For a quick moment, it looked as if one of the lifeboats would follow Titanic to the bottom. Water gushed through a hole in the bottom until a 28-year-old silent-screen actress from Hoboken, N.J., who was aboard with her mother rallied up underwear from the men and women that remedied the situation. In 1914 she married Jules Brulatour, the wealthy New York film director with whom she had been having a long-term affair and who had called her back from her European vacation just days before she boarded Titanic. The unhappy union ended in divorce two years later. Gibson, according to historian Don Lynch, died of a heart attack in Paris in 1946. Many remembered the actress for her starring turn in Saved from the Titanic, a silent film made one month after she was rescued. Her costume was the very dress she had worn the night of the disaster.

           MADELEINE AND JOHN JACOB ASTOR                an American millionaire and his wife said good bye forever

On a vessel flush with tycoons, New Yorker John Jacob Astor IV stood out as the richest of them all. He boarded at Cherbourg with an entourage that included his wife, Madeleine, a manservant, a maid, a nurse and his loving dog, Kitty. First-class staterooms like theirs cost as much as $4,000 for the voyage, equivalent to a staggering $50,000 today.

But there was more to John Jacob Astor than the $87 million fortune he made through real estate and his family's fur-trading empire. After graduating from Harvard, he patented such inventions as a turbine engine, and a bicycle brake and a "vibratory disintegrator" used to produce gas from peat moss. He wrote a science-fiction novel about life on Saturn and Jupiter and owned and financed his own Army battalion during the Spanish-American War.

But his second marriage, to Madeleine Force in 1911, caused a scandal of an affair. Force was 18 at the time, and he was 46. To escape wagging tongues, the couple took an extended honeymoon in Europe and Egypt where they joined his friend, Molly Brown. By the time they boarded the Titanic, Madeleine was five months pregnant.

Astor mentioned his wife's condition when asking an officer if he could take one of several empty seats in her lifeboat, but the officer refused. Astor took the refusal like a gentleman. He proudly lit a cigarette and tossed his gloves to his wife. Several days later, his partly crushed, soot-stained body was found floating in the Atlantic with $2,500 in a pocket. Experts believe Astor may have been hit by a sudden falling smokestack.

MOLLY BROWN
not even an iceberg could slow down this dynamo

Molly Brown loaded into lifeboat No. with about 65 people. With 24 women and two men, Brown, argued fiercely with Quartermaster Robert Hichens, who refused to return to the wreck site for fear survivors in the water, would swamp the boat. To fight the bitter cold, Brown taught the other women to row and shared her sable coat. And when Hichens dismissed a flare fired by an approaching ship as a "shooting star," Brown threatened to throw him. Once in command, she ordered the women to row to safety.

Molly Brown was born Margaret Tobin in Hannibal, Mo., in 1867. She left the poverty of her hometown behind and moved when she was 18 to the booming town of Leadville, Colo., to find work and a rich husband. She met prospector James Brown, at a church picnic and married him in 1886. Seven years later he struck gold at the Little Jonny Mine and began building his $5 million fortune.

After the ship sank with 13 pairs of her shoes and a $325,000 necklace, Brown raised funds for poor survivors and fought for women's suffrage. Yet, most of all, Brown, who died after a stroke in 1932, enjoyed her fame as a vivacious survivor. "Simple Brown luck," Brown said after the wreck. "We're unsinkable."

Thomas Andrews
The Builder of the Unsinkable

Thomas Andrews made a point of sailing with a group of mechanics on the first voyages of the Adriatic , Oceanic and Olympic in order to watch their operation and recommend improvements to future ships slated to be built by his firm. It was for this very reason that Andrews planned to sail on Titani 's first voyage to America, and the thirty-eight-year-old executive left his wife and daughter in Belfast while he accompanied the vessel first to Southampton and, later, out onto the wide expanse of the North Atlantic. In his final letter to Mrs. Andrews he talked his satisfaction with the new ship: "The Titanic is now about complete and will I think do the old Firm credit tomorrow when we sail”. Andrews got on with a complimentary ticket No. 112050.

On the evening of April 14th, as usual, Bedroom Steward Henry Samuel Etches came at 6:45 to help Andrews get ready for dinner which he usually took with Dr O'Loughlin the ship's surgeon. After dinner Andrews went to his cabin to pore over blueprints and collate his notes. Andrews barely noticed the collision and was unaware of any problem until Captain Smith sent a message asking his immediate presence on the bridge.

Later, Saloon Steward James Johnson described how he saw Andrews and Captain Smith walking on the forward part of the ship, they visited the flooding mail room and the squash court which was also rapidly filling with water. Back on the bridge Andrews broke the news to Captain Smith that in view of the wreckage the ship had suffered he did not expect her to stay afloat more than two hours.

During the liner's final moments Andrews wandered the decks encouraging passengers to wear their lifebelts and to make their way to the boats. He was last seen staring into space by the painting in the first class smoking room, his lifebelt cast aside.