Yes, but had they hung the inflated inner tubes over the outside of the ship, around the waterline, they might just have bounced off the iceberg without the annoying gash in the hull.
And I heard a suggestion that they could have removed those heavy wooden doors off their hinges and thrown them into the water where they could be used as improvised floatation devices.
Or…how about if, instead of inner tubes, there were 1000 modern-style instantly inflating life rafts? Or, here’s a really crazy, out-there idea…what if there had been an adequate number of lifeboats, and they had been filled to capacity from the start?
That’s the problem with hypotheticals- you can get pretty far afield pretty quickly. 
Unfortunately, the wooden doors only had a ‘one Kate Winslet per door’ capacity 
I am somewhar nonplussed with the idea that these large inflatable tyre inners are a prototype.
They are normal farm tractor tyre inners.
I imagine in the USA tubeless tyres are now the norm, even for those giant industrial farm tractors, but large size tubes are not unusual.
When I took my son to Alaska, we did an excursion paddling canoes to the face of a glacier. The water was cold. We wore full immersion suits that the guide told us might keep us alive long enough for rescue.
It’s been a while since I went scuba-diving. Wetsuits come in different thicknesses for different water temperatures. I recall wearing a 7mm suit while diving in a quarry once, where the water temp near the bottom was about 45F. I was starting to get pretty chilled after just a few minutes down there; not sure I would have lasted an hour and a half.
For sustained immersion in really cold water, divers turn to dry suits, but these require an air source (typically the diver’s tank) for inflation to provide an insulative air gap. But even dry suits have their limit: this selection guide makes recommendations for various temperature ranges, but only goes down to 45F. So even with a drysuit (and dry, insulative underlayers), Titanic passengers probably wouldn’t have lasted 100 minutes in 28F seawater.
I think the OP is referring to the plastic inner-tube shaped floats used in water parks, not actual tire inner tubes.
It wasn’t a door, it was a section of the door frame.
Inflatable armbands for swimming safety were invented in 1907 but I can’t find a date for swim rings as we now know them. Workable pneumatic inner tubes for tires made the market in 1911. So it’s unlikely that swim rings big enough to hold a person out of the water even existed in 1912.
Thousands of boats and ships of all kinds plied the Atlantic in the pre-WWI days. They were all concerned about shipwrecks and drowning. That’s why they carried life preservers. But I’ve never heard of any ship then or later carrying swim rings. You’d think that if they had even the possibility of use, someone would have tried them.
Parents call them “swimmies” IME.
As later investigation into the disaster revealed, the laws mandating how many lifeboats a passenger ship had to carry gave a number for all ships of a certain capacity “-and up”. The law hadn’t been updated while ship sizes had increased greatly. Many of the lifeboats on the Titanic couldn’t be deployed and those that were were used inefficiently.
I honestly don’t know if you’re joking. A few pounds of air pressure, even multiplied by however many tubes might actually make contact, isn’t going to do much against the relative motion of a big ship and a bigger iceberg coming together. Particularly as the fatal damage occurred below the waterline.
Plus, to the extent there might have been material deficiencies in the plates (perhaps too brittle in the cold), direct contact with the iceberg might not have been necessary to stove in or otherwise displace plates. The force would still have been transmitted through the tubes, even assuming they did not instantly burst or give way from overpressure on contact.
Are any survivors known to have been pulled from the water and not a lifeboat or from large debris?
I (not a parent) have heard that but I’d have called them water wings.
Wool is certainly an exception. I was working gate at one SCA event, when a cold soaking rain hit. I had wool undergarments, a wool tunic, and a heavy thick wool cloak. All got soaked thru, but I wasn’t cold. One guy also tried wool instead of Gore-tex on a longboat viking recreation, seeing how a longship could get to America from Greenland. He said he was warmer than the guys in Goretex, etc.
This is why I suggest a Smartwool t-shirt and briefs instead of cotton.
Yes, especially one of the thicker ones, and if you could cling to wreckage or a lifejacket- but for 100 minutes, tho? One of those floating exposure suits would work okay.
Note that two lifeboats were not fully successfully launched, and several had less than half capacity. They could have saved at least 1200, instead of the 700 or so. That is 500 souls lost due to incompetence, and callousness.
AKIAK, - no. Collapsible Boat A was mostly submerged, and several died, and only 13 survived. However, here is where wetsuits would have helped a lot- Collapsible Boat A & B both had people clinging to the side, etc, half in and half out.
One of the episodes of Deadliest Catch has a segment in which the crew of the Time Bandit sees a crewman swept off a nearby ship, and they manage to get him out of the water before he succumbs to hypothermia and drowns. You get to see the suit that is worn for attempting such a rescue.
Exactly.
“What if Capt. Smith took the ice warning seriously, and reduced speed or altered course to the ‘southern route’?”
“what if one of the Officers had made a dedicated search for the missing binoculars, so the lookouts could be better equipped? Maybe they’d have seen the iceberg a bit sooner.”
What if, instead of a calm night with “mill pond” seas, there had been 50 knot winds, driving rain, and 30 foot swells? Probably would have lost half of the survivors.
My real what if for things like the Titanic, is, what if they ship had missed the iceberg, never even seen it to know how close they were? And shipping lines would never have changed the number of lifeboats, and never added safety practices. And ships got bigger and bigger, and everyone kept on believing in “unsinkable ships”. They’d be going along, fat, dumb and happy, for years. Would the eventual disaster be even larger, even worse?
Maybe humans need to be shaken up with something like the Titanic, or the Challenger, every so often, lest we all get complacent. I don’t know.
Not back then.
https://www.marknetstreamline.com/images/projects/62461/1000x1000/scale/img_1657546322501814385.jpg
True. Whilst I have never personally been in a life and death situation of hypothermia, I have experienced a situation where, due to cold and exhaustion, the muscles in my lower legs simply stopped working. I could still feel pressure when I touched my legs, but they just wouldn’t move. I don’t think any kind of urgency would have changed that.
IIRC the reason was the lifeboat count was based on length, rather than passenger count. The ship that’s 5 times as long is 5 times as wide and 5 times as deep, so 125 times the capacity, likely needs more than 5 times the number of lifeboats. As you mention the law hadn’t been updated since ships were smaller.
Testimony from survivors was that the noise from passengers in the water died off within 20 minutes to half an hour. OTOH, the cook who rode the stern down into the water (as featured in the movie Titanic ) testified there was no undertow, “it was like stepping off an elevator” and apparently survived in the water for quite a while longer - IIRC he was rescued from the water by a lifeboat after more than an hour.
The Titanic did have two collapsible lifeboats and one did not get un-collapsed properly, the survivors had to stand with their feet in the water and carefully avoid tipping it.
The loading started well before people realized the boat was actually sinking (after all, giant boats like this don’t sink in calm seas) and so a lot of passengers were reluctant to get on, and some boats left nowhere near full. I don’t know how long it would take someone to fill a giant tube like the waterparks use, but I imagine that you’d take a while; Would there be enough deck space to launch them all? Were people going to dive into the water and swim to these, or lie on them and wait for the water to rise along the tilted deck?
Anecdotally, I’ve been on the Oregon coast in the summer and waded into the ocean up to my knees, and it was so cold it hurt; I have trouble imagining dealing with the shock of jumping into salt water allegedly below normal freezing.