November 24, 2008 • 18 mins
The Titanic was famously considered 'unsinkable' by the engineers who built it. However, the Titanic's reputation could not save it from the infamous iceberg that sank the ship on its maiden voyage. Check out this HowStuffWorks podcast to learn more.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, welcome to the podcast. I'm
editor Candice Gibson, joined by staff writer Jane McGrath. Jane,
I don't think that there's anything as big and posh
(00:24):
and attention catching in the annals of naval history as
the Titanic, but it's true. I don't think many people
who do not have up. I guess I should say
a marine history rather than naval history. So it was
a seagoing vessel, and it was almost like a hotel
on the water. And the idea behind it was precisely
that Jay Bruce is May and Lord Pierry of Harlem
(00:47):
and Wolf shipbuilders. They were at dinner one night and
they were talking about the Cunard lines newest liners, the
Mauritania and Lusitania, and they said to themselves, we can
make one or three. Even with their plan, we're gonna
have a triumvirate of ships that were even bigger and
better the Olympic, the Gigantic and the Titanic. That's right.
And they wanted to make these not only fast like
(01:09):
the Kuniard line, but but luxurious and attractive for for
the you know, the aristocratic passengers have spend you know,
a pretty penny to go on exactly the idea of
being that the more comfortable and luxurious the ship, the
longer distance people would be willing to travel. And so
they weren't just selling you know, a couple of dollars
(01:31):
worth of tickets to people. We're talking about a first
class ticket then in today's dollars, is equivalent to about
forty three thousand dollars to about eighty thousand dollars, which
is a ton of money. I mean, I don't even
know people who spend that on airfare, you know, flying
halfway across the world. A good point. Maybe you do,
if you do, write me because I want to travel
with you. So then what made the Titanic so special? Well,
(01:54):
it's interesting because it was so incredibly lush, and you
know the first class passengers, you know, they were they
were used to being treated nicely, but not as nicely
as on this as on this ship, I mean they
had such Uh they had a squash court, I think,
and that you mentioned in the article, and uh there's
gem there were a Turkish baths. Yeah, that and these
(02:15):
things are amenities that people had to pay a little
bit extra for But you bring up an important point
about the first class and what they had access to.
And I'm sure that all of you know this, but
there were three distinct classes on board the Titanic, first, second,
and steerage, and so it's really important to sort of
go ahead in your mind as you're picturing the Titanic
(02:35):
and that I think the nine different deck levels of it,
that it was very stratified. There were places that first
class were permitted to go. I mean, they could go
anywhere they wanted, really because they paid that much, but
they weren't going to wander down to steerage cabins. But
then the third class was pretty much restricted to the
bottom of the boat. Second class sort of in the middle.
And this was such a gigantic ship that it required
(02:57):
some really special engineering to make it go. And I'm
not gonna lie to you. I'm no engineer. I'm not
going to profess to know everything about horsepower, etcetera, etcetera.
But I do know that it had two giant engines
that were about four stories tall and these two three
blade propellers that were like twenty three ft across, and
so that's big and it enabled the ship to go
(03:17):
about twenty four knots, and that may sound slow to
us today, but back then it was really fast, that's true.
And they put it in the running against the Juniord Line,
which is the ships that they wanted to compete against,
and it was faster than them. But it's sort of
broke down in the process. But we'll get see that
in a minute. Yeah, it was interesting you mentioned with
the class distinctions, you know that might strike our modern sensibilities.
(03:39):
Is classism, which I yeah, it is. But it's interesting
to notice that UM the third class were even treated,
maybe even better than other ships UM of the time
because they had their own enclosed rooms and that was
kind of a luxury in itself. It was a lot
of them didn't even have that where they were coming from.
And the White Star Line, which was the manufacturer of
(03:59):
these three ships, knew that many of the Steerage members
were European immigrants who were going to New York to
start a new life, and they really sort of approached
this with a delicate sensibility and they wanted to make
this a very special and memorable passage for them. And
to that end, the quarters they had aboard the Titanic
were so much nicer than anything they would have seen
in any other ship. For instance, there were real mattresses,
(04:21):
whereas on other ships steerage would have had straw filled
sacks to sleep on. Now that's not to say that
it compared with the private and semi private baths of
the upper class ducks, but I think that there was
sort of a continuous design and feeling that pervaded the
entirity of the ship. But it wasn't just the third
class it had top of the line, it was everyone.
(04:44):
That's true. If you look at the China and and
everything like they had this the whole ship had the
sort of airy designed to it, with palm trees. Everything
was lush, and you know, they wanted to promote this
this luxurious atmosphere so much that if you look at
like the decks, they didn't want to clutter them up
too much with even safety equipment for instance fatal mistake. Yes,
(05:05):
so we have these wide open swaths of gleaming wood
decks and Thomas Andrews, who was the ship's designer, he
designed this ship to be unsinkable. And it's interesting too.
I mean you look at both the engineers and the
passengers aboard were pretty confident. Um just the sheer size
of the Titanic. It was so gigantic that they felt
(05:27):
really comfortable there that you know, it was a safe rode,
sort of like when you're an evolving station wagon. Yeah, nothing,
nothing can harm you. It's just so large. And it
wasn't just the size of the ship that made people
think it was unsinkable. The ship's designer, Thomas Andrews, designed
watertight doors to drop down between each of the sixteen
compartments and the bottom of the ship, the idea being
(05:50):
that if something happened to the ship, up to three
of those compartments could flood and the ship wouldn't sink,
And even in a stretch, four could take on some
water and the ship would still stay afloats. And that
makes me feel pretty secure, I mean, and we go
back to the idea that they didn't have a lot
of safety equipment on the decks, and that leads me
to my question actually that I have for you, is
(06:12):
that is it true? A lot of people say that
if they did have enough life boasts, they would have
been able to save a lot more people from the sinking.
That sadly is fiction. Really Yeah, And it's funny because
that's a point that people really harp on and attached
to it, that there were not enough lifeboats to save
everyone on the Titanic. I think people really latch onto
this idea because we would like to think that history
(06:33):
could be changed if there were more precautions. But the
fact of the matter is, there were so many things
that went wrong with the Titanic even before I picked
up passengers that I think it was doomed to sink
from the start. That's right, even if you look as
far back as the construction of it. I mean people
say that, um, the constructors used substandard iron, even in
in the materials to you to bank to make the
ship and uh, and even the the technology, the Marconi
(06:59):
wireless telegraphy, it was seen as maybe two cutting in
because a lot of people out there on the boats
they didn't know how to use it necessarily or to
decipher it right. So when the Titanic was sinking and
it sent out it's distress calls, people couldn't interpret it.
It was like speaking a totally different language. And there's
some information out there about there not being enough for
rivets and the ship or the rivets weren't tightened properly,
(07:22):
and we know for a fact that it only underwent
about six or seven hours worth of testing, and I
think it turned once or twice, but it was never
even sailed at its top speed. And what's more, a
lot of the crew didn't get on board until an
hour or say, before the passengers did, and they weren't
even told what their jobs were until after they got
(07:43):
on the ship. So how can you be a proper
lookout for a ship when you haven't been trained in
that post. That's sure, it doesn't leave a lot of
time for training. And also if you look at the
design of the ship, even um I read that the
rudder was actually kind of an old fashioned design and
it was smaller even the competition's rudders, And so this
made it so the ship itself a little less maneuverable,
(08:05):
and they couldn't shift out of an emergency situation as
fast as they should have. So when you have something
that large, it's like if you're you're driving an RV
and all of a sudden you're you're nearing a stop sign.
You need to know ahead of time that you need
to go ahead and start breaking slowly You can't just
slam on the brakes and expect things do okay. It's
not like you know, my idi bety Honda Civic, where
I haven't have time to do that. The Titanic was
the same way. If they saw something in the water
(08:27):
that they needed to avoid um and Iceberg, they had
to think about it a couple of miles ahead. And
the same goes for turning. You still need you know,
a bigger radius to turn something that large. And what
of my favorite points about how ill prepared the Titanic
was for this voyage, and it's just smacks of conspiracy,
is that JP Morgan was one of the big financial backers,
(08:51):
and there's some recent evidence lightly that he kept encouraging
the shipbuilders to use cheaper and cheaper materials because he
wanted as much bang for his buck as he could get.
Scandalous scandalous. Well, here's where it gets even juiced here.
He was supposed to be on the maiden voyage and
then just a couple of hours beforehand, Summa business came
up and he didn't ride. It's a little suspicious, I know,
(09:13):
I know, But all that aside back to the live
boats in question. So I'm gonna give you guys some
numbers just so you can help visualize it. And I
wanted to clarify too that there are so many numbers
out there when it comes to the Titanic, because Parliament
conducted an inquiry since it sets sail from England, but
the US Senate also conducted an inquiry. And that may
sound kind of funny, and it kind of is. One
(09:34):
of the senators, Senator William Smith, knew the captain of
the Titanic, John Smith, and he'd sailed with him before
and thought, he said, to get captain, how could this
have happened? And so the Senate got involved to again
kind of marking conspiratorial. So did the different investigations come
up with different different results? No, just about the same thing,
(09:55):
but the numbers are a little bit different. So we
know that there were enough lifeboats to hold one thousand,
one seventy six passengers, and that's only if they were
filled to capacity. So on board again numbers from the
U S and it we know there were two thousand
people and eight crew members. So even if you're doing
(10:15):
the math that fast, you know that's not enough. If
you can't get all those people into boats and The
reason why they had so few lifeboats on board sixteen
is that the Board of Trade was the governing body
that set the rules for ocean liners at this time,
and the number of requisite lifeboats for ships up to
ten thousand tons was sixteen. Well, the Titanic was forty
(10:38):
five thousand tons, but no one had bothered to sit
down and do the math and say we need this
many more lifeboats to combinate that difference. So the Board
of Trades regulations sort of went up to it was
sort of an old fashioned maximum. They weren't sort of
expecting something as big as a Titanic needing regulation exactly.
And you hit on the point earlier day when you
were talking about not wanting to clutter up the decks.
I think that Titanic X builders and designers conveniently misinterpreted
(11:04):
the guidelines. They could have filled in the number they needed,
but they didn't because they wanted their their decks to
look shiny and open and clean. But okay, so you asked,
could everyone have been saved if there have been enough
life But it didn't matter now, not really, because when
I was talking about how inefficient the crew wise and
how ill prepared they were and how little testing this
ship had undergone. I think they only practice lowering what
(11:26):
two to four lifeboats? Is that right? I think yeah,
I think I remember hearing those stuff. So they didn't
have an accurate time estimation for how long it would
take to get that many people ever board. And if
you you look at the survivors talk about it, you'll
notice that not even all of the lifeboats, they weren't
filled to capacity some of them, and that's pretty scandalous. Um.
(11:47):
There was one survivor who wrote um that passengers saw
that these lofe boats would have to take a fifty
foot drop, and I kind of scared them, and they thought, well,
I'm gonna stick on the unsinkable Titanic. You guys can
go ahead. And this one survivor claims that he asked
to be on this this on on the filled lifeboat,
and they said women and children first, see you later,
(12:07):
and they lowered the boat. And so that's it's a
kind of testament too. They didn't really know what they
were doing when they were flowering these boats. No one did.
And there were two evacuations on either side of the ship,
and one of the people conducting the investigation on one
side said women and children first. The guy on the
other side was letting anyone who could get in get in.
(12:27):
But when we say anyone, we mean first class and
then second class. Third class wasn't even told that the
ship was sinking until well after the fact. And it
was such a quiet disaster. When the ship scraped the iceberg.
It happens so quickly and so quietly that no one
really realized any damage had been done until Thomas Andrews
inspected and said, yeah, it's certain it's going to sink.
(12:51):
And it's sort of scary to think about the panic
that must have ensued down to the steerage decks because
even if people saw water filling up their cabins, like
we said, they weren't allowed is free room over the
ship like the other class passengers were. Can you imagine
them just getting lost in the bottom as you know,
imagine they'd be riots and and you know, fights all
over the place. It was crazy, It was, I mean,
(13:11):
it was essentially a struggle to survive. And later on
when White Star Line sent out rescue craft to search
for the bodies or any survivors, they got really confused
because they saw so many corpses wearing garments of first
class passengers, but essentially crew and steerage had raided the
cabins and put on whatever they could to stay warm.
(13:33):
As a terrible it sounds like they went through a
lot of havoc and panics. Yeah, I can't even imagine
how scary it was. And the recovery efforts for disasters too.
I mean, when the news broke that the Titanic had sunk,
the world was stunned. I mean, this was the unsinkable ship,
and I think it took nearly a week to even
compile a list of all the survivors and all that deceased.
(13:54):
So and it sort of captures the imagination even to today.
I mean, people are obsessed with no what actually happened,
you know, um people they have deferring historical accounts, whose
to blame and and it's it's a pretty intense debate
all around the board. And people are obsessed with the
story of the titan The Titanic. Yeah, and that's because
there were so many passengers on board, and everyone had
(14:16):
a different story, and everyone had a different eye witness account.
There were people who said that the ship broke in
half before I sink. There are people who didn't report that,
and later on I think people called it a litigation
nightmare because, like we said, Parliament and the Senate conducted investigations,
but any lawsuits that were brought on the White Star
Line were brought on by families of the individual passengers
(14:37):
for either people lost or property lost. And how I mean,
how could you even prove anything with all the different testimonies.
That's right, And one uh, one scandal that people disagree
on is about the chairman and managing director of the
Star the White Star is that it the White Star Line.
There was always start line. His name was Bruce is May,
(14:57):
as you said, and he actually jumped on one of
these not quite filled lifeboats, and um, people say, oh,
what a coward, like he took someone else's space when
really like it would not have been taken by by
another person. At least some organizations like the Titanic Historical
Society tried to defend him and say, like he had
a wife and kids and no one else was around,
and he just took his opportunity to save his life
(15:19):
and otherwise he just would have been, you know, sunk
with the ship. And it was sad because after he
he survived, and after he got to America he was
sort of ridiculed by uh like William Randolph Hurst and
his newspapers. And in England sort of they accepted him,
but America he got maligned. I'm sure he did. And
if you look at the other two arguably other important
(15:42):
figures on board from like Thomas Andrews, the ship's designer,
and then the captain of the ship, Captain Smith, they
both sort of quietly waited on board and went down
with the ship. And Thomas Andrews in particular. I mean,
even if you think about James Cameron's Titanic, that really
poignant scene where he says, I wish I could have
reality a better ship ms Rose, that really is sort
of how it happened that which where it is necessarily
(16:02):
but he didn't put on a life vest and he
sat in one of the first class lounges and just
quietly waited. And it's just so eerie even today if
you go and you look at pictures of artifacts that
have been um like photographed underneath the surface of the water,
or artifacts that have been brought up like one of
the most haunting things I saw that UM there's a
(16:24):
traveling Titanic exhibit called Titanic Aquatic, and you can see
all these things that are ms. Titanic has recovered that
particular society and they have sole ownership over the shipwreck.
And one of them, it's just um. It was a
China hutch that went down and was made of wood
and it had these porcelain and gratten dishes in it.
(16:44):
And over time the wood from the China cabinet disintegrated,
but the gratten dishes were left perfectly stacked and neat
Little Rose And that's how they are of right now
in the display. They're stacked and neat Little Rose. And
it's so creepy. That is fascinating because like the best
of the Titanic and you just see like even the
exterior of the ship underwater. It's it's really creepy to
(17:04):
see because of what what the pressure and the water
has done to it. Um. But to see something that
has survived that is that's really weird. It is And
I know what you're talking about. Like if you see pictures,
haven't you see this sort of like weird seaweed things
sort of waving in the water off the ship's rail
archaeologists have a word for them. They're called rusticles, because
(17:24):
essentially all these little tiny microbs underwater are just feasting
on the ship, and they suspect that in another I think,
like fifty to ninety years time, the ship is just
going to collapse and implode in on itself and it's
going to be over. So there's a lot of argument
right now about whether or not we should actually raise
what's left of the hall. That's that's really interesting because
(17:46):
I mean, as someone who's fascinated with the story, I
of course like I want to be in supportive, like
bring it up, because I don't want to see such
an interesting artifact of history destroyed just by you know, nature,
And I think I'm going to take a SHMV on
the other side, and not even just to play Devil's advocate.
I really feel that that's where it belongs. Because even
in the recovery efforts of those bodies, not all of
(18:08):
them were brought up, and a lot of the steerage
and crew members that were recovered, their bodies were actually
tied to iron rods and thrown beneath the water, so
they were in essence buried at sea. And so I
think that you know, that's where the ship belongs to them. Yeah,
that's true. There's so much history about the Titanic, and
(18:29):
there's so much that we haven't covered, and you can
learn even more when you read How Titanic Worked on
how stuff work dot com for moralness and thousands of
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at how stuff works dot com.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, welcome to the podcast. I'm
editor Candice Gibson, joined by staff writer Jane McGrath. Jane,
I don't think that there's anything as big and posh
(00:24):
and attention catching in the annals of naval history as
the Titanic, but it's true. I don't think many people
who do not have up. I guess I should say
a marine history rather than naval history. So it was
a seagoing vessel, and it was almost like a hotel
on the water. And the idea behind it was precisely
that Jay Bruce is May and Lord Pierry of Harlem
(00:47):
and Wolf shipbuilders. They were at dinner one night and
they were talking about the Cunard lines newest liners, the
Mauritania and Lusitania, and they said to themselves, we can
make one or three. Even with their plan, we're gonna
have a triumvirate of ships that were even bigger and
better the Olympic, the Gigantic and the Titanic. That's right.
And they wanted to make these not only fast like
(01:09):
the Kuniard line, but but luxurious and attractive for for
the you know, the aristocratic passengers have spend you know,
a pretty penny to go on exactly the idea of
being that the more comfortable and luxurious the ship, the
longer distance people would be willing to travel. And so
they weren't just selling you know, a couple of dollars
(01:31):
worth of tickets to people. We're talking about a first
class ticket then in today's dollars, is equivalent to about
forty three thousand dollars to about eighty thousand dollars, which
is a ton of money. I mean, I don't even
know people who spend that on airfare, you know, flying
halfway across the world. A good point. Maybe you do,
if you do, write me because I want to travel
with you. So then what made the Titanic so special? Well,
(01:54):
it's interesting because it was so incredibly lush, and you
know the first class passengers, you know, they were they
were used to being treated nicely, but not as nicely
as on this as on this ship, I mean they
had such Uh they had a squash court, I think,
and that you mentioned in the article, and uh there's
gem there were a Turkish baths. Yeah, that and these
(02:15):
things are amenities that people had to pay a little
bit extra for But you bring up an important point
about the first class and what they had access to.
And I'm sure that all of you know this, but
there were three distinct classes on board the Titanic, first, second,
and steerage, and so it's really important to sort of
go ahead in your mind as you're picturing the Titanic
(02:35):
and that I think the nine different deck levels of it,
that it was very stratified. There were places that first
class were permitted to go. I mean, they could go
anywhere they wanted, really because they paid that much, but
they weren't going to wander down to steerage cabins. But
then the third class was pretty much restricted to the
bottom of the boat. Second class sort of in the middle.
And this was such a gigantic ship that it required
(02:57):
some really special engineering to make it go. And I'm
not gonna lie to you. I'm no engineer. I'm not
going to profess to know everything about horsepower, etcetera, etcetera.
But I do know that it had two giant engines
that were about four stories tall and these two three
blade propellers that were like twenty three ft across, and
so that's big and it enabled the ship to go
(03:17):
about twenty four knots, and that may sound slow to
us today, but back then it was really fast, that's true.
And they put it in the running against the Juniord Line,
which is the ships that they wanted to compete against,
and it was faster than them. But it's sort of
broke down in the process. But we'll get see that
in a minute. Yeah, it was interesting you mentioned with
the class distinctions, you know that might strike our modern sensibilities.
(03:39):
Is classism, which I yeah, it is. But it's interesting
to notice that UM the third class were even treated,
maybe even better than other ships UM of the time
because they had their own enclosed rooms and that was
kind of a luxury in itself. It was a lot
of them didn't even have that where they were coming from.
And the White Star Line, which was the manufacturer of
(03:59):
these three ships, knew that many of the Steerage members
were European immigrants who were going to New York to
start a new life, and they really sort of approached
this with a delicate sensibility and they wanted to make
this a very special and memorable passage for them. And
to that end, the quarters they had aboard the Titanic
were so much nicer than anything they would have seen
in any other ship. For instance, there were real mattresses,
(04:21):
whereas on other ships steerage would have had straw filled
sacks to sleep on. Now that's not to say that
it compared with the private and semi private baths of
the upper class ducks, but I think that there was
sort of a continuous design and feeling that pervaded the
entirity of the ship. But it wasn't just the third
class it had top of the line, it was everyone.
(04:44):
That's true. If you look at the China and and
everything like they had this the whole ship had the
sort of airy designed to it, with palm trees. Everything
was lush, and you know, they wanted to promote this
this luxurious atmosphere so much that if you look at
like the decks, they didn't want to clutter them up
too much with even safety equipment for instance fatal mistake. Yes,
(05:05):
so we have these wide open swaths of gleaming wood
decks and Thomas Andrews, who was the ship's designer, he
designed this ship to be unsinkable. And it's interesting too.
I mean you look at both the engineers and the
passengers aboard were pretty confident. Um just the sheer size
of the Titanic. It was so gigantic that they felt
(05:27):
really comfortable there that you know, it was a safe rode,
sort of like when you're an evolving station wagon. Yeah, nothing,
nothing can harm you. It's just so large. And it
wasn't just the size of the ship that made people
think it was unsinkable. The ship's designer, Thomas Andrews, designed
watertight doors to drop down between each of the sixteen
compartments and the bottom of the ship, the idea being
(05:50):
that if something happened to the ship, up to three
of those compartments could flood and the ship wouldn't sink,
And even in a stretch, four could take on some
water and the ship would still stay afloats. And that
makes me feel pretty secure, I mean, and we go
back to the idea that they didn't have a lot
of safety equipment on the decks, and that leads me
to my question actually that I have for you, is
(06:12):
that is it true? A lot of people say that
if they did have enough life boasts, they would have
been able to save a lot more people from the sinking.
That sadly is fiction. Really Yeah, And it's funny because
that's a point that people really harp on and attached
to it, that there were not enough lifeboats to save
everyone on the Titanic. I think people really latch onto
this idea because we would like to think that history
(06:33):
could be changed if there were more precautions. But the
fact of the matter is, there were so many things
that went wrong with the Titanic even before I picked
up passengers that I think it was doomed to sink
from the start. That's right, even if you look as
far back as the construction of it. I mean people
say that, um, the constructors used substandard iron, even in
in the materials to you to bank to make the
ship and uh, and even the the technology, the Marconi
(06:59):
wireless telegraphy, it was seen as maybe two cutting in
because a lot of people out there on the boats
they didn't know how to use it necessarily or to
decipher it right. So when the Titanic was sinking and
it sent out it's distress calls, people couldn't interpret it.
It was like speaking a totally different language. And there's
some information out there about there not being enough for
rivets and the ship or the rivets weren't tightened properly,
(07:22):
and we know for a fact that it only underwent
about six or seven hours worth of testing, and I
think it turned once or twice, but it was never
even sailed at its top speed. And what's more, a
lot of the crew didn't get on board until an
hour or say, before the passengers did, and they weren't
even told what their jobs were until after they got
(07:43):
on the ship. So how can you be a proper
lookout for a ship when you haven't been trained in
that post. That's sure, it doesn't leave a lot of
time for training. And also if you look at the
design of the ship, even um I read that the
rudder was actually kind of an old fashioned design and
it was smaller even the competition's rudders, And so this
made it so the ship itself a little less maneuverable,
(08:05):
and they couldn't shift out of an emergency situation as
fast as they should have. So when you have something
that large, it's like if you're you're driving an RV
and all of a sudden you're you're nearing a stop sign.
You need to know ahead of time that you need
to go ahead and start breaking slowly You can't just
slam on the brakes and expect things do okay. It's
not like you know, my idi bety Honda Civic, where
I haven't have time to do that. The Titanic was
the same way. If they saw something in the water
(08:27):
that they needed to avoid um and Iceberg, they had
to think about it a couple of miles ahead. And
the same goes for turning. You still need you know,
a bigger radius to turn something that large. And what
of my favorite points about how ill prepared the Titanic
was for this voyage, and it's just smacks of conspiracy,
is that JP Morgan was one of the big financial backers,
(08:51):
and there's some recent evidence lightly that he kept encouraging
the shipbuilders to use cheaper and cheaper materials because he
wanted as much bang for his buck as he could get.
Scandalous scandalous. Well, here's where it gets even juiced here.
He was supposed to be on the maiden voyage and
then just a couple of hours beforehand, Summa business came
up and he didn't ride. It's a little suspicious, I know,
(09:13):
I know, But all that aside back to the live
boats in question. So I'm gonna give you guys some
numbers just so you can help visualize it. And I
wanted to clarify too that there are so many numbers
out there when it comes to the Titanic, because Parliament
conducted an inquiry since it sets sail from England, but
the US Senate also conducted an inquiry. And that may
sound kind of funny, and it kind of is. One
(09:34):
of the senators, Senator William Smith, knew the captain of
the Titanic, John Smith, and he'd sailed with him before
and thought, he said, to get captain, how could this
have happened? And so the Senate got involved to again
kind of marking conspiratorial. So did the different investigations come
up with different different results? No, just about the same thing,
(09:55):
but the numbers are a little bit different. So we
know that there were enough lifeboats to hold one thousand,
one seventy six passengers, and that's only if they were
filled to capacity. So on board again numbers from the
U S and it we know there were two thousand
people and eight crew members. So even if you're doing
(10:15):
the math that fast, you know that's not enough. If
you can't get all those people into boats and The
reason why they had so few lifeboats on board sixteen
is that the Board of Trade was the governing body
that set the rules for ocean liners at this time,
and the number of requisite lifeboats for ships up to
ten thousand tons was sixteen. Well, the Titanic was forty
(10:38):
five thousand tons, but no one had bothered to sit
down and do the math and say we need this
many more lifeboats to combinate that difference. So the Board
of Trades regulations sort of went up to it was
sort of an old fashioned maximum. They weren't sort of
expecting something as big as a Titanic needing regulation exactly.
And you hit on the point earlier day when you
were talking about not wanting to clutter up the decks.
I think that Titanic X builders and designers conveniently misinterpreted
(11:04):
the guidelines. They could have filled in the number they needed,
but they didn't because they wanted their their decks to
look shiny and open and clean. But okay, so you asked,
could everyone have been saved if there have been enough
life But it didn't matter now, not really, because when
I was talking about how inefficient the crew wise and
how ill prepared they were and how little testing this
ship had undergone. I think they only practice lowering what
(11:26):
two to four lifeboats? Is that right? I think yeah,
I think I remember hearing those stuff. So they didn't
have an accurate time estimation for how long it would
take to get that many people ever board. And if
you you look at the survivors talk about it, you'll
notice that not even all of the lifeboats, they weren't
filled to capacity some of them, and that's pretty scandalous. Um.
(11:47):
There was one survivor who wrote um that passengers saw
that these lofe boats would have to take a fifty
foot drop, and I kind of scared them, and they thought, well,
I'm gonna stick on the unsinkable Titanic. You guys can
go ahead. And this one survivor claims that he asked
to be on this this on on the filled lifeboat,
and they said women and children first, see you later,
(12:07):
and they lowered the boat. And so that's it's a
kind of testament too. They didn't really know what they
were doing when they were flowering these boats. No one did.
And there were two evacuations on either side of the ship,
and one of the people conducting the investigation on one
side said women and children first. The guy on the
other side was letting anyone who could get in get in.
(12:27):
But when we say anyone, we mean first class and
then second class. Third class wasn't even told that the
ship was sinking until well after the fact. And it
was such a quiet disaster. When the ship scraped the iceberg.
It happens so quickly and so quietly that no one
really realized any damage had been done until Thomas Andrews
inspected and said, yeah, it's certain it's going to sink.
(12:51):
And it's sort of scary to think about the panic
that must have ensued down to the steerage decks because
even if people saw water filling up their cabins, like
we said, they weren't allowed is free room over the
ship like the other class passengers were. Can you imagine
them just getting lost in the bottom as you know,
imagine they'd be riots and and you know, fights all
over the place. It was crazy, It was, I mean,
(13:11):
it was essentially a struggle to survive. And later on
when White Star Line sent out rescue craft to search
for the bodies or any survivors, they got really confused
because they saw so many corpses wearing garments of first
class passengers, but essentially crew and steerage had raided the
cabins and put on whatever they could to stay warm.
(13:33):
As a terrible it sounds like they went through a
lot of havoc and panics. Yeah, I can't even imagine
how scary it was. And the recovery efforts for disasters too.
I mean, when the news broke that the Titanic had sunk,
the world was stunned. I mean, this was the unsinkable ship,
and I think it took nearly a week to even
compile a list of all the survivors and all that deceased.
(13:54):
So and it sort of captures the imagination even to today.
I mean, people are obsessed with no what actually happened,
you know, um people they have deferring historical accounts, whose
to blame and and it's it's a pretty intense debate
all around the board. And people are obsessed with the
story of the titan The Titanic. Yeah, and that's because
there were so many passengers on board, and everyone had
(14:16):
a different story, and everyone had a different eye witness account.
There were people who said that the ship broke in
half before I sink. There are people who didn't report that,
and later on I think people called it a litigation
nightmare because, like we said, Parliament and the Senate conducted investigations,
but any lawsuits that were brought on the White Star
Line were brought on by families of the individual passengers
(14:37):
for either people lost or property lost. And how I mean,
how could you even prove anything with all the different testimonies.
That's right, And one uh, one scandal that people disagree
on is about the chairman and managing director of the
Star the White Star is that it the White Star Line.
There was always start line. His name was Bruce is May,
(14:57):
as you said, and he actually jumped on one of
these not quite filled lifeboats, and um, people say, oh,
what a coward, like he took someone else's space when
really like it would not have been taken by by
another person. At least some organizations like the Titanic Historical
Society tried to defend him and say, like he had
a wife and kids and no one else was around,
and he just took his opportunity to save his life
(15:19):
and otherwise he just would have been, you know, sunk
with the ship. And it was sad because after he
he survived, and after he got to America he was
sort of ridiculed by uh like William Randolph Hurst and
his newspapers. And in England sort of they accepted him,
but America he got maligned. I'm sure he did. And
if you look at the other two arguably other important
(15:42):
figures on board from like Thomas Andrews, the ship's designer,
and then the captain of the ship, Captain Smith, they
both sort of quietly waited on board and went down
with the ship. And Thomas Andrews in particular. I mean,
even if you think about James Cameron's Titanic, that really
poignant scene where he says, I wish I could have
reality a better ship ms Rose, that really is sort
of how it happened that which where it is necessarily
(16:02):
but he didn't put on a life vest and he
sat in one of the first class lounges and just
quietly waited. And it's just so eerie even today if
you go and you look at pictures of artifacts that
have been um like photographed underneath the surface of the water,
or artifacts that have been brought up like one of
the most haunting things I saw that UM there's a
(16:24):
traveling Titanic exhibit called Titanic Aquatic, and you can see
all these things that are ms. Titanic has recovered that
particular society and they have sole ownership over the shipwreck.
And one of them, it's just um. It was a
China hutch that went down and was made of wood
and it had these porcelain and gratten dishes in it.
(16:44):
And over time the wood from the China cabinet disintegrated,
but the gratten dishes were left perfectly stacked and neat
Little Rose And that's how they are of right now
in the display. They're stacked and neat Little Rose. And
it's so creepy. That is fascinating because like the best
of the Titanic and you just see like even the
exterior of the ship underwater. It's it's really creepy to
(17:04):
see because of what what the pressure and the water
has done to it. Um. But to see something that
has survived that is that's really weird. It is And
I know what you're talking about. Like if you see pictures,
haven't you see this sort of like weird seaweed things
sort of waving in the water off the ship's rail
archaeologists have a word for them. They're called rusticles, because
(17:24):
essentially all these little tiny microbs underwater are just feasting
on the ship, and they suspect that in another I think,
like fifty to ninety years time, the ship is just
going to collapse and implode in on itself and it's
going to be over. So there's a lot of argument
right now about whether or not we should actually raise
what's left of the hall. That's that's really interesting because
(17:46):
I mean, as someone who's fascinated with the story, I
of course like I want to be in supportive, like
bring it up, because I don't want to see such
an interesting artifact of history destroyed just by you know, nature,
And I think I'm going to take a SHMV on
the other side, and not even just to play Devil's advocate.
I really feel that that's where it belongs. Because even
in the recovery efforts of those bodies, not all of
(18:08):
them were brought up, and a lot of the steerage
and crew members that were recovered, their bodies were actually
tied to iron rods and thrown beneath the water, so
they were in essence buried at sea. And so I
think that you know, that's where the ship belongs to them. Yeah,
that's true. There's so much history about the Titanic, and
(18:29):
there's so much that we haven't covered, and you can
learn even more when you read How Titanic Worked on
how stuff work dot com for moralness and thousands of
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