets began via the hashtag #ns_mma.

The museum posted tweets that replicated the actual wireless messages sent out in Morse code from the ship at the time, continuing throughout the night as each event occurred.

The museum's historian, Dan Conlin, hoped that all the followers of the tweets would be able to go through and understand the enormity of the sequence of events from that night.

Conlin said: 'I think they'll get a sense that when this disaster happened nobody knew it was going to happen. We all know what happened to Titanic, we all know how the story unfolded in great detail. Well, nobody knew in 1912, let alone those poor wireless operators in their isolated, little windswept huts.'

The response was fantastic, and Twitter user @wearitsjeff said: '@ns_mma tweeting #Titanic telegraph messages in realtime.#ns_mma incredibly heartbreaking, eerie.'

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