Though much of it was fiction, the enormous success of the film "Titanic" vividly showed the enduring fascination the public has with that very real tragedy that claimed the lives of more than 1,500 passengers and crew.

APA members and others who attend this year’s annual meeting in May will have a rare opportunity to get a feel for what life was like on the huge ship before its fatal collision with an iceberg on April 14, 1912.

The Chicago Museum of Science and Industry has mounted the largest exhibit of Titanic artifacts ever assembled, which is open now through September 4. Among the pieces guaranteed to stun is the largest piece of the ship’s wreckage that divers have been able to salvage. Measuring 20 feet long and weighing 13 tons, the section of the hull is thought by experts to have formed the outer wall of two of the lavish first-class cabins. It was rescued in 1998 and then spent nearly two years in a French laboratory where scientists had the daunting task of removing 86 years of corrosion and salt buildup. The piece is so massive that the museum had to perform major surgery on one of its entrances to install the fragment in its temporary home.

The exhibit comprises displays of artifacts and recreations of several of the ship’s rooms. A few of the highlights are a bronze cherub from the liner’s grand staircase, the ship’s navigational lamp, an elaborate gilt chandelier, and a Spode china demitasse cup and saucer used by first-class passengers. (A first-class ticket cost $4,350 in 1912. In today’s dollars the same ticket would cost about $50,000.)

Other artifacts include one of the Titanic’s portholes, crystal and china bearing the White Star Line’s logo, and several pieces of jewelry, such as a talisman worn by one of the ship’s most famous passengers, the "unsinkable" Molly Brown, and a passenger’s gold pocket watch.

Ensuring that visitors will see the doomed voyage’s passengers as more than just statistics, personal effects such as handwritten letters, a clarinet, eyeglasses, a suitcase, pajamas, and a suit of clothes will be on display.

The museum is displaying the artifacts in recreations of a first-class and third-class cabin and has also constructed reproductions of the ship’s grand staircase and its engine room.

A particularly chilling experience the museum has arranged for Titanic visitors is a large wall of ice that exhibit visitors can touch to get a sense of what the water was like for the passengers and crew who were forced to abandon ship.

Restoring every object on display was a major project in itself, each one having to endure an hours-long conservation process to remove nearly nine decades of bacteria, salt, and acid buildups. The process, which had to begin once each object was exposed to the air, started with conservators cleaning the piece with a soft brush and then placing it into a foam-lined tube of water for transportation to the conservation laboratory in France. Different procedures were then used to restore metal, paper, leather, and wood objects, most using electric currents at some point in the process. Now restored, the artifacts must be temperature and humidity controlled and protected from sunlight.

Sixty-seven of the Titanic’s passengers had some connection to Chicago. Two of them, first-class passengers Ida Hippach and her daughter Jean, survived the disaster thanks to John Jacob Astor’s gallantry—he gave them his seat in one of the lifeboats. Another, Eleanor Shuman, was a year old when she and her mother boarded the ship’s third-class compartment on their way home from visiting a sick relative in Finland. The Shumans were the last people to be squeezed into the last lifeboat to leave the ship. Eleanor died in 1998, the last Titanic survivor in the U.S.

Tickets are required for the Titanic exhibit, and the number available each day is limited. Tickets are $10 for adults and $8 for children, in addition to the museum’s regular admission fee of $7 for adults and $3.50 for children. Thursdays are free. The museum is at 57th Street and Lake Shore Drive and is open from 9:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. weekdays and 9:30 a.m. to 5:30 on Saturdays and Sundays.