Personally, I see one culprit in the sinking of the "Titanic" - "Murphy's law", according to which, if a trouble should happen, it will definitely happen. But this does not absolve those of whom I will now tell from the responsibility.
The perpetrators of the sinking of the "Titanic"
It so happened that the most perfect ship of that time, just on the 5th day of its maiden voyage, made a fatal collision with an iceberg. It happened at about 3 o'clock in the morning, when the ice that passed along the starboard side, like a giant blade, ripped the skin. After another 2.5 hours, the ship sank in the Atlantic, killing nearly 1,600 people. Naturally, the question was asked: who is to blame? There are enough guilty people, and therefore I will tell you about them in order. So, the guilty ones are:
- shipbuilders;
- officers;
- radio operators.
The fault of the shipbuilders and the crew
Both the ship's designers and the steelmaking contractors are to blame. Strange, but the first thought that even 3 compartments could not be damaged at the same time, but apparently they were wrong. As for the second, there are suspicions that the materials were of poor quality, which means that someone managed to earn a tidy sum.
Regarding the team. There is a whole "bouquet" of negligence and rash actions. For example, the captain, who, as many suspect, lay in the cabin, struck down by the "green serpent". His first assistant did not show professionalism when he gave deliberately wrong commands. Turn the ship to the right, and even add a move, and the trouble could pass by. It was possible not to fold at all, because the bow of the ship was equipped with a special ram just for such a case.
What is the fault of the radio operators "Titanic"
In fact, these people are some of the most important on the ship, but since radio in the maritime business was just beginning its history, there was complete confusion. The radio operators were not crew members at all - the Marconi firm rented a small room, and its employees were busy sending paid messages.
Therefore, they did not care much that some SS Californian radio operator was warning about some field of icebergs: it didn’t concern them, period!
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Watching the film "Titanic", I sob every time when they show a scene of panic of people on a ship trying to survive, a scene of a magnificent orchestra playing and mothers and children falling asleep forever ... I constantly wonder why the largest ship of that time suffered such a terrible wreck, couldn't it avoid it?
The official cause of the shipwreck
The cause of the tragedy was a collision with an iceberg, this is understandable. And the official version says that such damage from the glacier was due to the low-quality steel with which the ship was sheathed. It contained a lot of sulfur impurities. And at low temperatures, this material becomes very brittle. Surely, with better quality steel, the blow would soften a little. But I doubt it's all about the material.
Factors influencing the sinking of the ship
Why did the Titanic collide with this iceberg? There are many theories describing the factors that influenced the scale of the tragedy:
- Inattentive radio operators. There were many rich people on the ship, who often asked to send telegrams, the radio operators were completely absorbed in this work. They simply did not notice the reports of dangerously moving ice floes.
- Captain's self-confidence. Even after the warning of an impending iceberg, he did not rush to give the order to reduce the speed (after all, the ship was going incredibly fast!). The captain decided that his ship was not afraid of anything.
- There were no red flares on the Titanic. Instead, white rockets lay. They were launched, but a nearby ship decided that it was a festive fireworks.
I also heard that the shipwreck was beneficial to the owners of the ship themselves, who insured it. According to one version, they agreed with the captain, who was supposed to ensure the wreck of the ship. The insurance company later paid a gigantic amount for those times. But I don’t want to believe in this inhumanity.
There are a lot of versions, new ones are being created, some of them sound unrealistic. I think that we are unlikely to find out the exact reason. And I will never understand why so few people were saved. :(
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After seeing the movie "Titanic", I wondered why he collided with an iceberg so absurdly. To find out all the details of the tragedy, I watched a two-hour documentary.
Known causes of the Titanic tragedy
Various arguments were presented in the film. They were all true in their own way. Here are the most important theories:
- The ship changed its course, due to which there was a fatal encounter with an ice block.
- Captains changed before departure. There is a version that the main captain was ill.
- The new manager was not given the key to the safe that contained the binoculars. Without binoculars, the commander could not see the approaching danger.
- Bad work of radio operators. They have not received reports from other vessels about the iceberg.
We can only guess what exactly caused the crash. Is it the fault of one person or all of the crew.
How it all happened
On the night of April 15, onlookers noticed a huge block of ice in front of them. Then they informed the manager about it, and the command "left rudder" was given. But it was too late. The Titanic hit the iceberg with its starboard side. They immediately began to send distress signals, but all but one of the ships were too far away (the Carpathia arrived at the crash site at 4 am and began to receive passengers). People were placed in boats, but not all of them were able to escape. At about two o'clock in the morning, the bow of the ship began to plunge rapidly into the water. At 2:20 am "Titanic" completely sunk.
Aftermath of the crash
The ship that arrived at the crash site rescued about 700 people and successfully brought them to New York. Among the survivors were 190 crew members, 130 men and 390 women and children. The death toll turned out to be about 1,500 people. Today, the liner still lies on the ocean floor. There were proposals to raise the vessel in order to make it a museum, but to this day this has not happened.
It is hard to realize that the largest liner sank so absurdly and tragically, taking the lives of many people and causing enormous damage. It’s scary to imagine what would have happened if the "Carpathia" had not come to the rescue.
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Wreck of the Titanic- the most terrible "civil" tragedy of the 20th century. Until now, when investigating the mystery of his death, many "why" and "if" are heard. I do not know, why the Titanic sank, but together with everyone I still want to know, so once again I will try to compare the facts and draw conclusions.
Technical errors "Titanic": why the unsinkable drowned
According to engineers, the liner could not sink... because I just couldn't. Its body was made up of 16 independent sealed compartments. Any four could have been flooded and no one would even notice (except for the crew, of course). The paradox is that this "rule" worked for sections in different parts of the ship, and iceberg rammed board along and damaged five compartments in succession. Result - water fills the bows, ship heels and when flooded breaks under its own weight.
Another well-known error is small number of boats... A total of 1178 places for 2224 people. Unforgivable carelessness!
An important role was played by "Heavy walking"... When the iceberg was sighted, it was 600 meters away. "Titanic" was in full swing, and even with an instant stop, the "stopping distance" of the water colossus turned out to be no less than a kilometer. I had to maneuver, but it was not possible to go around the ice block without collision.
The whims and surprises of nature
April 1912 became fatal due to an unfortunate combination of weather and natural conditions:
- confluence of anticyclones and high tides due to the strong approach of the moon influenced "Migration" of icebergs... There were many more of them than there are in the Atlantic in April, and many were larger than usual;
- the crash happened at the confluence of the Gulf Stream (warm current) and the Labrador cold current... It was calm, and this caused a strange phenomenon - temperature inversion when warm air hangs over cold air and creates a haze that impairs visibility;
- against the background of the night sky and dark water, the white block could be seen even in the haze, but the inversion can create a mirage and distort the idea of \ u200b \ u200bthe horizon. Quite possible, the iceberg was "hidden" from the lookouts beyond the mirage, until the Titanic was too close.
Tragic forgetfulness
Not obvious, but confirmed the reason the Titanic sank, the forgetfulness of David Blair, the second assistant, is called. He was fired just before the ship sailed, and he forgot (?) to hand over the key to the safe with binoculars... Quite possible, optics would help detect the problem in time. An interesting fact: this key was donated by Blair's daughter to a Canadian company, it was sold at an auction for £ 90,000, and is now in Nanjing.
What conclusion can be drawn? If it was possible foresee all technical faults if giant companies did not overestimate their capabilities and did not save on people if everyone worked flawlessly and never wrong, there would be fewer tragedies. It is worth remembering this and learning from other people's mistakes.
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"Titanic"- this is the first movie that I watched on the big screen, that is, in the cinema. After that, I reviewed it 11 more times. I was captivated by everything: both the plot and the shooting. The fate of the ship and its passengers amazed me so much that I absorbed any information I heard about it. I'll tell you what I know.
The first and last flight of the Titanic
Everyone knows this terrible catastrophe of the last century, and no one is indifferent to this story. But the questions how and why sank the most unsinkable ship, they still sound.
Ship architects and shipbuilders positioned "Titanic" as safe and waterproof, but did not take into account some of the subtleties that ruined the ship, and the reputation, and, most importantly, the lives of 1.5 thousand people.
For the reasons why Titanic sank, include:
- low grade steel;
- weak rivets that held the hull of the ship;
- no double skin;
- some design miscalculations.
So why did the Titanic sink?
In justification, we can say that the liner was actually built in such a way as to keep afloat, even if some of the compartments are flooded. In addition, it was assumed that he would even be able to withstand huge waves without turning over. But, in a hurry, the management did not have time to purchase rivets that secure the ship's hull from high-quality materials, and replaced them with ordinary ones. Due to haste and self-confidence, the entire team that designed and built "Titanic", thought it was too powerful, too safe, to pay attention to such little things as rivets.
For the first time, the Titanic made headlines as the largest ship in human history, and its maiden voyage was to make a long voyage across the Atlantic in April 1912. As everyone knows, instead of a triumphant voyage, the history of shipping was supplemented by the greatest disaster. On its fourth day of voyage 105 years ago, 643 kilometers off the coast of Nova Scotia, the ship hit an iceberg and sank within 2 hours and 40 minutes. On that terrible day, 1,500 passengers died, mostly not from injuries or asphyxiation, but from hypothermia. Few managed to survive in the icy water of the Atlantic Ocean, the temperature of which in April 1912 dropped to - 2 ° C. Take your time to be surprised, the water may well remain liquid in this cold, given that in the ocean it is a solution of salt with other nutrients, and not pure H2O.
But if you study the history of the Titanic deeper, you will also find stories of people who, during an unforeseen catastrophe, acted decisively, escaped death and helped other drowning people. Over 700 people survived the disaster, although for some it was a fluke. Here are 10 stories of survivors of the most tragic disaster in the Atlantic.
10. Frank Prentice - crew member (warehouse assistant)
Just before the Titanic finally submerged, the stern of the ship briefly lifted into the air perpendicular to the water level. At the same time, team member Frank Prentice, one of the last people on the ship, together with 2 of his comrades decided to jump from the sinking liner into the cold water. One of his colleagues during the fall hit the Titanic's propeller propeller, but Prentis managed to fly 30 meters to the water, where his friend's lifeless body was already waiting for him. Fortunately, Franca was soon picked up by a lifeboat.
The history of Prentice is easy to verify, especially since his watch stopped at exactly 2:20, which is the exact time of the final sinking of the Titanic into the waters of the Atlantic Ocean. Notably, a few years later, Prentice survived another shipwreck while serving aboard the warship Oceanic during World War I.
9. Eight Chinese passengers in third class
It may come as a surprise, but if you read the reports of the large-scale evacuation from the sinking Titanic, you will understand that at first it was a very civilized process. All passengers obediently obeyed the orders of the ship's crew, and many of them were happy to give their seats in the lifeboats to women and children. They did it voluntarily and without coercion. Panic has not deprived people of prudence and honor. At least not all of them, and not all at once.
But if you want to know how passengers managed to survive in a shipwreck of the early 20th century with a more practical approach to testing, you will be interested to hear about 8 Chinese immigrants who boarded the legendary ship all with one ticket. It was a group of people from Guangzhou who lost their jobs due to the coal crisis and sailed home to Hong Kong.
Their names have changed in different immigration reports, but today this is no longer important. When the iceberg hit, seven of them crept into the lifeboats before the boats were sent to the landing sites. The Chinese hid in boats under blankets, and remained unnoticed for a long time. Five of them survived. The eighth Chinese also suffered a shipwreck - he was picked up by lifeboat # 14 (which also saved Harold Phillimore, which we will talk about a little later). The rescue of 6 people from a group of 8 comrades is a good statistic, but their behavior can hardly be called heroic.
8. Olaus Jorgensen Abelset - second class passenger
Olaus Jorgensen Abelseth was a Norwegian herder who worked on a livestock farm in South Dakota. He was returning home from a trip home after visiting relatives, and in April 1912 boarded the Titanic with five of his family members.
During the evacuation from the Titanic, people were seated in lifeboats for certain reasons. A grown man could board a lifeboat only if he had a good experience in navigation, which would be useful for sailing a boat in the waters of the open ocean. There were only 20 lifeboats, and at least one experienced sailor had to be present on each of them.
Abelset had six years of sailing experience, in the past he was a fisherman, and he was offered a place in another boat, but the man refused. And all because some of his relatives did not know how to swim, and Olaus Jorgensen decided to stay with them to take care of the survival of his family. When the Titanic completely sank, and Olaus's relatives were washed into the water, the man remained afloat in the cold ocean for as long as 20 minutes until he was rescued. When Abelset was in the boat, he actively helped rescue other victims of the shipwreck, pumping out the frozen in the icy water.
7. Hugh Woolner and Maurits Bjornstrem-Steffanssson - first class passengers
Hugh Woolner and Mauritz Björnström-Steffansson were sitting in a smoking parlor when they heard about the collision with an iceberg. The gentlemen escorted their friend to the lifeboats and assisted the crew of the Titanic in arranging for the women and children to board the boats. Hugh and Maurits were on the lower deck when they decided to jump into the last boat while it descended on. Their jump took place 15 minutes before the final sinking of the Titanic, so it was a now or never attempt.
Bjornstrem-Steffanssson successfully jumped into the boat, but Woolner was less fortunate and missed. However, the man managed to grab the edge of the boat, and his friend managed to hold Hugh while he was hanging over the ocean. Ultimately, Woolner was helped into the boat. It was a salvation full of drama.
6. Charles Join - Crew Member (Head Baker)
Most of the victims of the Titanic crash died of hypothermia (hypothermia) within 15 to 30 minutes in icy water, but Charles Joughin is the real proof that every rule has its exceptions. Join was drunk when the steamer hit the iceberg. Despite the extreme conditions and his drunken state, the baker helped a lot other drowning people, throwing deck chairs and chairs overboard the Titanic so that people had something to grab onto and not drown. After the liner finally plunged under water, Charles drifted in the area of the crash site for more than two hours until he was nailed to one of the rescue ships.
Survival experts attribute Join's success to the fact that alcohol raised his body temperature, as well as to the fact that, according to the baker himself, he tried not to submerge his head in ice-cold water. Some critics doubt that the man was in the water for that long, but the fact remains, and Join has witnesses from the lifeboat.
5. Richard Norris Williams - First Class Passenger
Richard Norris Williams traveled with his father first class, and together they sailed to a tennis tournament. After the iceberg collided, both of them remained calm, demanding to open the bar, and spent some time in the gym. The Williams even managed to help one passenger when they realized it was not the time to chill.
As a result, Richard had a chance to watch how his father was covered with a chimney and carried into the sea by one of the waves that washed the Collapsible A folding boat into the ocean. It was one of the last 2 boats on board the sinking Titanic, and the crew did not physically have time to prepare both these life-saving appliances for boarding people and correctly launching into the water.
Later, aboard the British steamer Carpathia, the first to come to the aid of the victims of the Titanic, doctors advised the surviving Norris to amputate both frostbitten legs. The athlete opposed the recommendations of the doctors, and contrary to the initial forecasts of the doctors, not only did he not lose his legs, but also restored their functionality. Moreover, the man returned to tennis and won a gold medal at the 1924 Olympics. In addition, he was awarded for impeccable service in the First World War.
4. Rhoda "Rose" Abbott - third class passenger
Everyone knows the maritime rule "women and children first", but not everyone knows how tough it was. If a boy was over 13 years old, he was no longer considered a child. This did not suit third-class passenger Rhoda Abbott, who was not going to give up her two sons, 13 and 16 years old. Abbott gave up a place in the boat to stay with her children until the end. She was a woman of strong conviction, a member of the Salvation Army Christian humanitarian mission, and a single mother. Rhoda grabbed each child by the hand, and together they jumped over the side of the sinking ship.
Unfortunately, both of her sons drowned, and the mother-heroine surfaced to the surface of the water without them. Like Richard Norris Williams, Rosa grabbed onto the side of the overturned collapsible boat, the Collapsible A. Her legs suffered from hypothermia almost as badly as the tennis player's. Abbott spent 2 weeks in the hospital, but this does not change the fact that she was the only woman to survive after swimming in the icy waters of the Atlantic Ocean on the night of the sinking of the Titanic.
3. Harold Charles Phillimore - crew member (steward)
The famous character Rose Decatur, played by Kate Winslet in James Cameron's film, was fictional, but the romantic story could have been inspired by Steward Harold Charles Phillimore.
The man was found clinging to floating debris in the middle of a sea of corpses when the last lifeboat arrived at the crash site in search of survivors. Phillimore shared part of the drifting wooden beam with another passenger, which in Cameron's plot did not do Rosa Decatur, allowing the love of her life to die of hypothermia. After the tragic shipwreck, Harold Phillimore continued his naval career, achieved outstanding success and earned a medal for his service in the navy during the First World War.
2. Harold Bride - Marconi Wireless Representative
Harold Bride was one of two telegraph operators for the British company Marconi Wireless, which was tasked with providing communication between the ship's passengers and the mainland. Bride was also responsible for navigational messages and warnings from other vessels. During the crash, Harold and his colleague James Phillips were allowed to leave their post in order to escape as soon as possible, but both of them kept the Titanic in touch with the rest of the world until the last minutes of the legendary steamer.
The telegraph operators worked until water began to fill their cabin. Then they realized that it was time to leave the ship. Colleagues boarded the last lifeboat known as Collapsible B. Unfortunately, during launch, it turned upside down, and all of its passengers were in the icy water. Harold Bride had such cold feet that he barely climbed the escape ladder aboard the British steamer Carpathia when it arrived at the scene of the accident to help the surviving victims.
On the way to his rescue, Harold swam past a dead body, which turned out to be his friend James Phillips, who died that terrible night from hypothermia. Subsequently, Bride did not like to talk in public about what happened, because he was "deeply impressed by the whole experience, especially the loss of his colleague and friend Jack Phyllis."
1. Charles Lightoller - Second Rank Captain
Charles Lightoller began his naval career at the age of 13, and had seen a lot by the time he served on the Titanic as a second-class captain. Before signing a contract with the British shipping company White Star, which owned the giant steamer, Lightoller had already survived a shipwreck in Australia, a cyclone in the Indian Ocean, and hitchhiking from western Canada to England after participating in an unsuccessful exploration for gold deposits in the Yukon. ...
When the Titanic hit the iceberg, Lightoller was one of the first to launch lifeboats into the water. At about 2:00 (20 minutes before the liner was completely flooded), the authorities ordered him to get into the boat and save himself, to which Charles courageously replied something like: “No, I'm not damn likely.”
He ended up in the water, swam to the overturned collapsible B, which we mentioned above, and helped maintain order and morale among the survivors. The officer made sure that the boat did not capsize again with all the passengers on board, and seated the people so that no one was washed into the icy ocean.
Captain Second Rank Charles Lightoller was the very last rescued person to jump from the Titanic into the Atlantic Ocean, and was lifted aboard the Carpathia nearly four hours after rescuers from other steamers arrived. In addition, he was the most senior of all surviving crew members, and, according to the charter, participated in the hearings of the United States Congress in the case of the tragic sinking of the Titanic.
Many decades have passed since that terrible disaster, and no one doubted what exactly sent the magnificent Titanic to the bottom of the ocean. When the "unsinkable" ship, the largest, most luxurious ocean liner of its time, crashed into an iceberg on its first voyage in 1912, it carried over 1,500 of its 2,200 passengers to the bottom. When the ship slipped deep into the North Atlantic, the secrets of how and why it sank disappeared along with it.
"Titanic" (English Titanic) - British transatlantic steamer, the second liner of the "Olympic" class. Built in Belfast at the Harland & Wolfe shipyard from 1909 to 1912 by order of the White Star Line shipping company. At the time of commissioning, it was the largest vessel in the world. On the night of April 14-15, 1912, during the maiden voyage, it crashed in the North Atlantic, colliding with an iceberg.
The Titanic was equipped with two four-cylinder steam engines and a steam turbine. The entire power plant had a capacity of 55,000 liters. with. The ship could reach speeds of up to 23 knots (42 km / h). Its displacement, which exceeded the twin ship Olympic by 243 tons, was 52 310 tons. The hull of the ship was made of steel. The hold and lower decks were divided into 16 compartments by bulkheads with sealed doors. If the bottom was damaged, the double bottom prevented the ingress of water into the compartments. Shipbuilder magazine called the Titanic virtually unsinkable, a statement widely circulated in the press and among the public. In accordance with outdated regulations, the Titanic was equipped with 20 lifeboats, with a total capacity of 1,178 people, which was only a third of the maximum load of the steamer.
Titanic (left in the photo) in the port 
"Titanic" in the port
Two government investigations, which were conducted in the wake of the disaster, agreed that it was the iceberg, and not the defects and weakness of the ship itself, that sank the Titanic. Both commissions of inquiry concluded that the ship went to the bottom as a whole, and not in parts. That there were no major faults. The blame for a nightmarish calamity fell solely on the unfortunate captain of the ship I. Smith, who also died along with the entire crew. Smith was blamed for the fact that the Titanic was rushing at a speed of 22 knots (41 km) through the dangerous ice field, well known to sailors, in the dark waters off the coast of Newfoundland. The Titanic incident was over - it seemed once and for all.
Titanic before going out to the ocean 
The tail section of the ship "Titanic" The answers lay at the bottom of the sea
However, doubts and questions about what could have sunk the seemingly indestructible ship remained. In 1985, when oceanographer Robert Ballard, after many years of searching, finally found the remains of a ship at a depth of about 4 km on the ocean floor, he discovered that the Titanic actually split in half on the ocean surface before sinking.
Why did it split in half? - the experts were perplexed. Was the invincible Titanic weak in design?
Oil painting "The Death of the Titanic" Several years have passed since the discovery of Ballard, and now the first wreckage of the ship was raised from the ocean floor. A new hypothesis for the sinking of the Titanic is the low-grade steel used in the construction of the ship. However, a group of researchers concluded that it was not the steel that went into the hull of the ship, it was of low grade. The rivets were of poor quality, the overriding metal pins that tied together the steel plates of the ship's hull. Moreover, recently found wreckage from the bottom of the Titanic directly indicates that the stern of the ship never rose high into the air, as many Titanic experts, including Cameron, initially believed. In fact, the ship crashed into pieces and sank, keeping relatively flat on the surface of the ocean - a clear sign of miscalculations in its design, which were concealed after the disaster.
With the construction of the "Titanic" hurried
The Titanic was built on a tight schedule - in response to a competitive company producing a new generation of high-speed liners. The Titanic and its smaller siblings, the Olympic and Britannic, were the grandest ships in the history of shipbuilding. They were real colossus! - 275 meters from bow to stern! - even tall skyscrapers passed in front of them. Specifically equipped to withstand threats from the North Atlantic, including huge waves and sudden collisions, these sister ships were also - as it goes without saying - the safest. The Titanic could keep afloat even if 4 of its 16 watertight compartments were flooded - a real miracle for a ship of such gigantic size!
Titanic at sea On the night of April 14, 1912, however, in just a few days of the Titanic's maiden voyage, its Achilles heel played a sinister role. The ship was not nimble enough to avoid hitting the iceberg that the Marines were shouting about (the only way to spot an iceberg at the time) at the last minute and in pitch darkness. The Titanic did not collide with the fatal iceberg directly, but drove over it with its right side. Ice punched holes in the ship's steel plates, flooding six "watertight" compartments.
Two hours later, the Titanic overflowed with water and went to the bottom.
Shot from the movie "The Death of the Titanic" Achilles' heel of the Titanic
Experts continued to look for an explanation for the death of the ship equipped in accordance with all safety rules. And they came across a potentially weak link: more than three million rivets that secured the ship's hull. Taking a sample of 48 of these metal rods raised from the ocean floor, scientists found in them a high concentration of "scale" - sludge from smelting. Due to this scale, the metal becomes brittle and can crack.
Not because of the cheapness, but because time was running out, the builders of the Titanic began to use low-quality material. When the Titanic hit the iceberg, the weak steel rods in its nose cracked, exposing the seams in the hull and hastening the sinking of the ship. It is no coincidence that the water, having flooded six compartments held together by low-grade steel rods, stopped exactly where the stainless steel rivets began.
So one of the secrets carried by the Titanic to the bottom of the ocean was discovered. If all the rivets that secured the Titanic were of high quality steel, the disaster could have been avoided. It is not for nothing that immediately after the sinking of the Titanic, two other giant ships - Olympic and Britannic, built at the same shipyard and simultaneously with the Titanic - were urgently and comprehensively reinforced: the steel hull plating doubled and were raised much higher than the bulkhead ... The shipbuilding company clearly admitted defects and unacceptable miscalculations in the expressway - just to keep up with the competition! - the race to build the "Titanic", tried, as best she could, to fix them and hide them from experts, insurance agents and all inquisitive humanity.
In 2005, a new expedition set off to the site of a long-standing disaster. And very soon I found a solution to the questions of concern to everyone. This time, the divers did not look at the main crash site on the seabed, but took a little to the side, where they found two large debris from the bottom of the ship. When they began to analyze the jagged edges of these debris from the bottom, they came to a startling conclusion. It was impossible for the ship to split in such a way, as experts believed for decades - with the stern reared over the ocean at a 45-degree angle, and before the ship's hull split in two. From these significant bottom debris, one can judge that their split was interrupted in the middle - a sure sign that the ship then banked at a small angle (about 11 degrees), that its stern was still buoyant when it cracked. If the rear of the ship were to rise out of the water at a 45-degree angle, as stunningly depicted in Cameron's film, the stern would quickly break off the ship's hull and the whole bottom wreckage found at the bottom would be torn in two.
James Cameron and a team of scientists tried to reconstruct the course of events from the collision of the Titanic with an iceberg to its complete flooding:
Tilting a ship is a matter of life and death
It would seem, what does it matter how exactly the ship split into pieces? For the passengers on the Titanic, it was a matter of life and death. In the movies, the stern part of the ship rises up and then goes, along with the entire hull, to the bottom. This is a protracted dramatic action. In reality, the ship tilted quite a bit as the water flooded the bow, and the passengers on board had a false sense of security.
The passengers and many of the crew did not understand the gravity of the situation. When the water had sufficiently flooded the bow of the hull, the ship, remaining afloat, split in two and sank in minutes.
Interestingly, most of the survivors confirm this unexpected turn of events. Charlie Jugin, the Titanic's chef, stood close to the stern when the ship began to sink, but he saw no sign of a fractured hull. There was no suction funnel, no colossal splash. Dzhugin said that he calmly sailed away from the ship, without even wetting his hair.
Goodbye movie romantic "Titanic"!
Unlike Cameron's film, a giant wave did not go from the crash site - no one sitting in the lifeboats noticed it when the aft part of the ship disappeared under water. One of the former passengers of the Titanic told how he slipped into the water, turned around - and did not see the ship.
So, goodbye to the heartbreaking image of the Titanic with its stern soaring high, covered with doomed passengers, their general dying scream, and now the ship plunges into the water at a steep angle! Unfortunately or fortunately, nothing of the kind actually happened.
Although some of those in the lifeboats saw the stern of the ship being held high in the air, it could have been an optical illusion. When tilted at 11 degrees with propeller screws sticking out in the air, the Titanic, already twenty-story high, seemed even higher, and its roll in the water - even steeper.
Could the Titanic be stronger, more enduring? Undoubtedly. High quality steel rivets and a denser, double-skinned hull could have prevented a catastrophe or, for sure, would have kept the ship afloat many times longer.
On April 14, 1912, the world was still well-fed, arrogant and unsinkable. Mankind subdued the power of steam and electricity - it no longer needed God. Therefore, by the end of Black Saturday, April 14, rock reminded of itself. Heavy salty waves closed over the most ambitious dream of mankind after the Tower of Babel - the magnificent Titanic. Nobody was supposed to survive. It was an execution.
Studying the details of the shipwreck, researchers cannot get rid of a strange feeling: everything that happened was lined up in an endless goal of absurd, inexplicable and tragic misunderstandings. Thousands of minor human oversights merged into one monstrous absurdity, as if everyone around was consciously working to bury a giant liner in the black Atlantic depths.
Just a week before the disaster, when the liner was sailing from Southampton to Cherbah, all the Marines had binoculars. And when the four-tube ship at full speed rushed into the ice-packed Atlantic, no one had binoculars except the captain, but he had no intention of being a lookout.
Miss Mary Young, a second-class passenger, had theatrical binoculars and saw the fatal iceberg half an hour before the impact, but said nothing to anyone. The sailor in the observation "nest" on the mast noticed him two and a half minutes before the edge of the ice floe pierced the side of the Titanic and the water rushed into the "waterproof" compartments of the hold.
But even without binoculars, an experienced sentinel is able to see much earlier - unless, of course, we are talking about a "black" iceberg. They are found extremely rarely, violating all the laws of physics, ice blocks for some reason turn over in the water, exposing to the surface not the white frosty crown of the iceberg, but a translucent dark green part. It is believed that the chance to meet the "black iceberg" is about one in a thousand. Of course, the Titanic got this chance.
Meanwhile, the black ice assassin was spotted by one of the ships ahead of the Titanic on a busy route to New York. Usually, information about dangerous ice floes is immediately transmitted to the ships following behind. But ... it was on April 14 that the ship's radio station "Titanic" went out of order. Radio telegraph operators Phillips and Bride fiddled with the Marconi apparatus for seven hours in a row and repaired it a few hours before the disaster.
However, in seven hours, 250 telegrams accumulated at once, which had to be sent to New York. They were paid in advance by passengers in a hurry to inform their relatives that the Titanic arrived at the port of destination a day ahead of schedule, setting a new record for the speed of crossing the Atlantic Ocean. Therefore, telegraph operators simply did not have time to receive warning messages from other ships.
A thousand absurdities! For some reason, out of 32 boats on the liner, only 20. But these 20, in turn, departed from the ship only half loaded, which is why there were still 473 people on the sinking ship. The third class passengers did not have life jackets. Moreover, none of the crew members were trained to use vests until they left Queenstown.
The ship's captain did not have a direct telephone connection to the radio room, although telephones were in the 50 first-class passenger cabins. At the same time, there are several fatal scenes in the tragedy of absurdities and mistakes that cannot be explained from the point of view of human logic. Twelve miles from the sinking ship was the steamer Californien, frozen overnight, whose crew watched with interest as white flares flashed over the unfamiliar ship on the horizon.
"Falling stars?" - suggested the officer of the watch "Californien". "No - crackers!" - answered the cabin boy with a smile. In vain did the fourth officer, Boxhall, barely staying on the tilted deck of the Titanic, released his "crackers" eight times into the starry sky. After all, signal flares, meaning a call for help, are red. Everyone at sea knows this. And if the officer from the Titanic had fired a red rocket, the Californien would have managed to lift 1400 people on board, frozen in the icy water among the wreckage.
But he let out white ones. Because on board the ship were Turkish baths and pools, palms and chapels, caged parrots and boxes of first-class Burgundy, but there were no red flares. By whose will the Californian radio operator turned off his receiver and went to bed just a few minutes before the first signal for help was broadcast from the nearby Titanic.
"CQD" - the then analogue of "SOS" - was heard even in ... Egypt, in Port Said, 3000 miles from the scene of the tragedy, but not on the "Californien", in the line of sight. An impenetrable magical wall rose between the two ships that night - they were close, but forever far from each other. Therefore, on the sinking steamer, they did not notice the signals that the officer of “Californiena.
And he submitted them just in case, but did not receive an answer. Of the two thousand people rushing along the rearing deck of the liner, no one noticed the flashes of light on the horizon.
Bitter coincidences the very next day after the tragedy gave rise to persistent rumors about the mystical doom of the Titanic. They remembered about the "bad sign" - in the very first minutes of the voyage, leaving the port of Southampton, the Titanic almost collided with the ship "New York", docked at a nearby pier.
The powerful propellers of the Titanic created underwater currents of such force that New York was irresistibly pulled towards the giant liner - the collision was avoided with difficulty. Then the surviving passengers began to talk about all the new mysterious signs that did not bode well for the Titanic from the very first minutes of its voyage.
The launching ceremony of the Titanic on May 31, 1911 was organized with great pomp: thousands of guests and journalists were invited, special postcards and souvenirs were issued; locomotive oil and liquid soap. Rockets were launched into the sky, bottles of champagne were broken in dozens ... The organizers for some reason forgot only one thing - they did not consecrate the ship according to the Christian maritime custom.
Maybe it all started when the name of the ship was given? The Titans, children of the earth goddess Gaia, in Hellenic mythology personified the blind, unbridled and aggressive forces of nature. The Titans challenged the Olympian celestials, intending to seize power over the world - and each time they were defeated and driven back into the deep bowels of their mother earth.
The creators of "Titanic" - bosses of the transatlantic company "White Star" Bruce Ismay and Lord James Pirri - conceived their creation as a kind of ultra-modern challenge to nature, thrown down to her by the scientific and technological revolution. Like the Eiffel Tower, the steamer was intended to demonstrate the triumph of the audacious human mind. It was a hundred feet longer than former Atlantic champion Lusitania, owned by rival Cunard, and 1004 tons heavier than its younger brother, the Olympic.
An attack of gigantomania took possession of the creators so much that they built four pipes on the Titanic, although in reality only three worked (therefore, shots from the films, where all four pipes of the Titanic are full of smoke, cause a smile). The fourth was ordered to be added by the owner of the holding, multimillionaire Pearson Morgan.
The first voyage of the Titanic was conceived as an event comparable in scale to the main super shows of the century. A first class ticket cost about $ 50,000 in today's money. Hundreds of people did not pay money because they needed to go to New York. They bought tickets to the show. They got it.
All newspapers wrote about the "unsinkability" of the "Titanic": a system was created that put an end to the centuries-old struggle of man with the elements. Even icebergs are not scary anymore, because it was not the first time, having collided with ice floes, the steamers remained afloat - in 1879 it happened with the "Arizona", in 1879 - "Concordia", in 1911 - with the "Columbia". All vessels received holes below the waterline, but none of them sank. The Titanic was better prepared to meet the iceberg than any of these steamers.
He sank in an hour and a half. When the news of his death reached London, one of the local warlock masters calculated that the ship's number of the ship - 390904 - after the operation of "converting" numbers into letters reads like a short blasphemous phrase "No Pope". This observation became another argument in the treasury of "facts" and "prophecies", which, in the opinion of many, predetermined the fate of the Titanic.
Among the first, by the way, there was a version about the mysterious "cursed diamond", which was allegedly in the possession of one of the passengers (information about the diamond could not be verified, but it is known for certain that the pearl necklace of Mrs. Widener who escaped was then worth 16 million). They also talked about a certain "universal villain" who was on board the ship: as if providence, sending fifteen hundred people to the bottom, was in fact pursuing the goal of destroying only one of the passengers. The search for the villain continues to this day.
The list of famous personalities is very long - along with the Titanic, Colonel Archibald Butt, military adviser to the US President Taft, millionaire Gutenheim, who, according to legend, managed to change into a tailcoat in order to meet his death in a flooded cabin like a gentleman, died. The victim of the Titanic was another millionaire, 21-year-old Esley Widener (his mother came to the port of New York to meet the Titanic on her own train of four Pullman cars).
The ocean floor became the grave of the Strauss couple, owners of the Macys chain of stores, which is still thriving in the United States. The death of these people is also inexplicable. If to argue logically, for someone, but millionaires and aristocrats, first of all, there would be places in lifeboats.
There were almost three times more people of the lower classes among the dead, according to statistics. And the controversy still continues to this day: is it true that the passengers of the third class were locked in the holds. This leads some scientists to put forward their version of the ship's fatal doom. In their opinion, the fatal purpose of the catastrophe is to aggravate the class struggle in the Old and New Worlds.
Indeed, the total wealth of first-class passengers on the Titanic exceeded $ 500 million. And the passenger of the men from the first class saved more than the women of the children from the third. And this despite the strict maritime rules "Places in boats - for women and children!" “On the example of the Titanic, the poor were convinced that if the world perishes, only the rich will survive,” said a third-class passenger who escaped in one interview ...
However, if you follow this logic, among the 705 survivors, there must have been John Jacob Astor, one of the richest men of his Time. He was returning with his young wife (the second in a row and already pregnant) from a trip to Egypt. A day after the sinking of the liner, the secular publication American published a 4-page article about the deceased Mr. Astor and only at the end mentioned the rest of the victims of the crash.
Astor's wife escaped, and her husband's disfigured body was identified only by the monogram on his shirt - he was fished out of the water a week later. Astor had to be saved, the startled New York wealthy repeated in shock. Much was not supposed to happen that night, but providence had its own view of the Titanic. Isn't every word dictated by pride in the book of the deceased John Jacob Astor, in which he tells how a man will live on Mars and Saturn in 2000, and giant steamers “will cross the Atlantic in four and a half days” and “will be stable like a fortress "?
As the Titanic plunged into the ocean depths, eight musicians on the mangled deck continued to play - they died, all eight, when the waves swept them overboard overnight. When the bow of the steamer came off and went deep, they played "Autumn". And then they started the last song. It was called "God Is Getting Closer."
The dead body of the Titanic sank into the depths, and now the people in the lifeboats were slowly freezing to death. Standing nearby "Californien", as if in the grip of glamor, was still unable to notice them and come to their aid. The rest of the ships were terribly far away - the Russian steamer "Burma" heard the "SOS" and rushed to help, but even at full steam it could keep up only in the morning.
Mount Temple is 60 miles, Baltic is 55 miles, Olympic is 70 ... Salt water does not freeze at minus one degree Celsius. The crests of cold waves rolled over the low sides of the boats, which were mostly women and children, many of them in hysterics tried to jump overboard to share the fate of their loved ones.
In boat "A" people sat waist-deep in icy water, and after half an hour the bodies of two women had to be thrown overboard - they froze to death right in the boat. Rescue boat number 12 was twice covered with a wave - it did not sink only by a miracle. As the doctors later calculated, any of the 705 surviving passengers had no chance to live more than 12 hours ...
The small, underpowered vessel Carpathia was 58 miles southeast of the crash site when the ship's radio operator Francis Cottam heard the hysterical "CQD" from the sinking Titanic. He recalled later that he caught the signal at the very last moment, already taking off the headphones from his head and going to sleep. Kottam had no replacement. If he had fallen asleep five minutes earlier, the captain of the Carpathia would never have known that the Titanic was already dying. The captain's name was Arthur Rostron. He never drank, smoked or cursed. Even in the age of steam and electricity, in the age of the most ambitious dreams of mankind, he has not forgotten how to pray.
Subordinates nicknamed Rostron "electric spark" - for the ability to instantly make volitional decisions. This man's willpower was well known. At the age of 23, when Rostron joined the Kunard company, he forbade himself to drink alcohol once and for all. He stopped smoking two years later. He scolded extremely rarely - exactly once a month, as one of the officers counted - and every time afterwards he asked aloud the Lord for forgiveness for the foul language that had escaped his tongue.
For the first time, Arthur Rostron went to sea as a boy, at the age of 13 - with his father. They say that it was during the "sea baptism" of the boy that a certain incident took place that had a strong impact on his psyche - since then Rostron prayed every day.
When the radio operator Kottam, with his face twisted with horror, burst into the captain's bridge and mumbled something about the sinking Titanic, Arthur Rostron, as usual, made a decision instantly. First, he turned to the crucifix hanging on the wall and whispered a few words. Then he turned to his subordinates. “We are turning the ship around,” he said. It was a very risky decision - there were already eight hundred passengers on board the Carpathia.
Rushing to the aid of the victims of the disaster, the captain sent the steamer to the terrible area of icebergs, one of which turned out to be fatal for the Titanic. "Karpathia" with its only pipe developed a speed of only 14 knots - therefore Rostron ordered to transfer all additional resources of steam, hot water and electricity to the boilers. At full speed, a small and unsightly ship flew into the kingdom of icebergs. Needless to say, the sentinels, alas, also did not have binoculars? Providence took into account a lot, it did not take into account the will of Arthur Rostron.
The owners of the "Titanic" were going to bring the liner to New York a day ahead of schedule, so that there was a record. The record was set by "Karpatia" - she came to the crash site almost an hour earlier than she could and than everyone expected. Captain Rostron won only an hour from fate, but an hour turned out to be more expensive than a whole day. They were in time. 705 passengers were taken aboard.
"Carpathia" now really resembled a crowded Noah - an ark: dining rooms and corridors were hastily converted into hospital wards, tables were turned into beds, and yet dozens of people had enough space only on the floor .. All doctors from among the passengers of "Carpathia" were mobilized for treatment sick and wounded, all healthy women are sent to the kitchen to cook hot broth and coffee ...
When the overloaded Carpathia slowly and cautiously entered the New York port and docked at pier 41, when the crowd on the dock burst into tears and the flashlights were fired, the second Carpathia officer recalled one detail in a conversation with reporters: throughout the four-hour raid to the place where the Titanic was destroyed, Captain Rostron ... prayed.
“His lips were moving,” the officer said, “this is understandable: at that speed, we also had almost no chance to spot the iceberg in time.” A few days later Rostron himself confessed to one of the journalists: “I still cannot get rid of a strange feeling.
When we walked among the ice, it seemed to me that someone else's hand was on the steering wheel. It was she who drove the ship. " It is possible that it was precisely this feeling that prompted him to give the order for a short church service on board the Carpathia immediately after the last of the victims was taken aboard. Only after the end of his service Rostron gave the order to move on to New York.
Arthur Rostron overcame the will of providence. Or maybe it just made room. After all, the main thing has already been done: a terrible blow has been dealt to the pride of mankind. That's enough ... And in honor of Arthur Rostron, a special medal of the US Congress was issued.
He was knighted by British royal decree. After a while, Sir Arthur became the head of the entire passenger fleet of the Cunard Company. In many cities of England, the USA, France and Ireland, monuments have been erected to him. One of them - in the vicinity of Southampton - bears the inscription - “Sir Arthur Rostron. Who transformed the "age of steam" into the "age of the spirit."
Noah's ark called "Carpathia" quietly and unnoticed by everyone sank on July 1, 1918. An old 13,600-ton vessel was hit by three torpedoes fired by a German submarine. Of the 75 people, five died from the explosion, the remaining 70 safely reached the nearby British warship Snowdrop. The Carpathia disappeared under water very quickly in just 15 minutes. However, she never claimed the title "unsinkable".
And what happened to the other captain, Stanley Lord, who took his Californian out from under the very nose of trouble? Both the British and American commissions to investigate the circumstances of the sinking of the Titanic found him indirectly guilty of this. He was removed from the naval service and died in obscurity. Stanley Lord's son tried hard to rehabilitate his father's name. In the 1950s, he repeatedly applied to both commissions with requests for a re-investigation. But it was all in vain. Stanley Lord fulfilled the will of providence. It no longer needed him and rewarded him with oblivion.
100 years ago, on the night of April 15, 1912, after a collision with an iceberg in the waters of the Atlantic Ocean, the Titanic liner sank, with more than 2,200 people on board.
The Titanic is the largest passenger ship of the early 20th century, the second of three twin steamers produced by the British White Star Line.
The Titanic's length was 260 meters, width - 28 meters, displacement - 52 thousand tons, height from the waterline to the boat deck - 19 meters, distance from the keel to the top of the pipe - 55 meters, top speed - 23 knots. Journalists compared it in length with three city blocks, and in height with an 11-storey building.
The Titanic had eight steel decks, located one above the other at a distance of 2.5-3.2 meters. To ensure safety, the ship had a double bottom, and its hull was divided by 16 watertight compartments. Watertight bulkheads rose from the second bottom to the deck. The ship's chief designer, Thomas Andrews, said that even if four of the 16 compartments were filled with water, the liner could continue on its way.
The interiors of the cabins on decks B and C were made in 11 styles. The third class passengers on decks E and F were separated from the first and second class by gates located in different parts of the ship.
Before the departure of the Titanic on its maiden and last voyages, it was emphasized that 10 millionaires would be on board the ship on the maiden voyage, and gold and jewelry worth hundreds of millions of dollars would be in its safes. American industrialist, heir to the mining magnate Benjamin Guggenheim, millionaire with a young wife, Assistant to US Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft Major Archibald Willingham Butt, member of the US Congress Isidore Strauss, actress Dorothy Gibson, wealthy public figure British model Margaret Brown and many other famous and wealthy people of that time.
On April 10, 1912, at noon, the Titanic superliner set off on its only journey from Southampton (UK) to New York (USA), stopping at Cherbourg (France) and Queenstown (Ireland).
During the four days of the journey, the weather was clear and the sea calm.
On April 14, 1912, on the fifth day of the voyage, several ships sent messages about icebergs in the area of the ship's route. For most of the day, the radio was broken, and many messages were not noticed by the radio operators, and the captain did not pay due attention to others.
By the evening, the temperature began to drop, reaching zero Celsius by 22:00.
At 23:00 a message was received from the Californian about the presence of ice, but the Titanic radio operator cut off the radio exchange before the Californian had time to report the coordinates of the area: the telegraph operator was busy sending personal messages from passengers.
At 23:39, two lookouts noticed an iceberg in front of the liner and reported it by phone to the bridge. The oldest of the officers, William Murdock, gave the command to the helmsman: "Left rudder."
At 23:40 "Titanic" is in the underwater part of the ship. Of the 16 watertight compartments of the vessel, six were cut through.
At 00:00 on April 15, the designer of the Titanic, Thomas Andrews, was called to the captain's bridge in order to assess the severity of the damage. After reporting the incident and inspecting the ship, Andrews informed everyone present that the ship would inevitably sink.
On the ship, the bow began to be felt. Captain Smith ordered the lifeboats to be uncovered and the crew and passengers called for evacuation.
On the orders of the captain, the radio operators began sending out distress signals, which they transmitted for two hours, until the captain relieved the telegraph operators from duty a few minutes before the ship sank.
Distress signals, but they were too far from the Titanic.
At 00:25 the coordinates of the "Titanic" were taken by the ship "Karpatia", located from the crash site at a distance of 58 nautical miles, which was 93 kilometers. ordered to immediately head to the site of the Titanic disaster. Rushing to the rescue, the ship was able to reach a record speed of 17.5 knots - at the maximum speed possible for a vessel of 14 knots. For this Rostron ordered to turn off all appliances that consume electricity and heating.
At 01:30 the Titanic operator telegraphed: "We are in small boats." By order of Captain Smith, his assistant, Charles Lightoller, who led the rescue of people on the port side of the liner, put only women and children in the boats. The men, according to the captain, were to remain on deck until all the women got into the boats. First Mate William Murdock on the starboard side for men, if there were no women and children in the line of passengers gathered on deck.
Around 02:15, the Titanic's bow sank sharply, the ship moved significantly forward, and a huge wave swept across the decks, sweeping many passengers overboard.
The Titanic sank at about 02:20 minutes.
At about 04:00 am, about three and a half hours after receiving the distress call, the Carpathia arrived at the Titanic crash site. The vessel took on board 712 passengers and crew members of the Titanic, after which it safely arrived in New York. Among those rescued were 189 crew members, 129 male passengers and 394 women and children.
The death toll, according to various sources, ranged from 1400 to 1517 people. According to official figures, after the crash, 60% of passengers are first-class cabins, 44% are second-class cabins, and 25% are third-class.
The last surviving passenger of the Titanic, who traveled aboard the ship at the age of nine weeks, died on May 31, 2009 at 97 years old. The woman's ashes were scattered over the sea from the pier in the port of Southampton, from where the Titanic set sail in 1912.
The material was prepared on the basis of information from RIA Novosti and open sources
