I recall the “like stepping off an elevator” part of the quote but am not familiar with the man’s testimony. If he was liquored up, though, he survived in spite of the alcohol not because of it. Booze makes your surface arteries dilate – recall the flushed faces of your drunken friends – which is the opposite of what you want in a cold situation as they then radiate your body heat. A tot in the cold might make you feel warm inside (The whisky, it burns) but your chances of surviving a dire situation decrease.
The version I heard was that the lifeboat requirements were out of date: the number required was based on tonnage, and the Titanic fell into the highest category of “X- tonnes and over”- only “and over” had grown dramatically since the last time the regulations had been updated.
The difference is that my submarine (Los Angeles-class) had a submerged displacement of 6,900 tons, and main engines that delivered 35,000 shaft horsepower to the single screw. Our main engines were so powerful that we were sometimes limited by the maximum torque allowable to the propeller shaft.
Also, with a nuclear reactor onboard, we could ramp up power very quickly. Indeed, reactor power simply (and automatically) followed steam demand.
You know, the more I think about it, the better this theory sounds. Even today, if you found yourself adrift in a raft in the middle of the ocean, the odds that anybody would ever find you would be rather slim. Before modern communication, it could be months before anybody even started to get concerned about why the ship was overdue. So no, getting into a lifeboat without a known destination (like a nearby ship or island) doesn’t sound like it would be likely to do you much good.
Indeed. Some historians and naval architects believe the Titanic’s rudder was too small for the job, and that the ship was thus more unresponsive at the helm. She was bigger than the ships her crew was used to handling, and their instincts, honed on smaller ships, were not necessarily correct. The suction effect from her screws, for instance, pulled another ship loose from her moorings in Southampton on April 10, nearly causing a collision: SS City of New York (1888) - Wikipedia
Forgot to mention… the crew and passengers of the Andrea Doria were evacuated to nearby ships by lifeboat after it was damaged in a 1956 nighttime collision. The lifeboats along one side of the ship were rendered unusable due to the list of the stricken ship, but eventually almost everyone was safely evacuated. (My favorite part of that story was the French liner Ile de France coming in close and turning on all of its exterior lights, greatly lifting the spirits of the evacuees).
The suction effect of her flank, or of her bow wave, or of her “close passage”, but not of her screws.
A big ship going past will suck you in, and may turn you over. Conversely, a big ship going close to a steep shore may suck itself into a wall/reef.
It’s one of those hard-to-understand fluid dynamics things like “how does an airplain fly?”, and will happen even if the screws are idleing: the pressure sideways on the open-water side is greater than the pressure on the narrow (between ships) side.
Long forgotten so relatively unknown is waterskiing speed — much faster than flank — the first known use of which was at the order of the sadistic commander to the slave galley’s rowing-sync drummer in SCTV’s Ben-Hur.
The explanation for the lifeboat count was that the number of lifeboats required was based on a formula the British government published. IIRC this was based on the length of a ship, but was established before that era’s behemoths were being built. Loosely speaking, a ship twice the length has eight times the volume and presumably about eight times the passengers; but the formula only called for twice the lifeboats. As others said, the engineers did not see a reason to exceed this since “a ship this big won’t sink anyway, the passengers are safer on board”.
One suggestion about the cause of the extent of the disaster was that the rivets became very brittle in ice-cold water. If so, I wonder how much damage a head-on collision would have caused?
From my post (#33).
MD2000 observed:
“…he somehow avoided hypothermia before he was picked up by a lifeboat quite a while later.”
I live near Lake Tahoe where the water is particularly cold (except in the shallows) nearly year round, and the subject of hypothermia and death thereby has been, in light of a number of tragic deaths this past summer, a topic of discussion.
It turns out that vital signs in even the coldest water (as researched by Nazi’s on human subjects) can be detected for a considerable period of time; as I recall up to 30 minutes. As has been determined through autopsy of recovered bodies from Tahoe, the victims died not of hypothermia but drowning.
Apparently immersion into extremely cold water often elicits a sharp intake of breath, which alone can initiate drowning. In addition, those who survive the frigid plunge quickly discover that within minutes their extremities cease responding to brain commands and they sink and obviously, drown.
A young man dove from his families boat in Emerald Bay last year to swim on ahead to the small island in the bay, about 150’ away. He went down once, in I believe about 50F water, and was recovered by divers hours later. He drowned.
Wearing a PFD, the cook stayed afloat, but I would posit his mobility was severely compromised. And indeed all others similarly equipped would have endured long enough to eventually die of hypothermia. Those without PFDs would soon drown.
Death in very cold water of individuals w/o “life jackets” is not by hypothermia…
Is it any different for an airfancy?
And what if it’s on a treadmill?
Since the OP has been asked, debated, and largely answered, I thought I’d toss this into the mix for consideration.
Essentially, an atmospheric inversion caused by the warmer Gulf Stream meeting the colder Labrador current made visual scanning problematic, causing the iceberg to essentially “appear out of nowhere” at almost piont-blank range, and may have caused the Titanic/California estimated distance and visual mix-up.
Now, I’m not a scientist, but if you hum a few bars, I can follow along, and I found it interesting and compelling.
The documentary was on Netflix at one point, it might still be there, and it’s worth a watch.
But at that time, they thought the opposite; e.g. the stereotypical cask of brandy on a St. Bernard’s collar. He was wrong but sincere.
This is a good place to bring up some of the physics behind “flank speed.”
A displacement hull has an upper limit to speed determined by the length at the waterline. It is exactly equal to the speed at which the wavelength of the bow wave equals the length of the ship. Attempts to exceed this speed cause power consumption to rise asymptotically with little, if any, speed increase. You are essentially trying to push the ship uphill onto the wave.
Submarines would have the same effect from the pressure wave “wake” they generate.
Planing hulls, on the other hand, use a different set of rules. the hull lifts from the water and skims on the surface. Speed is limited only by effective power. Waterskis work from the same rules.
An inexact analogy might be a starship on impulse power in Einsteinian space versus being on warp drive in hyperspace.
Indeed, it is for this reason that surfaced submarines are operationally limited to “Full” speed when surfaced. Increasing the ordered speed to “Flank” speed on the surface results in a negligible increase in speed but vastly more reactor power. It’s basically a waste of fuel.
(Submerged, the situation is different, as modern submarines with their “teardrop-shaped” hulls are primarily designed for submerged operation.)
Deceptive visual conditions undoubtedly played a part, but the main reason the iceberg wasn’t spotted earlier was the calm sea—there were no breakers around its base, which would have provided at least some illumination. Also, one of the lookouts (Frederick Fleet, IIRC) testifed that had they been equipped with binoculars, they could probably have seen it a bit earlier. The *Titanic *officers’ failure to supply the lookouts in the crow’s nest with binoculars was never satisfactorily explained.
It should also be noted that the Californian’s “warning” thirty minutes prior to the collision was never identifed as such, and WO Operator Jack Phillips probably took it it as ship-to-ship chit-chat. A proper warning would have required Phillips to acknowledge receipt and pass it on to the bridge at once. However, nothing can justify Captain Lord’s failure to rouse his own radioman after being informed that a ship was firing rockets in the night.
It’s hard to believe, but Captain Smith actually ordered another boiler to be put on line Sunday evening, bringing the ship’s speed up to 24 knots for the first (and only) time. It’s been speculated that he wanted to get out of the ice zone as quickly as possible. He also ordered that they proceed at full speed for several minutes after striking the iceberg; no one has ever been able to explain why.
The attempt to “port around” the iceberg by swinging the ship’s bow one way and its stern another failed in part because the central propeller shut down, depriving the rudder of its slipstream and making it harder to steer. In addition, Titanic’s sea trials had been completely inadequate—no one really knew how well a ship that big could maneuver.
If memory serves, isn’t this part of the reason for the traditional long-and-narrow shape of cruiser hulls? They were built for speed, and that’s a good way to optimize for speed. Unless I’m badly mistaken.
He was a time traveler preserving the timeline by making sure the Titanic sunk. 
Nit Pick warning.
Captain Smith would not have had the authority to “order another boiler to be put on line”. He would have had the authority to order enough turns to make 24 knots. The Chief Engineer would then make the decision if another boiler would be necessary.