To someone looking from off the side as Titanic slowly trimmed down by the head over a period of some 2½ hours following the collision with an iceberg, the ship would have appeared to be slowly pivoting about an axis on her original waterline located somewhere about ⅓ the vessel’s length from the stern.
As we all know, it was about 11:40 PM ship’s time on the 14th of April 1912 that the SS Titanic collided with an iceberg. The iceberg itself was described as reaching a little higher than the height of the boat deck as it glided by at about 37 feet per second along her starboard side. In just under 8 seconds the major damage had been done.