Grace McCall Managing Editor / Alli Schmitt Op/Ed Editor

All aboard! The temporary exhibit dubbed Titanic: The Artifact Exhibition at The Louisville Science Center, is barely more than what its name describes it as.  With $18 you get one voyage through the exhibit and a boarding pass with the actual name and information of a passenger that sailed the Atlantic with the unsinkable ship in 1911.   

 The exhibit begins and continues with a timeline of the planning and construction of the Titanic. There are some pictures, movie clips, some small architectural parts from the ship, nothing too exciting. From there, you move onto information about the first few days of Titanic’s maiden, and only, voyage.

 Glass cases stationed around the exhibit display actual remnants of the Titanic’s fatal voyage. You can see the china that guests ate from, actual parts of the ship, and even personal belongings from passengers aboard the Titanic.

The personal belongings come alive through displayed profiles of various passengers who were the owners of these belongings. You can see a pair of old, worn shoes, and then read a sign telling you about the person who owned the shoes.

After strolling through the first few sections that depict everyday life on the boat and the various luxurious and basic rooms of the exhibit, you enter a hallway designed to replicate one of the Titanic’s third class hallways. You can look inside a third-class cabin (which looks surprisingly similar to the room Jack Dawson had in the movie ‘Titanic’), and see how cramped the living situations were.  Not only were the living spaces cramped but they were also usually shared with a complete stranger who often did not speak the same language or come from the same country.

It’s easy to see that the third class was given the bare minimum treatment and maybe even perceived as crooks.  This is so since all their dishes, bedding, and other basic items displayed the White Star Line emblem to discourage passengers from stealing them.   

From there, the exhibit takes on an icy, eerie feeling as the lights turn blue and the final countdown begins to describe the Titanic’s final hours. A timeline, similar to the one at the beginning of the exhibit, presents a step-by-step explanation of exactly what happened the night of the Titanic’s sinking.

Besides the timeline, there’s an ice berg replica to make a point of how cold the water really was.  But although this ice berg seems extremely cold, it is a freshwater ice berg and salt water is even colder.  This in-person experience brings about goose bumps after thinking about how cold it must have been as the Titanic sank into the icy depths of the Atlantic. 

After reading the already well known facts about the sinking of the Titanic, one can experience the Titanic in a more personal way; through listening to eye witnesses retelling of how the ship collapsed and how the passengers were preparing for the worst.  One passenger even said, “we were dressed in our best, prepared to go down like gentleman”. 

Finally, remember that boarding pass presented at the beginning of the voyage?  Well, pull that out because at the end of the exhibit, there is a list displaying names of passengers who survived the catastrophe and names of those who perished in the freezing water.  Here it is possible to search for the name of the card on the boarding pass offered earlier.  It is little touches like these that make the Titanic exhibit tolerable.

So the exhibit is over priced, and offers little new information to people even semi-knowledgeable about the Titanic. However, seeing the artifacts and personal belongings from the very real people who were aboard the Titanic, is a must for any history fanatic.