The catastrophe of the ocean liner "Titanic" is not the largest in the history of navigation. However, in terms of the massive impact on the minds, the death of the largest ocean vessel at that time surpasses all other sea misfortunes.
Even before the first voyage, the Titanic became a symbol of the era. The huge vessel was equipped with the latest technology, and the passenger areas were decorated with the luxury of a wealthy hotel. Even in the third-class cabins, basic amenities were provided. The Titanic had a swimming pool, squash and golf courts, a gym, and a wide variety of dining options, from luxury restaurants to pubs and third-class bars. The ship was equipped with watertight bulkheads, so they immediately began to call it unsinkable.
Part of luxury apartments
The team selected the appropriate one. In those years, among captains, especially young ones, the desire to master related professions was widespread. In particular, it was possible to pass an exam for a navigator and obtain an “Extra” patent. On the Titanic, not only Captain Smith had such a patent, but also two of his assistants. Due to the coal strike, steamers across the UK were idle and the owners of the Titanic were able to recruit the best talent. And the sailors themselves were eager for an unprecedented ship.
The width and length of the promenade deck give an idea of the size of the Titanic
And in these almost ideal conditions, the first voyage of the ship ends in a terrible disaster. And it cannot be said that the “Titanic” had serious design defects or the team made catastrophic mistakes. The ship was destroyed by a chain of troubles, each of which was not critical. But in the aggregate, they launched the Titanic to the bottom and claimed the lives of one and a half thousand passengers.
1. During the construction of the Titanic, there were 254 accidents with workers. Of these, 69 accounted for the installation of equipment, and 158 workers were injured at the shipyard. 8 people died, and in those days it was considered acceptable - one death per 100,000 pounds of investment was considered a good indicator, and the construction of the "Titanic" cost 1.5 million pounds, that is, 7 people also "saved". Another person died when the Titanic's hull was already being launched.
Before launching
2. Only for the maintenance of the boilers of the giant ship (length 269 m, width 28 m, displacement 55,000 tons), a daily watch of 73 people was required. They worked in shifts of 4 hours, and still the work of the stokers and their assistants was very difficult. The Titanic burned 650 tons of coal a day, leaving 100 tons of ash. All this moved through the hold without any mechanization.
Before launching
3. The ship had its own orchestra. Normally, it was supposed to consist of six people, but eight musicians went on the first voyage. The requirements for their qualifications included knowing by heart more than 300 tunes from a special list. After the end of one composition, the leader only had to name the next number. All Titanic musicians were killed.
4. More than 300 km of cables were laid along the Titanic, which fed electrical appliances, including 10,000 tantalum incandescent lamps, 76 powerful fans, 520 heaters in first class cabins and 48 electric clocks. The wires from the steward call buttons also ran nearby. There were 1,500 such buttons.
5. The unsinkability of the Titanic was actually a publicity stunt. Yes, there were indeed 15 bulkheads in the interior of the ship, but their water tightness was very doubtful. There really were bulkheads, but they were of different heights, worst of all - they had doors. They closed hermetically, but like any doors, they were weak points in the walls. But solid bulkheads of the required height reduced the commercial efficiency of the vessel. Money, as always, defeated security. The outstanding Russian shipbuilder A. N. Krylov expressed this idea more poetically. He sent a group of his students to build the Titanic and knew about the unreliability of the bulkheads. Therefore, he had every reason to write in a special article that "Titanic" died from depraved luxury.
6. The biography of Captain “Titanic” Edward John Smith serves as an excellent illustration of the processes that led to the end of the British Empire. Drake and the rest of the pirates with marque papers, and Cook, who sent the Lords of the Admiralty to hell, were replaced by captains, for whom the main thing was a salary (more than 1,500 pounds a year, a lot of money) and an accident-free bonus (up to 20% of the salary). Prior to the Titanic, Smith put his ships aground (at least three times), damaged the transported goods (at least twice) and sank other people's ships (three cases were documented). After all these incidents, he always managed to write a report according to which he was not guilty of anything. In the advertisement for the only flight of the Titanic, he was called the captain who did not suffer a single crash. Most likely, Smith had a good paw in the leadership of White Star Lane, and he could always find a common language with millionaire travelers.
Captain Smith
7. There were enough boats on the Titanic. There were even more of them than necessary. True, the necessity and sufficiency were determined not by the number of passengers, but by the special regulatory law “On commercial transportation”. The law was relatively recent - passed in 1894. It stated that on vessels with a displacement of 10,000 tons (there were no large ones at the time of the adoption of the law), the shipowner must have lifeboats with a volume of 9,625 cubic meters. feet. One person occupies about 10 cubic meters. feet, so the boats on the ship had to fit 962 people. On "Titanic" the volume of the boats was 11 327 cubic meters. feet, which was even more than normal. True, according to the certificate of the Ministry of Trade, the ship could carry 3,547 people along with the crew. Thus, at maximum load, two-thirds of the people on the Titanic were left without space in the lifeboats. On the unfortunate night of April 14, 1912, there were 2,207 people on board.
8. Insurance "Titanic" cost $ 100. For this amount, the Atlantic company undertook to pay $ 5 million in the event of a complete loss of the vessel. The amount is by no means small - all over the world in 1912 ships were insured for about $ 33 million.
9. The “stopping distance” of the vessel - the distance that the “Titanic” traveled after switching from “full forward” to “full backward” before stopping - was 930 meters. It took the ship more than three minutes to stop completely.
10. The victims of the "Titanic" could have been much more, if not for the strike of British coal miners. Because of her, the steamboat traffic was half-paralyzed, even in those shipping companies that had their own coal reserves. White Star Lane was one of them, but tickets for the first flight of the Titanic were sold sluggishly - potential passengers were still afraid of becoming hostages of the strike. Therefore, only 1,316 passengers climbed onto the deck of the ship - 922 in Southampton and 394 in Queenstown and Cherbourg. The vessel was just over half loaded.
In Southampton
11. Tickets for the first Titanic voyage were sold at the following prices: 1st class cabin - $ 4,350, 1st class seat - $ 150, 2nd class - $ 60, 3rd class - from 15 to 40 dollars with meals. There were also luxury apartments. The decoration and furnishings of the cabins, even in the second class, were gorgeous. For comparison, prices: highly skilled workers then earned about $ 10 a week, general laborers half as much. According to experts, the dollar has fallen in price 16 times since then.
First Class Lounge
Main staircase
12. Food was delivered to the Titanic in wagons: 68 tons of meat, poultry and game, 40 tons of potatoes, 5 tons of fish, 40,000 eggs, 20,000 bottles of beer, 1,500 bottles of wine and tons of other food and drinks.
13. There was not a single Russian on board the Titanic. There were several dozen subjects of the Russian Empire, but they were either representatives of the national outskirts, or Jews who then lived outside the Pale of Settlement.
14. On April 14th, the Titanic post office celebrated a holiday - five employees celebrated the 44th birthday of their colleague Oscar Woody. He, like his colleagues, did not survive the disaster.
15. The collision of the "Titanic" with an iceberg took place on April 14 at 23:40. There is an official version of how it went, and several additional and alternative ones explaining the actions of the crew and the behavior of the vessel. In fact, the Titanic, whose lookouts had seen the iceberg just a minute earlier, hit it tangentially and suffered several holes in its starboard side. Five compartments were damaged at once. The designers did not count on such damage. The evacuation began immediately after midnight. For an hour and a half, it went on in an organized manner, then panic began. At 2:20 am, the Titanic broke in two and sank.
16. Killed 1496 people. This figure is generally accepted, although estimates fluctuate - some passengers did not show up for the flight, but were not deleted from the lists, there could be "hares", some traveled under an assumed name, etc. 710 people were saved. The crew did their duty: only one in five survived, although in general one in three of those on the Titanic survived.
17. The victims, perhaps, would have been fewer or they could have been avoided altogether, if not for the fateful order of Captain Smith to continue moving forward. If the Titanic had stayed in place, the water would not have come into the hold so quickly, and it is likely that the ship would have been able to stay afloat even until sunrise. On the move, more water entered the flooded compartments than the pumps pumped it out. Smith issued his order under pressure from Joseph Ismay, head of the White Star Line. Ismay escaped and suffered no punishment. Arriving in New York, the first thing he did was order that no ship of his company should go on a voyage without boats, the number of seats in which corresponds to the number of passengers and crew. An enlightenment that cost one and a half thousand lives ...
18. Investigation of the Titanic disaster took place both in England and in the United States. Both times the commissions of inquiry came to the conclusion that there were violations, but there is no one to punish: the perpetrators died. Captain Smith ignored the ice hazard radiogram. The radio operators did not deliver the last, just screaming telegrams about icebergs (the ships just lay down in a drift, which is very dangerous), they were busy transmitting private messages at $ 3 per word. Captain's mate William Murdock performed an incorrect maneuver, during which the iceberg hit on a tangent. All these people rested on the ocean floor.
19. Several relatives of the deceased passengers on the Titanic have succeeded in winning claims for damages, but during the appeals the payments have been steadily reduced without causing significant damage to the owners of the Titanic. However, their business reputation was already undermined.
20. The wreckage of the "Titanic" was first discovered in 1985 by the American researcher Robert Ballard, who was looking for sunken submarines on the instructions of the US Navy. Ballard saw that the severed bow of the ship stuck into the bottom, and the rest collapsed during the dive. The largest part of the stern lies 650 meters from the bow. Further research showed that the lifting of the most famous ship in the history of navigation was out of the question: almost all wooden parts were destroyed by microbes, and the metal underwent severe corrosion.
"Titanic" under water
