Origin On April 15, 1912, the RMS Titanic struck an iceberg and sank to the bottom of the North Atlantic Ocean. One of the most storied events of the ship’s tragic sinking (and one of the most famous scenes from James Cameron’s 1997 movie “Titanic”) involves a group of musicians that continued to play as the ship began its descent into the icy waters: In April 2021, around the anniversary of the ship’s sinking, a photograph was circulated on social media supposedly showing the violin that the band’s leader, Wallace Hartley, had played aboard the Titanic: This is a genuine image of Hartley’s violin. Hartley, unfortunately, as well as the other seven members of the Titanic’s orchestra, perished during the disaster along with more than 1,500 other passengers (out of an estimated 2,224 people on board).