OttoDaFe, you attributed that quote to me, but I didn’t say it. Don’t have time to figure out who it was now, but just wanted to let you know.
Interesting question you bring up, btw.
It was big news over here (Finland). The child was thought to be Finnish but now appears to be English.
Link to BBC article.
Only Murphy wasn’t born until 1918.
Just sayin’. 
I never really knew for sure that Murphy was a real person, that’s an interesting article.
Cool!
The great Murphy gave his name to it, but as an immutable law it’s as old as humanity.
Thinking some more about OttoDaFe’s question, it seems clear that a big component of the problem was that the ship was so much bigger than any other ships a lot of these guys had sailed before, that they simply didn’t know how it was going to react in a situation like this. That is, they didn’t really have a grasp of how long it would take to turn the thing at the speed it was going, or what the best way to do it was. These are the kinds of things you would learn from experience, and they didn’t have the right kind of experience…which wasn’t their fault, because no one did.
I definitely don’t think just one person could be blamed for this…a LOT of stuff went wrong…
I’ve always thought it was an insurance job myself.
You, sir/madam, have the mind of a world-class conspirator. 
I happened to have seen (part of a) documentary about that (I think it was the discovery channel). They employed a navy accident specialist, and analyzed all of the known data using modern state-of-the-art methods.
They went through the usual suspect, concluding that none of them was to blame (some of their reasoning was stated in various posts in this thread).
The conclusion they came to was that it was the rivets. Apparently, the Titanic was so large, the standard steel rivets riveting machine could not be used on some parts of it. So, they used “manual” rivets. Since steel rivets are hard to apply manually, they used iron rivets. Knowing that iron rivets are not as strong as steel ones, they added ores to the iron. However, they added too much ore, causing the resulting rivets to be much more fragile than needed.
They tested the theory by re-constructing the same type of steel plates and ore-enriched iron rivets used at the time, connected them manually, and submitted them to stress analysis. Result: failure.
They then compared the microscopic pattern found in the broken rivets with microscopic patterns from rivets rescued from the Titanic, and found them virtually identical.
In defense of the Californian, one of the books I have on the Titanic suggest that there may have been a rather large, dense floe of icebergs between her and the Titanic. Even if Captain Lord had been aware of what was going on, it may weill have been difficult to reach the Titanic.
There’s also evidence that people did underestimate the difficulty of maneouvering the Titanic. There was an incident as she was leaving the dock in which the suction from her passage pulled another ship loose from its moorings and the other ship would have collided with the Titanic if it weren’t for the fast actions of some tug boats. I can post more information on this incident later, if anyone’s interested.
By the way, that same book has a photo of what seems to have been the berg which hit the Titanic. It was spotted a few days later and has a tell-tale stripe of red paint on it.
What can I say? I’ve been a Titanic for over 30 years now.
If this is the same episode I’m thinking of (the Hawke incident) the ship in question was actually Titanic’s sister ship, the RMS Olympic.
Stranger
Did Carpathia pass through the same ice field after Captain Rostron turned off his passenger’s hot water so that he would have more steam for speed?
I think I saw a similar show-the gist of which was that the steel used for the TITANIC’S hull plates wa of very poor quality-it was full of sulphur, which makes steel brittle in the cold. The impact with the iceberg cause hull plates to shatter and break. My question: we have a LT of 100-year old bridges in this country-are the steel beams in those bridges made of the same poor quality stell?
The Titanic had a near-miss with the New York on her departure from Southampton.
The Californian was stopped on the same side of the ice field as the Titanic approached from (the east), and was NNE of the Titanic at the time of the collision, but was slowly drifting SSE on the current (which is part of the uncertainty of her position relative to the Titanic’s, that on top of the normal margin-of-error in navigation).
That was the same current carrying the ice pack out into the shipping lanes.
The Carpatia was also on the east side of the ice pack, travelling west, SE of the Titanic’s position, and altered course NW to reach her. Captain Rostron did not have to traverse the ice pack to reach the Titanic’s lifeboats, but reportedly did encounter bits of drift ice (assumedly broken off from the main pack), and drifting more-or-less SSE with the current.
And as an aside, the key to the binoculars’ store was sold recently for £90 000.
Ex-Tank, the incident with the New York was the incident I was thinking of. After the Titanic cast off, she headed down the River Test. The New York and the Oceanic were moored next to each other, with the New York on the outside. The Titanic passed the New York with about 80 feet between them. As she passed, the New York’s mooring ropes snapped and broke and her stern started to swing out towards the Titanic. The tug Vulcan got a line to the New York and the Titanic reversed her engines, so a collision was avoided, but only by a few feet. You can find information on-line on this incident here, about halfway down the page. To tie this to the OP, I think the crew might have underestimated how long it took her to turn.
I got my information from Titanic An Illustrated History by Don Lynch. It’s got some terrific stuff in it, including some photos from the near collision with the New York, the iceberg photo I mentioned, and some photos taken on the Titanic herself.
I have the Lynch book, too. It’s great.
Lynch’s book is good, even if most of the information in it is retread from Walter Lord’s “A Night To Remember” and Dr. Ballard’s “The Discovery of the Titanic.”
But Lynch’s book has all of those excellent paintings by Ken Marschall. I can thumb through it for hours just looking at the pictures.
If you like that sort of thing (as I do), you might look into “Lost Liners,” by Dr. Ballard and Rick Archbold, with illustrations again supplied by Ken Marschall.
Hmm. I am a modest naval military history buff.
In regards to the “bad steel in cold water” claim, I have not heard of any catastrophic structural failures in any of the warships of the period.
Can you folks fight my ignorance?
Have there been other cases of sinkings due to the same weakness?