Last night, but like, 106 years ago, the unsinkable Titanic… sank.
We all know the story, right?
But that’s the problem.
We all know the story – probably just the story James Cameron told us in that movie.
A movie written to be dramatic and suspenseful in order to sell tickets.
It’s accurate in many ways, the overall design, the sets, even most aspects of the
timeline.
But not really the story.
My dad has been asking me to do a video on the Titanic for months – and I’ll be honest,
I was a little on the fence about it.
But a week or two ago I saw a Today I Learned post on reddit that obviously tipped the scales.
TIL the sea route that Titanic sunk on should have been populated by many other ships, which
could have saved victims of the sinking, however, ships transferred their coal to Titanic in
port so she could make the date of her voyage, resulting in the area being virtually isolated
when Titanic sunk.
Ugh…
There are so many things wrong with just the title – you might even know one or two already.
But to me, the first clue that something was off was…
Sea route It hurts just to hear that.
It’s sea lane.
Nobody who knows anything about naval anything would call it a sea route.
Now am I being overly pedantic?
Maybe.
But that was just the tip of the iceberg.
Hah get it?
No no, we’re not doing the title cards for this one…
besides, I hate that song.
So, the coal thing.
Or rather, the coal strike.
He left that little bit out of the title didn’t he?
In fact, the Wikipedia article he cites as his source doesn’t actually say what he
says it says.
I love Wikipedia, I’m not one of those people who thinks it’s a terrible source.
In fact a lot of the time, it’s pretty accurate.
There are a few articles with a rather clear and easily debunkable bias, but for the most
part it checks out.
But if you’re gonna use it as a source, at least make sure it says what you think
it says.
It is true that several ships in Southampton gave their coal to the Titanic.
But it wasn’t because the Titanic was so prestigious that it demanded coal offerings.
All hail the Titanic!
It was because in 1912, there was a coal miner’s strike in the UK.
As a result, the price of coal went up and so ticket prices went up.
All hail capitalism!
Many ships were unable to sell enough tickets to make the trip profitable so were simply
canceled.
So yes, the sea lane was somewhat less busy when the Titanic crossed – but not because
of the Titanic.
There were just fewer people travelling because of the coal strike.
This is evident by the fact that even though many ships canceled their crossing and gave
their coal and passengers to the Titanic, it left port only half full.
The Titanic had a maximum capacity of about 3300 people; 2400 passengers and 900 crewmembers.
When it left Cherbourg, France, it was only carrying 1300 passengers, with its 900 crewmembers.
That puts the total at only two-thirds of its max capacity.
When I went into the thread to correct the OP, as any good redditor would do, I saw him
repeating several other myths about the Titanic – many of which were from the movie.
The ship was running above it's reccomended power to try to impress the public by getting
to New York ahead of time.
The captain ignored several ice warnings.
There should have been more lifeboats onboard, although this was common practice at the time,
etc.
I know a lot on the topic, if you have any questions feel free to ask :)
Why am I showing you the cached version?
Because when he was being called out on his bs and it was pointed out that he was just
reciting the movie, he deleted it all.
As any self-respecting redditor would do.
The first claim I want to tackle is that it didn’t have enough lifeboats… which the
movie makes sure to bring a lot of attention to.
I did the sum in my head, and with the number of lifeboats times the capacity you mentioned,
forgive me, but it seems that there are not enough for everyone aboard.
About half actually.
The Titanic had 20 lifeboats.
There were two emergency lifeboats, kept at the ready for man overboard situations, with
a capacity of 40 each.
Four collapsible lifeboats, which took up less space when not in use, but only had a
capacity of 47.
And 14 standard lifeboats which could hold 65 people each.
If each boat was full, that would bring their total capacity to 1178 people, which means
they could have held just under half of the total number of people on board that voyage.
If the Titanic had been at maximum capacity, that’s only one third.
In fact I put in these new type davits, which can take an extra row of boats inside this
one.
But it was thought by some that the deck would look too cluttered.
That’s a lie.
There’s no other way to put it, that’s just a lie.
Even if that were true, that would have brought to total capacity to just 2000.
So several hundred people still would have drowned.
The Titanic actually had more lifeboats than was legally required.
Back then the amount of lifeboats you were supposed to carry depended on your tonnage
not on your carrying capacity.
So a ship that size only had to have enough lifeboats to carry 1060 people.
Which in hindsight is rather silly, but we’ll get to why later.
The Carpathia, the ship that rescues everyone in the end, also only had 20 lifeboats.
And here’s the Titanic’s sister ship, the Olympic, with its 20 lifeboats.
In order to have enough lifeboats to carry every passenger at maximum capacity, the Titanic
would have needed 64 lifeboats.
Which the Olympic started carrying only six months after the Titanic sank.
Here she is with all 64, 40 of which were collapsible.
So you’ve not yet lit the last four boilers.
No I don’t see the need, we are making excellent time.
The press knows the size of Titanic, now I want them to marvel at her speed.
We must give them something new to print.
This speed myth is often repeated, along with the captain ignoring ice warnings, thanks
to the movie.
Another ice warning.
This one’s from the Noordam.
Thank you, Sparks.
Oh not to worry, quite normal for this time of year.
In fact, we’re speeding up.
I’ve just ordered the last four boilers lit.
He didn’t ignore them, he posted them where they needed to be posted and that was it.
There isn’t much else to say about it, what else was he supposed to do?
Sources disagree on whether he actually ordered the last four boilers lit, but even if he
did, early in the movie, before he supposedly lit them, they state the speed as…
21 knots sir.
At the time of impact, it’s estimated that the Titanic was travelling at 22 knots.
For the non-seaworthy among you, that’s a difference of 1.15 miles per hour.
And even that 22 knots number is a guess by someone counting revolutions of the screws.
Airplanes have propellers, ships have screws.
Here’s a quick demonstration of why counting revolutions isn’t the best way to estimate
speed.
Of course, counting revolutions to estimate speed for a ship works better than it does
for a car, but it’s still not the best method.
We can reasonably assume 22 is correct, but we’ll obviously never know for sure.
People like to criticize that speed saying that were it moving slower it could have maneuvered
to avoid the iceberg or that the force of the impact wouldn’t have done as much damage.
But you could kinda say the same thing about going faster too.
It’s also said that had they just hit the iceberg head on it wouldn’t have flooded
as many compartments and the ship might have survived.
But could you imagine if Murdoch actually did that?
He’d never live that down.
The guy who rammed an iceberg with the Titanic.
So, you can’t really fault a guy for instinctively trying to avoid an iceberg rather than intentionally
hitting it.
Speaking of which.
Hard to starboard!
Wait… did you catch that?
Let’s play that back.
Omg is he turning the wheel the wrong way?
No.
This is a common “movie mistake” that people like to point out to try and look smart.
But it’s actually correct.
The Titanic used tiller orders rather than rudder orders.
For the nautically disinclined among you, a tiller is the stick on a sailboat that you
use to turn the rudder.
So when you say hard to starboard, you’re pushing the tiller to the right, and the rudder
goes left.
But since the helm isn’t a tiller, he turns it to the left.
That’s why the ship turns to port.
It’s as if First Officer Murdoch knows more about captaining a ship than the average moviegoer.
He also doesn’t “correct” the order after the iceberg strikes when he says…
Hard to port!
That’s intentional.
When the iceberg is spotted, he orders the helm hard to starboard, again, this turns
the rudder to port.
Turning a ship with a rudder isn’t like turning a car – it’s more like turning
a forklift, the turning action happens in the back.
As a result, the stern swings slightly to starboard while the bow turns to port.
After impact, he orders hard to port, which swings the stern in the other direction to
avoid hitting the iceberg twice.
Again, it’s almost like he knows what he’s doing or something.
Anyway, as you likely know if you saw the movie, the iceberg ruptures five watertight
compartments and the ship is only built to sustain four, so it sinks by the head.
There is a 2 hour and 41 minute video out there showing the Titanic sink in real time.
It’s accurate down to the minute including all of the orders that were given, the time
and capacity of each lifeboat launched, and… wait, what is that?
What about that ship over there?
You can see a light, isn’t she replying?
No sir, she’d blast our ears off if she did.
That’s the Californian, it was completely cut out of James Cameron’s version of events.
So when that redditor said that The area being virtually isolated when Titanic
sunk He’s wrong.
The Californian was between five to ten miles away.
They could see each other.
The Titanic was not isolated, virtually or… not virtually.
I feel like there should be a word for that.
The Californian did make it into a deleted scene though.
These two guys do not work for White Star Line.
They work for the Marconi International Marine Communication Company.
When you bought a Marconi wireless telegraph you also had to bring on a Marconi operator.
Nobody but Marconi employees could operate a Marconi telegraph… this becomes important.
Most ships only had one, but the Titanic had two keeping the room operational 24/7, mostly
delivering personal messages from first-class passengers.
Bloody hell, it’s that idiot on the Californian.
Tell him to sod off.
Volume control wasn’t really a thing back then – you were louder or quieter depending
on how close you were to the receiver.
The Californian was so close and his signal so loud that the Titanic operator in real
life threw off his headset.
If you’ve ever been listening to a rather quiet song followed by a really loud one,
you should understand.
He quickly sent the letters D-D-D which was code for “stop interrupting” followed
by the message Shut up, shut up!
I am busy; I am working Cape Race!
The exchange from the deleted scene makes the Titanic operator seem even more unprofessional
and the Californian operator hangs up and walks away.
In reality he sat and listened for ten minutes or so while the Titanic transmitted it’s
messages and THEN gave up, turned off the telegraph, and went to sleep.
The message he was trying to interrupt the Titanic to send was that the Californian had
found an ice pack and had stopped for the night.
The Titanic hit the iceberg ten minutes later.
The entire time, the Californian had been within visual distance of the Titanic.
They watched as the Titanic slowly sank and fired eight distress rockets.
The Titanic was also frantically trying to hail the ship by telegraph and morse lamp.
Crewmembers on the Californian saw the rockets and told the captain about it several times,
saying that the lights looked really strange.
That’s six rockets she’s fired sir.
Yes, maybe I better tell the captain.
We’ll never know what the captain thought, because he changed his story every time he
told it.
Sometimes he thought they were just some strange company signal, other times he thought they
were celebratory, but I can tell you what he definitely didn’t think.
Hey maybe we should wake up the radio operator and ask?
To give him some benefit of the doubt, he did order his Marconi operator to tell the
Titanic that they were stopped in an ice pack – and there’s the Titanic stopped in an
ice pack.
Maybe the rockets were fireworks for a party on the deck?
But I dunno, maybe pick up the phone and ask?
The point being that the Titanic knew the Californian was there – they could see it.
So when they started launching the lifeboats, making sure that they were packed full wasn’t
really a priority.
Because they thought help was right there.
Mr. Lightoller, why are the boats being launched half full?
Not now Mr. Andrews.
There look, 20 or so, in a boat built for 65.
And I saw one boat with only 12, 12!
Well, we weren’t sure of the weight Mr. Andrews, these boats may buckle.
That’s a lie, only there to make the White Star Line officers look incompetent for the
movie.
The first boats to be launched started heading in the Californian’s direction.
And that is why the Titanic wasn’t required to carry enough lifeboats to fit every passenger
– because they weren’t designed to support people floating in the middle of the North
Atlantic for several hours.
They were designed to ferry people from the sinking ship to the rescue ship.
Which again, they thought was right there.
So when it slowly disappeared over the horizon and the Titanic was sinking even faster, it
was too late for them to correct their mistake.
Likewise, when the boats first started launching, many passengers didn’t want to get in because
they didn’t really believe that the Titanic was going to sink… it wasn’t until the
bow started to dip below the water that it really began to sink in – haha!
I knew I could get another one in there.
It wasn’t until the Titanic and the subsequent government inquiries that important safety
measures that we would think of as obvious were put in place.
Like requiring the radio to be manned 24 hours a day, the standardization of rudder orders,
and having enough lifeboats to fit everyone on board.
When you have 100 years of hindsight to work with it’s easy to point to mistakes that
were made and claim that you have found the cause.
This is also where conspiracy theories come from, and don’t worry there’s plenty of
those about the Titanic as well.
Including that it never actually existed in the first place – which was debunked when
we found the wreckage in 1985.
Or that it was secretly replaced by the Olympic – nevermind that they were photographed
side by side.
Or that it was sunk on purpose to collect insurance money because it was deemed to be
a future financial loss, and that the 1500 people who died were secretly loaded onto
the Californian or a mysterious third ship – which would require a lot of people to
remain silent, and the insurance payout was still a financial loss, not to mention the
reputation damage done to White Star Line and the rest of the industry.
But like anyone would let something like facts get in the way of a good story!
People want to look at a major event with a critical eye and be able to pluck out some
previously unimportant fact and say ah-ha!
I have found the answer!
I know why the Titanic sank!
Because people are drawn to simple answers.
In the end, I was a combination of a dozen or so smaller, less exciting factors.
You know, mainly the iceberg.
But yeah, they didn’t spot it in time to properly maneuver around it.
Had they been going slower, maybe they could have.
The iron rivets and steel they used to build the ship, while “perfectly acceptable by
their standards at the time” were, and I’m quoting a metallurgist here: “brittle AF
when cold.”
They also thought help was just on the horizon and launched lifeboats without fully seating
them.
A great deal of blame should be placed on the Californian, the ship that did nothing
but watch while the Titanic sank.
The Titanic was going to sink no matter what after hitting the iceberg, but the amount
of people who died could have been greatly reduced, if not eliminated, if the Californian
had just… you know, turned on the radio.
If the Titanic could not see the Californian on the horizon, the lifeboats probably would
have been more full.
The 1958 movie “A Night to Remember” does a much better job of showing the Californian
watching the Titanic sink throughout the night.
While James Cameron seemed to want to place more blame on White Star Line and the officers
in his 1997 movie.
With a hundred years of extra knowledge you can make it look like whoever or whatever’s
fault you want it to be.
That is the benefit of hindsight.
So the next time someone tells you that they have the answer to something people have been
researching for a century, but now it’s about a coal strike or that a seasoned first
officer gave the wrong steering orders, you’ll know better.
I’m just kidding I love that song.
You’re here!
There’s nothing I fear!
And I know that my heart will go on…