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Titanic Deep Dive: Design, Disaster & Legacy | History for Sleep · Sleepless History: Sleep Documentaries

0:00
[UNKNOWN]: Welcome back to Sleepless History, the podcast where we take the grandest, most sweeping stories from the human past and lay them out for you.
0:10
[UNKNOWN]: Slowly, carefully, and in enough detail that your mind can finally settle down and drift away.
0:19
[UNKNOWN]: I am so glad you are here tonight.
0:21
[UNKNOWN]: Tonight, we are going to talk about a ship.
0:25
[UNKNOWN]: Not just any ship, of course.
0:27
[UNKNOWN]: We are going to talk about the most famous vessel in the history of human sea fairing.
0:33
[UNKNOWN]: A ship so large, so celebrated, and so catastrophically doomed that more than a century after she slipped beneath the cold waters of the North Atlantic, her name still commands a kind of reverence whenever it is spoken.
0:49
[UNKNOWN]: We are going to talk about the Titanic.
0:52
[UNKNOWN]: Now, you already know how the story ends.
0:56
[UNKNOWN]: Everyone does.
0:57
[UNKNOWN]: The ship hits an iceberg.
0:59
[UNKNOWN]: The ship sinks.
1:01
[UNKNOWN]: More than 1,500 people die.
1:04
[UNKNOWN]: That much is common knowledge embedded into the culture so deeply that it has become almost mythological.
1:11
[UNKNOWN]: One of those rare historical events.
1:14
[UNKNOWN]: that transcends the history books and becomes something else entirely.
1:18
[UNKNOWN]: A symbol, a metaphor, a ghost.
1:22
[UNKNOWN]: But tonight, we are not going to rush to the ending.
1:26
[UNKNOWN]: We are going to take our time.
1:28
[UNKNOWN]: we are going to start at the very beginning with the business decisions, the sketches on drafting tables, the foundry fires and the ambitions of men who believed they could build something truly extraordinary.
1:45
[UNKNOWN]: We are going to walk through that ship, stem to stern, and understand what it actually was before we talk about what happened to it.
1:54
[UNKNOWN]: We are going to spend time with the people on board, not just the famous ones, but the cold trimmers and the kitchen staff, and the third class passengers sleeping six to a cabin, and then slowly and carefully.
2:10
[UNKNOWN]: We are going to examine everything that went wrong, not just the iceberg, but the chain of decisions, the cultural assumptions,
2:18
[UNKNOWN]: the physical laws and the extraordinary bad luck that conspired to send her to the bottom.
2:27
[UNKNOWN]: Chapter one, the making of a Leviathan, conception, construction, and design.
2:37
[UNKNOWN]: It is hard to overstate how transformative the late 19th and early 20th centuries were for human transportation.
2:46
[UNKNOWN]: In the span of a single lifetime, a person born in 1850 could watch the world shrink from something vast and slow and largely unknowable into something connected, accelerating and increasingly small.
3:01
[UNKNOWN]: Railroads had already stitched together the interiors of continents.
3:06
[UNKNOWN]: The telegraph had collapsed the time it took for information to travel, and the steam-powered ocean liner had made the crossing of the Atlantic Ocean not just possible for ordinary people, but relatively routine.
3:20
[UNKNOWN]: By 1900, the North Atlantic shipping route was one of the most commercially important corridors on earth.
3:28
[UNKNOWN]: Millions of emigrants were crossing from Europe to North America every decade, fleeing poverty, persecution, and limited futures in the old world, seeking land and opportunity in the new.
3:40
[UNKNOWN]: And alongside that enormous human tide ran a smaller but equally vital stream of wealthy passengers, businessmen, socialites, diplomats, and tourists, for whom the ocean crossing was not just a necessity,
3:57
[UNKNOWN]: but an experience to be made as comfortable and as impressive as possible.
4:02
[UNKNOWN]: The shipping companies that serve this route understood that they were in two businesses at once.
4:08
[UNKNOWN]: On one hand, they were in the business of mass transportation, moving enormous numbers of people across the ocean as efficiently and as cheaply as possible.
4:19
[UNKNOWN]: On the other hand, they were in the business of luxury, catering to the first class passengers who paid enormous sums for their tickets and who expected, in return, an experience that rivaled the finest hotels in London or New York.
4:36
[UNKNOWN]: The company that would build the Titanic was called The White Star Line.
4:42
[UNKNOWN]: founded in 1845, and by the early 1900s operating under the ownership of the American financier, Jay, Pierpont Morgan's shipping trust, known as the International Mercantile Marine Company.
4:57
[UNKNOWN]: White Star had a long and distinguished history on the North Atlantic route, but by the early years of the 20th century,
5:06
[UNKNOWN]: the company was feeling the pressure of serious competition.
5:10
[UNKNOWN]: Their principal rival was the Cunard line.
5:13
[UNKNOWN]: Cunard had recently launched two ships, the Lucetania and the Mauritania, that were engineering marvels.
5:21
[UNKNOWN]: The Mauritania, in particular, was the fastest ocean liner in the world.
5:27
[UNKNOWN]: Capable of crossing the Atlantic in under five days and holding the blue rye band, the informal prize awarded to the fastest transatlantic crossing.
5:38
[UNKNOWN]: These ships were technological triumphs and they were drawing passengers, particularly wealthy passengers, away from white star.
5:48
[UNKNOWN]: J. Bruce Isme, the chairman of the white star line, understood that trying to outrun
5:57
[UNKNOWN]: The investment required to build ships faster than the Mauritania would be enormous, and the engineering margins were shrinking.
6:04
[UNKNOWN]: So instead of competing on speed, is made decided to compete on something else entirely.
6:11
[UNKNOWN]: Size, comfort, and luxury.
6:14
[UNKNOWN]: If white star could not build the fastest ships in the world, it would build the biggest and most magnificent.
6:22
[UNKNOWN]: In the summer of 1907, Izme had dinner with Lord William James Perry, the chairman of Harland and Wolfe, the bell-fast shipbuilding firm,
6:33
[UNKNOWN]: that had a long standing and exclusive relationship with the white starline.
6:38
[UNKNOWN]: By the end of that evening, or at least according to the legend that grew around the meeting, the two men had sketched out the concept for three enormous new ships.
6:50
[UNKNOWN]: They would be called the Olympic, the Titanic, and the gigantic.
6:56
[UNKNOWN]: They would be the largest moving objects ever constructed by human beings.
7:02
[UNKNOWN]: And they would be so magnificent, so complete in their appointments, so extraordinary in their passenger experience that no one who traveled on them would ever want to sail on anything else.
7:15
[UNKNOWN]: The formal design work began in earnest in 1908.
7:19
[UNKNOWN]: The lead designer was Thomas Andrews, a nephew of Lord Perry, and the head of Harland and Wolf's design department.
7:27
[UNKNOWN]: Andrews was by all accounts, a brilliant and deeply conscientious engineer.
7:33
[UNKNOWN]: a man who cared not just about the grand sweep of a ship's profile, but about the smallest details of its interior fittings.
7:42
[UNKNOWN]: He would personally oversee the design of everything, from the massive reciprocating steam engines at the heart of the ship to the chairs in the first-class smoking room.
7:53
[UNKNOWN]: The specifications that emerged from Andrew's department were extraordinary.
7:59
[UNKNOWN]: The Titanic.
8:00
[UNKNOWN]: The second of the three planned ships would be 882 feet long and 92 feet wide.
8:04
[UNKNOWN]: She would displace 46,328 tons.
8:05
[UNKNOWN]: She would stand approximately 175 feet from her heel to the top of her four funnels.
8:10
[UNKNOWN]: Though only three of those funnels would actually function, the fourth
8:28
[UNKNOWN]: was added partly for aesthetic balance, and partly because the design team believed that passengers associated large numbers of funnels with power and reliability.
8:39
[UNKNOWN]: She would contain nine decks accessible to passengers, with additional decks below for boiler rooms, machinery, and cargo.
8:49
[UNKNOWN]: She would be powered by a combination of two massive reciprocating steam engines and one low pressure steam turbine.
8:57
[UNKNOWN]: driving three propellers, one on each side, and one at the centre, and she would be capable of a top speed of approximately 23 knots, or about 26 miles per hour.
9:10
[UNKNOWN]: Now, 26 miles per hour does not sound very fast by modern standards.
9:17
[UNKNOWN]: But on the ocean in 1912, for a ship of this size,
9:25
[UNKNOWN]: The engines alone were extraordinary objects.
9:29
[UNKNOWN]: Each of the two main reciprocating engines, the piston-driven machines that drove the two outer propellers, stood 40 feet high, weighed over 1,000 tons, and generated around 15,000 indicated horsepower.
9:46
[UNKNOWN]: Together with the turbine engine at the centre,
9:48
[UNKNOWN]: The Titanic's propulsion system produced a combined output of around 46,000 indicated horsepower.
9:56
[UNKNOWN]: That is a great deal of power, and generating it required a corresponding amount of fuel.
10:02
[UNKNOWN]: The ship's boiler rooms, there were five of them, occupying a large portion of the lower decks,
10:12
[UNKNOWN]: each roughly 18 feet in diameter, and between 11 and 15 feet in length.
10:19
[UNKNOWN]: These boilers were fed by 159 furnaces, which burned coal, a great deal of coal.
10:28
[UNKNOWN]: At normal operating speed, the Titanic consumed approximately 620 tons of coal every single day.
10:37
[UNKNOWN]: On a transatlantic voyage of roughly five to seven days, that meant the ship required somewhere between 3,000 and 5,000 tons of coal, just for propulsion, with additional reserves kept on board for safety margins.
10:53
[UNKNOWN]: This coal was stored in large bunkers built into the sides of the ship alongside the boiler rooms.
11:00
[UNKNOWN]: and it was the job of a group of workers called Trimmers to move it.
11:05
[UNKNOWN]: Trimmers would shovel coal from the bunkers into wheelbarrows, push those wheelbarrows to the furnace fronts, and deposit the coal in heaps where the stokers also called firemen,
11:19
[UNKNOWN]: could shovel it directly into the blazing furnace openings.
11:23
[UNKNOWN]: It was brutal, filthy, enormously hot work, performed in conditions that were genuinely dangerous.
11:31
[UNKNOWN]: The temperature near the furnaces could reach well over 100 degrees Fahrenheit.
11:38
[UNKNOWN]: and the stokers had to work in rotation, taking their place at the furnace for a shift, then stepping back to cool down before returning.
11:48
[UNKNOWN]: These men, the stokers and tremors who kept the fires burning, were among the lowest paid workers aboard the ship, and they occupied the very bottom of its social hierarchy.
12:00
[UNKNOWN]: They were, in a very real sense, the hidden engine of the entire enterprise.
12:06
[UNKNOWN]: Construction of the Titanic began at the Harland and Wolf shipyard in Belfast in the spring of 1909.
12:14
[UNKNOWN]: She was laid down in the same slipway that her sister ship, the Olympic, had recently vacated.
12:20
[UNKNOWN]: And the two ships were built in close proximity, which allowed workers and materials to be shared between them.
12:27
[UNKNOWN]: The shipyard employed roughly 14,000 workers at the height of the project.
12:33
[UNKNOWN]: and the Titanic herself required the labour of hundreds of specialised craftsmen, riveters, platters, corkers, joiners, electricians, plumbers and countless others.
12:47
[UNKNOWN]: The process of building a ship of this size was a genuinely staggering logistical undertaking.
12:54
[UNKNOWN]: The keel, the structural backbone running along the bottom of the ship, was laid first, and from it, the steel frames of the hull rose upward, like enormous ribs, hundreds of them, each one carefully shaped and positioned before being attached.
13:12
[UNKNOWN]: These frames were then covered with steel plates, each one roughly 30 feet long and six feet wide,
13:24
[UNKNOWN]: and then bent to the curved shapes required by the hull before being riveted in place.
13:30
[UNKNOWN]: Riveting was the primary method of joining steel plates in this era before welding became practical for large-scale shipbuilding.
13:40
[UNKNOWN]: Rivets essentially large steel bolts were heated until they glowed orange.
13:47
[UNKNOWN]: Then passed to a riveter.
13:49
[UNKNOWN]: who inserted them through pre-drilled holes in the overlapping steel plates.
13:55
[UNKNOWN]: A holder on pressed a dolly against the round head of the rivet from one side.
14:01
[UNKNOWN]: While a riveter hammered the protruding end flat from the other, compressing the hot metal and creating a tight seal when it cooled.
14:10
[UNKNOWN]: Three million rivets held the Titanic together.
14:15
[UNKNOWN]: around a third of them were steel, driven by hydraulic riveting machines in the flatter sections of the hull where machinery could reach.
14:25
[UNKNOWN]: The remaining two thirds, particularly in the more curved bow and stern sections, were iron driven by hand.
14:33
[UNKNOWN]: Each team of four riveters could play somewhere between 200 and 500 rivets per day, depending on the difficulty of the work.
14:43
[UNKNOWN]: as the whole took shape, the internal structure was simultaneously being built out.
14:49
[UNKNOWN]: The ship was divided horizontally into multiple decks and vertically into a series of watertight compartments by the installation of transverse bulkheads, walls of steel running across the width of the ship.
15:05
[UNKNOWN]: that were designed to prevent flooding from spreading from one section to another.
15:09
[UNKNOWN]: There were 15 of these bulkheads in total, creating 16 compartments, and the ship's designers calculated that she could remain afloat with any two of the forward compartments flooded, or with any four adjacent compartments open to the sea.
15:27
[UNKNOWN]: This was the basis for the oft-repeated claim that she was in some meaningful sense unsinkable.
15:35
[UNKNOWN]: a claim that was always a somewhat loose interpretation of the engineering, but one that was genuinely supported by the mathematics of her design in normal flooding scenarios.
15:46
[UNKNOWN]: The Titanic was launched, meaning the bear hole was slid into the water for the first time, on May 31st, 1911.
15:55
[UNKNOWN]: The launch was a major public event.
15:57
[UNKNOWN]: Tens of thousands of spectators gathered along the banks of the River Lagan to watch, there was no formal ceremony, no christening with a bottle of champagne.
16:09
[UNKNOWN]: It was not white stars custom to name their ships in that fashion.
16:13
[UNKNOWN]: The hull simply slid down the grease coated ways and entered the water for the first time.
16:20
[UNKNOWN]: From that point,
16:21
[UNKNOWN]: The work of fitting out the interior could begin.
16:25
[UNKNOWN]: Fitting out took the better part of the year, and it was in many ways the most complex phase of the entire project.
16:33
[UNKNOWN]: The raw steel shell had to be transformed into a floating city.
16:39
[UNKNOWN]: Complete with passenger accommodations ranging from simple dormitory-style 3rd-class births to elaborately decorated private sweets.
16:48
[UNKNOWN]: With restaurants, smoking rooms, lounges, a swimming pool, a gymnasium, a Turkish bath, a squash court, a hospital, a post office, a dark room for amateur photographers, and all the mechanical, electrical and plumbing infrastructure required
17:09
[UNKNOWN]: The first class accommodations in particular represented an extraordinary level of investment and craftsmanship.
17:16
[UNKNOWN]: The first class dining saloon, located on D-deck, was the largest room afloat at the time, capable of seating over 500 guests at one sitting, with white paneled walls in the Jacobian style.
17:31
[UNKNOWN]: carved oak furniture and linoleum-tiled floors in a blue and white pattern that suggested the sea.
17:39
[UNKNOWN]: adjacent to it was the reception room, a grand open space used for pre-dinner gathering.
17:46
[UNKNOWN]: Decorated in Louis XVI style, with plush furnishings and a large staircase connecting it to the Decks above and below.
17:56
[UNKNOWN]: The grand staircase itself was one of the ship's most celebrated features, an oak paneled stairwell rising through five decks topped with an ornate,
18:12
[UNKNOWN]: At the base of each flight, carved oak nule posts supported ornamental lamps and the whole space was furnished with the kind of carved wooden detailing that one might expect in a fine country house or a London club.
18:30
[UNKNOWN]: A large carved clock set into the paneling at one landing showed the
18:39
[UNKNOWN]: A detail that, in retrospect, carries a painful irony.
18:43
[UNKNOWN]: There was a first-class lounge in the style of the Palace of Versailles.
18:48
[UNKNOWN]: There was a Veranda Café paneled in Trellis' work and hung with real climbing plants.
18:54
[UNKNOWN]: There was a reading and writing room designed for ladies, finished in Georgian style in white and gray.
19:01
[UNKNOWN]: There was a first-class smoking room paneled in mahogany, inlaid with mother of pearl, with stained glass windows and a working fireplace.
19:12
[UNKNOWN]: There were private promenade decks reserved for first-class passengers, enclosed against the weather and stretching along both sides of the ship.
19:22
[UNKNOWN]: The first-class state rooms ranged from simple but comfortable two-birth cabins to the two elaborate pile of sweets, one on each side of B deck, which were the most expensive accommodations on board.
19:36
[UNKNOWN]: Each parlor suite consisted of a sitting room, two bedrooms, a private promenade deck, a private bathroom and a wardrobe room, all decorated in one of several period styles.
19:50
[UNKNOWN]: The most expensive, the ones farthest forward on B-deck were decorated in the style of the Adam's brothers.
19:58
[UNKNOWN]: A late 18th century British aesthetic of white plaster walls with delicate neoclassical detailing in soft colours, silk draperies and polished mahogany furniture.
20:12
[UNKNOWN]: These sweets cost £750 per person for a single crossing,
20:17
[UNKNOWN]: equivalent to something in the range of 80,000 to 100,000 pounds in today's money, or well over 100,000 dollars.
20:26
[UNKNOWN]: Not all of the first-class accommodations were quite so grand, of course.
20:31
[UNKNOWN]: The less expensive first-class cabins were still well appointed by any normal standard.
20:37
[UNKNOWN]: private rooms with proper beds rather than bunks, with running hot and cold water, electric lights and heating.
20:45
[UNKNOWN]: But the variety within first class was enormous, and so was the price range.
20:51
[UNKNOWN]: A modest first class cabin might cost 30 or 40 pounds per person, while the grandest
21:02
[UNKNOWN]: Second class on the Titanic was, in many ways, comparable to first class on most other ships of the era.
21:11
[UNKNOWN]: The second class dining saloon was paneled in oak, fitted with proper swivel chairs bolted to the floor.
21:17
[UNKNOWN]: and served meals from a reasonably varied menu.
21:21
[UNKNOWN]: There was a second-class library, a comfortable lounge, a smoking room, and a small promenade deck.
21:29
[UNKNOWN]: The second-class cabins were compact but well constructed, with births rather than proper beds in most cases, but with proper walls and doors, rather than the curtain-bunks common on other vessels.
21:42
[UNKNOWN]: A second-class ticket might cost somewhere between 12 and 40 pounds, depending on the accommodation type.
21:50
[UNKNOWN]: Still significant sums for most people, but within reach of middle-class professionals, merchants, and their families.
21:59
[UNKNOWN]: Third-class, the accommodations for the immigrants and the working-class passengers was a different story.
22:06
[UNKNOWN]: The Titanic's third-class was considered unusually good by the standards of the time.
22:12
[UNKNOWN]: Rather than the open dormitory arrangements common on other ships, the Titanic's third-class passengers had enclosed cabins with two to six births each, fitted with electric lights, wash basins, and linoleum floors.
22:28
[UNKNOWN]: There was a third-class general room, a large common area, with wooden chairs and tables, and a separate smoking room for the men.
22:37
[UNKNOWN]: The meals served in a third-class dining saloon on the forward lower decks, were simple but adequate, featuring staples like porridge, bread, soup, boiled meat and potatoes.
22:51
[UNKNOWN]: A third-class ticket for the Atlantic Crossing could be obtained for somewhere between seven and nine pounds, which represented roughly two weeks' wages for a typical laboring worker.
23:04
[UNKNOWN]: By the spring of 1912, the fitting-out work was essentially complete.
23:10
[UNKNOWN]: The ship underwent her sea trials in Belfast Life on April 2nd, 1912.
23:17
[UNKNOWN]: A series of maneuvers designed to test her steering, her stopping capability, her speed, and the functioning of her various mechanical systems.
23:28
[UNKNOWN]: The trials lasted only about half a day.
23:31
[UNKNOWN]: a relatively brief period for a ship of her complexity, and then she sailed for South Hampton to begin loading for her maiden voyage.
23:40
[UNKNOWN]: She arrived in South Hampton on April 3, 1912.
23:46
[UNKNOWN]: She was, by every measure, the largest, most sophisticated and most expensive moving object ever created by human hands.
23:56
[UNKNOWN]: And in eight days, she would be at the bottom of the ocean.
24:00
[UNKNOWN]: But we are getting ahead of ourselves.
24:03
[UNKNOWN]: Let's stay in South Hampton for a while.
24:05
[UNKNOWN]: Let's talk about what it took to actually run this ship.
24:08
[UNKNOWN]: To feed it, staff it, fuel it,
24:14
[UNKNOWN]: because the operational reality of the Titanic was almost as extraordinary as her design.
24:21
[UNKNOWN]: The ship required a crew of approximately 890 people to operate.
24:27
[UNKNOWN]: This was divided into several distinct departments.
24:31
[UNKNOWN]: The deck department, under Captain Edward John Smith and his officers, was responsible for navigation, watchkeeping, and the actual operation of the ship at sea.
24:42
[UNKNOWN]: The engineering department, under Chief Engineer Joseph Bell, was responsible for the engines, boilers, and all mechanical systems and the virtualing department.
24:53
[UNKNOWN]: by far the largest in terms of headcount was responsible for feeding and serving the passengers, maintaining their accommodations and providing the enormous range of services that the first class passengers in particular expected.
25:10
[UNKNOWN]: Captain Edward John Smith was 62 years old at the time of the voyage and was one of the most experienced and respected ocean line captains in the world.
25:20
[UNKNOWN]: He had been with the White Star line for over 30 years, had commanded a succession of their most important ships and was known to passengers and crew alike as a steady, unflappable, and thoroughly competent officer.
25:35
[UNKNOWN]: The Titanic's maiden voyage was to be the last command of his career.
25:41
[UNKNOWN]: He had announced his intention to retire upon its completion.
25:45
[UNKNOWN]: He was, in the parlance of the time, going out in style, under Captain Smith, the deck officers included first officer William Murdoch, a capable, experienced scotsman, who would be in charge of the watch at the moment of the iceberg collision.
26:03
[UNKNOWN]: And second officer Charles Leitler, a tough, resourceful Yorkshireman,
26:09
[UNKNOWN]: who had become one of the most celebrated survivors of the disaster.
26:14
[UNKNOWN]: Below them were a further five officers responsible for standing watch, maintaining navigational records and overseeing the work of the crew on deck.
26:24
[UNKNOWN]: The engineering department operated in a world largely invisible to the passengers of both.
26:31
[UNKNOWN]: Chief Engineer Bell presided over a team of roughly 300 engineers, Stokers, Trimmers and Electrical Workers who kept the ship running around the clock.
26:42
[UNKNOWN]: These men worked in rotating shifts, four hours on, eight hours off.
26:49
[UNKNOWN]: and their workplace was the hot, loud, mechanically complex world of the boiler rooms and engine spaces far below the waterline.
27:00
[UNKNOWN]: The virtualing department was enormous.
27:02
[UNKNOWN]: Approximately 450 people representing roughly half the entire crew.
27:08
[UNKNOWN]: This included the stewards and stewardesses who attended to the passengers in their cabins, the restaurant staff who served meals in the various dining rooms, the cooks and their assistants.
27:19
[UNKNOWN]: The wine stewards, the bedroom stewards, the elevator operators, and all the various specialists required to keep the passenger experience running smoothly.
27:31
[UNKNOWN]: Running a hotel for over 2,000 guests required a surprisingly large number of people.
27:37
[UNKNOWN]: and the Titanic was not just a hotel, but also a restaurant, a spa, a gymnasium, a post office, a retail operation, and a travel agency.
27:49
[UNKNOWN]: All in one, the food required to sustain this floating city for a crossing of five to seven days was staggering in quantity.
27:59
[UNKNOWN]: The Titanic stores, loaded at Southampton and supplemented at Sherberg and Queen's Town during the outward voyage, included approximately 75,000 pounds of fresh meat, 11,000 pounds of fresh fish.
28:15
[UNKNOWN]: 80,000 pounds of potatoes, 36,000 oranges, 160 cases of fresh lettuce, 12,000 pounds of fresh butter, 1,900 pounds of coffee, 800 pounds of tea, and over 6,000 pounds of fresh cream.
28:22
[UNKNOWN]: There were 40,000 eggs.
28:38
[UNKNOWN]: There were 36,000 apples.
28:41
[UNKNOWN]: There were more than 1500 gallons of fresh milk and an equal quantity of condensed milk for the long voyage.
28:49
[UNKNOWN]: There were 1500 bottles of wine and 800 bottles of spirits for the first class dining rooms alone.
28:56
[UNKNOWN]: Plus separate stocks for the second and third class.
29:00
[UNKNOWN]: Feeding over 2,000 passengers and nearly 900 crew members,
29:06
[UNKNOWN]: Three meals a day for up to a week required an industrial scale of preparation.
29:12
[UNKNOWN]: The ship's galleys, there were separate kitchens serving each class, were fitted with large coal-fired ranges, mechanical mixes, refrigerated ladders, and all the equipment of a serious professional kitchen.
29:30
[UNKNOWN]: The first class galley was perhaps the most sophisticated, capable of producing elaborate multi-course dinners for 500 guests simultaneously.
29:42
[UNKNOWN]: The menu for the first class dinner on the night of April 14th.
29:46
[UNKNOWN]: the night of the sinking, ran to eleven courses, beginning with oysters and a choice of soups and progressing through several fish courses.
29:56
[UNKNOWN]: Various entrays, roasted meats and poultry, cold buffet dishes, vegetables, desserts, icees and fresh fruit all served with appropriate wines and followed by coffee and lecures in the smoking room.
30:13
[UNKNOWN]: Preparing a dinner of this complexity for this many people was not just a matter of cooking, it was a logistical operation, requiring careful coordination between dozens of cooks, kitchen assistance and stewards, spread across multiple preparation areas and working against the precise timing of the service.
30:36
[UNKNOWN]: The head chef, whose name was Charles Proctor, oversaw a kitchen brigade of around 60 people, working in the specific hierarchical structure of the professional kitchen.
30:48
[UNKNOWN]: Head chef, Sue chefs, the various departmental chefs responsible for stocks, sources, pastry, and so on, down through kome's chefs and scullery hands.
31:02
[UNKNOWN]: Keeping all this food fresh during the voyage required the ship's refrigeration systems, a relatively new technology that allowed large quantities of perishable goods to be carried over long distances without spoilage.
31:15
[UNKNOWN]: The Titanic had refrigerated compartments for meat, fish, dairy and wine.
31:22
[UNKNOWN]: maintained at appropriate temperatures by a mechanical refrigeration plant.
31:27
[UNKNOWN]: These systems, like everything else on the ship, ran on the power generated by the steam plants, another invisible but essential link in the chain of complexity that kept the enterprise running.
31:40
[UNKNOWN]: Fresh water was another critical resource.
31:44
[UNKNOWN]: The ship carried approximately 350 tons of fresh water for drinking, cooking, and washing, stored in large tanks.
31:54
[UNKNOWN]: Additional fresh water could be produced during the voyage using evaporators, devices that distilled fresh water from sea water using waste heat from the engines.
32:05
[UNKNOWN]: The boilers themselves also required large quantities of treated water.
32:10
[UNKNOWN]: carefully maintained to prevent the mineral scale that would foul the heating surfaces and reduce efficiency.
32:17
[UNKNOWN]: The ship's electrical systems were equally impressive.
32:21
[UNKNOWN]: The Titanic was fitted with four main generators capable of producing a combined output of around 400 kilowatts.
32:30
[UNKNOWN]: enough to power over 10,000 electric lights throughout the ship, run the elevators, power the wireless telegraph system, drive the refrigeration machinery, and supply electricity for hundreds of other purposes.
32:45
[UNKNOWN]: The main electrical switch board located in the generator room,
32:49
[UNKNOWN]: was a large panel of switches, fuses and meters that looked to a 21st century eye, almost architectural in its size and complexity.
33:02
[UNKNOWN]: The ship was, in this sense, a self-contained electrical utility.
33:08
[UNKNOWN]: Generating all the power it needed from its own steam plant.
33:12
[UNKNOWN]: All of this complexity, all of this coal and food and water and electricity, all of this staff and machinery and maintenance, had to be coordinated and managed within the confines of a ship that was at sea completely isolated from the shore.
33:31
[UNKNOWN]: If the refrigeration broke down at sea, the meat would spoil.
33:36
[UNKNOWN]: If a boiler went off line, the speed would drop.
33:39
[UNKNOWN]: If the freshwater ran out, the passengers would go thirsty.
33:43
[UNKNOWN]: The Titanic was a masterwork of integrated systems thinking.
33:48
[UNKNOWN]: and keeping it all running required a level of organizational competence that we might now recognise as something approaching supply chain management.
33:57
[UNKNOWN]: The loading of all this material took three days at Southampton.
34:02
[UNKNOWN]: The coal was particularly critical.
34:05
[UNKNOWN]: The ship required approximately 6,000 tons for the maiden voyage, and obtaining it was actually somewhat difficult.
34:13
[UNKNOWN]: A national coal strike had been ongoing for some weeks, and supplies were tight.
34:19
[UNKNOWN]: The white star line managed to resolve the issue by transferring coal from other ships in their fleet.
34:26
[UNKNOWN]: Some of which had to have their own departures delayed as a result.
34:31
[UNKNOWN]: But by the time
34:34
[UNKNOWN]: On the morning of April 10, 1912, her bunkers were adequately filled, she was by any measure, a masterpiece of the industrial age.
34:47
[UNKNOWN]: She was also, and this is important to remember, a ship on the water, subject to all the physical forces and environmental hazards that have always made ocean travel dangerous.
34:59
[UNKNOWN]: The grandeur of her design and the luxury of her fittings were a kind of argument against the sea, an assertion that human ingenuity could tame the ocean, could make it comfortable and predictable and safe.
35:14
[UNKNOWN]: That argument, as we will see, was about to be tested in the most dramatic possible way, but first, let's spend some time with the people who sailed on her.
35:25
[UNKNOWN]: because the Titanic was not just a ship, it was a society.
35:32
[UNKNOWN]: Chapter two, a floating world, the sociology of life aboard.
35:41
[UNKNOWN]: When the Titanic departed Southampton on the morning of April 10, 1912, she carried 2,224 people.
35:52
[UNKNOWN]: This number is remarkably precise.
35:55
[UNKNOWN]: It has been painstakingly reconstructed by historians from the ship's records, the surviving testimony of passengers and crew, and the records of those who did and did not survive.
36:09
[UNKNOWN]: 2,224 people, they came from every walk of life, every nation, every economic circumstance imaginable.
36:20
[UNKNOWN]: And for the four days they were at sea together before the disaster.
36:24
[UNKNOWN]: They occupied the same physical space, while inhabiting entirely different social worlds.
36:31
[UNKNOWN]: The Titanic was in miniature, a portrait of Edwardian society, which is to say, a society of extraordinary hierarchy and stratification, in which class determined almost everything
36:52
[UNKNOWN]: how they were treated, what they could expect from the world, and ultimately, as we will see whether they survived.
36:59
[UNKNOWN]: Let's begin at the top, where the living was grandest, and the stories were, in some ways, the most dramatic.
37:07
[UNKNOWN]: First class carried 324 passengers on the maiden voyage.
37:13
[UNKNOWN]: They occupied the upper decks, the boat deck, the promenade deck, and the upper reaches of the ships forward section, and they lived for the duration of the crossing, in surroundings that many of them found comparable to the finest land establishments they frequented.
37:31
[UNKNOWN]: In fact, a number of the wealthiest passengers specifically commented,
37:37
[UNKNOWN]: that the Titanic was as comfortable as the Ritz, or as grand as any private home they had visited.
37:45
[UNKNOWN]: The first class passenger list
37:47
[UNKNOWN]: was a role call of Edwardian and American wealth and celebrity.
37:52
[UNKNOWN]: Among the most prominent was John Jacob Aster the fourth, who at the time of the voyage was one of the wealthiest men in the world, with a fortune estimated at roughly $87 million equivalent to something in the range of $2 billion in today's terms.
38:11
[UNKNOWN]: Asta was travelling with his new young wife, Madeline, who was about 18 years his junior and who was also 5 months pregnant.
38:21
[UNKNOWN]: The marriage had been controversial in New York society.
38:25
[UNKNOWN]: and the couple had spent much of the previous year traveling in Europe and Egypt in part to let the social storm blow over before returning home.
38:35
[UNKNOWN]: Also in first class was Benjamin Guggenheim, a member of the famous Guggenheim mining dynasty and heir to a considerable fortune.
38:45
[UNKNOWN]: Guggenheim was travelling with his valley and his personal secretary, and also somewhat less publicly, with his mistress, a French singer named Leontine Orbert, who travelled under the name of Madam Orbert.
39:01
[UNKNOWN]: The arrangement was not unusual in the social world of the time, though it required a certain diplomatic management of the passenger lists.
39:11
[UNKNOWN]: Isidor Strauss, the co-owner of Macy's Department Store, and one of the most respected businessmen in New York, was travelling with his wife, Ida.
39:21
[UNKNOWN]: The Strauss is word by all accounts deeply devoted to each other after more than 40 years of marriage, and their behaviour during the sinking, Ida refusing to leave her husband,
39:34
[UNKNOWN]: Both of them eventually sitting together on a pair of deck chairs as the ship went down.
39:40
[UNKNOWN]: became one of the most celebrated and heartbreaking stories of the disaster.
39:45
[UNKNOWN]: Margaret Brown
39:47
[UNKNOWN]: Known to history as the unsinkable Molly Brown was a Colorado socialite whose husband had made a fortune in the silver mines of Leadville.
39:56
[UNKNOWN]: She was travelling alone, having just visited her alien grandson in Paris, and her conduct during the sinking, taking command of a lifeboat, organising the rowing, and refusing to simply wait for rescue, made her one of the heroes of the story.
40:14
[UNKNOWN]: There were numerous British aristocrats and their families.
40:19
[UNKNOWN]: There were several American industrialists.
40:22
[UNKNOWN]: There was Charles Melville Hayes, the president of the Grand-Trunk Railway of Canada, traveling with his wife and daughter.
40:30
[UNKNOWN]: There was William Thomas Stead, one of the most influential journalists in Britain, a pioneering investigative reporter, social reformer, and passionate advocate for international peace,
40:43
[UNKNOWN]: somewhat notoriously, also become deeply interested in spiritualism and communication with the dead.
40:50
[UNKNOWN]: There was Archibald Butt, the military aide and close personal friend of President William Howard Taft.
40:58
[UNKNOWN]: returning to Washington after several months in Europe.
41:02
[UNKNOWN]: J. Bruce Ismay, the chairman of the White Starline, was also on board, a fact that would later become enormously significant because Ismay survived the sinking.
41:13
[UNKNOWN]: and his survival while so many others died would become the source of lasting controversy and to some extent the ruin of his reputation.
41:24
[UNKNOWN]: Thomas Andrews, the ship's designer, was also traveling as was typical for a chief designer on a maiden voyage.
41:31
[UNKNOWN]: He was there in an official capacity.
41:34
[UNKNOWN]: part of a small team of harland and wolf employees monitoring the ship's performance, looking for any issues that needed to be addressed before the ship went into regular service.
41:45
[UNKNOWN]: Witnesses who saw Andrews on the night of the sinking described him working frantically for hours.
41:51
[UNKNOWN]: calculating the rate of flooding, consulting with Captain Smith, helping passengers into lifeboats.
41:58
[UNKNOWN]: Before eventually being seen standing alone in the first class smoking room, staring at a painting on the wall, his life jacket lying on a nearby table, where he had placed it.
42:10
[UNKNOWN]: after deciding he would not use it.
42:13
[UNKNOWN]: The social life of first class in the days before the disaster was elaborate and carefully structured.
42:20
[UNKNOWN]: Meals were the primary social occasions, long, formal affairs in the dining saloon or for those who preferred a more intimate experience in the Alacart restaurant, which was operated as a separate concession by the Italian restaurant her Luigi Gatti.
42:39
[UNKNOWN]: and charged separately from the regular first class service.
42:43
[UNKNOWN]: Between meals, passengers gathered in the reception rooms, the smoking room, or the lounge, where conversation, cards, and alcohol filled the hours.
42:56
[UNKNOWN]: The gymnasium fitted with mechanical horses, rowing machines, stationary bicycles, and other equipment,
43:09
[UNKNOWN]: The Turkish bath, a complex of hot rooms, cooling rooms, and a plunge pool, was available by appointment and proved popular.
43:18
[UNKNOWN]: The ship's library stocked current books and newspapers from the last port of cool.
43:24
[UNKNOWN]: The social dynamics of first-class were, in many ways, a microcosm of the tensions of the Edwardian Age.
43:32
[UNKNOWN]: Particularly the tension between old money and new, between European aristocracy and American industrial wealth, between established social hierarchies and the disruptive power of the new economy.
43:48
[UNKNOWN]: Many of the British aristocrats on board regarded the American millionaires with a mixture of admiration and condescension.
43:56
[UNKNOWN]: Their wealth was enormous, their manners, sometimes startling, their energy and informality, a contrast to the more measured style of upper-class English life.
44:09
[UNKNOWN]: The Americans, for their part,
44:11
[UNKNOWN]: We're in the habit of treating the Atlantic crossing as a kind of social performance, the right ship, the right cabin, the right company, a statement of arrival and membership in a global elite.
44:24
[UNKNOWN]: Within first class, there was a further hierarchy.
44:27
[UNKNOWN]: that a careful observer could discern.
44:30
[UNKNOWN]: The occupants of the two most expensive parlor suites were treated with a deference that even other wealthy passengers did not quite receive.
44:40
[UNKNOWN]: The truly grand personages, the astas, the straws is made.
44:46
[UNKNOWN]: had a kind of precedence that was understood and respected without needing to be stated.
44:53
[UNKNOWN]: And at the margins of first class in the less expensive cabins, there was a category of passengers who were technically first class, but whose wealth was modest enough that they were in social terms.
45:07
[UNKNOWN]: somewhat peripheral to the main drama.
45:10
[UNKNOWN]: Second class was a world unto itself.
45:14
[UNKNOWN]: Smaller, less glamorous, but in its own way quite comfortable.
45:20
[UNKNOWN]: The 284 second class passengers on the Titanic were drawn largely from the professional middle classes on both sides of the Atlantic.
45:30
[UNKNOWN]: Doctors, teachers, clergymen, small businessmen and their families.
45:37
[UNKNOWN]: They traveled for reasons ranging from family visits to professional opportunities to emigration, and they made up a community that was in many ways more internally cohesive than first class, simply because the social range was narrower.
45:54
[UNKNOWN]: The second class experience was genuinely good.
45:57
[UNKNOWN]: The dining saloon served solid, well-cooked meals, roasted meats,
46:07
[UNKNOWN]: not quite in the elaborate style of first class, but substantially better than most of the passengers would have eaten at home.
46:14
[UNKNOWN]: The lounge and smoking room were comfortable if not luxurious.
46:18
[UNKNOWN]: The library was well stocked, and the outdoor promenade, though smaller than the first class equivalent, offered fresh air and sea views.
46:27
[UNKNOWN]: Among the notable second-class passengers was father Thomas Biles, a Catholic priest, traveling to New York to conduct his brother's wedding.
46:37
[UNKNOWN]: He would spend the final hours of the voyage conducting confession and prayers for those who could not get into lifeboats, and he is remembered as one of the quiet heroes of the disaster.
46:49
[UNKNOWN]: Also, in second class, were a number of school teachers, a handful of professional musicians, and several families emigrating to begin new lives in America and Canada.
47:01
[UNKNOWN]: The social atmosphere in second class was notably more relaxed than in first.
47:08
[UNKNOWN]: The relative equality of circumstances and the smaller size of the group created something closer to genuine community.
47:16
[UNKNOWN]: Passengers who had never met before found themselves in extended conversation over dinner, organizing group activities, playing cards together in the evenings.
47:28
[UNKNOWN]: There was something almost collegiate about the social life of second class, a warmth and informality that was in its own way, rather appealing.
47:39
[UNKNOWN]: Third class was the most complex and diverse social world on the ship.
47:44
[UNKNOWN]: and in some ways the most interesting.
47:47
[UNKNOWN]: The 709 third-class passengers came from an extraordinary range of national backgrounds.
47:54
[UNKNOWN]: There were large contingents of Scandinavians, Swedes, Finns, and Norwegians who had emigrated in considerable numbers to the upper Midwest of the United States and who were making the crossing to join family or community already established there.
48:14
[UNKNOWN]: There were Lebanese and Syrian immigrants referred to in the records of the time as Syrians.
48:21
[UNKNOWN]: A term then applied broadly to Arabic-speaking peoples from the Ottoman Empire.
48:27
[UNKNOWN]: Many of whom were traveling to join established communities in New England and the industrial cities of the North.
48:37
[UNKNOWN]: There were Croatians and Slovaks and other immigrants from the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
48:44
[UNKNOWN]: There were Irish men and women from the West of Ireland, part of the long and painful stream of emigration that had been depleting that region's population since the famine of the 1840s, and there were British workers of various backgrounds.
49:00
[UNKNOWN]: traveling to try their luck in the new world.
49:03
[UNKNOWN]: The linguistic diversity of third class was remarkable.
49:07
[UNKNOWN]: On any given evening in the third class general room, one might hear English, Irish, Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish, Arabic, Croatian, Slovak, and several other languages being spoken simultaneously.
49:24
[UNKNOWN]: Communication across these divides was managed partly by the handful of multi-lingual crew members in the third class service department and partly by the natural social ingenuity of people who have a strong motivation to make themselves understood.
49:41
[UNKNOWN]: The accommodations in third class were, as noted, better than on most comparable ships.
49:48
[UNKNOWN]: But the physical environment was still very different from the upper decks.
49:53
[UNKNOWN]: Third-class passengers were housed deep in the forward and after ends of the ship.
49:58
[UNKNOWN]: In the bow and the stern, in enclosed cabins of two to six births each.
50:04
[UNKNOWN]: The cabins were clean and adequately ventilated, but they were small and the proximity of six strangers in a small space was a significant social challenge, particularly for passengers from different language backgrounds.
50:20
[UNKNOWN]: The food in third class was simple but nourishing, oatmeal porridge and bread for breakfast, soup and boiled meat with potatoes for lunch, similar fare for dinner with tea and coffee available throughout.
50:34
[UNKNOWN]: It was not sophisticated cooking, but it was adequate and many of the third class passengers coming from backgrounds of genuine poverty found it more than adequate.
50:46
[UNKNOWN]: Indeed.
50:47
[UNKNOWN]: For some emigrants who had spent years eating a diet of potatoes and little else, the regular meals of the Atlantic crossing were a kind of abundance they had not previously experienced.
50:59
[UNKNOWN]: The social life in third class was organised around the general room, a large open space fitted with tables, chairs and benches, where passengers gathered in the evenings.
51:12
[UNKNOWN]: There was singing and dancing, organized informally, with whoever happened to have brought a fiddle or a mouth organ providing the music.
51:21
[UNKNOWN]: The Irish passengers, in particular, had a tradition of social singing and dancing that translated easily into this context, and the general room was often a lively place in the evenings.
51:35
[UNKNOWN]: The language barriers, paradoxically, sometimes lowered social inhibitions.
51:41
[UNKNOWN]: People who could not talk easily to one another could still dance together, and the music created a kind of temporary community that crossed the linguistic divides.
51:53
[UNKNOWN]: But beneath the conviviality, third-class life on the Titanic was also marked by anxiety.
52:00
[UNKNOWN]: Most of the emigrants were travelling to a country they had never seen, whose language many of them did not speak, where they would have to build new lives from very little.
52:11
[UNKNOWN]: The uncertainty of that future was a constant, undercurrent.
52:16
[UNKNOWN]: Many were leaving behind families they might never see again.
52:20
[UNKNOWN]: Parents, siblings, grandparents.
52:24
[UNKNOWN]: In an era when a transatlantic ticket cost two weeks wages and international telephone calls did not yet exist.
52:32
[UNKNOWN]: The letters they had written before departure to be posted from Queenstown at the last stop might be the last written communication some of them would have with their families for years.
52:44
[UNKNOWN]: The relationship between the three classes on board was defined by the physical structure of the ship, which was carefully designed to keep them largely separate.
52:54
[UNKNOWN]: The upper decks A, B and C deck in the forward section and A deck throughout were first class territory.
53:03
[UNKNOWN]: Second class occupied the middle decks in the after portion of the ship.
53:07
[UNKNOWN]: Third class was at the extremities, the bow and the stern, and on the lowest passenger decks.
53:14
[UNKNOWN]: There were separate entrances, separate stairways, separate dining rooms, separate promenades, separate lounges.
53:24
[UNKNOWN]: The only points of intersection
53:26
[UNKNOWN]: were purely functional, the ship's crew members, who moved between the classes in the course of their duties, and the occasional transgression by a passenger, who wondered where they were not supposed to be.
53:38
[UNKNOWN]: This segregation was not merely a matter of social convenience.
53:43
[UNKNOWN]: It was also, in part, a legal requirement.
53:47
[UNKNOWN]: United States immigration law required that third-class passengers be kept separate and screened for infectious diseases before being allowed to land.
53:56
[UNKNOWN]: The barriers between third-class and the upper decks served a regulatory function, as well as a social one, and they were enforced by physical gates and locked doors at certain key points of the ship.
54:12
[UNKNOWN]: occupied a social position that was in some ways below all three passenger classes and in some ways cut across them.
54:21
[UNKNOWN]: The officers, particularly the senior officers, were educated, experienced professionals who moved with ease in first-class social circles and were frequently invited to die at the captain's table.
54:36
[UNKNOWN]: or join the first class passengers in their lounges.
54:40
[UNKNOWN]: The stewards in first class spent their working days in intimate proximity to some of the wealthiest people in the world, attending to their needs with a practice deference that was its own kind of social performance.
54:55
[UNKNOWN]: But the engineers and stokers in the bowels of the ship lived in a completely different world from the passengers above.
55:01
[UNKNOWN]: They slept in birthing spaces in the forward lower decks, ate in their own mess rooms, and spent their working hours in the hot, loud, mechanically brutal environment of the engine and boiler spaces.
55:16
[UNKNOWN]: The social distance between a cold trimmer in boiler room 6 and a guest in the first class parlour suite on B-deck was as great as any social distance in Edwardian society, which is saying a great deal.
55:31
[UNKNOWN]: This social world, this floating Edwardian microcosm was in existence for four days before the disaster.
55:41
[UNKNOWN]: Four days of meals and conversations and card games and walks on the promenade deck.
55:47
[UNKNOWN]: Four days of the ship performing exactly as advertised, smooth, fast, warm, comfortable, and apparently quite safe.
55:56
[UNKNOWN]: Four days during which most of the passengers had no reason to think about lifeboats or ice, or the depth of the water below their feet.
56:11
[UNKNOWN]: the ship entered an ice field.
56:16
[UNKNOWN]: Chapter three, the chain of errors, how a ship is lost.
56:23
[UNKNOWN]: The sinking of the Titanic was not caused by a single mistake.
56:28
[UNKNOWN]: It was caused by a chain of decisions, assumptions, omissions and pieces of bad luck that linked together in a way that had any one of them been different, might have broken the chain and saved the ship.
56:42
[UNKNOWN]: Understanding the disaster means tracing that chain carefully, link by link and recognizing that catastrophes are almost never the result of a single catastrophic error.
56:56
[UNKNOWN]: They are usually the result of many small things going wrong at the same time.
57:03
[UNKNOWN]: Icebergs are carved from the glaciers of Greenland, broken off by the action of thermal expansion, wave-action, and the relentless pressure of the ice mass pushing toward the sea.
57:15
[UNKNOWN]: Each year, hundreds of icebergs drift south from the waters around Greenland, carried by the Labrador Current down the eastern coast of North America and into the shipping lanes of the North Atlantic.
57:30
[UNKNOWN]: The density and distribution of icebergs in the shipping lanes vary significantly from year to year, depending on weather patterns and currents.
57:39
[UNKNOWN]: But there is always some risk, particularly in the spring.
57:44
[UNKNOWN]: When the previous winter's ice production is being released into the warmer southern waters, 1912 was an unusually bad year for icebergs in the shipping lanes.
57:56
[UNKNOWN]: The winter had been particularly productive in terms of carving, and the spring had been warm, which meant that more icebergs than usual were surviving far enough south to enter the principal shipping routes.
58:09
[UNKNOWN]: In the days and weeks before the Titanic's voyage, numerous ships had reported ice in the area the Titanic would be crossing, and the shipping community was generally aware
58:24
[UNKNOWN]: the Titanic received multiple ice warnings on April 14th.
58:29
[UNKNOWN]: Beginning in the morning and continuing through the afternoon and early evening, at least seven separate wireless messages from other ships in the vicinity, reported ice, icebergs and field ice, in the region the Titanic was approaching, the wireless operators, Jack Phillips and Harold Bride, received these messages and relayed most of them to the bridge.
58:55
[UNKNOWN]: Some of them were posted on the chart room bulletin board,
58:59
[UNKNOWN]: Captain Smith was informed of the ice situation.
59:02
[UNKNOWN]: Here is the first critical decision point.
59:05
[UNKNOWN]: What to do with this information?
59:07
[UNKNOWN]: The standard response in such a situation by the practices of the time was to proceed with caution.
59:15
[UNKNOWN]: to maintain a good watch, to keep lookouts posted with orders to report anything that looked like ice, and to continue on the intended course.
59:26
[UNKNOWN]: What was not standard practice, though it was certainly possible, and some captains in similar situations had done it, was to significantly reduce speed or alter course to a more subtly track that would take the ship further from the known ice field,
59:43
[UNKNOWN]: Captain Smith did neither.
59:45
[UNKNOWN]: He posted the lookouts, he maintained the established track, and he maintained the ship's speed, which was at approximately 21.5 knots, slightly less than the ship's maximum, but still very fast by any reasonable standard.
1:00:03
[UNKNOWN]: The reason for this decision has been debated for more than a century.
1:00:08
[UNKNOWN]: Some historians argue that Smith was acting under pressure, implicit, or explicit, from J. Bruce is made to arrive in New York, on schedule, or even ahead of schedule, as a demonstration of the new ship's capability.
1:00:24
[UNKNOWN]: Others argue that Smith was simply following the conventions of his time and his profession.
1:00:30
[UNKNOWN]: which generally held that a good watch was sufficient protection against ice and that reducing speed was an overreaction.
1:00:40
[UNKNOWN]: What is clear is that in the culture of the North Atlantic passenger trade in 1912, running fast in ice was not considered particularly reckless.
1:00:50
[UNKNOWN]: It was essentially normal practice.
1:00:52
[UNKNOWN]: numerous experienced captains on numerous well-run ships did it regularly and the vast majority of the time, nothing went wrong.
1:01:03
[UNKNOWN]: The risk was known but it was regarded as acceptable, a calculated gamble against the pressure of competitive schedules and the expectations of passengers who expected to arrive on time.
1:01:15
[UNKNOWN]: This brings us to the second critical factor,
1:01:22
[UNKNOWN]: The lookouts on the night of April 14th were Frederick Fleet and Reginald Lee stationed in the crow's nest, a platform roughly 50 feet up the forward mast.
1:01:35
[UNKNOWN]: They had been instructed to watch for ice and to report anything suspicious.
1:01:41
[UNKNOWN]: and they were watching diligently.
1:01:43
[UNKNOWN]: But they were watching without binoculars.
1:01:46
[UNKNOWN]: The binoculars that were normally kept in the crow's nest for look-out use had gone missing during a change in officers at Southampton.
1:01:55
[UNKNOWN]: The ship's second officer, David Blair, who had been replaced at the last minute and removed from the voyage's crew manifest, had apparently taken the key to the
1:02:06
[UNKNOWN]: containing the crow's nest binoculars with him when he left the ship, an innocent error that had catastrophic consequences.
1:02:14
[UNKNOWN]: The replacement officers who took over had not been given a key and in the confusion of the last minute crew changes and the rush of departure, the missing binoculars were never replaced.
1:02:28
[UNKNOWN]: Binoculars would not necessarily have saved the ship, even with magnification
1:02:34
[UNKNOWN]: Icebergs are very difficult to spot in certain conditions, particularly on a calm, dark night with no moon, which is exactly the kind of night it was on April 14th, but binoculars would have given the lookouts a better chance of seeing the iceberg slightly earlier.
1:02:53
[UNKNOWN]: and even a few seconds of additional warning time, at the speeds involved, might have made the difference between a graze and a head-on collision, or between a glancing blow and a fatal one.
1:03:06
[UNKNOWN]: The night itself was, from the perspective of detecting icebergs, almost maximally difficult.
1:03:13
[UNKNOWN]: The sea was completely calm, a flat, glassy surface, with no swell and no waves.
1:03:21
[UNKNOWN]: This sounds like it should be an advantage for the lookouts, and in many ways it was.
1:03:27
[UNKNOWN]: But it also meant that there was no luminescent braking of waves at the base of the iceberg, the white froth.
1:03:35
[UNKNOWN]: that normally betrays the presence of a large object in the water by night.
1:03:40
[UNKNOWN]: On a rough sea, an iceberg shows itself by the wave action around its base.
1:03:46
[UNKNOWN]: On a calm sea, it simply sits there, dark and silent, invisible until the eye adjusts to see it directly.
1:03:56
[UNKNOWN]: There was also no moon that night, it was a new moon phase, and so the only light was from the stars, which were brilliantly clear in the absence of any clouds.
1:04:08
[UNKNOWN]: but which do not provide directional illumination, sufficient to reveal a dark object on a dark sea at any significant distance.
1:04:19
[UNKNOWN]: The temperature that evening had dropped sharply.
1:04:22
[UNKNOWN]: As the night war on and the Titanic steamed deeper into the ice field, the air temperature felt a near freezing, and the sea temperature was also near freezing, around 28 degrees Fahrenheit.
1:04:36
[UNKNOWN]: just below the freezing point of fresh water but normal for salt water.
1:04:41
[UNKNOWN]: This extreme cold was itself a further clue to the proximity of ice but the ship was already preceding at full speed in exactly the conditions where ice was most dangerous.
1:04:55
[UNKNOWN]: Fleet spotted the iceberg at approximately 1140 in the evening, ships time.
1:05:01
[UNKNOWN]: His account of the moment is one of the most memorable passages in the entire history of the disaster.
1:05:08
[UNKNOWN]: He saw a dark mass ahead and immediately rang the crow's nest belt three times.
1:05:14
[UNKNOWN]: The signal for an object ahead and telephone the bridge with the words, I spoke right ahead.
1:05:21
[UNKNOWN]: The officer of the watch, first officer Murdoch, immediately ordered the helm hard to starve it, which would turn the ship to the left, and simultaneously rang the engine room telegraphs to fuller stern, ordering the engines to reverse.
1:05:38
[UNKNOWN]: What followed in the next 37 seconds was a piece of applied physics that sealed the fate of the ship and more than 1,500 people.
1:05:48
[UNKNOWN]: A ship of the Titanic's size and speed cannot stop or turn in 37 seconds.
1:05:55
[UNKNOWN]: The basic mechanics of momentum, mass and hydrodynamics simply do not allow it.
1:06:01
[UNKNOWN]: Moving at 21.5 knots and weighing 46,000 tons, the Titanic had far more kinetic energy than any maneuver of the engines or the rudder could dissipate in such a short time.
1:06:15
[UNKNOWN]: What the engine reversal and the helm order could do was begin to slow the ship and begin to change its heading.
1:06:22
[UNKNOWN]: But the process was barely initiated before the ship made contact with the iceberg.
1:06:28
[UNKNOWN]: The contact when it came was not the dramatic head-on collision that popular imagination sometimes pictures.
1:06:35
[UNKNOWN]: The massive crunch of steel meeting ice.
1:06:38
[UNKNOWN]: The ship crumbling like a tin can.
1:06:41
[UNKNOWN]: The actual collision was from the perspective of most passengers, almost disappointingly subtle.
1:06:48
[UNKNOWN]: The iceberg grazed the right side of the ship's hull, along a length of approximately 300 feet in the bow section, and the scraping contact lasted only about 10 seconds.
1:07:01
[UNKNOWN]: Most passengers who were not on deck did not notice it at all, or noticed only a slight shutter and a distant grinding sound.
1:07:09
[UNKNOWN]: Some reported that it felt like the ship had briefly run over a small mound, or like gravel being thrown against the hull.
1:07:18
[UNKNOWN]: The actual damage that was done, however, was catastrophic in ways that were not immediately visible.
1:07:25
[UNKNOWN]: For many years,
1:07:29
[UNKNOWN]: had carved a continuous gash in the Titanic's hull, a long dramatic wound running the length of several hull plates.
1:07:38
[UNKNOWN]: When the wreck was explored and examined beginning in the 1980s, this picture had to be revised.
1:07:45
[UNKNOWN]: The actual damage appears to have been a series of smaller breaches, buckled and separated seams, popped rivets, small irregular holes,
1:07:57
[UNKNOWN]: distributed along the hull in a pattern consistent with a glancing blow that intermittently deformed and punctured the steel plating rather than cutting a clean continuous gash.
1:08:10
[UNKNOWN]: The revised understanding of the damage has focused attention on the rivets.
1:08:16
[UNKNOWN]: As mentioned earlier, the whole plates in the bow section of the ship were joined with iron rivets, rather than steel, driven by hand, rather than by hydraulic machinery.
1:08:27
[UNKNOWN]: An analysis of rivets recovered from the Titanic rec site has revealed that many of them contained relatively high concentrations of slack.
1:08:37
[UNKNOWN]: an impurity that made the iron more brittle than it should have been.
1:08:41
[UNKNOWN]: This does not necessarily mean the rivets were defective by the standards of the time.
1:08:47
[UNKNOWN]: The testing methods available in 1912 were not sophisticated enough to detect slag inclusion systematically.
1:08:55
[UNKNOWN]: But it does suggest that the bow section of the ship may have been somewhat more vulnerable to the kind of glancing impact it received than a perfectly specified set of rivets would have been.
1:09:07
[UNKNOWN]: In any case, the damage was sufficient.
1:09:11
[UNKNOWN]: The first five compartments forward of the midship section were breached.
1:09:16
[UNKNOWN]: Water began pouring in through the compromised hull, and the rate of ingress was, from the outset, faster than the pumps could handle.
1:09:25
[UNKNOWN]: Thomas Andrews was woken and brought to inspect the damage.
1:09:30
[UNKNOWN]: He made his assessment quickly,
1:09:33
[UNKNOWN]: Working through the calculations in his head, the rate of flooding, the volume of the compartments, the buoyancy remaining in the unaffected sections.
1:09:44
[UNKNOWN]: His conclusion was delivered to Captain Smith, in terms that left no room for ambiguity.
1:09:50
[UNKNOWN]: The ship could float with four compartments flooded, five were flooding.
1:09:55
[UNKNOWN]: Given the geometry of the hull, as the forward section filled and the bow began to dip, water would progressively flow over the tops of the bulkheads and flood successive compartments toward the stern.
1:10:08
[UNKNOWN]: The ship was going to sink.
1:10:10
[UNKNOWN]: It was not a question of if.
1:10:12
[UNKNOWN]: It was a question of when.
1:10:15
[UNKNOWN]: Andrews estimated approximately one hour and 45 minutes.
1:10:21
[UNKNOWN]: In fact, it took two hours and 40 minutes.
1:10:26
[UNKNOWN]: This brings us to the most consequential failure of the entire disaster and the one that directly determined how many people would die, the lifeboats.
1:10:40
[UNKNOWN]: 14 of these were standard wooden lifeboats, capable of holding 65 people each.
1:10:47
[UNKNOWN]: Two were emergency cutters, smaller wooden boats with a capacity of 40 people each.
1:10:54
[UNKNOWN]: and 4 were collapsible lifeboats, wooden bottomed boats with canvas sides that could be raised each with a stated capacity of 47 people.
1:11:06
[UNKNOWN]: The total certified capacity of all these boats was 1178 people.
1:11:10
[UNKNOWN]: The total number of people aboard the ship was 2224.
1:11:12
[UNKNOWN]: In other words,
1:11:20
[UNKNOWN]: the Titanic's lifeboats, even if every single one of them had been launched completely full, could have saved fewer than half the people on board.
1:11:31
[UNKNOWN]: How had this happened?
1:11:32
[UNKNOWN]: The answer lies in the regulatory framework governing British merchant shipping, which was administered by the Board of Trade and which had not been substantially updated since 1894.
1:11:48
[UNKNOWN]: required ships above 10,000 tons to carry 16 life boats, plus whatever additional equipment the board of trade deemed necessary.
1:11:58
[UNKNOWN]: The Titanic displaced over 46,000 tons and was the largest ship in the world.
1:12:05
[UNKNOWN]: But the regulations had been written in a time when 10,000 tons was considered a large ship, and they had not kept pace with the extraordinary growth in vessel size that the previous two decades had seen.
1:12:20
[UNKNOWN]: The board of trade regulations were, in the language of bureaucratic failure, a legacy system.
1:12:26
[UNKNOWN]: They represented the accumulated thinking of an earlier era,
1:12:31
[UNKNOWN]: written into law and then left in place while the world moved on around them.
1:12:36
[UNKNOWN]: The ships had gotten bigger, the number of passengers had increased dramatically, but the regulatory requirement for lifeboat capacity had not kept pace.
1:12:47
[UNKNOWN]: And because the regulations were the baseline,
1:12:50
[UNKNOWN]: and because compliance with the regulations was the standard by which safety was measured, the white star line and every other shipping company could build enormous ships within adequate lifeboat provision and do so entirely legally.
1:13:08
[UNKNOWN]: with the approval of the regulatory authority.
1:13:11
[UNKNOWN]: It is important to note that the Titanic actually carried more lifeboats than the regulations required.
1:13:18
[UNKNOWN]: The regulations called for 16 boats.
1:13:21
[UNKNOWN]: The Titanic carried 20.
1:13:24
[UNKNOWN]: The additional four were installed at the suggestion of Alexander Carlisle.
1:13:29
[UNKNOWN]: a former partner at Harland and Wolf, who had been involved in the early design discussions.
1:13:34
[UNKNOWN]: But even this exceeded requirement was woefully insufficient for the number of people on board.
1:13:42
[UNKNOWN]: The inadequacy of the lifeboat provision was compounded by the way in which the boats were loaded and launched during the emergency.
1:13:50
[UNKNOWN]: The evacuation of the Titanic was, from almost every perspective, a disaster of organization
1:13:59
[UNKNOWN]: It began too late, proceeded too slowly and was characterised by a failure to use the available capacity that represents one of the most heartbreaking aspects of the entire story.
1:14:12
[UNKNOWN]: When the order to prepare lifeboats was given,
1:14:15
[UNKNOWN]: Many passengers, particularly in first class, were initially reluctant to get into them.
1:14:22
[UNKNOWN]: They had been told the ship was sinkable, only within enormous difficulty, and the lifeboats looked small and cold and precarious against the warm, brightly lit luxury of the ship's decks.
1:14:36
[UNKNOWN]: The night was bitterly cold.
1:14:38
[UNKNOWN]: The ocean was black and apparently endless, and the ship seemed was, for the moment, solid underfoot.
1:14:46
[UNKNOWN]: Several first-class passengers who were directed towards lifeboats declined to board.
1:14:52
[UNKNOWN]: Preferring to wait and see what happened and had to be urged repeatedly before they would leave the ship.
1:14:58
[UNKNOWN]: As a result, the first life boats to be launched were launched severely under capacity.
1:15:05
[UNKNOWN]: Lifeboat number 7, the first one lowered, left with approximately 28 people aboard against a stated capacity of 65.
1:15:14
[UNKNOWN]: Lifeboat number one, left with only 12 people, including a number of first-class passengers and crew, who simply rode away without waiting to take on more survivors.
1:15:26
[UNKNOWN]: The officer in command of the loading of the boats, largely second-office a light-holder on the port side, and first-office a Murdock on the starboard side, were both working without a clear understanding of how quickly the ship was sinking.
1:15:40
[UNKNOWN]: and therefore, without the urgency that a complete understanding of the situation would have produced.
1:15:45
[UNKNOWN]: There was also a critical problem with communication and the distribution of information among the passengers.
1:15:52
[UNKNOWN]: The ship's officers knew the ship was sinking, but this information was not clearly communicated to the passengers, particularly in the early stages of the emergency.
1:16:03
[UNKNOWN]: Captain Smith gave the order to uncover the boats and prepare to load passengers at approximately 12, 10 in the morning, 30 minutes after the collision.
1:16:15
[UNKNOWN]: But there was no announcement to passengers, no shipwider alarm.
1:16:20
[UNKNOWN]: no coordinated instruction to put on life jackets and proceed to boat stations.
1:16:26
[UNKNOWN]: Passengers were informed if they were informed at all by individual crew members approaching them in the corridors or on deck.
1:16:36
[UNKNOWN]: The consequences of this communication failure were distributed unequally across the three classes.
1:16:43
[UNKNOWN]: First-class passengers whose cabins were near the boat deck and who had personal stewards available to guide them were generally better informed and better directed than the passengers in the lower classes.
1:16:59
[UNKNOWN]: Second-class passengers were somewhat less well-served.
1:17:03
[UNKNOWN]: third-class passengers were the worst served of all.
1:17:06
[UNKNOWN]: The situation in third-class during the sinking is one of the most contested and emotionally charged aspects of the disaster.
1:17:16
[UNKNOWN]: The claim that third-class passengers were actively kept below decks, while the lifeboats were loaded, that the gates between third-class and the upper decks were deliberately locked to prevent the poorer passengers from competing with the wealthy for lifeboat places, became one of the central narratives of the disaster in the years following.
1:17:39
[UNKNOWN]: and it gained powerful cinematic expression in the 1997 James Cameron film.
1:17:46
[UNKNOWN]: The actual historical picture is more complicated and, in some ways, more troubling than simple deliberate malice.
1:17:55
[UNKNOWN]: There is no convincing evidence that third-class passengers were intentionally locked below decks as a matter of policy.
1:18:03
[UNKNOWN]: What there is evidence of is a much more systemic and therefore more damning failure.
1:18:10
[UNKNOWN]: The ship's emergency procedures simply did not adequately account for third-class passengers and the physical design of the ship.
1:18:19
[UNKNOWN]: With third-class, located at the extremities and separated from the upper decks by multiple barriers, made it much harder for third-class
1:18:34
[UNKNOWN]: The evidence suggests that many of the gates separating third class from the upper decks were indeed locked, or at least not thrown open, for extended periods during the emergency.
1:18:47
[UNKNOWN]: Some of this was inertia.
1:18:49
[UNKNOWN]: the gates were normally kept locked to comply with immigration regulations.
1:18:53
[UNKNOWN]: And in the chaos and confusion of the emergency, no one thought systematically to open them.
1:18:59
[UNKNOWN]: Some of it was the result of inadequate instruction to the crew members responsible for third-class areas who were not given clear orders about what to do with their passengers.
1:19:10
[UNKNOWN]: and some of it was the result of the basic physical reality that third-class passengers, even when they could get to the upper decks, often found the boats already gone, or already full.
1:19:22
[UNKNOWN]: The survival statistics tell the story starkly.
1:19:26
[UNKNOWN]: Of the first class passengers, approximately 62% survived.
1:19:32
[UNKNOWN]: Of the second class passengers, approximately 41% survived.
1:19:37
[UNKNOWN]: Of the third class passengers, approximately 24% survived.
1:19:42
[UNKNOWN]: Among the crew, survival rates were also low, around 24%.
1:19:49
[UNKNOWN]: But this reflects in part, the fact that many crew members stayed at their posts and helped with the evacuation until it was too late for them to save themselves.
1:20:00
[UNKNOWN]: The disparity in survival rates between classes,
1:20:04
[UNKNOWN]: is not entirely explained by the lifeboat situation.
1:20:08
[UNKNOWN]: Third class passengers were also physically more distant from the boat deck, which meant they had further to travel to reach safety, and therefore lost more of the precious two-hour window.
1:20:20
[UNKNOWN]: Some third-class passengers who reached the boat deck did so only as the last boats were being loaded or after they had already been launched.
1:20:29
[UNKNOWN]: There was also in the later stages of the sinking, a horrifying dynamic at play on the boat deck.
1:20:37
[UNKNOWN]: As the ship's bow sank lower, and it became clear that there were not enough boats for everyone.
1:20:44
[UNKNOWN]: The orderly evacuation began to break down.
1:20:47
[UNKNOWN]: There was shoving and scrambling for the last boats.
1:20:51
[UNKNOWN]: There were groups of passengers, predominantly third-class men and male crew members.
1:20:58
[UNKNOWN]: Gathered at the stern as the bow went under, watching the water rise around the lower decks, and knowing that the odds of their survival were growing very small.
1:21:09
[UNKNOWN]: The last lifeboat was launched at approximately 2.15 in the morning.
1:21:15
[UNKNOWN]: The ship sank at 2.20 in the morning, two hours and 40 minutes after the collision.
1:21:23
[UNKNOWN]: As she went down, her stern rose high out of the water.
1:21:27
[UNKNOWN]: the bow already far below the surface, and the people still on board by some estimates several hundred of them held on to whatever they could.
1:21:38
[UNKNOWN]: Some jumped, some were swept off by the water as the deck tilted, some climbed to the highest point of the stern and rode it down.
1:21:48
[UNKNOWN]: When the stern finally disappeared, it left behind an open expanse of dark freezing ocean, littered with
1:21:57
[UNKNOWN]: and alive with the sounds of hundreds of people in the water.
1:22:01
[UNKNOWN]: The sea temperature was 28 degrees Fahrenheit.
1:22:05
[UNKNOWN]: In water that cold, consciousness is typically lost within 15 to 30 minutes.
1:22:11
[UNKNOWN]: And death follows shortly after.
1:22:14
[UNKNOWN]: The distance between that moment
1:22:16
[UNKNOWN]: the final disappearance of the ship at 220 in the morning, and the arrival of the rescue ship Carpathia, which came alongside the first lifeboat at 4-10 in the morning, was one hour and 50 minutes.
1:22:32
[UNKNOWN]: No one who was in the water when the ship went down survived.
1:22:37
[UNKNOWN]: The lifeboats sat on the dark ocean, within earshot of the people dying in the water, and they did not go back.
1:22:45
[UNKNOWN]: This is another of the devastating facts of the disaster that the people in the boats, most of them with empty seats, did not immediately row back into the field of wreckage to pull survivors out of the water.
1:22:58
[UNKNOWN]: The reasons given afterward were various.
1:23:01
[UNKNOWN]: fear of being swamped by panicking swimmers.
1:23:05
[UNKNOWN]: Fear of being pulled under by the suction of the ship, simple paralysis in the face of the horror.
1:23:12
[UNKNOWN]: Lifeboat 14 commanded by fifth officer Harald Lowe did eventually go back after the screaming in the water had mostly stopped and pulled four people
1:23:30
[UNKNOWN]: Of the 2,224 people who had sailed from Southampton, 710 survived.
1:23:32
[UNKNOWN]: 1,514 died.
1:23:33
[UNKNOWN]: Among the dead were Captain Smith, Thomas Andrews, William Murdoch, Charles Hayes, William
1:23:58
[UNKNOWN]: John Jacob asked to the fourth, died in the water, his body, when recovered, showed signs of the impact of the funnel, falling and striking him.
1:24:09
[UNKNOWN]: Benjamin Guggenheim, who reportedly changed into his finest evening clothes, after concluding that he could not get into a life boat, reportedly told a steward,
1:24:21
[UNKNOWN]: We've dressed in our best and are prepared to go down like gentlemen.
1:24:26
[UNKNOWN]: Isidor and Ida Strauss died together as they had lived together, refusing to be separated.
1:24:33
[UNKNOWN]: Thomas Andrews was never seen again after a steward spotted him alone in the smoking room in the final hour.
1:24:41
[UNKNOWN]: Jay Bruce is me, got into a lifeboat.
1:24:46
[UNKNOWN]: chapter 4, the rescue and the reckoning, aftermath and inquiry.
1:24:55
[UNKNOWN]: The Carpathia, a Cunard liner under the command of Captain Arthur Rostron, received the Titanic's distress call at 1225 in the morning, and immediately turned toward the stricken ship, pushing her engines well beyond their normal operating limits and making approximately 17 knots where 14 was standard.
1:25:18
[UNKNOWN]: Rostron prepared his ship with remarkable efficiency, clearing the public rooms for the survivors, organising medical teams, laying out blankets and food and hot drinks, and positioning rope ladders and bosons chairs at the sides of the ship for boarding survivors from the sea.
1:25:39
[UNKNOWN]: It was a model of emergency response, and Rostron would later be knighted for his conduct that night.
1:25:46
[UNKNOWN]: But the Carpathia could not arrive in time to save those in the water.
1:25:51
[UNKNOWN]: She arrived at the location of the sinking at 4-10 in the morning and spent several hours moving through the debris field, taking on the survivors from the lifeboats.
1:26:03
[UNKNOWN]: By 530 in the morning, all 710 survivors had been brought aboard.
1:26:09
[UNKNOWN]: Rostron then made the decision to sail directly for New York.
1:26:13
[UNKNOWN]: The nearest large port with the medical facilities, housing, and communications infrastructure to handle the situation rather than returning to Southampton, or proceeding to Halifax.
1:26:33
[UNKNOWN]: was a haunting tablo of the disaster's scale and intimacy.
1:26:38
[UNKNOWN]: Wouldn't furniture, life preserves.
1:26:42
[UNKNOWN]: deck chairs, personal belongings, coats, hats, bags, a child's toy, and bodies, dozens of them, floating in their life jackets in the cold water.
1:26:55
[UNKNOWN]: The grim evidence of how many people had gone into the sea and had not been pulled to safety in time.
1:27:02
[UNKNOWN]: Several ships were dispatched from
1:27:07
[UNKNOWN]: The cable ship Mackay Bennett was the first to arrive, and her crew spent several days systematically collecting bodies from the debris field, working in conditions of considerable emotional difficulty.
1:27:20
[UNKNOWN]: In total, 333 bodies were recovered from the ocean.
1:27:25
[UNKNOWN]: Of these, 119 were buried at sea.
1:27:30
[UNKNOWN]: largely those who could not be identified and preserved for transport, and 209 were brought to Halifax.
1:27:39
[UNKNOWN]: The remaining bodies were never recovered.
1:27:42
[UNKNOWN]: The condition of the recovered bodies and their belongings provided a grim forensic record of the disaster.
1:27:49
[UNKNOWN]: The bodies were numbered and tagged, and the contents of their pockets and the clothes they were wearing were carefully documented.
1:27:57
[UNKNOWN]: Many of the recovered bodies were those of third-class passengers and crew members, not the wealthy first-class passengers whose deaths had attracted the most public attention.
1:28:08
[UNKNOWN]: Some of the bodies were identified by name.
1:28:11
[UNKNOWN]: Others were listed as unknown male, or unknown female, and buried under simple markers in the symmetries of Halifax,
1:28:25
[UNKNOWN]: The Carpathia arrived in New York on the evening of April 18, 1912.
1:28:30
[UNKNOWN]: The harbour was full of ships and boats that had come out to meet her, and the docks at the white starpeer were packed with an enormous crowd.
1:28:41
[UNKNOWN]: Relatives of survivors and victims, journalists, photographers, and thousands of simply curious onlookers.
1:28:51
[UNKNOWN]: The scene as the survivors came down the gangways, was one of extraordinary emotional intensity, reunions between survivors and families who had spent four days, not knowing whether their loved ones were alive or dead, interspersed with the quiet, devastating absence of those who were not coming.
1:29:12
[UNKNOWN]: The news of the sinking had been filtering out in the four days since the disaster, but the full picture of the loss had been obscured by the unreliability of early wireless reports and the confusion of the first hours.
1:29:26
[UNKNOWN]: Some early reports had even suggested that the Titanic had not sunk, that she had been taken under tow.
1:29:33
[UNKNOWN]: By the time the Carpathia docked,
1:29:36
[UNKNOWN]: The scale of the disaster was clear, but the emotional reality of it was still being absorbed.
1:29:42
[UNKNOWN]: The public response to the disaster was unlike anything that had come before.
1:29:48
[UNKNOWN]: In the era before radio broadcasting, before television, before the internet.
1:29:54
[UNKNOWN]: news spread through newspapers and the newspaper coverage of the Titanic sinking was extraordinary in its volume and intensity.
1:30:04
[UNKNOWN]: The front pages of newspapers in Britain, America, and around the world carried the story for days and then weeks.
1:30:13
[UNKNOWN]: The stories of individual survivors and victims were told in exhaustive detail, the questions.
1:30:21
[UNKNOWN]: Why hadn't there been enough lifeboats?
1:30:24
[UNKNOWN]: Why had the ship been going so fast?
1:30:27
[UNKNOWN]: Where were the rescue ships?
1:30:29
[UNKNOWN]: Were being asked loudly and insistently within days of the disaster?
1:30:35
[UNKNOWN]: Official inquiries had been announced on both sides of the Atlantic.
1:30:40
[UNKNOWN]: In the United States, Senator William Alden Smith of Michigan,
1:30:45
[UNKNOWN]: the chairman of the Senate Committee on Commerce, launched an immediate investigation that began even before all the survivors had left the ship.
1:30:55
[UNKNOWN]: Smith subpoenaed key witnesses, including J. Bruce Ismay, who had been planning to return to Britain as quickly as possible and held them in New York until they had given testimony.
1:31:07
[UNKNOWN]: The American inquiry was characterised
1:31:15
[UNKNOWN]: Though his lack of technical knowledge of ships and the sea led to some questions that were later mocked by British commentators, he was accused of grandstanding and of exploiting the disaster for political purposes, but his inquiry did bring a great deal of information to light and produced a set of recommendations that had significant legislative consequences.
1:31:44
[UNKNOWN]: a distinguished judge and began in May of 1912.
1:31:49
[UNKNOWN]: It was more formally structured and technically informed than the American inquiry, and it examined the disaster over the course of several weeks, taking testimony from nearly a hundred witnesses.
1:32:03
[UNKNOWN]: The British inquiries conclusions were somewhat more sympathetic to the officers of the ship than the American inquiries had been.
1:32:11
[UNKNOWN]: It found that Captain Smith had followed the practices standard in his profession, that first officer Murdoch had done what could reasonably be done in the circumstances, and that the overall cause of the disaster was the combination of ice in an unexpected location.
1:32:30
[UNKNOWN]: and the established practice of maintaining speed in ice fields, which the inquiry criticised.
1:32:37
[UNKNOWN]: but did not condemn as reckless.
1:32:39
[UNKNOWN]: Both inquiries made essentially the same finding about the fundamental cause of the disaster.
1:32:46
[UNKNOWN]: The ship had been going too fast in a known ice field, and there had not been enough lifeboats.
1:32:52
[UNKNOWN]: Both inquiries made recommendations for changes to regulations governing lifeboat provision, ship speed in ice, wireless communication requirements, and the protocols for handling ice warnings.
1:33:06
[UNKNOWN]: And both inquiries to varying degrees, found that the behavior of the shipping industry, including but not limited to the white star line, had allowed commercial pressures and competitive culture to override basic safety considerations.
1:33:24
[UNKNOWN]: Jay Bruce is May's role in the disaster, became one of the most intensely contested aspects of the entire inquiry.
1:33:34
[UNKNOWN]: The American Press, led by the publisher William Randolph Hearst, had already characterized his May as a coward and a villain.
1:33:44
[UNKNOWN]: a man who had pressured the captain to maintain speed, and then had saved himself while over 1500 passengers and crew members died.
1:33:54
[UNKNOWN]: The coverage was ferocious, and it permanently damaged his main reputation.
1:34:00
[UNKNOWN]: He gave testimony at both inquiries, and maintained that he had not pressured captain Smith.
1:34:06
[UNKNOWN]: that he had had no role in determining the ship's course or speed, and that he had gotten into a lifeboat only when it was being lowered and there was no one else nearby to take the empty seat.
1:34:20
[UNKNOWN]: Some witnesses corroborated this account, others did not.
1:34:24
[UNKNOWN]: The historical verdict on Izme has never been entirely settled.
1:34:29
[UNKNOWN]: What seems clear is that the worst of the popular characterisation that he was directly responsible for the ship's speed and therefore directly responsible for the sinking is not supported by the evidence.
1:34:44
[UNKNOWN]: Captains of white starliners did not take orders from passengers, however important, about matters of navigation.
1:34:52
[UNKNOWN]: But the softer version of the criticism that is made created a culture and an atmosphere in which commercial considerations were routinely allowed to override safety margins.
1:35:03
[UNKNOWN]: has more substance, and it is the version that has endured in the historical literature.
1:35:09
[UNKNOWN]: The other figure whose legacy was most dramatically affected by the disaster was Captain Smith himself.
1:35:17
[UNKNOWN]: In death, Smith became a hero.
1:35:19
[UNKNOWN]: The noble captain who went down with his ship, who maintained his composure under the
1:35:30
[UNKNOWN]: before accepting his own fate.
1:35:33
[UNKNOWN]: Monuments to Smith were erected in his hometown of Hanley and in Lichfield.
1:35:39
[UNKNOWN]: The narrative of the steadfast captain became one of the central motifs of the disaster's commemoration, but historians have been somewhat less generous.
1:35:51
[UNKNOWN]: The evidence suggests that Smith made a significant era of judgment in maintaining speed in a known ice field on a dark calm night.
1:36:02
[UNKNOWN]: an error that reflected the cultural norms of his profession rather than any individual negligence, but an error nonetheless.
1:36:11
[UNKNOWN]: And the management of the evacuation, while it took place under conditions of extraordinary difficulty and confusion, was marked by failures of communication and organization that cost lives.
1:36:24
[UNKNOWN]: The changes to maritime law and practice that followed the Titanic disaster were sweeping and lasting.
1:36:32
[UNKNOWN]: The international convention for the safety of life at sea, known as Solas, was drafted in the year following the disaster and established a new international framework for maritime safety regulations.
1:36:45
[UNKNOWN]: It required among many other things that ships carry sufficient lifeboat capacity for all
1:36:53
[UNKNOWN]: that lifeboat drills be conducted on all ships that ships maintain a continuous wireless watch and that ice warnings be taken as a serious safety matter, requiring action rather than merely being filed away.
1:37:10
[UNKNOWN]: The International Ice Patrol was established in 1914 to monitor ice in the North Atlantic shipping lanes and warn ships of its presence and location.
1:37:21
[UNKNOWN]: A service that has operated continuously ever since and has not had a single iceberg related sinking occur within its area of coverage since its establishment.
1:37:32
[UNKNOWN]: The wireless communication aspects of the disaster
1:37:38
[UNKNOWN]: One of the most striking facts of the disaster's early hours was that the Californian, a ship that was stopped in the ice field, approximately 10-12 miles from where the Titanic sank, apparently saw the distress rockets fired by the Titanic, but did not respond.
1:37:57
[UNKNOWN]: The Californian's wireless operator had turned in for the night before the Titanic struck the Iceberg, and no one on the ship had an explanation for the rockets that was acted upon.
1:38:09
[UNKNOWN]: Whether the Californian's officers saw the rockets and failed to respond appropriately,
1:38:15
[UNKNOWN]: or whether they misidentified them, or whether the distress signals were too distant to be clearly seen.
1:38:22
[UNKNOWN]: All of this has been argued extensively for over a century, without definitive resolution, but the failure of the Californian to come to the Titanic's assistance.
1:38:34
[UNKNOWN]: If it was indeed close enough to have done so in time, remains one of the most troubling aspects of the entire story.
1:38:41
[UNKNOWN]: The soulless convention requirement for continuous wireless watch addressed exactly this film-rebility, ensuring that ships at sea could always be reached by wireless and would always be in contact with the broader communication network of the shipping lanes.
1:38:58
[UNKNOWN]: The personal reckonings that followed the disaster for the survivors were as various and as complex as the survivors themselves.
1:39:07
[UNKNOWN]: Second officer Lightoller, the most senior officer to survive, went on to a distinguished career, continued to serve in the Royal Navy during the First World War.
1:39:18
[UNKNOWN]: And later became famous for sailing his own motor yacht across the channel to help evacuate Allied troops from Dunkirk in 1940.
1:39:28
[UNKNOWN]: He wrote a detailed memoir of the Titanic disaster that remained one of the most important first-hand accounts.
1:39:35
[UNKNOWN]: He always maintained that Captain Smith had acted appropriately and that the disaster was ultimately the result of an extraordinary and unforeseeable convergence of circumstances.
1:39:49
[UNKNOWN]: Margaret Brown, Molly Brown, used the celebrity that the disaster gave her to advocate for the safety reforms that were then being debated and testified before the Senate Committee.
1:40:01
[UNKNOWN]: She later used her platform to advocate for a range of social causes, including women's suffrage and workers' rights.
1:40:11
[UNKNOWN]: Jay Bruce is May returned to Britain, resigned from the chairmanship of the White Star line shortly after the inquiry is concluded and withdrew from public life.
1:40:22
[UNKNOWN]: He lived for another 25 years, dying in 1937.
1:40:28
[UNKNOWN]: but never recovered his reputation, or his place in public life.
1:40:33
[UNKNOWN]: He spent much of his later years in a house on the West Coast of Ireland, largely avoiding society, and left behind relatively few accounts of his own experience of, or feelings about the disaster.
1:40:46
[UNKNOWN]: Wireless operator Harold Bride survived, with badly frostbitten feet, and gave a compelling account of the disaster's final hours in the wireless room.
1:40:58
[UNKNOWN]: Jack Phillips, the senior wireless operator, who had kept sending distress signals until the very end, and whose transmissions ultimately brought the Carpathia to the scene, died in the water after the ship went down.
1:41:12
[UNKNOWN]: The families of the third class passengers scattered across two continents and multiple national communities received far less public attention than those of the first class victims, but their grief was no less real, and their losses were in many ways less cushioned by wealth and social support.
1:41:33
[UNKNOWN]: The immigrant communities that had lost members on the Titanic, the Lebanese families of New England, the Irish families of County Mayo, the Scandinavian farm families of Minnesota and Wisconsin, mourned privately, and without the public ceremony that attended the deaths of the wealthy.
1:41:53
[UNKNOWN]: their names are less well-known.
1:41:56
[UNKNOWN]: Their stories are less often told, but they are no less important, and in recent decades, as historians and researchers have turned their attention more deliberately to the third-class experience of the disaster, their stories have begun to receive the attention they deserve.
1:42:17
[UNKNOWN]: Chapter 5, the undying ship, legacy, wreck, and meaning.
1:42:26
[UNKNOWN]: The Titanic sank into roughly 12,500 feet of water in the North Atlantic.
1:42:33
[UNKNOWN]: approximately 370 miles south southeast of the coast of Newfoundland.
1:42:38
[UNKNOWN]: She came to rest on the ocean floor in two main sections, the bow section and the stern section, separated by a distance of about a third of a mile.
1:42:49
[UNKNOWN]: The break had occurred somewhere in the area of the third and fourth funnels as the stern rose out of the water in the final moments of the sinking.
1:42:59
[UNKNOWN]: The structural stresses becoming too great for the hull to bear.
1:43:04
[UNKNOWN]: Between the two main sections lay an extensive debris field containing thousands of objects that have been scattered as the ship broke and sank.
1:43:15
[UNKNOWN]: and as the stern section tumbled and imploded on its way to the bottom.
1:43:20
[UNKNOWN]: For over 70 years, the wreck was inaccessible.
1:43:24
[UNKNOWN]: The technology required to reach such deaths, 12,500 feet, is over two miles.
1:43:32
[UNKNOWN]: And to conduct useful visual investigation, they simply did not exist in the early decades after the sinking.
1:43:39
[UNKNOWN]: Numerous expeditions were proposed over the years.
1:43:45
[UNKNOWN]: but all of them ran into the same fundamental problem.
1:43:50
[UNKNOWN]: The depth was beyond the reach of any available diving technology, and even robotic or unmanned systems were not yet capable of operating effectively at such pressures.
1:44:02
[UNKNOWN]: The breakthrough came in September 1985, when a joint American French expedition led by the Oceanographer Robert Ballard using a remotely operated underwater vehicle called Argo,
1:44:18
[UNKNOWN]: approximately 400 miles south of Newfoundland, about 27 miles from where the ship had long been estimated to rest.
1:44:26
[UNKNOWN]: The initial discovery, the Argo's cameras showing boiler drums emerging from the sediment on the ocean floor, was deeply moving, and the images that ballad and his team brought back from their subsequent dives transformed the public's relationship
1:44:45
[UNKNOWN]: Balard was followed in subsequent years by numerous other expeditions, including several commercial salvage operations that recovered thousands of artifacts from the debris field, China, clothing, jewelry, tools, personal effects, and structural components of the ship.
1:45:06
[UNKNOWN]: The salvage expeditions have been intensely controversial.
1:45:10
[UNKNOWN]: Ballard himself argued strongly against the recovery of artifacts, believing that the rec side should be treated as a grave and left undisturbed.
1:45:22
[UNKNOWN]: Others argued that the artifacts were being lost to natural deterioration in any case and that recovery and preservation was preferable to their ultimate dissolution.
1:45:34
[UNKNOWN]: This debate has never been fully resolved.
1:45:37
[UNKNOWN]: The wreck itself is deteriorating steadily.
1:45:41
[UNKNOWN]: When Ballard first explored it in 1985, the stern section was substantially intact.
1:45:49
[UNKNOWN]: Though already significantly distorted from the stresses of the sinking and the collapse of internal structures under hydrostatic pressure, by the time of subsequent expeditions in the 1990s and 2000s, significant deterioration was already visible.
1:46:07
[UNKNOWN]: Driven by iron-eating bacteria that consume the metal of the hull and create the characteristic rust formations called rusticles that cover much of the wreck.
1:46:18
[UNKNOWN]: By some estimates, the wreck has deteriorated more in the 40 years since its discovery than in the 70 years before discovery, because the exploratory visits have disturbed the settled sediment and changed the local chemical environment around the hull.
1:46:34
[UNKNOWN]: The bow section remains the most iconic part of the wreck.
1:46:39
[UNKNOWN]: It came to rest upright on the ocean floor and has settled into the sediment to a depth of approximately 40 to 60 feet, with the hull plating from the water line down buried below the seabed.
1:46:53
[UNKNOWN]: The forward section of the hull, from the bow to approximately the break water.
1:46:58
[UNKNOWN]: is relatively well preserved.
1:47:01
[UNKNOWN]: The steel plating still intact in many places.
1:47:04
[UNKNOWN]: The anchor chains still in place.
1:47:07
[UNKNOWN]: Even the crow's nest still recognizable, though the wood of its structure has long since disappeared.
1:47:13
[UNKNOWN]: Further,
1:47:14
[UNKNOWN]: The damage from the sinking becomes increasingly evident.
1:47:17
[UNKNOWN]: The roof of the officer's quarters collapsed.
1:47:20
[UNKNOWN]: The funnel base is gaping open, the bridge front pushed in.
1:47:24
[UNKNOWN]: The stern section is a very different picture, a chaotic mass of twisted steel, where the implosion of the internal space is during the descent, and the catastrophic structural failure of the breakup, have created a landscape of wreckage
1:47:44
[UNKNOWN]: Individual spaces and structures can be identified, but the overall impression is of tremendous violence.
1:47:51
[UNKNOWN]: The steel of the ship contorted by forces far beyond those it was designed to resist.
1:47:57
[UNKNOWN]: The debris field between the two sections has yielded some of the most poignant fines of the wreck.
1:48:03
[UNKNOWN]: Thousands of personal objects, suitcases, shoes, chamber pots, dolls, medicine bottles, letters, and countless other items lie scattered across the ocean floor, preserved in many cases because the cold, dark, pressure-rich environment of the deep sea
1:48:27
[UNKNOWN]: at conserving certain materials.
1:48:29
[UNKNOWN]: The shoes are among the most famous of these objects.
1:48:33
[UNKNOWN]: Pears of shoes still lying together in the sediment, exactly as they fell from the decaying bodies of those who went down with the ship.
1:48:41
[UNKNOWN]: A quiet, heartbreaking testimony to the people who wore them.
1:48:46
[UNKNOWN]: The cultural afterlife of the Titanic has been as extraordinary as the disaster itself.
1:48:53
[UNKNOWN]: The ship has been the subject of more books, films, documentaries, museum exhibitions and artistic works than any other single event in maritime history.
1:49:03
[UNKNOWN]: and its hold on the popular imagination shows no sign of weakening more than a century on.
1:49:09
[UNKNOWN]: The first film about the disaster was released in 1912, the same year as the sinking, and starred one of the survivors.
1:49:18
[UNKNOWN]: Since then, there have been at least five major theatrical films about the disaster, including the enormously successful 1997 James Cameron production.
1:49:31
[UNKNOWN]: that became one of the highest grossing films of all time, and introduced the story to a new generation of viewers.
1:49:39
[UNKNOWN]: The Cameron film is a mixed blessing from a historical perspective.
1:49:43
[UNKNOWN]: Its visual recreation of the ship was extraordinarily detailed and accurate in many respects, but its dramatic narrative, introduced and popularized a number of simplifications and exaggerations,
1:49:59
[UNKNOWN]: that have become embedded in the popular understanding of the disaster.
1:50:03
[UNKNOWN]: The books about the Titanic constitute a small library in themselves.
1:50:09
[UNKNOWN]: The definitive history of the disaster remains for most specialists.
1:50:14
[UNKNOWN]: Walter Lords 1955 account called a night to remember, which was based on extensive interviews with survivors, and which set the standard for popular historical writing about the event.
1:50:29
[UNKNOWN]: Lords' work has been supplemented, and in some respects superseded by later scholarship, but it remains remarkably accurate and readable more than 70 years after its publication.
1:50:43
[UNKNOWN]: The museums and exhibitions dedicated to the disaster have multiplied since the discovery of the wreck.
1:50:50
[UNKNOWN]: The Titanic Belfast Museum opened in 2012 on the site of the shipyard where the vessel was built is one of the largest attractions in Northern Ireland.
1:51:01
[UNKNOWN]: and receives hundreds of thousands of visitors per year.
1:51:05
[UNKNOWN]: Exhibitions of artifacts recovered from the wreck have toured internationally and attracted large audiences everywhere they have appeared.
1:51:15
[UNKNOWN]: The disaster has its own dedicated community of researchers, enthusiasts, and historians whose work continues to refine and expand the historical record.
1:51:26
[UNKNOWN]: What is it about the Titanic?
1:51:28
[UNKNOWN]: that makes it so persistently fascinating.
1:51:31
[UNKNOWN]: Why does this particular disaster, one among many terrible disasters of the 20th century, retain such a powerful grip on the imagination?
1:51:42
[UNKNOWN]: part of the answer is simply the dramatic elements of the story.
1:51:47
[UNKNOWN]: The ship was the largest and most celebrated in the world.
1:51:51
[UNKNOWN]: It was on its maiden voyage.
1:51:53
[UNKNOWN]: The night was calm and clear and cold.
1:51:57
[UNKNOWN]: The collision was unexpected.
1:52:00
[UNKNOWN]: Its consequences initially unrecognized.
1:52:04
[UNKNOWN]: The final hours had all the elements of the finest tragedy, heroism and cowardice, class conflict and human solidarity, love and loss, the grand gesture and the small act of kindness.
1:52:22
[UNKNOWN]: The story has everything a great narrative needs, and it is all true, but there is something
1:52:33
[UNKNOWN]: in the cultural imagination as a kind of crystallization of a particular historical moment.
1:52:40
[UNKNOWN]: The moment of the early 20th century when human technological confidence was at its height.
1:52:47
[UNKNOWN]: When the industrial revolution had produced miracles of engineering that seemed to put nature itself in retreat, and when the class hierarchies of the Victorian era were still largely intact, but beginning to creek under the pressure of new social and political forces.
1:53:05
[UNKNOWN]: The sinking of the Titanic punctured that confidence in a specific and dramatic way.
1:53:12
[UNKNOWN]: Here was the greatest ship ever built, created by the most skilled engineers using the finest materials and the most advanced methods available.
1:53:22
[UNKNOWN]: and it was at the bottom of the ocean in less than three hours, defeated not by any human enemy, but by a piece of floating ice.
1:53:32
[UNKNOWN]: The hubris of the claim that the ship was unsinkable.
1:53:36
[UNKNOWN]: A claim that was mostly a journalistic oversimplification but that had become part of the ship's identity in the public mind made the sinking feel like something more than an accident.
1:53:49
[UNKNOWN]: it felt like a judgment.
1:53:52
[UNKNOWN]: The disaster also occurred at a very specific intersection of social history.
1:53:58
[UNKNOWN]: The Edwardian era of which the Titanic was in some ways the Apotheosis, the culmination of a period of extraordinary prosperity and confidence among the wealthy classes of Britain and America was about to end.
1:54:13
[UNKNOWN]: Two years after the Titanic sank, the first World War began, and the comfortable world of the Edwardian upper classes would be destroyed as thoroughly as the ship itself.
1:54:27
[UNKNOWN]: the titanic thus stands in historical retrospect.
1:54:32
[UNKNOWN]: As the last great monument of the pre-war world, a world of unquestioned hierarchies of enormous wealth and enormous poverty, of enormous technological achievement and equally enormous human hubris, the class dynamics of the disaster.
1:54:51
[UNKNOWN]: The stark difference in survival rates between first, second and third class, made it a story about social justice, as well as maritime disaster.
1:55:03
[UNKNOWN]: And this dimension became increasingly important, as the 20th century progressed, and the assumptions of Edwardian class society were challenged.
1:55:13
[UNKNOWN]: and ultimately overturned.
1:55:15
[UNKNOWN]: The fact that the poorest passengers died in the greatest numbers, while the richest survived in the greatest numbers, was not lost on contemporaries, and it has not been lost on the historians and filmmakers and commentators who have returned to the story in the decade since.
1:55:33
[UNKNOWN]: The Titanic is also, in a very direct way, a story about the gap between the way things look and the way they are.
1:55:42
[UNKNOWN]: The ship looked magnificent, looked safe, looked permanent, looked unsingable.
1:55:48
[UNKNOWN]: The regulatory framework governing its safety looked adequate, because it was legally compliant.
1:55:55
[UNKNOWN]: The ice warnings looked manageable.
1:55:58
[UNKNOWN]: because the practice of ignoring them in favor of maintaining speed was normal and established.
1:56:05
[UNKNOWN]: Everything looked fine until, in a matter of seconds, it wasn't, and this gap between appearance and reality, between the confidence of those in charge and the vulnerability of those in their charge, resonates across the intervening century in ways that feel far too familiar.
1:56:27
[UNKNOWN]: The technological lessons of the disaster have been largely implemented,
1:56:32
[UNKNOWN]: ships today carry sufficient lifeboat capacity for all persons on board.
1:56:38
[UNKNOWN]: They maintain continuous wireless watch and follow elaborate protocols for ice warnings and hazardous conditions.
1:56:47
[UNKNOWN]: The international ice patrol continues its work.
1:56:51
[UNKNOWN]: Maritime safety regulations, though in perfect, are incomparably more rigorous than those that govern the Titanic.
1:56:59
[UNKNOWN]: The specific failures that sent the Titanic to the bottom have in their specific forms been addressed.
1:57:07
[UNKNOWN]: But the deeper lessons about the dangers of overconfidence.
1:57:12
[UNKNOWN]: about the consequences of allowing commercial pressures to override safety considerations.
1:57:18
[UNKNOWN]: About the way that class and wealth determine who is protected and who is exposed in a crisis, these lessons are harder to institutionalize and they remain as relevant today as they were in 1912.
1:57:32
[UNKNOWN]: Every year on April 14th and the early morning of April 15th,
1:57:38
[UNKNOWN]: There are ceremonies and commemorations around the world to mark the anniversary of the sinking.
1:57:44
[UNKNOWN]: At the site of the wreck itself, where the ocean is two and a half miles deep and absolutely dark, the ship rests on the sea floor, rusting slowly away.
1:57:56
[UNKNOWN]: The decks slowly collapsing.
1:57:58
[UNKNOWN]: The steel slowly being consumed by the bacteria that have been feeding on it for decades.
1:58:08
[UNKNOWN]: Depending on the rate of deterioration, there may be very little left that is recognizable as a ship, just a scattering of objects on the seabed, a stain in the sediment where the iron dissolved, and the long, slow fading of physical evidence.
1:58:26
[UNKNOWN]: But the story will not fade.
1:58:29
[UNKNOWN]: It has been retold too many times, examined from too many angles, absorbed into too many works of art and literature and film and popular culture.
1:58:39
[UNKNOWN]: It has become one of those events, like the Fall of Rome or the Black Death or the Landing on the Moon that seemed to tell us something about ourselves about what we are capable of achieving and what we are capable of losing.
1:58:54
[UNKNOWN]: about the grandeur of our ambitions and the vulnerability of our arrangements.
1:59:00
[UNKNOWN]: 1,514 people died in the early morning hours of April 15, 1912.
1:59:08
[UNKNOWN]: They ranged in age from a few months.
1:59:11
[UNKNOWN]: There were several infants on board, mostly in third class, to over 70 years old.
1:59:17
[UNKNOWN]: They came from dozens of countries and dozens of trades and professions.
1:59:22
[UNKNOWN]: They died in the freezing dark of the North Atlantic, within sight of those who might have saved them but did not.
1:59:30
[UNKNOWN]: Their names are recorded, their stories, many of them have been told, their deaths changed the laws that govern the sea, and those changed laws have saved countless lives in the century since.
1:59:44
[UNKNOWN]: That is not a comfort, exactly, but it is something
1:59:51
[UNKNOWN]: And there you have it, the full story of the Titanic, from the drawing boards of bell-fast to the ocean floor of the North Atlantic, from the grandeur of its first class dining room to the crowded bunks of third class, from the decisions that sealed its fate, to the legacy that outlasted it by more than a century.
2:00:13
[UNKNOWN]: Thank you for spending this time with sleepless history.
2:00:16
[UNKNOWN]: If this episode helped you drift away, consider sharing it with someone else who struggles to sleep.
2:00:22
[UNKNOWN]: There are more stories where this one came from, long, detailed, carefully told stories about the past and its people and its extraordinary events, and we will be here whenever you need us.
2:00:38
[UNKNOWN]: Until next time, good night!