Sinking of the RMS Titanic believed that ice posed little risk; close calls were not uncommon, and even head-on collisions had not been disastrous. In 1907, , a German liner, had rammed an iceberg and suffered a crushed bow, but was still able to complete her voyage. That same year, "Titanic"s future captain, Edward Smith, declared in an interview that he could not "imagine any condition which would cause a ship to founder. Modern shipbuilding has gone beyond that." As "Titanic" approached her fatal collision, most passengers had gone to bed and command of the bridge had passed from Second Officer Charles Lightoller to First
RMS Titanic in popular culture romantic tragedies with personal heroism. It has inspired many moral, social and political metaphors and is regularly invoked as a cautionary tale of the limitations of modernity and ambition. The RMS "Titanic" has been commemorated in a wide variety of ways in the century after she sank in the North Atlantic Ocean in 1912. As D. Brian Anderson has put it, the sinking of "Titanic" has "become a part of our mythology, firmly entrenched in the collective consciousness, and the stories will continue to be retold not because they need to be retold, but because we need to tell them."