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titanic

A vintage piano at the Titanic Museum.

Musician Edwin Rivera from Jacksonville, Florida, was celebrating his honeymoon with his wife and as part of the trip, they visited the Titanic Museum in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee. The museum showcases over 400 pieces of memorabilia from the Titanic and features a breathtaking recreation of the ship’s grand staircase. It also features a large replica of the doomed vessel striking an iceberg.

Rivera’s wife turned her camera on to catch his reaction as he walked into the music room and saw an 118-year-old piano. She thought he would just twinkle the keys a bit, but he went much further than that. "The video was initially supposed to be Edwin's raw reaction to touching the replica piano," Staci McClure, a friend of the couple who posted the video, told Newsweek. "When he pressed the keys and it was tuned, he spontaneously decided to play. And what else to play other than ‘The Portrait’ from Titanic?"

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#edwinriverathepianoman #titanic #titanicmuseum #pigeonforge #honeymoon #piano #music #celinedion #fyp

The video is impressive because he plays the beautiful piece without sheet music. A crowd of strangers at the museum was also impressed with his playing, breaking into applause at the end. “I had to do it, I had to do it,” the pianist said, with a twinge of bashfulness in his voice as he left the bench. The couple gave the video to McClure because she has over 4,000 followers on TikTok, and they thought it might help the musician book a few gigs. “Little did we know that 48 hours later it would have nearly 8 million views,” McClure told Newsweek.

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The video impressed a lot of folks on TikTok in the comments. “Omg, can you imagine being surrounded by those artifacts and hearing that? They'd have to take me out on a stretcher for uncontrolled sobbing,” one wrote. “The fact he remembered that song from memory without the sheet music, is pretty damn cool,” another added.


titanic replica, the titanic, titanic movie, titanic attraction, titanic museum, icebergA replica of the Titanic hitting an iceberg in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee.via Titanic Museum/Media Page

The post also brought out a couple of jokesters. “I would've laid across the piano and told him to draw me like one of his French girls,” someone joked. "Should’ve followed it up with under the sea,” another commenter added. In a follow-up video, Rivera did just that.

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Replying to @Imnotyourbabydaddy666 #edwinriverathepianoman #titanic #titanicmuseum #pigeonforge #honeymoon #piano #music #thelittlemermaid #underthesea @Edwinjrivera.music

“The Portrait” was initially written by composer James Horner to score the scene where Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio) sketches Rose (Kate Winslet) wearing The Heart of the Ocean necklace. However, in the final film, a piano demo called “Sketch” by Horner was used for the scene instead due to a mix-up over the word “sketch.” However, “The Portrait” would later appear in “Back to Titanic” and the 20th anniversary soundtrack.

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James Cameron, Oscar-winning Director of Titanic, says the music for the famous Jack and Rose sketching scene was something he accidentally placed in while editing, leading to one of the most iconic music moments in cinema history by the late Oscar-winning composer, James Horner. #titanic #leonardodicaprio #katewinslet #jamescameron #jameshorner #celinedion #film #filmhistory #filmscore #filmmusic #composer #myheartwillgoon

The Titanic Museum Attraction in Tennessee is an interactive exhibit that allows people to get close to genuine artifacts from the Titanic and get to know its passengers and crew members as well. Upon entering the attraction, everyone is given the name of a real passenger on the boat, and by the end of the tour, they know whether they lived or perished in the icy waters where it sank. It puts a real human face to a tragedy that has become such a big part of American maritime history.

titanic replica, the titanic, titanic movie, titanic attraction, titanic museum, titanic grand stairwell A replica of the Titanic's Grand Staircase.via Titanic Museum/Media Page

The hull of the Titanic.

The violent implosion of the Titan submersible on the way to visit the Titanic captured people’s attention across the globe. It brought up a lot of conversations about social class, the vehicle's questionable construction and the haunting history of death surrounding the Titanic itself.

For those of us who don’t work in oceanography or physics, it also brought up a lot of questions about underwater implosion. A big one circulating among conspiracy theorists and confused laypeople alike: Why did the Titan implode while the Titanic didn’t?

The Titan submersible is understood to have disintegrated in milliseconds somewhere neat a depth of 11,500 feet. In comparison, we can still see most of the wreckage of the Titanic 12,500 feet down on the ocean floor.


A lot of people are asking the question on Twitter.

First, what is an implosion versus an explosion? “In an explosion, the force acts outwards, but in an implosion, the force acts inwards,” Arun Bansil, professor of physics at Northeastern University, said. “When a submersible is deep in the ocean, it experiences the force on its surface due to water pressure. When this force becomes larger than the force hull can withstand, the vessel implodes violently.”

Blair Thornton, a professor at the University of Southampton, told NBC that the force of the implosion was up to 10,000 tons of physical force, the equivalent of the weight of the Eiffel Tower.

So, if the Titanic also traveled through the same depths en route to the bottom of the ocean, why didn’t it suffer a similar fate?

In some ways, it's quite simple: There was a difference in pressure between the enclosed submarine and the Titanic, which had doors and windows so that water could easily travel through it, equalizing the pressure on the inside and the outside.

However, researchers believe there may have been two implosions on the Titanic's journey to the bottom of the ocean. Research published by Dave Gleicher posits that parts of the stern and the poop deck imploded as the ship sank. But most of the boat was water permeable, so the wreckage was recognizable when it was first discovered in 1985.

Although no one is sure why the Titan submersible, created by OceanGate Expeditions, succumbed to the pressures of the ocean depths, many experts are pointing to its carbon fiber hull as the culprit. Carbon fiber is a relatively new material, especially for submarines, that hasn’t been adequately tested in extreme depths. Some speculate that the Titan’s hull could have been compromised due to its 2 dozen previous dives. Like a balloon, all it takes is one hole at extreme depths for the entire vessel to collapse.

“It was very clear that these people were operating a submersible that was unsafe,” Katy Croff Bell, president and founder of the Ocean Discovery League, told NBC News.

“They knew it. They had been warned on multiple occasions,” she added. “And I think that we can only hope that we ensure in the future that something like this does not happen, and people take this very, very seriously.”

"Titanic" director James Cameron.

Twenty-five years ago, James Cameron released his epic “Titanic,” achieving a rare feat in Hollywood: a box office smash that was also loved by critics. “Titanic” won 11 Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director, and raked in $1.8 billion at the box office, making it the third-highest-grossing film of all time.

Even though his film is one of the most acclaimed in Hollywood history, Cameron still can’t help himself from getting involved in the great debate about the film. Did Leonardo DiCaprio’s character, Jack Dawson, die unnecessarily at the end of the film?

Specifically, could Jack have fit onto the door Rose floated on instead of getting hypothermia and drowning?


Cameron has previously dismissed the discussion surrounding the scene. “I’ve never really seen it as a debate, it’s just stupid,” Cameron told the BBC in 2019. “There’s no debate. But if you want to unearth all the dumbass arguments associated with it.”

Around the same time, he noted that Jack’s death was an artistic choice so the size of the door doesn’t matter.

"It was an artistic choice, the thing was just big enough to hold her, and not big enough to hold him," he told Vanity Fair. "The film is about death and separation; he had to die. So whether it was that, or whether a smoke stack fell on him, he was going down. It's called art, things happen for artistic reasons, not for physics reasons."

Regardless of how Cameron feels about the scene, the debate has raged on. “Mythbusters” proved that Rose and Jack could have fit on the door together. But they would have had to fit a life preserver beneath it to improve its buoyancy. Good luck putting that together in the frigid water.

America’s leading science communicator Neil deGrasse Tyson has also poked holes in the scene’s logic by noting that Jack would have put up more of a fight to stay alive. "Whether or not he could've been successful, I would've tried more than once. You try once. 'Oh, this is not gonna work. I will just freeze to death in the water.' No, excuse me," Tyson told HuffPost. "The survival instinct is way stronger than that in everybody, especially in that character. He's a survivor, right? He gets through. He gets by."

Although, after Jack saves Rose from trying to jump ship earlier in the film, he notes that it’s impossible to think in such cold water.

"To tell you the truth, I'm a lot more concerned about that water being so cold," Jack told Rose in the film. "Water that cold, like right down there—it hits you like a thousand knives stabbing you all over your body. You can't breathe. You can't think."

Even though Cameron dismissed the discussion in the past, he has to be a bit bothered that the pivotal scene in his film is questionable enough to cause a rigorous, 25-year debate. So now he’s launched a thorough investigation into the scene to settle it once and for all.

“We have done a scientific study to put this whole thing to rest and drive a stake through its heart once and for all,” Cameron told Postmedia while promoting his new film, “Avatar: The Way of Water.”

“We have since done a thorough forensic analysis with a hypothermia expert who reproduced the raft from the movie and we’re going to do a little special on it that comes out in February,” Cameron continued. “We took two stunt people who were the same body mass as Kate and Leo and we put sensors all over them and inside them and we put them in ice water and we tested to see whether they could have survived through a variety of methods and the answer was, there was no way they both could have survived. Only one could survive.”

Cameron is doing all he can to end the “Titanic” debate, but no matter what kind of research he shows, the scene he filmed will always have a hard time passing the eye test when someone sees it for the first time. But, that’s not so bad, the scene always passes the heart test which, in art, is all that matters anyway.

And, as we know, Jack’s heart will always go on.

The "unsinkable" Titanic sunk on April 14, 1912.

The sinking of the Titanic on April 14, 1912, is one of the most talked-about tragedies in modern history, and not only because of the James Cameron film. When a ship that's been marketed as "unsinkable" literally sinks on its maiden voyage, it's automatically a riveting story, even without any other details.

But the details matter. Each life lost and each life saved on that fateful night was a unique human whose story impacted everyone connected to them.

We don't need a Jack and Rose romance to be transfixed by stories from the Titanic. One thing Cameron's film did well was show what it must have been like as the ship hit the iceberg at 11:40 p.m. and sank in slow, dramatic fashion for the next two and a half hours, but hearing an account from someone who lived it brings that event to life in on a whole other level. When we're watching a movie, even about a true historical event, our brains can easily pretend it's not real. Hearing it described by someone who lived it doesn't allow for that sort of mental game.


There are no living survivors of the Titanic left to share their stories anymore, but we do have recordings of them. One of those recordings came from a 1979 interview with Frank Prentice, the ship's assistant purser.

The film footage from the BBC archive shows Prentice describing the moment the ship hit the iceberg—how it felt like slamming on the brakes in a car—and the part he played in helping people get onto the lifeboats. (There was space for 800 people on the lifeboats, but only 500 made it into them in the chaos and confusion. Even if they'd filled every space, that would have barely saved a third of the 2,240 passengers and crew on the ship.)

Prentice's delivery sounds so calm, belying the traumatic experience he's describing from 67 years prior. But at the end of the segment, the interviewer asked if it bothered him to talk about it. "I should probably dream about it tonight," he replied. "Have another nightmare. You'd think I'm too old for that but you'd be amazed."

Anyone who knows the full story of the Titanic likely wouldn't be surprised that reliving that horror would have an impact no matter how much time had passed. Only 705 people total survived the sinking, either being lucky enough to snag a space on a lifeboat or rescued from the water in time. More than 1,500 perished. Those who survived were fortunate, but they had to experience and witness so much fear and loss.

Even close to seven decades after the fact, we get a glimpse of that pain in Frank Prentice's interview.