If there has been a study to that effect then I bow to that.
But this would surprise me. With ships, it’s all about watertight compartments. Absorbing energy would have been effected by the cracking and buckling of the first compartment or the first few, anyway, and i would have thought that enough of them would have remained watertight for the ship to have remained afloat.
In my line of work I regularly see photos of ships that have had head on collisions. They usually just concertina from the bow, and enough of the length (and watertight sections) remain intact as to keep them afloat.
Of course I mostly see modern ships, which are welded and which probably have better steel etc but for what it’s worth…
Remember too that Titanic was an enormous ship built in an age when the only real criteria for its size was, “Will it float?” There was absolutely no concern (or ability to really test) for what might happen to it in an accident. Unlike today where these things are accounted for starting right from the design.
Yeah, it had early 20[sup]th[/sup] century state of the art in its electronically controlled watertight compartments, but that was about it in terms of coping with catastrophic failure (hence the lack of enough lifeboats).
Also remember that this is all really a moot point. Not even today, with little time to react, would anybody ever make the decision that its probably better to hit something head on rather than make no attempt to steer around it.
An article I read around 1999 speculated that the reason for the speed of the Titanic at time of impact was due to the coal fire. The men were feeding the boilers heavily to get rid of the burning coal.
Using water on a coal fire is a very bad idea so the only real solution would have been to concentrate on that area of the coal bunker to use up the burning coal. Of course, they could always have ignored it depending on how bad the fire really was.
Sounds fishy. I’m pretty sure that all of the accounts of the accident say that the high speed and refusal to slow down in iceberg territory was hubris and the desire of the White Star Line to hold the record for the Atlantic crossing.
A desire to set a speed record probably did exist. But the owners and crew of the Titanic knew that it would never hold on to any speed records it might set. The Titanic was built to be the most luxurious liner on the ocean. Other ships like the Mauritania were designed to be the fastest.
Note that after the Titanic, The bulkheads were improved for the sister ships Britannic and Olympic. The Britannic (a hospital ship in WWI) sunk after hitting a mine (probably) – 3 times faster than the Titanic, even with the improvements.
If the officer of the deck had not ordered a turn and had ordered all engines back full, then the collision alarm, Titanic would have hit the iceberg head on and probably not sank, although there would have been several dozen dead.
And, a small defense to the lack of sufficient lifeboats: Trans-Atlantic traffic was very dense back then, and it was very uncommon in peacetime for a ship to sink as quickly as Titanic did.
It was assumed there would always be other ships around close enough to help a ship in distress, and that the lifeboats would be used basically as ferries to go back and forth to the rescuing ship several times to offload all the passengers and crew.
If it helps, the sinking of Titanic led not just to new rules about having enough lifeboats, but also to the formation of the International Ice Patrol, so the tragedy of her sinking probably helped save hundreds or thousands of lives in the 92 years since.
Regarding the idea of moving the passengers to the iceberg temporarily, I know that this was a point brought up and dismissed a while previously in this thread. That discussion reminded me of a story I’d read that a photo had recently surfaced of the berg that struck Titanic.
You can see the photo here and also read about why this iceberg is considered the likely culprit and how this photo came to light.
Actually, the Captain of the Califorian, despite admitting that they saw a ship that was in the same direction as the Titanic, likely the same distance, was shooting off fireworks at the same time and then “mysteriously” disappeared early that morning, insisted that it must have been another ship between the Titanic and the Californian, and that’s the ship the Titanic saw and “mistook” for the californian.
Interesting that nobody has been able to identify this “mystery ship” since then. Perhaps it was the Flying Dutchman.
One ironic thing about the incident was Titanic’s response to a critical ice warning: "Shut Up! Shut Up! your jamming me !" The radio operators had to get back to the very important business of sending holiday greetings and getting stock quotes for the first class passengers.
One other thing about opening the watertight doors and allowing the ship to sink on an even keel was Titanic’s most powerful pumps were in the stern and could not be brought to bear on the leaks while the ship sank bow first. How much extra time this would have bought them, I don’t know.
“The People’s Almanac Presents the 20th Century” by *David Wallechinsky also has a photo of “The iceberg that sank the Titanic.” It doesn’t look much like the photo in the link, but he also offers no corroboration or source. The one in Wallechinsky’s book has a more-or-less even top, with just the slightest “dip” in the middle. It also has a trailing “tail” about ¼ the length of the main part of the berg.
Actually, I wasn’t. I just remember from A Night to Remember that the ship was in sight of the Titanic and didn’t know how long it would take a rowboat to go that far.
The Californian was stopped for the night, as others have noted.
Believe it or not, there are STILL people who defend this theory, to this day.
The iceberg photo-there WAS a photo taken of what was most likely the actual iceberg. Someone on a passing ship took a photo of it-before even having heard of the Titanic sinking, because there was a mysterious streak of red paint on the bottom. It’s included in either A Night to Remember, or The Night Lives On. (I have a bunch of books on the Titanic and ocean liners, I’ll have to look it up). Ah, here we go!
And according to the book Titanic-An Illustrated History: “Photographed on the morning of April 15 in the area of the sinking, it had a telltale smudge of red paint along its base.”
Exactly which “objective measure” are you using here? Number of dead?
So you categorize the Titanic with other “pissant little incidents” like Challenger, the assassination of JFK, the Oklahoma bombing …? :rolleyes:
Don’t forget that as well as the huge death toll, the tragedy of the Titanic included the failure of what was thought to be state of the art, safe technology, and had a far wider effect on just this count alone.
And yet other tragedies of similar magnitude are almost unheard of even though they happened at nearly the same time in history and within sight of land - or in a place that would have been within sight of land if the fog hadn’t been so thick. The Empress of Ireland sank with the loss of over 1000 people on the St Lawrence River - you’d think that would get as much press as the Titanic being lost in the middle of the North Atlantic where dangerous icebergs were known to be a hazard to navigation, wouldn’t you? Especially since a handful more people died on the Empress…But no, hardly anyone today knows about a ship by that name having gone down, and most think that the Titanic was the greatest maritime tragedy ever, even though other ships have gone down with greater loss of life.
I found an interesting resource that lists the 20 worst. Titanic and Empress of Ireland don’t even make it to the bottom of the list…but the list is skewed somewhat by torpedoed/bombed troop ships from World War II.
Not counting acts during wartime, according to this source, it appears that the most costly (from a standpoint of human life) shipwreck would be the Philipine passenger ferry Dona Paz in 1987. Over four times the number of lives lost compared to Titanic - 4,341 dead.
A family hero. He advised for more lifeboats but was turned down, and died with his ship as a gentleman. (He got to meet Kate Winslett too )
This is all from family tradition, so don’t take it as gospel, but as N9IWP said, the real issue was that the chambers created by the bulkheads weren’t topped off, so if the water breached the top of a bulkead, it would spill over the top into the next chamber. Nobody had ever thought of topping them off at the time. The number of bulkead chambers (five, I think) was the reason that the ship was reputed ‘unsinkable’. Unfortunately, the gash in the hull was long enough that there was a majority of bulkheads (three, I think) compromised with water, providing a great enough angle of sinking to pour water over the tops of the uncompromised bulkheads, as bonzer says. The Olympic was redesigned after the tragedy to seal the tops of the chambers, not that it helped.
