Continued: Titanic TRIVIA

Perhaps nothing exemplifies the power of Hollywood more than this country's continuing fascination with the Titanic. Thanks to James Cameron, Leo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, no other catastrophe in history has such an avid following.

The latest indication: This weekend, the Science Museum of Minnesota brings us "Titanic: The Artifact Exhibition," the second major Titanic showcase in a decade in St. Paul.

For many, it seems, there's no such thing as being "Titantic-ed out." So with the help of Laurie Coulter and Hugh Brewster's book "882 1/2 Amazing Answers to Your Questions About the Titanic" (named for the ship's length) and the Science Museum, we tried to unearth some facts that even the most ardent students of the shipwreck saga might not know.

BY THE NUMBERS

13

Honeymooning couples on the voyage, an ominous note given that there was no use of this number on cabins or decks.

22

Tons of soap, tallow and train oil used to "grease the skids" when the Titanic was launched down wooden platforms into Belfast's River Lagan.

23

Female employees on the ship (out of 892 crew members), including a Turkish-bath attendant and a chaperone for single women in third class.

76,000

Weight, in pounds, of each of the two bronze main propellers.

$7.5 M

The cost of building the Titanic -- about $130 million in today's money.

Shipboard life

• To announce that lunch and dinner were ready, a bugler played a little ditty called "The Roast Beef of Old England."

• The Titanic had one of the first swimming pools aboard a ship. It was filled with seawater.

• Among the dogs aboard were a Pekingese named Sun Yat Sen, a small mutt named Frou Frou and a champion bulldog named Gamon de Pycombe. Of those three, only Sun Yat Sen survived.

• There were two bathtubs in third class, which had 710 passengers.

• Probably the best place to "feel" what it was like on the ship is the White Swan Hotel in Alnwick, England, which boasts the RMS Olympic's first-class lounge, identical to the Titanic's.

In the aftermath ...

• The RMS Carpathia, which picked up Titanic survivors and transported them to New York, was sunk during World War I near Ireland. The wreckage was discovered in 1999, and artifacts were removed in 2007. Those artifacts make their worldwide debut in this exhibit.

• Doctors on the Carpathia wanted to amputate R. Norris Williams' legs, badly frozen from his lengthy stretch in a swamped lifeboat. But he insisted that he could rehabilitate the legs -- and did, later winning national tennis championships in singles and doubles.

• More than 24 hours after the ship went down, London's Daily News declared "Titanic sunk, no lives lost."

• In 1916, Oceanic Steam Navigation Co., Titanic's owner, paid $664,000 to settle all legal claims.

• Not a single life has been lost to ice in the North Atlantic since the Titanic sunk.

Six degrees of the Titanic

• Jim Leidiger of Mayer in Carver County bought six bottles of the same champagne that was served on the Titanic. The Heidsieck bubblies set him back $4,000 apiece and were not from the Titanic, but rather another shipwreck from that era. Only one of the bottles had gone bad -- he got a refund -- and the rest, Leidiger said, were "very fruity, very full-bodied and the bottle seemed like it never emptied. Every sip just filled your mouth."

• Perhaps no one hereabouts is more excited about the exhibit than Maplewood's Scott Rostron, whose great-great-grandfather's brother commanded the ship that picked up the survivors. RMS Carpathia Capt. Arthur Henry Rostron, nicknamed "the Electric Spark" because of his energy, died in 1940, so Scott, 56, never met him, but "my grandmother had some great stories about him," he said.

• The back room at Kieran's Pub in Minneapolis is called the Titanic Lounge. "It is a little bit of the dark side of Irish humor," said owner Kieran Folliard. The Titanic was built at Belfast's Harlan & Wolff shipyards. "We were sitting around drinking, and after one beer too many, the idea of the Titanic Lounge came up. We put in a mural behind the bar supposing that I was the captain and started saying that the ice cubes came from the Titanic iceberg. ... But to this day, some people get a little bit nervous of having a function back there because of their superstition."

Bill Ward • 612-673-7643