this post was submitted on 19 May 2025
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There’s a podcast, Titanic: Ship of Dreams, which is very worth listening to.
Up to the point of the iceberg strike, nobody did anything wrong, considering the conventional wisdom of the day.
I’m pretty sure the titanic didn’t have enough life boats before it hit the iceberg.
Now that I think about it, it may have also been designed in a way that would enable it to sink faster (not saying this was on purpose) considerably before even touching the water.
It had the number of lifeboats required at the time.
That’s because lifeboats on such a ship were intended to ferry passengers to other ships, making multiple trips. Nobody expected the largest ship in the world to go down in two and a half hours.
Which it did because of the specific gash it received in the collision. This may have had to do with the shape of the iceberg below the water line, as well as it being sighted late due to unique weather conditions.
It went down fast due to a failure of design. Water was able to move freely from cabin to cabin. This was not the typical design of ships during this time.
https://writing.engr.psu.edu/uer/bassett.html
I'm pretty certain that the podcast will address all that in future episodes. They're still in the middle of the event to this point.
I was aware of the high sulfur content of the steel. This appears to be something that was learned after the wreck was discovered and pieces recovered. With regard to the open top bulkheads, at the time of construction a 300 foot gash damaging six compartments was never expected. Apparently, too, if the ship had hit the iceberg head on instead of trying to avoid it, ~200 people in the bow would have been killed, but the ship would have stayed afloat plenty long enough to safely evacuate the remainder.
I recommended this podcast specifically because of the post-sinking conventional wisdom that I myself had subscribed to: "so many mistakes." But looking at the event through the lens of conventional wisdom of the time, there really weren't any mistakes. Even the high sulfur content of the steel wouldn't have mattered as much except for the extreme cold weather.
I'm definitely curious to see how they address the steel quality and other things learned and adjusted for in hindsight.