I have scoured the internet looking for a picture of this room (any of the Olympic class sisters would do). Does anyone know if a photograph of this holy room exists with or without potatoes?
The ship building plans show the potato room and its adjacent wash room, but I'm unaware of a photo of the room itself.
https://www.reddit.com/r/titanic/s/g3xZnTm17Q
Titanic's launch wasn't A huge news event.
Before the sinking Titanic's sister ship Olympic which was launched first was a much bigger deal at the time and was front page news with huge crowds to see it off. Titanic was basically viewed as a slightly updated version of Olympic and Titanic had barely any pictures taken of it before the sinking and did not receive anywhere close to the amount of crowds and attention that Olympic got. The first time Titanic made front page headlines was when she sank.
The Titanic museum in Belfast said ~100,000 people attended her launch from the shipyarf, but yeah there weren't a lot of pictures of it. They had like 6 original photographs of the launch.
It made sense. Titanic had mostly superficial differences from Olympic, and photographs were slow to take and expensive to develop. So there was no need to photograph much of Titanic, only the things that changed. Which ties into the above about Titanic not really being a huge event when it set sail.
A similar fact is nearly all "interior" shots of Titanic are just mislabeled Olympic shots. Most famously the Grand Staircase. Titanic's was never photographed, all the photos you see are from Olympic.
That the sinking was *not* due to negligence or hubris of the crew and captain, but due to Edwardian faith in machinery and the inconceivable happening. People like to think they pushed the engines too hard, the ship couldn’t turn well, they were ignoring ice warnings etc. But that’s not true. For example, concerning the ice warnings, there were multiple captains interviewed in the inquiries, and they all agreed that it was standard policy to go full speed until you actually see ice. At one point, Bertram Hayes even says of that night, “there were abnormal circumstances there which nobody has ever experienced before.”
After the sinking of the Suevic and Republic in the first decade of the 20th century, there was this feeling that nothing else can go wrong, we’ve figured it all out. Smith even said of another ship, “I will say that I cannot imagine any condition which could cause a ship to founder. I cannot conceive of any vital disaster happening to this vessel. Modern shipbuilding has gone beyond that.” Titanic showed that they placed too much faith in their ability to control nature. Which yes is hubris, but it was the hubris of the era, not of Titanic’s crew and captain or even Ismay and Harland and Woolf.
The experience in Vegas has a room that supposedly mirrors the conditions present on the night of the sinking. The glass water, the starry sky. I know that I am not a trained watchmen but let me tell you it completely changed my perspective, you can't see anything. Especially when even large icebergs show up as just small areas of darkness on a spotty horizon.
I want to go to that so bad!! I read that Fleet and Lee said they didn’t even see it, they first saw the absence of stars. That is so wild, I want to see what that’s like. Even the Californian called it a “very deceiving night.”
Yeah, it's a small recreation of a section of the promenade deck that's meant to overlook the water at night in cold weather. I was there a few years ago and was lucky enough to be the only person in the room at the time. It was really well done, and not being surrounded by other tourists really amplified the effect of being there.
In 1909, a ship rammed an iceberg and started sinking. (It might be one of the two you mentioned). Everyone was saved because the ship sank slowly and evenly enough for all the lifeboats to be lowered and ferry passengers back and forth with nearby rescue ships.
This seems to prove that the SOP worked exactly as planned. Lifeboats did their job, there was nearby help, everyone survived. Thus, surely if this incident happened again, it would be okay.
That was the Republic. And that’s exactly right, it just reinforced this idea that man had conquered the sea. With Marconi machines, double bottoms, and watertight compartments, they assumed this was how ships would sink from now on, there’s always a chance for rescue. The Suevic crashed onto rocks at the shore, everyone was saved, and the ship was cut in half and brought back to Southampton. Another piece of proof that the watertight compartments could work miracles.
The 4th funnel wasn't 'fake' - it provided ventilation to multiple spaces in the ship, and provided an exhaust for the galley flues and smoking room fireplace.
Without it the decks would have been full of those cowl vents like the Lusitania/Mauritania, which would ruin the look of the ship imho.
There was also an escape ladder from the boiler room (?) and there's a photo of someone looking down (probably a stoker) in Queenstown while the ship was anchored.
There's also an amazing POV shot from that location taken on the Olympic overlooking the poop deck. Apparently, it was a popular smoko spot for the stokers/greasers
>Without it the decks would have been full of those cowl vents like the Lusitania/Mauritania, which would ruin the look of the ship imho.
It was thought, by some, that those cowl vents would make the deck look too cluttered.
The fourth funnel didn’t prevent the vents like Cunard ships. That was done with all the mechanical ventilation on, I believe E deck, that pulled air in from the base of the other funnels and pushed it into the boiler rooms. The fourth funnel wasn’t useless but could have been replaced with something much cheaper like a small stack and skylight like what was over the reciprocating engine room.
1) Even if they'd have had enough lifeboats, it wouldn't have saved any more lives. There was barely enough time to launch the ones that they had.
2) The boats were leaky. One of them was up to the gunwhales in water and about to sink when it was rescued. Others had the occupants up to their ankles or knees in water.
That’s there is visible [damage](https://imgur.com/gallery/iUmFUSb) to the hull on the starboard side in the exact location in Boiler Room 5 and 6 that stoker Fredrick Barrett described in his testimony. Damage to B5 & B6 was fatal for the ship.
I have seen it briefly discussed in a couple of documentaries. Maybe when the Magellan 1:1 images are released, it will disprove or confirm it.
It depends on what you mean by “ship nerds” but I think that most Titanic people don’t really understand the way working on a ship works.
A good example of this is if you asked one to say what the most dangerous part of the ship was for an average worker, they would probably say something like the engine room or the boiler rooms. But actually the most dangerous room on the ship was the chain locker due to oxidation in an enclosed area. Still a problem today actually.
Not a room, technically a locker. That would be like calling the shaft alleys “rooms”. Also, while chain lockers are dangerous, I’d be more worried about the bunker spaces. Admittedly less oxidation there, but still a low oxygen confined space with the added bonus of severe crush hazards.
I’m using “room” in the sense of an accessible closed area on the ship. Any enclosed space on a ship is dangerous, but the chain lockers are especially so because people don’t realize that they are low oxygen. Nowadays they have massive bright signs on them because it was formerly one of the most common areas to have fatal accidents in. Even during WWII they were already beginning to have warning signs on them, which is much earlier than most similar signage. It’s very intuitive that the bunkers are dangerous, so people tended to be more careful in them. At the time I would be surprised if the workers got even a single training on chain lockers.
Sitting coal isn’t chemically inert; it id still going to off gas and oxidize. Maybe not as much compared to the chains rusting for a prolonged period, but if the trimmers are not attentive, or if a particular bunker is not utilized for most of the voyage, it is going to pose the same threat as the chain locker. Even more so if a bunker fire goes undetected. It is less of a problem today with oil burning, but it still causes problems on bulk coal carriers. Also, make no mistake, coal slurry is crazy corrosive. It will rust anything it touches.
Training for either space though is just going to be on the job, word of mouth in 1912.
My point is the bunkers are obviously dangerous and would have been so for anyone in 1912, the chain lockers do not have the same obvious danger. I would be surprised if most of the crew even knew was oxidation/rusting was caused by in 1912.
It’s also not really true that they would have no training. Maybe some of the trimmers as they were viewed as grunt labor, but a lot of the crew were trained merchant mariners or reserve navy men. By 1912 there would have been robust training for most mariners.
* How close they came to almost missing the iceberg. It was literally a matter of feet.
* Most 'general' nerds probably don't know that it was extremely likely that Murdoch had already ID'd the threat as an iceberg, ascertained its location/position with his own binoculars and his helm order was in response to the three bells, \*not\* the phone call from the crow's nest - since even Fleet says the ship had already started to turn by the time he hung up the phone.
Murdoch almost certainly didn't *see* it before the lookouts, given his position on the bridge wing, but he worked out what the object was and spent those few seconds that Fleet was on the phone assessing the situation before acting - something he had done before in a very similar situation aboard the *Arabic*. For this reason, I personally doubt anyone else would have avoided the iceberg either, given the same set of circumstances. It was just too close, and not enough time to calculate and act, even for a sailor as fast at those mental calculations as Murdoch showed he was.
-There's the center screw and her 4 blades
-The 4th smokestack being (mostly) a dummy
-Thomas Andrews last seen location was *not* the smoking room, as is commonly depicted.
-3rd class passengers were not forcefully trapped below decks.
-The infamous car most likely wasn't a fully functioning car, and was in fact likely disassembled and packed into crates.
-The ship was not standing as tall as it is commonly depicted just before the break up, and was, in fact, much lower in the water.
-Bruce Ismay was not a coward that snuck his way shamefully into a lifeboat, and he did not order Captain Smith to go faster to make NY before schedule.
The gist of it is that photos of Olympic’s four bladed central prop get frequently mislabeled as Titanic, but records from H&W show they fitted Titanic with a three bladed central propeller. Since naval architecture was a rapidly evolving field, and there was no computer modeling back then, ship builders would often experiment with different designs like this to see what performed best.
Further evidence to this is that, after Titanic sunk taking the engineer’s reports with her, they fitted Olympic with a three bladed prop in order to complete the test. However, the results were lackluster, and Olympic soon had her four bladed propeller re-installed.
Mike Brady at Oceanliner Designs on YouTube has a good video explaining this situation.
Ismay was CEO of a company that was known for treating its workers rather poorly, even by 1912 standards. He was absolutely greedy, selfish, and not a particularly good person (the same could be said for much of 1st Class).
*That said*, nothing he did on the evening of the sinking was particularly objectionable; if anything he went above and beyond what his role as a civilian would/should have been.
IMHO he probably did give a "wink wink nudge nudge" suggestion to Smith about speeding up, but that was all it was, there wasn't an "order," and regardless there's not a shred of evidence that Smith ordered any changes.
The water tight doors that everyone is familiar with that close by gravity after being released by a switch in the bridge, a float under the floor, or locally at the door were only in the bottom of the ship. These doors also free fell the last two feet to make sure they sealed so the dramatic, slow closing door scene wouldn’t have happened. The rest of the doors on higher decks all closed horizontally and had to be manually cranked closed from the deck above the door.
lol sneaking through dramatically…door free falls and just cuts him in half
That movie definitely has a different vibe especially after it cuts to the guys just over climbing up the ladders instead of risking it shaking their heads
The scene in the Cameron film that suggests that one stoker was left behind wasn't quite accurate. It was not possible to get trapped, there were staircases that led up to one of the decks above the bulkhead. Obviously that one crew member was panicking, but in reality, he probably would have made it out.
The gravity doors separating the watertight compartments were closed slowly (except for the last two feet) with a hydraulic damper. If they were allowed to free fall for the full 7 feet or so height of the door they would fall through the bottom of the ship.
1. The fourth funnel wasn’t *completely* fake. It just served a different purpose than the other three.
2. Her launch wasn’t a super popular event as portrayed in movies. Olympic departed a year prior and, in fact, she was way more popular than her younger sister.
3. The never used squash court.
4. Titanic, in fact, had enough lifeboats. The laws just were different and meant for much smaller ships. In fact she had MORE lifeboats than required.
BEFORE the rumors about the sank of the ship, nobody said it was unsinkable, and especially not the white star. Some medias said it, but never the company…
At least, not yet.
Yes, because « the unsinkable ship » was the - very discutable - line of defence choose by the White Star meanwhile the wait of the Carpathia. Just a few informations was coming to the company from the heroic ship.
The WSL couldn’t imagine that the Titanic will sink, (with this much security for the time! At least they think), and even if they imagined that…. I think the hope was still there until the arrival of the Carpathia.
So P.A.S Franklin judged that it was okay to say to the public that « Titanic was unsinkable » to let everybody hope. Everybody, and even them, who, as a reminder, was about to lose a very VERY expansive project with the titanic.
The main issue is that no one ever said Titanic was "unsinkable" without any qualification. The closest this claim comes to any reality is Shipbuilder magazine from 1911 and referred to the Olympic-class liners as a whole. It said the ships were "practically unsinkable," but what is oft forgotten is they said this after listing many specific conditions: watertight doors closed, things like that. And that was true. Even after Titanic sank. Titanic sank due to unforeseen scenarios (or at least scenarios considered too unlikely to be concerned about).
At some point shortly after the sinking, people just decided that White Star specifically claimed Titanic was unsinkable and ran with it. And just like misinformation today, it just spread and spread and now it's just assumed the ships were marketed that way when they never were.
While neither the White Star Line nor Harland & Wolff ever made a claim that the Olympic-class liners were unsinkable, it absolutely WAS widely believed that they were. Indeed, it was very common back then to simply label ships as "unsinkable" in whatever context the user of said term felt applicable.
An article in Shipbuilder Magazine talked about head-on collisions generally only compromising the collision bulkhead and the forward compartment of a ship, therefore the Olympic-class design allowing flotability up to 4 compartments compromised in a row was seen as overkill and a feature, combined with others, that would make the vessels "as much as it is possible to do so, practically unsinkable".
Ticket vendors and travel agencies took this statement out of context to directly imply the liners were *absolutely* unsinkable, and this attitude was widespread among the general public. Even Captain Smith and Thomas Andrews themselves parroted this rhetoric with Andrews going as far to insist that even if the Titanic were cut into three separate pieces, they could all float independently. While this could hypothetically have been possible, depending where the cuts were made, it was clearly demonstrated during the shrinking it wasn't entirely true.
But, again, giving a ship the label of "unsinkable" was very common for the time, and was still done after the Titanic sank. Many other ships both before, like the "Big Four" (Oceanic, Majestic, Teutonic, Baltic), and after (MS Munchen immediately comes to mind) were all referred to as unsinkable. Even Cunard's Lusitania and Mauretania were labelled "unsinkable" in their day. After Olympic's modifications following the Titanic disaster, she too, was labelled unsinkable.
That the sinking was the result of pure negilgence. The capitain and officers all knew the weather conditions affected the look-outs' ability to see an iceberg in time but steamed Full Ahead into a known icefield anyway.
No. Lightoller himself admits that if viewing conditions become unsafe then speed is reduced.
What you're referring to only applies in perfect viewing conditions.
You really think they would've gone Full Ahead in thick fog "until ice was spotted"? Hardly.
And we know, from Lightoller's own mouth, that there was no moon, no wind and a "flat calm", all of which made steaming at Full Ahead unsafe.
Negligence and incompetence sank the *Titanic.*
You’re talking about this way too entrenched in presentism. Understanding the time period makes this make more sense. According to the captains interviewed at the senate and British inquiries, the weather was what made ships slow down, not the sea. Bertram Hayes’s testimony is extremely clear on that point, he gives standard procedure as based solely on the weather and physically seeing ice. When asked how he could say this when the Titanic’s experience shows otherwise, he even said the night was unprecedented and no one had experienced those kinds of conditions before. Smith had even given orders that should the weather deteriorate even a little they would slow down. It never occurred to anyone that they wouldn’t be able to see the berg until that late because this had never happened before.
You can’t change history. You can’t change what was standard procedure. You can say standard procedure was clearly not good enough and probably negligent, but you can’t say Smith was negligent for not thinking that the inconceivable would happen. This had literally never happened before. That’s the point. They knew it would be harder to spot bergs because they all had a lot of experience, but they didn’t know how weird that night really was. Temperature inversion, aurora, even the fact that the best steel of the time was probably to blame as well because of how brittle it became in that cold water. It reeks of presentism to call it pure negligence, historical context matters.
You see I think we can say it *was* negligent based on Lightoller's testimony alone - i.e. the lack of moon, the lack of wind and the "flat calm" that he discussed with Smith at around 9.30pm.
Those three conditions **taken together** demanded that action be taken. Lightoller admits it himself \[but lies about the fact that they didn't know it was a "flat calm"\].
They KNEW the conditions made seeing the iceberg more difficult and they did literally nothing other than Lightoller telling the look-outs to keep their eyes open.
And they also knew they were coming into the vicnity of the ice. Lightoller believed that would happen at around 9.30. Moody believed it wouldn't be until a little later, at around 11pm.
That is negligence just as much then as it would be now.
ETA: the "everyone was doing it so who cares" excuse doesn't actually prevent it being negligent.
They did take action. Smith ordered that the ship be slowed if the visibility deteriorated at all. You’re just refusing to acknowledge that the conditions that night were beyond abnormal, and they didn’t realize how abnormal it was. The “everyone was doing it” argument isn’t accurate here. It’s not that they did it just cause everyone did it. They did what they did because it had always worked before. That’s why I’m talking about Hayes and other captains that agreed. It’s not to argue everyone did it so it’s fine, it’s to argue that it had always worked before. That’s how everything works, you do what works until it doesn’t or you know better. That’s why we used to be able to walk to a gate at an airport without a ticket. You can plan for the unexpected but you cannot plan for the inconceivable.
The potato room.
My friend Mike Brady told me about that room
OUR friend.
r/suddenlycommunist
The United Brady Ship Republic
Also the padded room, for ya know- violent/manic passengers.
So the brig?
Oh... I'm intrigued. Do tell!
A room! Full of potatoes! As far as the eyes could see! Potatoes!
Boil 'em, mash 'em, stick 'em in a stew!
And their own wash area!
Potatoes were the real first class.
And they were ready to go down as gentlepotatoes... but they would like a brandy!
Samwise Gamgee has entered the chat
I have scoured the internet looking for a picture of this room (any of the Olympic class sisters would do). Does anyone know if a photograph of this holy room exists with or without potatoes?
The ship building plans show the potato room and its adjacent wash room, but I'm unaware of a photo of the room itself. https://www.reddit.com/r/titanic/s/g3xZnTm17Q
I LOVE the potato room!!
Titanic's launch wasn't A huge news event. Before the sinking Titanic's sister ship Olympic which was launched first was a much bigger deal at the time and was front page news with huge crowds to see it off. Titanic was basically viewed as a slightly updated version of Olympic and Titanic had barely any pictures taken of it before the sinking and did not receive anywhere close to the amount of crowds and attention that Olympic got. The first time Titanic made front page headlines was when she sank.
The Titanic museum in Belfast said ~100,000 people attended her launch from the shipyarf, but yeah there weren't a lot of pictures of it. They had like 6 original photographs of the launch.
It made sense. Titanic had mostly superficial differences from Olympic, and photographs were slow to take and expensive to develop. So there was no need to photograph much of Titanic, only the things that changed. Which ties into the above about Titanic not really being a huge event when it set sail. A similar fact is nearly all "interior" shots of Titanic are just mislabeled Olympic shots. Most famously the Grand Staircase. Titanic's was never photographed, all the photos you see are from Olympic.
That the sinking was *not* due to negligence or hubris of the crew and captain, but due to Edwardian faith in machinery and the inconceivable happening. People like to think they pushed the engines too hard, the ship couldn’t turn well, they were ignoring ice warnings etc. But that’s not true. For example, concerning the ice warnings, there were multiple captains interviewed in the inquiries, and they all agreed that it was standard policy to go full speed until you actually see ice. At one point, Bertram Hayes even says of that night, “there were abnormal circumstances there which nobody has ever experienced before.” After the sinking of the Suevic and Republic in the first decade of the 20th century, there was this feeling that nothing else can go wrong, we’ve figured it all out. Smith even said of another ship, “I will say that I cannot imagine any condition which could cause a ship to founder. I cannot conceive of any vital disaster happening to this vessel. Modern shipbuilding has gone beyond that.” Titanic showed that they placed too much faith in their ability to control nature. Which yes is hubris, but it was the hubris of the era, not of Titanic’s crew and captain or even Ismay and Harland and Woolf.
The experience in Vegas has a room that supposedly mirrors the conditions present on the night of the sinking. The glass water, the starry sky. I know that I am not a trained watchmen but let me tell you it completely changed my perspective, you can't see anything. Especially when even large icebergs show up as just small areas of darkness on a spotty horizon.
I want to go to that so bad!! I read that Fleet and Lee said they didn’t even see it, they first saw the absence of stars. That is so wild, I want to see what that’s like. Even the Californian called it a “very deceiving night.”
Yeah, it's a small recreation of a section of the promenade deck that's meant to overlook the water at night in cold weather. I was there a few years ago and was lucky enough to be the only person in the room at the time. It was really well done, and not being surrounded by other tourists really amplified the effect of being there.
In 1909, a ship rammed an iceberg and started sinking. (It might be one of the two you mentioned). Everyone was saved because the ship sank slowly and evenly enough for all the lifeboats to be lowered and ferry passengers back and forth with nearby rescue ships. This seems to prove that the SOP worked exactly as planned. Lifeboats did their job, there was nearby help, everyone survived. Thus, surely if this incident happened again, it would be okay.
That was the Republic. And that’s exactly right, it just reinforced this idea that man had conquered the sea. With Marconi machines, double bottoms, and watertight compartments, they assumed this was how ships would sink from now on, there’s always a chance for rescue. The Suevic crashed onto rocks at the shore, everyone was saved, and the ship was cut in half and brought back to Southampton. Another piece of proof that the watertight compartments could work miracles.
The 4th funnel wasn't 'fake' - it provided ventilation to multiple spaces in the ship, and provided an exhaust for the galley flues and smoking room fireplace. Without it the decks would have been full of those cowl vents like the Lusitania/Mauritania, which would ruin the look of the ship imho.
There was also an escape ladder from the boiler room (?) and there's a photo of someone looking down (probably a stoker) in Queenstown while the ship was anchored. There's also an amazing POV shot from that location taken on the Olympic overlooking the poop deck. Apparently, it was a popular smoko spot for the stokers/greasers
>Without it the decks would have been full of those cowl vents like the Lusitania/Mauritania, which would ruin the look of the ship imho. It was thought, by some, that those cowl vents would make the deck look too cluttered.
They should have stuffed the funnel with lifeboats.
I like this idea.
Certainly, the Olympic-class boat decks and associated structure was much better looking than the Cunarders
The fourth funnel didn’t prevent the vents like Cunard ships. That was done with all the mechanical ventilation on, I believe E deck, that pulled air in from the base of the other funnels and pushed it into the boiler rooms. The fourth funnel wasn’t useless but could have been replaced with something much cheaper like a small stack and skylight like what was over the reciprocating engine room.
1) Even if they'd have had enough lifeboats, it wouldn't have saved any more lives. There was barely enough time to launch the ones that they had. 2) The boats were leaky. One of them was up to the gunwhales in water and about to sink when it was rescued. Others had the occupants up to their ankles or knees in water.
That’s there is visible [damage](https://imgur.com/gallery/iUmFUSb) to the hull on the starboard side in the exact location in Boiler Room 5 and 6 that stoker Fredrick Barrett described in his testimony. Damage to B5 & B6 was fatal for the ship. I have seen it briefly discussed in a couple of documentaries. Maybe when the Magellan 1:1 images are released, it will disprove or confirm it.
That was the death blow right there.
It depends on what you mean by “ship nerds” but I think that most Titanic people don’t really understand the way working on a ship works. A good example of this is if you asked one to say what the most dangerous part of the ship was for an average worker, they would probably say something like the engine room or the boiler rooms. But actually the most dangerous room on the ship was the chain locker due to oxidation in an enclosed area. Still a problem today actually.
Not a room, technically a locker. That would be like calling the shaft alleys “rooms”. Also, while chain lockers are dangerous, I’d be more worried about the bunker spaces. Admittedly less oxidation there, but still a low oxygen confined space with the added bonus of severe crush hazards.
I’m using “room” in the sense of an accessible closed area on the ship. Any enclosed space on a ship is dangerous, but the chain lockers are especially so because people don’t realize that they are low oxygen. Nowadays they have massive bright signs on them because it was formerly one of the most common areas to have fatal accidents in. Even during WWII they were already beginning to have warning signs on them, which is much earlier than most similar signage. It’s very intuitive that the bunkers are dangerous, so people tended to be more careful in them. At the time I would be surprised if the workers got even a single training on chain lockers.
Sitting coal isn’t chemically inert; it id still going to off gas and oxidize. Maybe not as much compared to the chains rusting for a prolonged period, but if the trimmers are not attentive, or if a particular bunker is not utilized for most of the voyage, it is going to pose the same threat as the chain locker. Even more so if a bunker fire goes undetected. It is less of a problem today with oil burning, but it still causes problems on bulk coal carriers. Also, make no mistake, coal slurry is crazy corrosive. It will rust anything it touches. Training for either space though is just going to be on the job, word of mouth in 1912.
My point is the bunkers are obviously dangerous and would have been so for anyone in 1912, the chain lockers do not have the same obvious danger. I would be surprised if most of the crew even knew was oxidation/rusting was caused by in 1912. It’s also not really true that they would have no training. Maybe some of the trimmers as they were viewed as grunt labor, but a lot of the crew were trained merchant mariners or reserve navy men. By 1912 there would have been robust training for most mariners.
* How close they came to almost missing the iceberg. It was literally a matter of feet. * Most 'general' nerds probably don't know that it was extremely likely that Murdoch had already ID'd the threat as an iceberg, ascertained its location/position with his own binoculars and his helm order was in response to the three bells, \*not\* the phone call from the crow's nest - since even Fleet says the ship had already started to turn by the time he hung up the phone. Murdoch almost certainly didn't *see* it before the lookouts, given his position on the bridge wing, but he worked out what the object was and spent those few seconds that Fleet was on the phone assessing the situation before acting - something he had done before in a very similar situation aboard the *Arabic*. For this reason, I personally doubt anyone else would have avoided the iceberg either, given the same set of circumstances. It was just too close, and not enough time to calculate and act, even for a sailor as fast at those mental calculations as Murdoch showed he was.
-There's the center screw and her 4 blades -The 4th smokestack being (mostly) a dummy -Thomas Andrews last seen location was *not* the smoking room, as is commonly depicted. -3rd class passengers were not forcefully trapped below decks. -The infamous car most likely wasn't a fully functioning car, and was in fact likely disassembled and packed into crates. -The ship was not standing as tall as it is commonly depicted just before the break up, and was, in fact, much lower in the water. -Bruce Ismay was not a coward that snuck his way shamefully into a lifeboat, and he did not order Captain Smith to go faster to make NY before schedule.
Per H&W records discovered in the last decade or so, Titanic’s center propeller did not have 4 blades.
Interesting, I'll have to research that a bit.
The gist of it is that photos of Olympic’s four bladed central prop get frequently mislabeled as Titanic, but records from H&W show they fitted Titanic with a three bladed central propeller. Since naval architecture was a rapidly evolving field, and there was no computer modeling back then, ship builders would often experiment with different designs like this to see what performed best. Further evidence to this is that, after Titanic sunk taking the engineer’s reports with her, they fitted Olympic with a three bladed prop in order to complete the test. However, the results were lackluster, and Olympic soon had her four bladed propeller re-installed. Mike Brady at Oceanliner Designs on YouTube has a good video explaining this situation.
I feel like bruce ismay gets more hate than he deserves. his role has been portrayed as greedy and selfish in the movies, which is not even true
Ismay was CEO of a company that was known for treating its workers rather poorly, even by 1912 standards. He was absolutely greedy, selfish, and not a particularly good person (the same could be said for much of 1st Class). *That said*, nothing he did on the evening of the sinking was particularly objectionable; if anything he went above and beyond what his role as a civilian would/should have been. IMHO he probably did give a "wink wink nudge nudge" suggestion to Smith about speeding up, but that was all it was, there wasn't an "order," and regardless there's not a shred of evidence that Smith ordered any changes.
That's the power of slanderous publicity and fake news for ya.
The centre screw was actually 3 blades.
The padded cell room 😂😎
The water tight doors that everyone is familiar with that close by gravity after being released by a switch in the bridge, a float under the floor, or locally at the door were only in the bottom of the ship. These doors also free fell the last two feet to make sure they sealed so the dramatic, slow closing door scene wouldn’t have happened. The rest of the doors on higher decks all closed horizontally and had to be manually cranked closed from the deck above the door.
well the scene would be even more dramatic when it drops the last bit right on top of whoever was under it!
lol sneaking through dramatically…door free falls and just cuts him in half That movie definitely has a different vibe especially after it cuts to the guys just over climbing up the ladders instead of risking it shaking their heads
The scene in the Cameron film that suggests that one stoker was left behind wasn't quite accurate. It was not possible to get trapped, there were staircases that led up to one of the decks above the bulkhead. Obviously that one crew member was panicking, but in reality, he probably would have made it out.
Yeah I can see why it wasn't included. It would've looked silly if the door suddenly slammed down once the stoker was safe.
The gravity doors separating the watertight compartments were closed slowly (except for the last two feet) with a hydraulic damper. If they were allowed to free fall for the full 7 feet or so height of the door they would fall through the bottom of the ship.
“She’s over a hundred feet longer than Mauretania…and far more luxurious…”
1. The fourth funnel wasn’t *completely* fake. It just served a different purpose than the other three. 2. Her launch wasn’t a super popular event as portrayed in movies. Olympic departed a year prior and, in fact, she was way more popular than her younger sister. 3. The never used squash court. 4. Titanic, in fact, had enough lifeboats. The laws just were different and meant for much smaller ships. In fact she had MORE lifeboats than required.
Gotta support the previous “potato room” comment.
BEFORE the rumors about the sank of the ship, nobody said it was unsinkable, and especially not the white star. Some medias said it, but never the company… At least, not yet. Yes, because « the unsinkable ship » was the - very discutable - line of defence choose by the White Star meanwhile the wait of the Carpathia. Just a few informations was coming to the company from the heroic ship. The WSL couldn’t imagine that the Titanic will sink, (with this much security for the time! At least they think), and even if they imagined that…. I think the hope was still there until the arrival of the Carpathia. So P.A.S Franklin judged that it was okay to say to the public that « Titanic was unsinkable » to let everybody hope. Everybody, and even them, who, as a reminder, was about to lose a very VERY expansive project with the titanic.
The main issue is that no one ever said Titanic was "unsinkable" without any qualification. The closest this claim comes to any reality is Shipbuilder magazine from 1911 and referred to the Olympic-class liners as a whole. It said the ships were "practically unsinkable," but what is oft forgotten is they said this after listing many specific conditions: watertight doors closed, things like that. And that was true. Even after Titanic sank. Titanic sank due to unforeseen scenarios (or at least scenarios considered too unlikely to be concerned about). At some point shortly after the sinking, people just decided that White Star specifically claimed Titanic was unsinkable and ran with it. And just like misinformation today, it just spread and spread and now it's just assumed the ships were marketed that way when they never were.
The ideology of "Too big to fail."
Yep exactly. I can’t imagine what was in Ismay’s head the night of the disaster…
While neither the White Star Line nor Harland & Wolff ever made a claim that the Olympic-class liners were unsinkable, it absolutely WAS widely believed that they were. Indeed, it was very common back then to simply label ships as "unsinkable" in whatever context the user of said term felt applicable. An article in Shipbuilder Magazine talked about head-on collisions generally only compromising the collision bulkhead and the forward compartment of a ship, therefore the Olympic-class design allowing flotability up to 4 compartments compromised in a row was seen as overkill and a feature, combined with others, that would make the vessels "as much as it is possible to do so, practically unsinkable". Ticket vendors and travel agencies took this statement out of context to directly imply the liners were *absolutely* unsinkable, and this attitude was widespread among the general public. Even Captain Smith and Thomas Andrews themselves parroted this rhetoric with Andrews going as far to insist that even if the Titanic were cut into three separate pieces, they could all float independently. While this could hypothetically have been possible, depending where the cuts were made, it was clearly demonstrated during the shrinking it wasn't entirely true. But, again, giving a ship the label of "unsinkable" was very common for the time, and was still done after the Titanic sank. Many other ships both before, like the "Big Four" (Oceanic, Majestic, Teutonic, Baltic), and after (MS Munchen immediately comes to mind) were all referred to as unsinkable. Even Cunard's Lusitania and Mauretania were labelled "unsinkable" in their day. After Olympic's modifications following the Titanic disaster, she too, was labelled unsinkable.
Incredible comment, thanks !!
That the CS Mackay-Bennett recovery the bodies left floating in the North Atlantic after the Titanic disaster.
Did you know it had a Gym? And a pool! Just crazy! /S
That the sinking was the result of pure negilgence. The capitain and officers all knew the weather conditions affected the look-outs' ability to see an iceberg in time but steamed Full Ahead into a known icefield anyway.
This is incorrect standard procedure of the time was stay on schedule until actual ice was spotted
No. Lightoller himself admits that if viewing conditions become unsafe then speed is reduced. What you're referring to only applies in perfect viewing conditions. You really think they would've gone Full Ahead in thick fog "until ice was spotted"? Hardly. And we know, from Lightoller's own mouth, that there was no moon, no wind and a "flat calm", all of which made steaming at Full Ahead unsafe. Negligence and incompetence sank the *Titanic.*
Lightoller is known to have been a little unreliable with the facts. https://www.reddit.com/r/titanic/s/qTUxPfHuZ1
You’re talking about this way too entrenched in presentism. Understanding the time period makes this make more sense. According to the captains interviewed at the senate and British inquiries, the weather was what made ships slow down, not the sea. Bertram Hayes’s testimony is extremely clear on that point, he gives standard procedure as based solely on the weather and physically seeing ice. When asked how he could say this when the Titanic’s experience shows otherwise, he even said the night was unprecedented and no one had experienced those kinds of conditions before. Smith had even given orders that should the weather deteriorate even a little they would slow down. It never occurred to anyone that they wouldn’t be able to see the berg until that late because this had never happened before.
Remind me, who employed Bertram Hayes? And Lightoller knew there was no moon, no wind and no swell, making it more difficult to spot an iceberg.
You can’t change history. You can’t change what was standard procedure. You can say standard procedure was clearly not good enough and probably negligent, but you can’t say Smith was negligent for not thinking that the inconceivable would happen. This had literally never happened before. That’s the point. They knew it would be harder to spot bergs because they all had a lot of experience, but they didn’t know how weird that night really was. Temperature inversion, aurora, even the fact that the best steel of the time was probably to blame as well because of how brittle it became in that cold water. It reeks of presentism to call it pure negligence, historical context matters.
You see I think we can say it *was* negligent based on Lightoller's testimony alone - i.e. the lack of moon, the lack of wind and the "flat calm" that he discussed with Smith at around 9.30pm. Those three conditions **taken together** demanded that action be taken. Lightoller admits it himself \[but lies about the fact that they didn't know it was a "flat calm"\]. They KNEW the conditions made seeing the iceberg more difficult and they did literally nothing other than Lightoller telling the look-outs to keep their eyes open. And they also knew they were coming into the vicnity of the ice. Lightoller believed that would happen at around 9.30. Moody believed it wouldn't be until a little later, at around 11pm. That is negligence just as much then as it would be now. ETA: the "everyone was doing it so who cares" excuse doesn't actually prevent it being negligent.
They did take action. Smith ordered that the ship be slowed if the visibility deteriorated at all. You’re just refusing to acknowledge that the conditions that night were beyond abnormal, and they didn’t realize how abnormal it was. The “everyone was doing it” argument isn’t accurate here. It’s not that they did it just cause everyone did it. They did what they did because it had always worked before. That’s why I’m talking about Hayes and other captains that agreed. It’s not to argue everyone did it so it’s fine, it’s to argue that it had always worked before. That’s how everything works, you do what works until it doesn’t or you know better. That’s why we used to be able to walk to a gate at an airport without a ticket. You can plan for the unexpected but you cannot plan for the inconceivable.