100 Years Ago.....

[James diGriz]

The RMS Titanic went to her final resting place. It is a tale of human arrogance against nature, and unfortunately one lesson that will never be learned by most.

[Mynock]

"God himself could not sink this ship."
--Thomas Andrews

"Challenge Accepted"
--God

Technology is no match for stupidity. 1514 people died that night due to this fact. May they rest in peace.

[Jinn]

I watched a show about the science behind why the Titanic crew didn't see the ice berg until it was literally in front of them. The host of the show did some investigating and figured out that a high pressure cold front created some weird mirage effects that concealed the floating ice from a distance. Isn't there a quote in the bible about the devil having the face of many waters?

[kham]

Yeah, temperature inversion. It's one of several factors in the error chain leading to the collision. The simplest answer though is not gods or devils, but a Master who continued steaming at 20 knots+ into a known ice field in spite of numerous warnings over the last three days. That, and a lack of knowledge about just how lousy the Olympic-class (and all large ships of the era) were at manuevering.

[Rickington]

Although this has been discussed/debated a lot, I wonder if the Titanic would of survived IF she hit the iceberg head-on?

[kham]

Short answer? Yes

The bow would have been mashed and there would have been shock damage to everything all the way aft to the sternlight, but the ship would have not sunk. It would have been like stemming a dock at full speed; Titanic displaced 55,000 -odd tons, the iceberg about 250,000 +. No one would have slept through that, and a lot of red faces. But that would have been it.

[James diGriz]

"God himself could not sink this ship."
--Thomas Andrews

"Challenge Accepted"
--God

Technology is no match for stupidity. 1514 people died that night due to this fact. May they rest in peace.

I hate to pick nits here Mynock, but that quote was not Thomas Andrews. It is attributed to a deck hand, or Bruce Ismay, depending on your source. Andrews knew of the shortcuts taken, as well as what could make it sink. He said it was a strong ship, but Andrews knew her faults. Otherwise, a nice quoted meme.

[Mynock]

^^Oops, my bad. Does have a nice ring to it though hahaha...
I think like many other disasters this one was a "perfect storm" of minor errors that just happened to line up the right (wrong) way. Somebody lost the keys to the binoculor case on the same night the ocean was dead calm and the sky moonless. If they'd turned a few seconds later she would've hit head on and floated till help arrived, a few seconds sooner and they would've missed the berg entirely. It probably would've also been a clean miss if they kept the hammer down instead of reversing the engines.
What is unforgiveable, imho, is the fact that the crew manning the lifeboats allowed them to leave half empty. I get that in 1912 nobody gave a shit about poor people, which is why there weren't enough lifeboats for everybody, but the ones that were there ended up getting launched with something like 400 combined empty seats.

[kham]

The problem with the lifeboats was a lack of knowledge about the davits and boats; they were both designed to be lowered with full capacities but somehow the crew (particularly the officers) were unaware of this.

[rickyj]

Someone also told me that the President of the company that owned the Titanic took and ENTIRE lifeboat just for himself...anyone else hear of this? He appearently was the only one in that lifeboat. I dont' know if that's true but someone who knows a lot about the diaster told me that. Also, apparently some cargo ship passed right by them (maybe 10-20 miles I'm not suree) while it was sinking, and they thought the SOS flares the titanic was shooting off were party fireworks, so they just ignored it and kept going.
As for the collison, you got to understand that by the time they saw the iceberg, the crew wasthen panicking and didn't have time to think about things like hitting it head on would have been better, or going full speed would have swing the ship around to avoid it....lets face it, in a pressure situation just about anyone's first instinct would be to hit full reverse and turn the ship hard over because that on he surface makes the most logical sense to avoid an object. That's what a car driver would do when they see something they think they will hit--they brake like crazy and swerve the wheel. So we can't fault the crew too much one they saw it, the real person to blame is obviosly Mr. Crap-i-tan who like previous poster above said ignoring repeated warnings of the threats days in advance. All he had to do was go maybe 300 miles south or something into safer waters, but there prob a ton of pressure on him to make the voyage in a set amount of time. Haste makes waste.
And to only have enough lifeboats for 1/2 the people is ridiculous. The main point of the 1997 movie was exposing how the poor got the shaft.