Titanic life jackets were made of solid cork
Victorian safety gear relied on the natural buoyancy of tree bark, providing enough lift to keep an adult afloat for two full days in the open ocean.
When the Titanic set sail in 1912, its state-of-the-art safety equipment relied on a technology invented nearly sixty years earlier by Thomas Hancock. Each of the 3,500 life jackets on board was stuffed with roughly six pounds of solid cork granules sewn into heavy canvas. This dense bark was chosen because it is riddled with microscopic air pockets that resist being crushed even under fifty pounds of pressure per square inch.
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