Tarter Source

I saw an online article recently on ‘How the Titanic’s gym forever changed fitness.’ It’s another example of Titanic magic. “As the Titanic creaked and groaned and began its collapse into the sea, hundreds of desperate people swarmed toward the middle of the boat,” wrote Ryan Hockensmith. “The ship’s crew tried to load panicked people into lifeboats, about 60 at a time, but a terrible reality set in almost immediately: Only about one-third of the ship’s 2,240 passengers were going to fit.”

There we are again—back in the cold Atlantic in 1912—in that ship that was supposedly unsinkable. But we all know that, right? But maybe you didn’t know about the exercise equipment on board.

“Amid all the chaos, there became only one semi-quiet space on the ship, and it just so happened that the room was also the most mysterious spot on the boat: the Titanic gym, which was located right beside the ship’s lifeboats,” noted Hockensmith. “By that night, the Titanic’s third full day at sea, most passengers had at least a passing knowledge of this curious place and the thick-chested man who managed it. Thomas W. McCawley had become a carnival barker on the boat, explaining to anybody and everybody who would listen that someday physical fitness was going to take the world by storm.”

There we have it—yet another Titanic story to capture our imagination 112 years since the great ship was lost. Another angle—after all, you may have already consumed tales about radio transmissions, the failure of a nearby ship to come to the scene, the band that played on (check out Ian Whitcomb’s 1997 CD, Titanic: Music as Heard on the Fateful Voyage,) the fabulous food served in first class (there are several Titanic cookbooks as well as the The Last Dinner on the Titanic), the wealth of passengers like John Jacob Astor IV, etc.  

You even have coverage of the iceberg in question. Daniel Stone’s 2022 article for Smithsonian Magazine, “The Incredible Story of the Iceberg That Sank the Titanic,” revealed “the three-year-old chunk of ice had just weeks to live when it hit the cruise ship.”

But let’s get back to the gym: “As the ship sank, the Titanic band famously played on, and so did McCawley. Hundreds of people came in and out of the gym, which held many of the Titanic’s life jackets. It was warm and slightly calmer in there, so mobs of people — mostly first-class passengers — ducked in and prayed for hope amid the disarray,” Hockensmith stated, adding that McCawley “professed the necessity of fitness, insisting that someday there would be a gym in every town.”

Even as the ship was going down, here was a health prophet who, decades before Jack LaLanne, had a part in launching a major industry, according to Hockensmith. “McCawley didn’t invent fitness, and the Titanic wasn’t the first gym. But it’s impossible to overestimate McCawley and his gym’s impact on launching the modern fitness industrial complex. Big Fitness is now a $30 billion business annually just in the U.S., and many of its roots sprouted up from the deck of the Titanic.,” he noted.

I’ll tell what’s impossible to overestimate: the drawing power of the Titanic. We’ve had films, of course. Not just Hollywood’s but undersea footage of the wreck, itself. The Titanic is more than just history. It’s an experience.

At the present time there are numerous Titanic exhibitions across the country—in Skokie, Ill., Pigeon Forge, Tenn., Las Vegas and National Harbor, Md.–to mention just a few. You pay your $30 and take in pictures, facts and artifacts while you imagine how you would have behaved when you got the word that the ship was going down.

In an interview with Stone, whose book, Sinkable, was published in 2022, he gave his own explanation on why the Titanic tragedy has captured our imagination. “Dozens of ships hit icebergs before the Titanic but (when the Titanic went down) some 1,500 people died but 700 people lived, many of them children who lived another 50 to 60 years to keep the story alive,” he said.

Interview with Daniel Stone: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1950812/episodes/11154365