When the director of this film, James Cameron, was writing the script, he intended the main characters to be completely fictional, but later discovered that there was a real J. Dawson on the ship, who died on board. Joseph Dawson was an Irishman who was born in 1888. On the Titanic, he was in charge of bringing coal to the workers who were in the furnaces, as well as making sure that the piles of this material were correctly distributed to maintain the balance of the ship.