There's this moment in James Cameron's
1997 blockbuster, Titanic
where Kate Winslet's character Rose
notices something about the lifeboats that ends up being
kind of important...
"It seems that there are not enough for everyone aboard."
To which Victor Garber
who played Titanic's architect Thomas Andrews
responds in a flawless Irish accent:
"I have built a good ship, strong and true."
"She's all the lifeboat you need."
Since the viewer already knows how this story ends....
This line comes off as either
tragic arrogance or some sort of bad joke.
But it's central to understanding how the Titanic was designed...
and how it all went wrong.
The Titanic actually had more lifeboats
than was required by British law.
The Merchant Shipping Act of 1894
required that big ships — those weighing over 10,000 tons
have at least 16 lifeboats that could hold 990 people.
Ships only got bigger and bigger from there
but the minimum didn't change.
When the Titanic first launched in 1911
the ship weighed over 45,000 tons
but still only needed 16 lifeboats by law.
Titanic had 20, which, if filled to maximum capacity
could carry a total of 1,178 people.
Nowhere near enough
to accommodate the approximate 2,240 passengers and crew
on board when the ship sank.
But at least from a design perspective
the builders of the Titanic
had every reason to believe that they had constructed
the safest passenger ship the world had ever seen.
"She's all the lifeboats you need."
This line might be made up for the movie
but it's how people talked about the Titanic
even after it went down.
Let's unpack what that means.
The Titanic was designed to stay afloat
even after taking on serious damage.
The bottom of the ship was divided into 16 compartments
by these partitions called bulkheads.
If the ship's hull was breached
these compartments could be sealed off from each other
with the flick of a switch
that closed watertight doors connecting them.
Once sealed off, the water in the affected compartments
would rise to the height of the sea called the waterline
but prevent the rest of the ship from flooding.
The idea was that the giant ocean liner
even after taking on water
would still be the safest place to wait
as lifeboats methodically ferried passengers to a rescue ship.
This bulkhead plus lifeboat strategy
had worked successfully just a couple of years earlier
when a ship accidentally rammed
straight into the side of the RMS Republic.
Newspaper diagrams from 1909
showed how the Republic was ripped wide open...
and where it was taking on water.
But the crew remained calm
and didn't evacuate the ship right away.
Their confidence was due in large part
to a brand new piece of technology they had on board:
the Marconi Wireless Telegraph system.
When the Republic was hit, its telegraph operator
tapped out the morse code signal C-Q-D
the distress call that later became SOS
to all nearby ships.
A few hours later, a rescue ship arrived
and the crew carefully transferred everyone
off the Republic in small groups using lifeboats.
The Republic eventually sank
but except for 6 people killed in the initial collision
every single person on board was saved.
The Republic was the first shipwreck
to make use of a wireless distress signal
and its operator was hailed as a hero.
This incident seemed to prove that on the busy
North Atlantic route, with other ships always nearby
a combination of careful ship design
and this miraculous piece of new technology
had made disasters at sea a thing of the past.
This 1909 news article, The Triumph of Wireless
pretty much sums up the optimism of the time:
"The passenger on a well-equipped transatlantic liner
is safer than anywhere else in the world."
Just three years later...
Here's what went wrong.
When the Titanic was built
regulations recommended that all passenger ships
ships should be able to remain afloat
with any two adjacent compartments flooded.
I talked to Sam Halpern
an engineer and long time Titanic researcher
who created this diagram
based on data from a 1996 forensic analysis
of the Titanic's design.
He showed me how the ship was built to stay afloat
even with three — and in these scenarios
up to four adjacent compartments flooded.
The key was to keep the ship level
so the waterline never reached the top of the bulkheads
and flooded over into the other compartments.
These scenarios show
the ship was protected from almost any crash imaginable at the time
including from rocks, colliding with another ship and even hitting an iceberg.
But the Titanic didn't hit the iceberg head on.
Instead, it scraped along the side of it.
And sonar analysis shows the ship was most likely breached.
Here.
Here, here, here.
And most crucially, here:
Boiler Room six.
The movie actually does a really good job of explaining this
so I'm going to let Victor Garber take it from here.
"That's five compartments."
"She can stay afloat
with the first 4 compartments breach, but not 5."
"Titanic will flounder."
"It is a mathematical certainty."
Flooding the first 5 compartments overwhelmed the design.
It was just too many for the ship to stay upright.
And as the bow dipped farther into the ocean...
the water flowed over the bulkheads...
flooding the watertight compartments one at a time.
The Titanic sent out its first wireless distress call
at 12:15 AM.
35 minutes after hitting the iceberg.
From there, the messages became increasingly desperate.
"We have struck an iceberg."
"We are sinking fast."
and "Cannot last much longer
women and children in boats."
But the nearest ship to the Titanic that night, SS Californian
never got these messages.
That ship's sole wireless operator
had turned off the radio for the night and gone to bed.
The Titanic's wireless operators
were communicating with other ships like the Olympic...
and the Baltic that started to head to its coordinates
but we're a long way off.
The last message from the Titanic received by our RMS Carpathia
at 1:45 AM was "Engine room full up to boilers."
Without a rescue ship all the Titanic had left
was its lifeboats.
By the time the Carpathia got there around 4 AM...
the ship had disappeared into the ocean
taking down more than 1,500 passengers and crew with it.
The only survivors were 706 people
who made it in to the Titanic's lifeboats.
The disaster permanently altered
the public's view on the necessity of lifeboats.
You can see how quickly things changed
when you compare this photo of RMS Olympic
Titanic's near identical twin in 1911
to this one of the Olympic in 1912
immediately following the Titanic disaster
showing double the number of lifeboats along the top deck.
the biggest impact of the Titanic disaster had on safety regulations
and ship design was the enacting of
the International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea or SOLAS
a 1914 international treaty that required
wireless telegraph communication to be active 24/7
and upped the lifeboat minimum to account for everyone on board.
Today, SOLAS requires cruise ships
to be able to accommodate 125%
of the ship's capacity in small boats in the event of emergency.
Ultimately, the Titanic disaster was less about a fatal flaw in design
and more about tragic timing in the early days
of wireless communication
and a collision scenario too extreme
to have been considered possible...
until it happened.
Oh, and one more thing about
that foreshadowing lifeboat scene in Titanic.
"Waste of deck space as it is, on an unsinkable ship!"
The Titanic was never advertised as unsinkable.
Although this 1911 edition of the trade magazine, The Shipbuilder
did describe both the Titanic and the Olympic as "practically unsinkable"
and there are reports from 1912
that some of the passengers who went down with the ship
refused to believe it was really sinking.
But the term only became
widely associated with the Titanic in the media
after the disaster.
Thanks for watching!
I had a lot of fun making this one.
Especially with adapting this 1911 side plan of the Titanic
to help visualize how the watertight bulkheads were supposed to work.
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