Kroonland美国关于,与泰坦尼克号擦肩而过七位名人

The sinking of the Titanic claimed some 1,500 lives, among them a gallery of early 20th-century A-list celebrities.1 Captains of industry John Jacob Astor IV and Benjamin Guggenheim both went down with the ship, as did Macy’s co-owner Isidor Straus and his wife, Ida, who refused to lee his side.2 The popular American mystery writer Jacques Futrelle, the American painter and sculptor Francis Millet, and Maj. Archibald Butt, friend and aide to then-President William Howard Taft, were lost as well.3 But for all the boldface names among the Titanic’s victims, many more might he been aboard, but for the vagaries of fate.4 Among them were:
Theodore Dreiser5
The novelist, then 40, considered returning from his first European holiday aboard the Titanic; an English publisher talked him out of the plan, persuading the writer that taking another ship would be less expensive.
Dreiser was at sea aboard the liner6 Kroonland when he heard the news. He recalled his reaction the following year in his memoir, A Treler at Forty: “To think of a ship as immense as the Titanic, new and bright, sinking in endless fathoms of water.7 And the two thousand passengers routed like rats from their berths8 only to float helplessly in miles of water, praying and crying!”
Guglielmo Marconi9
The Italian inventor, wireless telegraphy10 pioneer and winner of the 1909 Nobel Prize in Physics was offered free passage on Titanic but had taken the Lusitania three days earlier. As his daughter Degna later explained, he had paperwork to do and preferred the public stenographer aboard that vessel.11
Three years later, Marconi would narrowly escape another famous maritime disaster.12 He was on board the Lusitania in April 1915 on the voyage immediately before it was sunk by a German U-boat in May.13
Milton Snely Hershey14
The man behind the Hershey’s Milk Chocolate Bar, Hershey’s Kisses, Hershey’s Syrup had spent the winter in France and planned to sail home on the Titanic. Fortunately for Hershey, business back home apparently intervened15, and he and his wife instead caught a ship that was sailing earlier, the German liner Amerika. The Amerika would earn its own footnote16 in the disaster, as one of several ships to send the Titanic warnings of ice in its path.
J. Pierpont Morgan
The legendary 74-year-old financier, nicknamed the “Napoleon of Wall Street,” had helped create General Electric and U.S. Steel.17
Among his varied business interests was the International Mercantile Marine, the shipping combine that controlled Britain’s White Star Line, owner of the Titanic. Morgan attended the ship’s launching in 1911 and had a personal suite on board with his own private promenade deck and a bath equipped with specially designed cigar holders.18 He was reportedly booked on the maiden voyage but instead remained at the French resort of Aix to enjoy his morning massages and sulfur baths.19
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2. sprain: 扭伤（关节）；hospitalize:送……住院。

23. multimillionaire: 大富豪，巨富；heir: 继承人；Vanderbilt shipping and railroad empire: （美国）范德比尔特航运铁路帝国。
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4. casualty:（事故或战争）伤者，死者。

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5. evangelist: 巡回布道者。

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6. humble: 简陋的。

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7. biography: 传记。

28. descendant: 后代。
29. villain: 恶棍，坏人。
30. Goodyear Tire and Rubber:（美国）固特异轮胎橡胶公司，始建于1898年，是世界上规模最大的轮胎生产公司。
Famous Passengers Booked for the Ship’s Next Voyage
The Titanic’s return trip to England was scheduled to begin on April 20. Among the more famous names who had apparently booked passage:
Henry Adams, descendant28 of two presidents and author of The Education of Henry Adams.
John Alden Dix, then governor of New York.
J. Bruce Iay, managing director of the White Star Line. A survivor of the Titanic disaster, Iay was portrayed as a villain29 in many accounts in part for the ship’s shortage of lifeboats and for getting himself safely into one.
Guglielmo Marconi. Hing skipped the maiden voyage, Marconi had apparently made arrangements to take the second.
Frank Seiberling, founder of Goodyear Tire and Rubber30.
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