The tragedy
One hundred years ago, during the night of April 14, 1912, the RMS Titanic collided with an iceberg, and in the small hours of the next day went down into the cold Atlantic Ocean with the loss of 1,517 lives.

There have been worse tragedies in history. Some were more violently spectacular, some still govern the daily routines of the survivors. Yet the Titanic disaster has strongly resonated with us for a century. Why? Because it is a tale of humanity as classic as a Greek tragedy. The story has been told and retold for the past century in movies, books, songs and magazine articles. Even James Cameron made a film using the Titanic saga as a backdrop.

Hubris—an excess of pride and confidence—is central to any classical tragedy. The Titanic set out from Queenstown, Ireland, on April 11, 1912, as a grand symbol of modernity and comfort. As she steamed at high speed through the dark of night her captain ignored the Cassandra-like warnings that icebergs lurked nearby, and through hubris the ship collided with one.

Within the tale of the sinking are interwoven many (mostly true) vignettes of human suffering—and also some cathartic scenesof triumph. Benjamin Guggenheim and his valet shucked off their life belts and donned their formal wear, saying, "We've dressed up in our best and are prepared to go down like gentlemen." Thomas Andrews, the designer of the flawed ship, sat forlornly in the opulent smoking lounge awaiting death, perhaps contemplating this awful reversal of fortune. J. Bruce Ismay, chairman of the White Star Line (which owned the Titanic), quietly slunk into a lifeboat and was later widely excoriated by the public for taking up a place when so many women and children were left to die on his ship. Charles John Joughin, the kitchen staff's chief baker, provides the comic relief in our retelling: He was the last person to step off the sinking ship into the ice-cold water, but was so well-fortified with liquor he survived to be picked up, his hair still dry. The "Unsinkable Molly Brown" was arguably the ship's most famous survivor: she defied convention and in an act of compassion commandeered her lifeboat to go back and look for survivors in the frigid water.

Heroes and villains. The quick and the dead. And all of this pathos communicated to the world by radio and by newspaper within hours of the tragedy.

The reality
Over the past century, a more prosaic reality has appeared in our path and the mythic tale has collided with it. Every detail mentioned here has been endlessly disputed (or fabricated) since April 15, 1912. With the growth of the Internet, a host of Titanic experts have become newly obsessed with the details down to the nanoscopic level. Google shows there are now 11 million sites with "Titanic" in the URL. (There are only 1.9 million for "gigantic.")

With every assertion and counterclaim, a pattern emerges, one that is not far different from the one that Scientific American reported  two weeks after the ship went down. Despite some wonderfully creative conspiracy theories that have been floated in the past 100 years, the building and sinking of the ship is a study in failure: of engineering systems, of law, of design, of private profit versus public safety.

4 Comments

1. 1. bongobimbo 06:36 PM 4/4/12

   PART ONE: Click on "Suggestion for a Full Complement of Lifeboats", and read, after reading this.
   
   RMS TITANIC had a complement of 1,178 passengers, crew and hired specialists. The naval architect wanted 64 lifeboats, but the company provided only 20. Doing the arithmetic shows that each lifeboat, even if filled to the capacity of 47 (very few were) would still need to turn 5 or more people away to drown. Only by increasing the size of each lifeboat to a capacity of 59 could 1,178 fit into 20 boats. So far as I know, enlarging the lifeboats and increasing space between the davits was never considered and may have been impossible in 1912.
   
   Had 64 lifeboats been provided (hung in tiers) each boat could have been lowered after a maximum of 18 passengers boarded. (64 into 1178 = 18.40625.) 60 boats would have been triple the 20 boats that were furnished, and more efficient than 64. 60 boats could handle 19 people, well within the capacity of a 47-person boat. Makes me wonder why Mr Andrews asked for 64.
   
   The SciAm team that analyzed the sinking in 1912 and wrote the "Full Complement of Boats" report came up with an even more efficient lifeboat plan. If hung single-tier in the davits, we can count 36 boats in the SciAm 1912 illustration. 32 people could have fit into each 47-capacity boat and every single person of the 1,178 could have been saved. There would be no need to hang boats double-tiered since 72 boats would be too many. Tragic that Mr Andrews didn’t argue longer or louder with the company, and tragic that no one in Parliament argued with the Board of Trade over a long-obsolete reg originally adopted in the age of sail. But of course it was the "Gilded Age", an era of foolish and dogmatic misuse of capitalism against a sensible (and actually more conservative) social contract that was desperately needed.

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2. 2. bongobimbo 06:41 PM 4/4/12

   PART TWO: Today the sleepwalking lawmakers aren’t the Board of Trade, but the NeoCons and Blue Dogs in the US Congress and their counterparts in other countries who, like the early 1900s’ robber barons, also worship the great god Mammon via a form of virulent capitalism that must have Adam Smith screaming in his grave! These greedos ignore or defy the evidence for human-caused runaway global warming--not to mention multitudes of other needed reforms on behalf of real people.
   
   Like the Board of Trade a hundred years ago, quick profits for their good buddies the fossil fuel super-rich dazzle them, since they known there will be a rake-off for them. Having no consciences to warn them of the need for public safety and common sense, the Tea Partiers of 2012 plod along in a state of advanced hubris. They too will face public fury, because just like the TITANIC, their arrogance is speeding the world to crash into the planetary equivalent of an immovable iceberg in a sea lane. Except this time billions of lives will be lost.
   

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3. 3. WizeHowl in reply to bongobimbo 09:00 AM 4/7/12

   I think you have your numbers slightly wrong, from my memory there were 2,278 or there about. Since 1,517 died your figures are out.
   
   But your on the right track. With 64 boats an average of 36 people could have safely been transferred to the Carpathia and other rescue ships with virtually no loss of life.
   
   

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4. 4. dschlenoff in reply to bongobimbo 11:14 AM 4/16/12

   Lifeboats--yet another detail that can be endlessly disputed. Only 4 lifeboats (the collapsible ones) had a 47-person capacity; 14 had a capacity of 65 (one was tested prior to the journey and had 70 men crammed in it safely, although office Lightoller testified later that he was worried that a lifeboat at full capacity would have strained the lowering mechanism); the two small cutters had a capacity of 40.

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