What are some historical lies that people generally believe?
The myth that Titanic was in any way badly designed, badly built, or badly operated - by the standards of the time.
In fact there are so many crazy inaccuracies surrounding Titanic that it's hard to list them all here...
But I'll give it a go!
* She was an incredibly seaworthy ship - probably moreso than any passenger ship around today.
The iceberg damage stretched almost a third of the way down her side, and she still stayed afloat for more than two hours!
* In that time, all but two of her lifeboats were launched - there wasn't time to launch any more.
She could have had a hundred
more lifeboats on board, but that wouldn't have helped without vastly more crew to operate them.
* Titanic's passengers genuinely did believe that she was practically unsinkable.
When the time came to begin loading the lifeboats, many thought they would be safer staying on Titanic.
There wasn't time for the crew to wait around convincing more people to get in, so when a lifeboat was ready, if there was no-one else waiting to get in, it had to go.
This is why so many of Titanic's lifeboats left only half-full - it's not just because the crew were worried about over-filling them.
* Titanic wasn't travelling too fast for the conditions - by the standards of practice around at the time.
Further precautions were put into practice after the incident, but no-one on board can be blamed for doing what anyone on any ship would have done the same.
* Titanic was by no means a fast ship, nor was she ever intended to be.
The White Star Line (Titanic's owners) were in competition with one other big shipping line, Cunard.
Cunard's liners (Mauretania, Lusitania and later Aquatania) were the fastest in the business.
To combat this, instead of fighting for speed, White Star decided to try to make their liners the most
luxurious in the world.
Olympic and Titanic were famed for their splendour and comfort - passengers said that it was easy to forget that you were at sea, as there were very few vibrations from the engines, and the ships remained stable even in fairly rough seas.
By comparison, Cunard's liners were very fast, but their quadruple-screw configuration made vibration more apparent.
It's a myth that Titanic was ever trying to make record-breaking speed across the Atlantic.
* She wasn't built using sub-standard materials.
This rumour goes around a lot these days because of an article that was written some time ago; what the article is supposed to mean is
that there is much better quality steel available today.
This was not the case in 1909.
Additionally, Titanic's builders were paid on a fee plus materials basis - they were given a set fee to construct the ship, plus the cost of *all* materials used.
There was no incentive to use anything but the best steel they could get their hands on.
The shipyard had an excellent reputation and would not risk tainting it by using bad steel, which could easily be noticed on inspection anyway.
* Titanic and her two sister ships Olympic and Britannic were also surprisingly manoeuvrable for their size - much moreso than was expected.
Some will tell you that Titanic's rudder was too
small, but this simply isn't true.
In fact, Olympic's wartime captain marvelled at her manoeuvrability, and was even able to throw her into a sudden turn, ramming (and sinking) a German U-boat.
Olympic was the first of only two merchant vessels throughout the First World War recorded to have sunk an enemy vessel.
* While it's true that the lookouts' binoculars were misplaced (or rather, locked away in a cabinet that no-one on board had the key to open), this made no difference to Titanic's fate.
The images of sea captains and pirates scanning the horizon through telescopes, while common in films, has virtually no stead in
reality.
Binoculars and telescopes narrow your field of vision down to a fine point, making it harder to spot anything.
Lookouts on real ships will use their eyes alone to search for objects of interest, and once they've been spotted, will use a set of binoculars to further inspect it.
Titanic's lookouts would not have been using their binoculars to search for iceberg even if they'd had them.
* Third class passengers were never trapped below decks.
The big metal gates you might remember from the film never even existed.
The only time passengers were kept below decks was near the beginning of the disaster, when the officers needed
time to prepare the lifeboats.
First and second class passengers were allowed on deck, but as there were so many more third-class passengers the crowd was asked to stay below for a short while, until the officers were ready to start loading lifeboats.
No-one was ever locked up.
In fact a higher percentage of third-class males survived the sinking than second-class males.
* Titanic was the largest ship in the world, but not by much.
Her older sister Olympic was identical in almost every way.
A few changes to Titanic's layout (including the covering up of some promenade decks, making them count as interior space) made
her technically larger, but both ships were almost exactly the same length, breadth and height.
Olympic had a GRT (gross registered tonnage) of 45,324 gross register tons.
Titanic's GRT was some 1,000 tons greater.
After the disaster, Olympic received a refit, after which her GRT was up to about 30 more than Titanic's had been.
But Titanic's younger sister, Britannic, which was launched after the disaster and had been modified during construction as a result of it, was about 2 feet wider than her sisters and had a GRT more than 2,000 tons greater than Titanic's.
* White Star Line's owner, Bruce Ismay, likely had nothing to do
with the incident.
Another myth popularised by the film is that Ismay had convinced Captain Smith to sail faster and try to get to New York in record time.
He's also portrayed as a bumbling idiot, and sneaks onto a lifeboat when the officers aren't looking.
While we'll never know whether or not Ismay really did discuss Titanic's schedule with Smith, it's incredibly unlikely - Smith was looking to retire after commanding Titanic, had an extremely good reputation, and was a much-loved public figure.
Passengers scrambled to sail on a ship under his command.
He is unlikely to have been swayed to make rash decisions based on Ismay's need for Titanic to make headlines.
Ismay himself
played an active role during the sinking, helping passengers into lifeboats and doing what he could where possible (one officer recalled telling him to get out of the way as he was making a nuisance of himself by getting involved, but testified that he was trying to help).
Ismay stepped into an empty spot on one of the last boats to leave the ship, just as it was preparing to lower.
He didn't take anyone else's space.
Unfortunately the media needed a scapegoat, and he was the highest-ranking official to survive the disaster.
He adopted a secluded lifestyle after the disaster, funding several naval charities but otherwise staying out of the public eye.
* Higher watertight compartments or compartments sealed at the top would not have saved the ship.
Most people could tell you that Titanic sunk because the weight of the water in the foremost watertight compartments pulled the bow down, allowing the water to spill over the top into more compartments, and so-on throughout the ship.
But had Titanic's watertight bulkhead walls run all the way to the top deck, she might actually have sunk faster - with so much water contained in the front third of the vessel, she would have begun to tilt forwards much earlier, and possibly have broken in two sooner than she did.
Sealing the tops of the bulkheads to prevent water from
spilling over was actually illegal, and still is today.
The International SOLAS (Safety Of Life At Sea) Regulations state that no civil (non-military) vessel can have any obstruction above watertight compartments that could impede a passenger's escape.
The bottom line is that Titanic was damaged beyond her specifications, and was doomed from the moment she hit the iceberg.
* "Full Astern" - There's a belief (popularised again by the film) that Titanic's engines were thrown full astern on sighting the iceberg, and that this may have hindered her ability to turn away from it.
This rumour started because of evidence given by the
fourth officer, who who wasn't even on the bridge at the time of the collision.
The only survivor who was present was the quartermaster, but from his position in the wheelhouse he couldn't see the commands sent to the engine room on the bridge telegraphs.
Survivors from the engine room and the boiler rooms attested that the command was "stop" rather than "astern".
Whoever you choose to believe, when you think about the timescale it really makes very little difference.
There was less than 40 seconds between the iceberg sighting and the collision - and in that time, the lookouts had to ring the bell, pick up the phone, wait for 6th officer Moody to enter the wheelhouse
and answer it, and alert him to the iceberg; then, Moody relayed that order to the most senior officer on the bridge (1st Officer Murdoch); Murdoch ordered the turn to port, then crossed to the telegraph to send the order to stop.
Try acting that out in real time, and work out how long the engineers had to act on the "stop" order - not long enough.
There's a really good article explaining exactly what went on in the engine rooms [here]( this goes into a lot more detail than I can, and comes to the same conclusions.
Long story short - there wasn't even enough time to stop the engines, let alone put them in reverse.
Slowing down or keeping full-ahead would have had no difference, as the
turning circle stays the same.
Leaving the starboard engine running may have turned Titanic's bow away from the iceberg, but it would have made it more difficult to keep the stern away.
And please, *please* don't mention the Olympic switch conspiracy ...
>My favorite lie is Ultra.
>It's not really just one lie.
It's a campaign of lies, probably more widespread and deep-routed than any in history, all leading to one collossal lie: Hiding the fact that the Allies broke the Enigma cipher.
And, later, the Japanese "Purple" cipher, and the German Lorenz cipher, and the Italian C-38 cypher.
>Basically, the Allies had blown every code the Axis used out of the water, thanks to the work of the Polish Cipher Bureau, and the Bletchley Park mathematicians including Alan Turing, and the
American Signal Intelligence Service.
>The collective intelligence from all these broken codes was called Ultra.
>But what do you do when your code gets broken?
You make a new, harder one.
The allies couldn't let that happen, they couldn't let the axis know that their codes were broken.
So how do you use data from a broken code without revealing that the code is broken?
You lie.
If they wanted to take out an Axis supply ship after finding it through Ultra, they didn't just do that.
They had a spy plane fly over where they knew the ship would
be, then they sunk it.
So the crew are all like "oh beep we got spotted."
They also had to hide the broken codes from their own soldiers, lest they be revealed under careless talk.
So they sent out other spy planes knowing nothing would be found, so crews wouldn't wonder how mission found an enemy every time.
>They would never attack until they had a "cover story".
Men undoubtedly died, by attacks the government knew were coming, because they would not compromise Ultra.
>One of the few times they were forced to sink ships immediately, they covered it by sending a message in a code they knew the Germans had broken, to a spy in Naples, congratulating him of his success.
The spy didn't exist, but the Germans intercepted the message and assumed everything was still good with Enigma.
>The best part is, they didn't even reveal Ultra after the war.
They saw to it that the Enigma machines were sold to potential enemies in the Third World, who continued to use the broken
codes for years.
Ultra wasn't revealed in its full extent until 1974, 29 years after the war.
Never has a secret of such massive importance been so well kept for so long.
That Cleopatra was some sort of otherworldly beauty who mesmerized every man she met.
Ancient historians were more impressed/scandalized by her intelligence and ability to manipulate as easily as she breathed, and it wasn't until centuries later than she began to develop this reputation as a sexy seductress.
Cleopatra's ancestors were *big* fans of incest (the sixteen roles of her great-great-grandparents were filled by just six individuals), and members of the Ptolemaic dynasty had a reputation for being...odd-looking.
Cleopatra, reportedly, was above-average-looking compared to others in her family, but according to historians like Plutarch, the general consensus was
that “her beauty… was in itself not altogether incomparable, nor such as to strike those who saw her.”
"NASA spent millions on developing a pen for space.
The Russians used a pencil."
[suggesting NASA isn't very intelligent]
They were perfectly correct to make a pen for space.
A pencil would have released loads of tiny graphite particles during use, which would float around and interfere with electronics.
That Marie Antoniette proclaimed "Let them eat cake."
In reality it seems to have emerged from a short anecdote in an autobiography published by french (edit: Genevan born) philosopher Jean-Jacques Rosseau and is frequently misattributed to her.
That the Roman Empire fell in 476 AD and then it was the dark ages.
In reality, a peasant living through 476 probably wouldn't have realized they were living through the end of one age and the start of another.
The beginnings of feudalism had already started back during Diocletian's reign, barbarians warbands and barbarian roman troops had been a fact of life for generations.
The barbarian king who deposed Augustulus still considered himself a rightful representative of the Empire, etc.
In some ways, the fall of Rome was sudden and traumatic (the population of Rome itself absolutely cratered in the 400's, after all), but it
was really more of a gradual, centuries long transition than a fall.
Einstein got straight A’s in school.
They probably only say it to make kids feel better about themselves.
That Iceland was named Iceland by the vikings to try to try to trick colonists into not colonizing when in fact the reason is that when the first people landed on iceland it was winter and the viking that named it saw a lot of ice and promptly named it as such
That Napoleon was short, he was of average height by those times.
French just used the different scale of measurement.
No, burning the Library of Alexandria didn't set humanity back by a thousand years.
Charlemagne would not have been the first person on the moon if it had remained intact.
That George Washington had wooden teeth.
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