It is a disaster that has gone down in history, including that of cinema.
110 years ago, the reputedly unsinkable Titanic was shipwrecked.
We don't always know it, but his last stopover was in France, in Cherbourg, the time to board passengers, food... and champagne!
From now on, a permanent route, baptized
Titanic, return to Cherbourg,
has opened its doors at the Cité de la Mer, in Cherbourg.
You can see different objects from the Titanic and their history, from personal memorabilia like ocean liner elements to dramatic legend.
-/AFP
Some of the passengers had therefore embarked in Cherbourg on April 10, 1912. Along this route, called
Objects from the Titanic tell us...
, four display cases retrace the era, the fate of the ship and of these passengers.
But a small gold watch in particular caught the attention of the Cité de la Mer teams. Where did it come from?
Who had it belonged to?
More than a century after the disaster, the mystery remained whole about it, when the story of other watches found on victims or kept by survivors was now perfectly known.
Some have also been awarded a fortune at auction, six of them having joined the collection of the American John Miottel.
AFP / HO / AFP / JOEL SAGET
As for this watch, found during the exploration of the wreck in 1987 in a small leather bag with jewels and money, impossible to know where it came from and to whom it belonged, with its strange inscription
" Patent application filed”
.
This expedition brought 1,892 objects to the surface, including this gold watch.
Its needles, probably made of steel, did not survive corrosion at the bottom of the ocean.
But one thing was certain: at the time of the tragedy, this type of watch strap did not yet exist on the other side of the Atlantic.
Enough to bring the experts of the Cherbourg museum to find the trace not of a victim, but of a survivor of the Titanic: Henry Blank, an American jeweler who embarked in Cherbourg.
City of the Sea
who was he?
An American jeweler who, from 1907, traveled to Europe every spring to locate his next watch models or to buy precious stones.
In 1912, after another business trip, Henry Blank boarded the Titanic.
But although being a man, he will not be among the victims.
As he will have to explain for a good part of his life, he had boarded the first boat, the n°7, of which only 20 places out of 65 were occupied by women and children.
Other passengers not wanting to leave their husbands, the crew then chose passengers to complete the lifeboat.
Wikimedia
After extensive research, it seems that this watch, exhibited in Paris in 2013 and now presented in Cherbourg, did belong to Henry Blank, who then intended to bring back to the United States the concept of an extendable chain bracelet, without clasp.
A patent that he had found in Germany and of which he had acquired the rights for the USA.
It was already importing IWC and Charles Meylan movements across the Atlantic.
Sam Jospeh, owner of his house in Glen Ridge in the United States, started collecting memorabilia from the history of Henry Blank and the Titanic.
He thus kept his cigar knife and his pocket watch marked CH Meylan, Brassus, made by Charles-Henri Meylan.
As for the company of the jeweler who survived the sinking of the Titanic, his company renamed Henry Blank & Co in 1917 did not close its doors until 1986.
PAUL J. RICHARDS/AFP
See also
– Titanic: unpublished images of the wreckage show its advanced deterioration
Titanic: unpublished images of the wreck show its advanced deterioration – Watch on Figaro Live