In 1898, years before shipbuilding on the real RMS Titanic had even begun, Morgan Robertson wrote a short story titled “Futility”, which involved a 45,000-ton displacement steamship named Titan crashing into an iceberg in the North Atlantic and sinking.
According to this webpage about Morgan Robertson, after the Titanic disaster in 1912, Robertson re-wrote a few details of the story to more closely match the Titanic incident (e.g. increasing the ship’s displacement from 45,000 tons to 70,000 tons), and re-issued it under the title “The Wreck of the Titan.”
But even the 1898 edition apparently contained some eerie similarities to the actual wreck of the Titanic. RMS Titanic was 882.5 feet long, and the Titan in “Futility” was 800 feet long. Although Titanic’s actual displacement exceeded 66,000 tons, its registered displacement was 45,000 tons – just like the Titan. Titanic’s maiden voyage would have taken it to Southampton, and Titan’s home port was Southampton. Both ships were considered “unsinkable” due to their separate watertight compartments (15 on Titanic, 19 on Titan). Both ships lacked sufficient lifeboats to save all their passengers.
I did find one interesting-looking book on this subject on amazon.com, titled The Wreck of the Titanic Foretold?; but although Martin Gardner is listed as the “author,” a closer look at the cover merely says “Edited by Martin Gardner with a new preface.”
So … was Morgan Robertson’s short story prophetic? A coincidence? Something “anyone” could have foreseen given the technology of the time? Had a ship named “Titanic” already been planned in 1898? If so, were the details of its construction and its anticipated shipping routes acrosss the North Atlantic already known at that time? Did the story first appear in 1912 (after the Titanic sank) and the 1898 edition is just a hoax? Enquiring minds want to know!
I remember hearing about this a few years ago and found it rather eerie. I would have to say no just out of knee-jerkiness, though.
I would have to say that the dimensions are probably coincidence. The unsinkable part is easier to explain. I’m sure that the idea of an unsinkable boat would have been on the minds of many people during a time when ships were the main form of long distance travel. As such, it would have been not very out of the ordinary for someone to write a story involving one. Of course, since every story needs a conflict, the idea of the “unsinkable” ship sinking would have been a natural progression.
Since no one in the book thought the ship would sink then it is natural that they didn’t have enough lifeboats, just like they did in real life. If course, in the book, the not enough lifeboats thing is also good because it adds a bit of morality about over-confidence and such and makes things just that much more intense.
Also, I believe that Southampton was a pretty busy shipping area so it’s not that incredible that both had a link to it.
To me, the really creepy part is the iceberg. And that they both went down in around the same area of the Atlantic.
If you design and build the biggest ship in history and you want to give it a name that lets everyone know that it’s big, Titan or Titanic are on the short list of names that would do this.
According to that webpage, Robertson was a merchant seaman before becoming a writer and a successful one at that, writing more than 200 short stories and publishing 14 books. He recognized mistakes in a Kipling story about seafaring, so he apparently knew his stuff. This tells me that he may have known enough about designing vessels that he could have realistically described a large ocean liner. He may have been a diligent researcher and simply asked designers how big an ocean liner could realistically be. (Note that his Titan was actually smaller than the Titanic.)
The iceberg hazard in the North Atlantic has been well-known for many years, long before the Titanic sank. I would not be surprised if other ships ran into icebergs before the Titanic did. Robertson could have based his story on a previous, real-life accident.
The fact that both ships sailed from Southampton is hardly coincidence since it was already well-established seaport when Robertson wrote his book. Where else would you depart Britain for America?
Here’s yet another webpage devoted to this intriguing story.
Here’s a review of the book. The reviewer was not impressed.
Here’s a page devoted to Titanic coincidences from a British psychics site. It mentions Robertson’s book. While the detail were close, they aren’t so close that one could say that Robertson had a psychic gift for premonition, IMHO.
I have this book. It is somewhat uncanny. The protaganist is somewhat preoccupied with predestination, as well. Drugged with hashish, and on watch when they hit the iceberg, he is in a foggy sort of reverie:
And, wonder of wonders, there are “coincidences” mentioned on this psychic’s webpage which weren’t really there at all. (Or at least, about which there are conflicting reports.)
F’rinstance, the above British psychic’s site claims that, in the Robertson short story, the Titan hit an iceberg on its inaugural voyage just like the Titanic did in real life – but the website linked to in my OP claimed that the Titan didn’t hit an iceberg until it was on its third voyage. Perhaps the 1912 edition of the short story had the Titan sinking on its maiden voyage. Or perhaps the psychic didn’t check his facts very carefully, as many prophetic claimants are wont to do.
I agree with jab1. Both boiled down to the sinking (by an iceberg) of a supposedly unsinkable large ocean liner that travelled between Britain and the US. The rest of the details just followed.
Actually, it looks like a spooge of the two: It has the 70,000 ton displacement, but also includes the last paragraph which was removed for the 1912 version.
Actually, didn’t Mr. Robertson sink the Titanic in order to boost sales for Futility?
I’m pretty sure if he wore a wetsuit, duct-taped himself to the hull and went at it with a hacksaw and hammer he’d be able to sink the whole shebang by the time it crossed the Atlantic. Or not, as the case may be.
Ya know, there’s a whole book devoted to this. Martin Gardner’s The Wreck of the Titanic Foretold?. If you know anything about Martin Gardner (who has a regular column in The Skeptical Inquirer), you know what his answer is.
Titanic buffs have known about this for quite some time (I’m relatively new to the scene myself). There are good pages on Snopes, of course, and tons and tons of Titanic websites out there with more info. I did not know, though, that the re-release in 1912 had been altered.
There are pages on Snopes about Morgan Robertson’s “The Wreck of the Titan” or “Futility”? Really? I couldn’t find any such pages with the Snopes search feature.
I’m going by memory from a read of Lord’s book, The Night Lives On, but I believe that British Admiralty regulations at the time calculated the number of life-boats that a ship had to carry by means of a formula based on the ship’s tonnage, not the number of passengers on the ship. (Apparently the British Admiralty envisaged the role of life-boats as salvaging the ship, rather than, oh, saving passengers. )
Although Titanic did not have enough life-boats for all her passengers, she actually had more life-boats than the law required her to carry under that formula, a point that the White Star line made at the various hearings. As a result of the Titanic disaster, the Admiralty changed its regs to require all ships to carry enough boats for all the passengers.
If Robertson was reasonably well-informed about shipping, as some of the posts here indicate, he would probably have known about the life-boat regs and could have worked the issue of “not enough life-boats” into his story.
There is indeed a Titanic section on Snopes, although it doesn’t deal with Morgan Robertson’s book.
One thing it does note here is a clipping from the New York Times, September 17, 1892. It says, six years before Robertson’s book, that the White Star Company was planning a ship that would beat existing Atlantic records in both size and speed.
So the idea of beating records was obviously on shipbuilders’ minds already. And collisions with icebergs were hardly an unheard of occurrence either; check this site, which shows they’re still happening today, even with modern equipment. Robertson, on this evidence, was hardly a great prognosticator.
But here’s something else: from this site, there’s a note that “Robertson later wrote a book, Beyond the Spectrum, that described a future war fought with aircraft that carried “sun bombs”. Incredibly powerful, one bomb could destroy a city, erupting in a flash of light that blinds all who look at it. The war begins in December, started by the Japanese with a sneak attack on Hawaii…”
Beyond the Spectrum appears to be suffering the same sort of inflated prescience attributed to Futility.
A Google search turned up several hits, including an expired page of http://members.nbci.com/porthole/titanic1.htm available only through Google’s cache. It is a retraction by John Sauvageau, a Titanic aficianado, of some hyperbole he had posted on Futility and Beyond the Spectrum. The correction is based on a letter he received from someone who had actually read both works. Regarding the later story, the letter writer, one Lyle F. Padilla, says
From The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Unsolved Mysteries (a book I found at the library), written by Michael Kurland:
Kurland also notes that both the real ship and the fictional one sailed in April. But it seems to me that April ought to be the earliest that one could expect the north Atlantic to be free of ice. Wait until May, and the sailing season may be too short to be profitable.
Kurland, referring to “Beyond the Spectrum”:
Looks like yet another Idiot’s Guide is responsible for disseminating false information. (This book has other mistakes that took me only a few moments to find, but they have nothing to do with Robertson’s stories.)
Posted by tomndebb:
I bet that’s why the story is entitled “Beyond the Spectrum”!
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