Useful Notes / RMS Titanic

The RMS Titanic was a transatlantic liner that sank in 1912, causing approximately 1,500 deaths. At the time of her maiden (first) voyage, she was the largest ship to have ever sailed the seas. Construction started in 1909 in the Harland & Wolff shipyard in Belfast, and was completed a few months before the big trip—enough time for rumors to spread about the luxurious White Star Liner being "unsinkable". Then, said ship sets sail for New York, hits an iceberg on the fourth day, and sinks in less than three hours. Its fate has inspired at least 36 movies, including a Nazi propaganda film, a giant Box Office Bomb about raising the wreckage that became a major Creator Killer and Franchise Killer, two cartoonified versions in which Everyone Lives (with a sequel for one of them), and James Cameron's 1997 blockbuster Titanic.

Throughout the 19th and first half of the 20th centuries, millions of emigrants wanted to go to America to start a new life, and the mail services in Europe needed a swift and reliable means of transporting hundreds of thousands of letters and packages across the Atlantic. Various ship lines in Great Britain, the United States and eventually Germany would answer the call with large, steam-driven ships, but the most famous of these lines, Great Britain's Cunard and White Star, would be the big dogs, constantly competing against each other for emigrant passenger tickets (the real bread and butter of the trade, rather than first-class passengers) and the profitable license to carry the mail to and from Britain. Hence the initials RMS on ships that held that license — Royal Mail Steamer.

But in the late 1890s, the Norddeutscher Lloyd and Hamburg America Lines threatened to encroach into Cunard and White Star's competition with the launch and maiden voyages of the Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse and Deutschland, two liners of unprecedented size, speed (with Kaiser running at a then-unheard-of speed of 22.35 knots (Just over 41km/h or almost 26mph), and Deutschland traveling even faster) and luxury. In response, the Cunard Line (that had always placed speed and reliability as paramount for their ships) produced the 787 and 790-foot long Lusitania and Mauretania in 1907, with top speeds of over 24 knots, thanks to their four turbine engines (the first class of ocean liners to be exclusively turbine-driven, after the comparative experiment with Cunard's liners Carmania and Caronia over the cost-effectiveness of the turbine in 1905) and the largest liners in the world both in physical size and mass (the empty shell of the Lusitania at launch outweighed the fully outfitted Kaiser by 2,000 gross tons), as well as among the first to have elevators (or "lifts" as the British know them) for passengers.

White Star, seeing the threat Cunard's new "Greyhounds of the Atlantic" presented to the company, quickly drafted a response. As opposed to Cunard, White Star prided itself on comfort and luxury rather than pure speed (as that tended to come at the cost of passenger capacity, and resulted in a tendency to vibrate uncomfortably). Part of this was granting modest luxuries to third-class, which included linens, silverware, waiters who brought their food, and free postcards on their menus, so that they could praise White Star to their friends and relatives back home. As such, they sought to build two, possibly three, liners that were at least ninety feet longer than the Lusitania and Mauretania, and by far more luxurious than both together.

The answer was the Olympic-Class of ship: 52,000 ton, 882-foot long superliners with the capacity for 3,000 passengers and crew, three lifts in first-class and one for second-class, and two reciprocating high-pressure engines for the two "wing" propellers, and a low-pressure turbine for the smaller, central propeller, increasing cost-effectiveness in steam economy by reusing steam wasted by the reciprocating engines. For luxury, the ships boasted promenade decks for each class, whose cabins for third and second class were just as good as second and first-class cabins on other ships, and the first-class rooms were just as splendid as any suite at the best hotels in the world, with the most expensive suite of cabins (yes, suite of cabins) went for hundreds of thousands of American dollars in 2017 money, with private baths for more first class cabins than any other ship afloat (even as late as the 1930s most ships still required even the higher-paying passengers to share bathing facilities like in a college dorm.) As the popular ships of the day had four funnels, a fake was added on the back, which also doubled as a large ventilator for the engineering spaces, reducing the number of ventilator cowls on deck, producing a clean outline, whereas the Mauretania and Lusitania's deckhouse roofs, with their multitude of cowls, looked cluttered in comparison.

Safety was also considered in the design: a double-bottomed hull to contain flooding in the event of running aground; fifteen bulkheads that went two decks above the waterline (any two of which could flood with bulkheads above the floodwater to spare that divided the ship into sixteen watertight compartments); in the event of a collision, or in the impractical probability of the first four compartments flooding the ship would still float, acting as its own lifeboat until help could arrive; and above all, in the event of the worst, the ships boasted a new davit design that could hold up to 68 lifeboats, but for various reasons (cosmetics, impracticality, cost, etc.) the number was reduced to 20, which was still four boats beyond the legally required 16 for ships 10,000 tons and over in the British Board of Trade regulations.

Impractical being the operative word. Certainly, unpredictable things might happen, but as a major passenger tragedy had not befallen any White Star ship in some forty years, there was little reason for anyone in the shipping industry to be overly concerned beyond academics.

And so it became known in the shipbuilding world that the Olympic-Class were "practically unsinkable", and the press at large censored out the "practical" part and simply deemed them "Unsinkable," and the public bought it and ran with it. After all, in an age where men were flying, and one person communicating with someone else on the other side of the world in real time, and horses were losing buyers to the horseless carriage, the idea of a ship that could not be sunk was hardly unimaginable.

And so the first ship, RMS Olympic, set sail in 1911, and the response was so successful that White Star ordered a third ship, Britannic (the urban myth that she was to be named "Gigantic" and renamed after the disaster is just that, Gigantic was a joke bandied about by the workers at Harland and Wolf as a hopeful potential name for all new ships).

It was in this environment that the middle child, Titanic, rose to prominence. On her maiden voyage, starting at Southampton, England and Cherbourg, France on April 10th before going off to Queenstown (now Cobh), Ireland, she was loaded with not only hundreds of emmigrants from both the Continent and the British Isles, but some of the wealthiest aristocrats, by title or by position, on both sides of the Atlantic. These included big names such as John Jacob Astor IV, heir to the Astor Railroad fortune and his barely 19-year old bride Madeleine returning home from their extended honeymoon (and to wait out the scandal involving JJ's divorce and marriage to a younger woman... and to ensure that their unborn child was born on American soil). As well as the Strauses, Isidor and Ida, co-owners of the world-famous Macy's Department Store in New York, along with scores of other members of the 1912 rich and famous. White Star was also represented on board, with managing director J. Bruce Ismay and Harland & Wolff's head designer Thomas Andrews traveling to observe the general performance of the new ship. The banker and financier (and ultimate owner of International Mercantile Marine, White Star's parent company) J.P. Morgan, was also due to be on board, but made a late cancellation.

And at the helm, was Captain E.J. Smith, "The Millionaire's Captain," and White Star's favorite officer, who took out every new ship of the line on her maiden voyage for the past decade and a half. At the age of 63, Smith planned to retire. If not after this voyage on Titanic, then certainly after Britannic's in the spring of 1915. While the majority of the crew were hired at Southampton in the days prior to the voyage, which was a common practice at the time, Smith's officers were a handpicked collection of White Star's best.

Titanic's maiden voyage almost ended in disaster just as it was starting. As the ship was leaving Southampton, its powerful suction pulled a nearby vessel, the SS City of New York, from its moorings and into Titanic's path. Captain Smith quickly ordered Titanic's port propeller into reverse, and the resulting wash pushed the New York away from Titanic, giving several tugs time to usher it safely away. The near collision still delayed the start of Titanic's journey by an hour. When the maiden voyage finally got underway the first three days were calm and without incident.

But the winter of 1911-12 was unusually warm, and the threat of icebergs breaking off from the glaciers of Greenland and northeast Canada was more dire than usual, with a thicker density of icebergs and pack ice farther south than usual. Titanic's wireless operators received a number of ice warnings, but due to the nature of their employ, only sent a few to the bridge. On the day of the disaster, the operators were trying to clear a large backlog of messages that had accumulated as their equipment had broken down the day before. This made Senior Wireless Operator Jack Phillips a bit irritable, and when a nearby ship called the Californian tried to warn them of an ice field right in their path, Phillips told him to shut up, as the Californian was so close they were interfering with Titanic's signal to the mainland (the Titanic also had much more sensitive radio equipment than the Californian; the message nearly blew out Phillips' ear drums). The operator on the Californian then turned in for the night and shut down his equipment, and thus the one ship within fifteen miles of the Titanic would not hear of the disaster until morning.

On Sunday, April 14th, at 11:40 PM ship's time, it was a new moon and the sea as smooth as glass, highly unusual for the typically swell-filled North Atlantic. These circumstances made the prospect of finding icebergs almost impossible, without the light of the moon or the whitewash of waves breaking at the waterline of the iceberg. Normally, the lookouts would be equipped with binoculars, but a last-minute change to the command structure resulted in the binoculars being misplaced at Southampton. So it's a testament to Frederick Fleet's eyes and dedication that he saw the iceberg when he did (really more of a black mass where starlight wasn't), his co-watchman Reginald Lee ringing the bell as Fleet telephoned the bridge.

The officer on duty on the bridge, First Officer Murdoch, saw the iceberg too, and ordered "Hard to Starboard" (technically to Port, or a Left Turn, but Titanic used tiller commands and so the directions were reversed), and ordered all of the engines full astern. Murdoch then ordered the turn reversed and engines stopped, bringing the bow back towards the iceberg. While seemingly counterintuitive, this order, known as "porting around," was the standard collision-avoidance maneuver, reducing the ship's speed while swinging the stern away from the hazard. Simply turning away could mean presenting the ship's entire side to be ripped open as her existing momentum carried her outside of the ordered turn.

However, in the heat of the moment, Murdoch forgot a vital factor in Titanic's turning ability: The turbine could not go in reverse, so in a full-astern order it, and the center propeller directly in front of the rudder, simply stopped, and with the two wing propellers turning in reverse, the water flow over the rudder was greatly reduced, rendering the rudder practically useless. He likely ordered it to reduce speed in case they could not turn in time^note The iceberg was sighted a quarter of a mile away and it took thirty seconds for the full tiller command to be implemented., but it has been speculated by some that had Murdoch ordered only the port engine reversed, or simply left the engines alone, Titanic could have either missed the iceberg entirely, or collided with greatly reduced damage. This is disputed, and porting around was the standard collision-avoidance action for a reason. But what was done was done, and less than forty seconds later, Titanic hit the iceberg.

Most of the passengers never noticed the collision, or felt little more than a slight rumbling bump. The first sign to the passengers that something was amiss came minutes later, when the engines were suddenly stopped. Thomas Andrews, the designer, never even knew of the accident until Captain Smith ordered him to go down below to examine the damage. After midnight, Andrews returned with the news, and it wasn't good. Six compartments had been breached: the forward peak, all three cargo holds, and boiler rooms 5 and 6. Titanic could float with any two compartments, or the four foremost compartments, flooding. Any more, and the ship would sink. The engineers were able to fix Boiler Room 5's two or so feet of damage and began pumping, but for every gallon the engineers pumped out, Titanic took on 15 more. Andrews informed the captain that Titanic would sink in less than two hours.

Over the next two hours the crew rushed to launch the boats while Senior Wireless Operator Jack Phillips worked frantically to get the word out, right up to the very end. The closest ship to respond to the distress call, RMS Carpathia, rushed to Titanic's aid, but was four hours away. The launching of lifeboats was extremely chaotic and disorganized. Titanic had never had a lifeboat drill and only had enough boats to accommodate barely half those on board. Captain Smith, upon realizing the scope of the emergency, gave vague orders and became so disconnected he didn't bother to find out if they were being carried out. His command of "Women and children first" was interpreted by Murdoch to mean "Women and children first, let men in if there's room," while Second Officer Lightoller took it to mean "Women and children only." Neither officer was informed of the rated capacity of the lifeboats, and erred on the side of caution. Furthermore, the ship did not appear to be in immediate danger, which made passengers reluctant to leave it on a small rowing boat in the middle of the night. All of which meant that boats built for 65 were lowered half-full.^note One lifeboat, #1, had only 12 people in it. All told, there were some 400-500 empty berths on the lifeboats. Due to the chaotic nature of the evacuation, and the limited time in which they were launched, it has been speculated that even had there been enough lifeboats for all on board, only a small additional number would have been saved. The last boats were launched less than ten minutes before the ship went under.

At 2:20 AM local time, Titanic broke apart and slipped beneath the waves, and the some-odd 1,500 men, women, and children left behind died of hypothermia in the 28°F (-2°C) water within half an hour. Only one lifeboat went back to look for survivors, and only found six. This is another point of contention about the disaster, but it's usually agreed that many desperate swimmers trying to climb into the lifeboats could have resulted in them flipping over, dooming even more survivors. With little to do but wait, the survivors were picked up by RMS Carpathia at dawn. Within hours, news of the disaster started to spread to newspapers across the globe. However, it would not be until the Carpathia's arrival in New York three days later that the true scope of the sinking was clear.

After the disaster, new legislation was passed on both sides of the Atlantic to ensure that such a tragedy couldn't happen again, and the Titanic became another piece of pop culture until 1985, when a joint French and American team found the wreckage, and the following year the Woods-Hole Oceanographic Institute sent a team, lead by discoverer Dr. Robert "Bob" Ballard, to dive and photograph the wreck.

Today the wreck lies in two big chunks, with smaller chunks consisting of the middle section over a fifteen-square mile area. The bow is mostly intact and still resembles a ship, whereas the stern is a jumbled mess of decking and hull plating.^note This is due to the way both sections reached the bottom. The bow, streamlined and filled with water, gently descended until it struck the ocean floor, whereas the stern, mostly filled with air, violently imploded on its way down. The wreck itself is being consumed by iron-eating bacteria, and assuming that those don't finish her off, recent sonar scans show dunes that dwarf the ship are slowly being blown her way by the currents, ensuring that the whole site will be buried.

There is much controversy concerning the near-constant dives on the wreck and the issue of salvaging artifacts from the site, and the damage the efforts do to the wreckage (the team that retrieved the ship's bell destroyed the crow's nest while doing so, which until then had been virtually whole and intact. On one of the dives with the Russian Mir, a sub accidentally damaged a deckhouse with its propeller). Some equate the salvaging with grave robbing, and that the ship should be left to rust in peace. Others claim that such comparisons are invalidated by the treatment of similar legendary disaster sites such as Pompeii, and that it is important to document the wreck site as clearly and thoroughly as possible while the ship still exists.

Current international legislation prohibits tampering with the wreck of the ship itself, but the debris field containing thousands of artifacts ranging from pots and pans to shoes to tableware to dolls to wreckage is more or less free rein for the Salvor-in-Possession Titanic, Inc. (now Premier Exhibitions) to collect items from, which can be seen in museums and traveling exhibitions the world over.

• The Ace: Titanic, as with all White Star ships, had eight senior officers: the Captain, a Chief Officer, and six officers, 1-6. By law, in order to get promoted to command positions in the British Merchant Marine, one had to get a series of licenses, with increasing scope and difficulty. All of Titanic's officers had to pass the exams to attain those licenses if they were to ever have a shot at promotion. However, all of the officers had failed their exams for at least one license at least once before finally passing. Except for one man: William McMaster Murdoch.
• Anyone Can Die: Titanic's victims ranged from rich and powerful individuals like John Jacob Astor and Major Archibald Butt to humble stokers and greasers.
• Arc Number: Ships are given a specific number in the order of which they are built at a specific yard, and parts for certain ships are stamped with that number to differentiate them from the same or similar parts for other ships. The Olympic was 400, the Titanic was 401, and the Britannic was 433. The 401 stamp is still clearly visible on one of the propeller blades on the stern. This is vitally important evidence in discrediting the Conspiracy Theories that the Titanic was really the Olympic, scuttled as part of an insurance scam after the latter's accident with the HMS Hawke the previous year.
• Big Damn Heroes: The RMS Carpathia. The captain and crew pushed their ship's engines to the limit to reach the last known coordinates. Subverted in that they still couldn't get there fast enough to save everyone.
• Bigger Is Better: The ship is often claimed to have been the largest ship in the world. In truth, Titanic was a mere three inches longer than her sister ship Olympic. However, a last minute decision to add sliding windows on the forward half of the A Deck promenade meant that Titanic was heavier by about a thousand tons, thus allowing her to claim the title of largest ship.
• Blasphemous Boast: According to legend (i.e. take it with a grain of sea salt), a passenger asked a deckhand if Titanic really was 'unsinkable.' The deckhand proudly claimed that "God Himself cannot sink this ship." Let's hope that deckhand didn't have money riding on that claim.
  • According to most researchers, the characterization of the Titanic as "unsinkable" didn't start until after it had sunk, when the media started playing it up because it made the sinking even more sensational. The phrase was actually "practically unsinkable", as in "no disaster that we could think of could sink this ship". Titanic just had the bad luck to sideswipe an iceberg, which was a possibility that nobody had thought of yet.
    • More specifically, Titanic was divided into multiple watertight compartments, and was designed to float with one (or even several) flooded, and most accidents wouldn't flood many compartments (the Olympic, which had the same compartments as the Titanic, once survived being T-boned by HMS Hawke, a ship designed to ram and sink enemy shipping, which opened two adjacent compartments to flooding). The iceberg ripped small holes into six of the Titanic's compartments, at which point it became a Foregone Conclusion that she was going down.
• Bystander Syndrome: At the time of the sinking, the wireless operators were not part of the crew, but employees of the Marconi Wireless Company, and thus the main priority of Jack Phillips and Harold Bride was sending and receiving telegrams for the passengers, not concerning themselves with "weather reports." Also, this meant that 24/7 service was not a requirement, as not all ship companies could afford to have two or more operators on every single one of their ships. This changed real quick after the disaster, especially in light of the fact that the Californian was stopped due to ice not even 10 miles away, and never knew what was happening until the next morning because... their only wireless guy was asleep. Carpathia, the ship that eventually came to the rescue (too late), also had only one wireless operator, and narrowly avoided missing out on Titanic's distress signals because the operator decided to inform the Titanic of a routine piece of information literally as he was getting ready to go to bed.
  • In addition, at the time, iceberg warnings were treated as advisories rather than major hazards. Close calls were not uncommon in the North Atlantic, not to mention head-on collisions were not fatal for many ships.
• The Captain: Three civilian sea captains who would go down in history in three very different ways.
  • Edward Smith of the Titanic. A well-accredited old school sea captain, often given at least some of the blame for the Titanic's accident, fairly or unfairly. He died in the sinking.
  • Stanley Lord of the Californian, currently the maritime poster boy for Bystander Syndrome, is often blamed for not coming to the Titanic's aid.^note But Lord did not, as is sometimes asserted, ignore Titanic's distress rockets; he did not know the Titanic was in distress, that the rockets his crew observed were distress rockets, or indeed that they were coming from the Titanic. When Lord finally did learn of the Titanic's situation the following morning, he twice took his ship through an ice field to aid the rescue effort.
  • Arthur Rostron of the Carpathia, acclaimed as a hero because he immediately ordered full steam ahead (and then some) the instant he got word about Titanic, with only the sheer distance between the ships preventing him from saving hundreds more lives.
• Cassandra Truth: One of the problems commonly pointed out is that the bulkheads weren't sealed at the top. A visiting Russian engineer allegedly pointed the problem in 1909 but was ignored.
  • Of course, watertight decks have their own problems in an emergency situation, such as what is known as the "Free-Surface Effect," where the water sloshes around and pools on one side or the other. If the water gathers in the lower decks this isn't an issue, as the center of gravity is better at staying where it needs to be. But if the water is higher up, the center of gravity shifts, and the ship capsizes. This actually happened to the Normandie when a fire broke out, and the firefighters weren't able to hose off the ship evenly. And as the Olympic-Class wasn't being built for wartime use conversion like Cunard's Lusitania and Mauritania, they didn't need to adhere to the Admiralty's standards for warships, which include watertight decks as well as longitudinal (lengthwise) bulkheads (in fact, those bulkheads did nothing but make Lusitania's sinking worse by collecting water on one side, rather than letting it evenly flood the interior). Then there's the fact that watertight decks require hatches so that passengers and crew would be able to move about the ship, hatches that could easily be forgotten about during an emergency, such as when the HMS Audacious struck a mine in 1914 (leading to the loss of that ship). So it's not like White Star and H&W were being arrogant about safety.
  • The radio operator of the infamous SS Californian tried to warn the Titanic crew about the ice that forced his ship to lay adrift for the night, only to be rudely interrupted by Philips (who was busy working the tenous connection with the shore station) shortly before the accident. He then ended his watch and turned in for the night. Unfortunately, Californian had only one radio operator...
  • Because of the reputation the Titanic had as a very safe ship, it took a while for it to sink in that the ship had actually gone down with horrible casualties. There's a story floating around that one passenger on the Carpathia, inquiring about the crew's sudden activity, was told that the Titanic was sinking and they were going to help her. He went back to his cabin and told his family to be ready to evacuate, because he thought it was more likely that his own ship was on fire than that the Titanic was going down.
• Cherry Tapping: The iceberg damage. For decades the accepted wisdom was that only a massive can-opener type gash 300 feet long could have done Titanic in, even after the wreck was discovered and the hull outside boiler rooms 5 and 6 showed a slit formed by buckled plates. It wouldn't be until 1996 that, with the use of sonar, it was confirmed beyond a shadow of a doubt, that six tiny slits as wide as an adult's hand◊, formed as the rivets snapped and buckled hull plates separated, were all that were needed to lay Titanic low.
  • This theory was actually presented at the inquiries by Harland & Wolff's best naval architects. They noted that reports of the flooding were different in each compartment, meaning each one likely suffered its own unique damage and that the actual damage could be very small. However, the press ignored that and went with the myth of the 300ft gash.
• Cool Car: The 1912 Renault Type CB Coupe de Ville belonging to William Carter, who had purchased the vehicle in Europe and was having it shipped back to New York. The Carters all survived the sinking, but the car, if it has survived a century underwater, is probably The Alleged Car now.
• Creator Killer:
  • Bruce Ismay was one of the men who boarded a lifeboat and survived the sinking. The reputation he earned for not going down with the ship claimed his long career with White Star within a year, and he lived the rest of his life a recluse.
  • Thomas Andrews, Titanic's designer, died during the sinking.
  • The surviving officers, Charles Lightoller, Herbert Pitman, Joseph Boxhall and Harold Lowe, all found that their careers stalled as a result of their association with the Titanic. None of them ever received a major command.
  • As a matter of fact, the only really noteworthy crew member who both survived and did not get shamed for surviving was the ship's chief baker, Charles Joughin, who also was responsible for sending loaves of bread as provisions for the lifeboats with his baking staff; he is technically considered to be the final passenger of the Titanic to disembark the ship (by way of riding the stern down in the final plunge; the ship fully submerged into the water under his feet, thereby forcing him off the Titanic). He spent a good chunk of time in the freezing water until he found Collapsible B and hung onto the overturned boat until he and the other 5 people on it were rescued. He was heavily drunk for the final stages of the sinking, yet the alcohol actually gave him the ability to survive the freezing cold (it should have done the opposite), and he spent the rest of the night on the sea before being rescued by a lifeboat and taken to the Carpathia in the morning. This rather odd story about how he both stayed aboard and survived the whole ordeal more or less gave him immunity from the shame, and he lived to 1956.
  • Averted, surprisingly, by the White Star Line. Despite the hit it took with the loss of the Titanic (finanical and reputation), White Star remained a successful and profitable business throughout the 1920s. They still had the old reliable Olympic and, as part of Germany's war reparations, in 1920 they were given the largest passenger ship in the world, the Hamburg-America line's Bismarck (renamed Majestic by White Star), as recompense for the loss of the third Olympic-class sister Britannic, which had been used as a hospital ship in the First World War and sunk after striking an underwater mine in 1916. What really finished off White Star was the tightening of US immigration laws, depriving the company of its main source of income, and subsequently the Great Depression, leading to its merger with Cunard (which was also struggling for the same reasons) in 1934. What exists of White Star now is part of the Carnival Cruise Corporation, who are the current owners of Cunard (along with Costa Cruises, who would be involved in another historic maritime disaster with the Concordia in 2012, only a few months before the centenary of Titanic.)
  • Stanley Lord, the captain of the Californian, was fired with prejudice from his line that August after he did not respond to the Titanic's sinking.^note Lord did not know the Titanic was sinking. He was on another ship several miles away and only knew that his crew had seen some rockets Neither he nor any of his crew were ever criminally charged for ignoring the rockets and wireless telegraphs^note The Californian crew did not actually ignore any wireless telegraphs. This was in the days before a ship's wireless had to be manned 24 hours, and the Californian's sole wireless operator had already turned in for the night before the Titanic struck the iceberg., but the mess still turned him into a hated man. He joined a different company and worked there until 1927, but his career and reputation were forever stained. Probably a case of Historical Villain Upgrade and a great irony that a captain who prudently stopped his ship for the night after encountering heavy ice and delivered his crew and cargo safely to port should end up being villified.
  • Averted with the actual builders of the ship, Harland and Wolff, who continued to build ocean liners for decades until the jet airplane made it considerably easier to get around the globe. H&W are still in operation in the 21st century.
• Dated History:
  • For many years it was widely believed that Titanic sank intact. The discovery of the wreck in two main pieces almost half a mile apart proved beyond any doubt that the ship broke apart during the sinking.
  • A popular myth was that the iceberg ripped a 300 ft gash in the ship's hull. Despite Harland & Wolff's best naval architects discrediting this, as each compartment had a separate pattern of flooding, it remained a leading explanation. It was finally disproven in the 90s when sonar scans were able to accurately determine the damage.
  • Titanic was assumed to have foundered at or near its last transmitted distress position, yet when the wreck was discovered, it was found to be some 13 miles away.
• Dirty Coward: If you were a man, and you survived, then chances were you'd face this accusation. Bruce Ismay never lived it down, and after leaving the White Star Line the year after the sinking, spent the rest of his life as a recluse.
• Distress Call: One of the first major disasters in which radio played a key role, and also one of the earliest to use the newly established SOS distress signal as well. Additionally the ship fired a number of distress rockets. Unfortunately, Captain Lord of the Californian, the only ship that could see them, did not find them important enough to respond to for whatever reason.
  • The only thing that was standardized about maritime communication in the Atlantic back then was Morse Code and radio frequencies. Lord apparently was of the opinion that the rockets/flares were company-specific signals that carried no connotations of distress. Yeah...that sounds reasonable
  • In fact the status of rockets at sea in 1912 was more ambiguous than it is today, largely thanks to the Titanic. At least two other ships in the vicinity fired rockets that night, neither of which was in distress: the Carpathia (to let those aboard Titanic know that help was en route), and also the Almerian, which was attempting to signal a ship in the distance. For rockets to be a signal of distress, they were required to be fired at "regular intervals". It is also unclear how many rockets Lord was informed about by his crew before the ship firing them (in their view) steamed away.
• Disguised in Drag: Rumors and stories abound of male passengers and crew doing just this, choosing pragmatic survival over heroic sacrifice. Of course, it could have happened as advertised - A sinking ship is not exactly a situation where one pays that much attention. However, it appears to be a misrepresentation of a real incident: As mentioned elsewhere, Lightoller had a Zero Tolerance policy of men boarding the boats on his side (to the point of ordering 12 stokers out of a boat at gunpoint), and teenage boys ran the risk of being forced to stay behind if they were Younger Than They Look. There was a family traveling whose son was 13, but was tall enough to be confused for being older. His mother was Genre Savvy enough to know that Lightoller would not believe her if she insisted that he was still a boy. Therefore, she put her shawl around him and told the lad to keep quiet and not look anyone in the face.
• Driven to Suicide: Several survivors reported that an officer shot himself just before the final plunge. Some believe this was Captain Smith while several adaptations depict William Murdoch as doing so. There's little evidence to corroborate who did this, if anyone, and Murdoch's family and hometown are adamant that he died a hero (when James Cameron depicted Murdoch shooting himself in his movie, it prompted a backlash from Murdoch's family that forced an apology).
• End of an Era: The sinking is viewed as the moment the Edwardian Era died: the faith in man's engineering achievements making wonders. Also foreshadows the coming of World War I during which the masses were killed over the seeming arrogance of the upper classes.
• Exact Time to Failure: Played straight and averted. Thomas Andrews gave the ship another ninety minutes when he saw the damage done, but the ship lasted a whole two hours forty minutes.
• Exact Words: The aforementioned British Board of Trade Regulations concerning lifeboats and ship sizes. It was only after the disaster that they were changed to the much more inclusive "enough lifeboats for all aboard."
• Face Death with Dignity: The Titanic offered a wealth of examples:
  • There are many stories of fathers leaving their wives and children in the boats, and stepping back so that others may have a seat.
  • Benjamin Guggenheim, who when he realised that escape was no longer an option returned to his cabin to change into his finest clothing. He handed a note to a survivor that stated, "Dressed in our best, going down like gentlemen". Guggenheim and his valet Victor Giglio were last seen seated in deck chairs in the Staircase sipping brandy and smoking cigars.
  • John Jacob Astor helped his pregnant young wife into a lifeboat, but was denied entry himself. He simply stood back, lit a cigarette and waved goodbye.
  • The Strauses: Ida was granted a seat in a lifeboat, but the officer in charge initially refused Isidor entry. This prompted Ida to give her seat up to remain with her husband. The officer relented and said that nobody would really object "an elderly gentleman" like Isidor taking a seat in the lifeboat, but he insisted that he would not leave the ship before the other men. Isidor tried to convince Ida to get back on the lifeboat, but she only responded, "We have lived together for many years. Where you go, I go." They both perished in the sinking.
  • A notorious subversion is J. Bruce Ismay, owner of the White Star Line, who climbed aboard a lifeboat and survived. He was pilloried for his actions which were seen as an act of supreme cowardice (though he got in the lifeboat after he had helped with the loading and lowering of several others and only when he was sure that no women were in the vicinity) and he was never welcome in polite society again.
  • Senior Marconi Operator Jack Phillips stayed at his post and continued to key out his distress call even as the fading power made the radio inoperable. The (equally heroic but somewhat more fortunate) junior operator Harold Bride had this to say about him:
    The water was pretty close up to the boat deck. There was a great scramble aft and how poor Phillips worked through it I'll never know. I learned to love him that night, I suddenly felt for him a great reverence. To see him there, sticking to his work while everyone else was raging about, I'll never live to forget the work Phillips did in those last 15 minutes.
  • The ship's Musicians played music to calm the passengers as the life boats were loaded and didn't stop until they had died. One eyewitness account said:
    Many brave things were done that night, but none were more brave than those done by men playing minute after minute as the ship settled quietly lower and lower in the sea. The music they played served alike as their own immortal requiem and their right to be recalled on the scrolls of undying fame.
• For Want of a Nail: One of the bridge officers had been fired shortly before the Titanic sailed and accidentally (or purposefully; who knows?) took the key for the locker containing the lookouts' binoculars with him. With binoculars, the iceberg would probably have been detected early enough for the ship to miss it completely. Unfortunately, the lookouts were forced to rely on their vision alone, on a moonless night no less.
  • It is doubtful that binoculars would have made much difference, given the moonless night and the flat calm sea. Furthermore, lookouts were trained to look out with the naked eye, since binoculars greatly narrow one's field of vision, and would only be used to inspect an obstacle once it had been sighted. Ernest Shackleton was called as an expert witness at the British inquiry, and he echoed this viewpoint.
• God Never Said That:
  • No official source from either Harland and Wolf or the White Star Line ever called Titanic or her sisters "unsinkable." When talking about the safety features of the ship, it was stated that all the usual expected causes for accidents at sea (or more accurately, near a port and thus NOT at full speed) had been considered and countered with structural features to take them into account:
    • Grounding: The double-bottom hull will keep the water out of the main hull.
    • Hitting something: The first four compartments can flood and the ship would not be in danger, when usually the worst damage would be the first two compartments flooding.
    • Being hit BY something: Worst case scenario was being hit right at a bulkhead, resulting in two compartments flooding. Titanic and her sisters could take such a hit and still have watertight bulkhead space above the waterline. Three in ridiculously favorable conditions. This actually happened to Olympic when she got rammed by HMS Hawke at the junction of 2 compartments. Both flooded, but the ship remained stable and was able to limp back to Harland and Wolf under her own power. This was seen as a validation of the watertight compartment system at the time. In the wake of Titanic, the bulkheads were extended further up the sister ships to allow at least one more compartment to flood safely (this wasn't enough to save the Brittannic when her watertight doors malfunctioned).
  • What happened was a shipbuilder's trade magazine listed these features and wrote "Practically Unsinkable." The press got word of that and gleefully 'forgot' about the "practically" part and just said "Unsinkable."
  • Moreover, the safety features which led to the "practically unsinkable" claims were nothing new by 1912. Brunel and Russell's Great Eastern (launched in 1858) had its hull subdivided into forty watertight compartments, with bulkheads stretching to 30 feet above the waterline.^note Outside New York harbour in 1863, Great Eastern scraped along some large underwater rocks, which opened a gash nine feet wide across 90 feet of her hull (ie worse than that sustained by the Titanic) and made it to New York under her own steam, without anyone actually realising the ship had been seriously damaged. Numerous ships had already been fitted with the same Stone-Lloyd watertight doors as Titanic, including Cunard's big two, Mauretania and Lusitania. Stone-Lloyd also claimed that their watertight doors made ships using them "practically unsinkable". The phrase was more like a marketing tool applied generally in the industry. It only entered the popular imagination as a boast unique to Titanic because it sunk.
• Going Down with the Ship: Captain Smith. There's some speculation to how he died according to different survivor testimonies but most believed they last saw him in the ship's wheelhouse and stayed there until the bridge flooded and drowned.
  • Thomas Andrews, the ship's designer, also stayed aboard as Titanic sank. Most stories say that he was last seen in the First Class smoking room, in the midst of a Heroic B.S.O.D..
  • Averted by J. Bruce Ismay, who escaped the sinking and became the object of scorn and derision as a result. Whether Ismay was really a Dirty Coward who saved his own neck as other more deserving people drowned, or whether he was just in a fortunate position that he took full advantage of to reduce the body count by one is a call that's pretty much up to each individual, but the fact that he survived when his captain did not made him an easy target. William Randolph Hearst, a man Ismay had a long standing feud with, had a field day raking his reputation through the muck, and Ben Hecht wrote an utterly scathing poem on the topic of Ismay's survival, see the Quotes page for the full text.
  • Most of the prominent members of the ship's other departments also died that day, including the Chief Steward, the Chief Engineer, the Purser, the Senior Wireless Operator, all but three of the Stoking Foremen, and even the owner of the onboard restaurant.
  • Famously, Wallace Hartley and the band played one last tune right as the boat deck started to go under.
• Hauled Before A Senate Subcommittee: The sinking resulted in two public inquiries, one American with a US senator chairing and a British Board of Trade one respectively. As it turned out, they proved rather complementary with the US one focusing on "what happened" while the UK one focused on "why."
• Hell Is That Noise: As depicted in the 1997 adaptation, survivors reported beyond the screams of the people in the water, they could hear the metallic groaning of the ship as it sunk further and further into the water. Despite the darkness, the passengers in the lifeboats could hear the Titanic as if she were in agony, especially when she broke her back and sank faster. Things only got more terrifying when the silence came...
• Heroic B.S.O.D.: Captain Edward John Smith, beloved "Millionaire's Captain" of the White Star Line, forty years experience at sea. After the order was given to launch the lifeboats, he was reported to have been detached and in a haze, leaving his officers to carry out the evacuation.
  • While he had 40 years experience, he never encountered a serious emergency in his career, and, moreover, much of his career was reportedly spent on sailing ships, with only infrequent steamship voyages. He described his own experience of life at sea as "uneventful" in an interview, and the worst event he was ever involved in before Titanic was the collision between Olympic and HMS Hawke a few months earlier. Faced with the prospect of a very real disaster unfolding on his watch (and his own impending death), he simply shut down. Just because you've been at sea a long time doesn't really mean you're experienced.
• Hero of Another Story:
  • RMS Olympic: Known as "Old Reliable". She served White Star until the merger with Cunard in 1934, covering millions of miles over 257 voyages, served as a troop transport in WWI, was the only merchant ship to ever sink a U-Boat in 1917 (by running it over, no less), and at the outbreak of the war helped rescue the sailors of the mined HMS Audacious. But she wasn't Titanic so who gives a damn?
  • Second Officer Charles Lightoller, who had a colourful career outside of Titanic. During World War I, a ship he was in command of successfully rammed and sunk a German U-Boat, earning him the Distinguished Service Cross. And in the Second World War, Lightoller's private motorboat was one of the "little ships" which participated in the evacuation of the British Expeditionary Army which was trapped at Dunkirk. Lightoller personally piloted the vessel across the English Channel and back, and brought home 130 British soldiers.
• Heroic Sacrifice: The engineers stayed below decks, struggling to maintain power vital for the electric lights, the pumps working against the flood, and most importantly the Marconi Wireless, right up to the very end, and by then there was no hope to escape.
  • In a lesser way, the band. They kept playing as long as they could in order to keep the passengers calm and entertained as the worst was happening. There was also nothing else they could do.
  • All five of the ship's postal workers tried to save the enormous quantities of mail before they were overcome and drowned early in the sinking.
  • Thomas Andrews did what he could to help with the evacuation. Initially the last reported sighting of him was at 1:40 AM in the first class smoking room, waiting for the ship to go down, but new evidence suggested that he was on the boat deck after 2:00 AM, throwing deck chairs into the ocean for survivors to use as flotation devices, and continued assisting until the very end.
  • Isidor and Ida Straus, who had easily secured lifeboat positions on account of their age, refused to leave for the same reason, not wanting to take an opportunity denied to younger people.
• Honor Before Reason: Averted with Hosono Masabumi, the ship's only Japanese passenger. As Lifeboat 10 was lowered, an officer said there was room for two more. Hosono saw another man jump in and soon followed. Like Ismay, he became a pariah in Japan afterwards for surviving in this manner.
• Hope Spot: When the stern broke off and became level with the waterline, those who could see it thought it would remain afloat long enough for help to arrive. There were several reported cries of "It's a miracle! The men are saved!"
  • The flooding of Boiler Room 5 was, for a while, contained to the point that the stokers and firemen were able to pump all the water out. This would have been able to save the ship, but unfortunately, the bulkhead door, damaged by a coal fire that had been raging for the past few days of the voyage, collapsed from the weight of the water on the other side, and sealed the ship's fate.
  • William Murdoch as well. Titanic was to be his first ship to be Chief Officer of, after years floundering at the First Officer position. Then, at the last minute, Captain Smith requests Henry Tingle Wilde, his Chief Officer from Olympic and earlier commands, to be shuffled onto Titanic. The phrase "gut punch" comes to mind.
• Hufflepuff House: Second-class passengers, of which Titanic was carrying 272 are almost entirely ignored in most depictions of the disaster, seemingly lacking the glamour of the first-class and romanticism of the third. In fact third-class males were twice as likely to survive as second-class males. A partial exception are the members of Titanic's orchestra who were technically listed as second-class passengers rather than members of the crew.
• Ignored Aesop:
  • Averted with Titanic, as it did lead to lasting improvements in safety at sea. Henceforth all passenger ships had to carry enough lifeboats for everyone aboard and all had to have wireless manned 24 hours a day. The status of rockets was clarified so that they would only signify distress. And a North Atlantic ice patrol was created to track icebergs in the region and alert ships of their whereabouts.
  • Almost played straight with Olympic. Less than a fortnight after the Titanic sank, she was set to leave port without enough lifeboats. However, several hundred stokers went on strike in protest at this, and enough lifeboats for all aboard were hastily found.
• Infant Immortality: Averted, as shown by the tragic story of little Sidney Leslie Goodwin, Aged 19 months.
  • Played straight with the children from Second Class.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Benjamin Guggenheim. His trip aboard the Titanic consisted largely of cheating on his wife with his mistress, but when the ship started to go down he made sure to save the female members of his party (including said mistress) and then decided to Face Death with Dignity, not wanting to take a place that would otherwise go to a woman or child.
• Late to the Tragedy: Sadly, no amount of Heroic Resolve on Captain Rostron's part could get the Carpathia on the scene in time.
• Legend Fades to Myth: On account of the very confused nature of the tragedy itself and the media storm that occurred afterwards, there's a lot of myths and disputed facts surrounding the sinking, and nobody agrees on exactly what happened. Titanic had it all- conflicting witnesses, later embellishments, people not seeing the whole picture, and just plain mistakes, not to mention good old fashioned fabrication. Several newspapers simply started making stories up when the scant information that existed in the period between the sinking and Carpathia's arrival in New York dried up, one paper printed "eyewitness accounts" that claimed passengers saw the iceberg an hour before the collision, that the ship almost capsized from the force of the collision, that the boilers exploded, flinging screaming passengers into the sea, etc etc... While most of the more outrageous stories were quickly debunked, some stories that have no real basis in fact no doubt survive to this day and are accepted as true because there isn't anybody left to assert otherwise.
  • Walter Lord encountered this while writing A Night to Remember. He interviewed survivors who remembered Titanic having a tennis court, a golf course and even a herd of dairy cows.^note It almost goes without saying that the Titanic had none of these features Others claimed it was twice the size of Olympic^note It was actually only 1000 tonnes heavier and a mere three inches longer and that the so-called mystery ship nearby was so close that people could be seen moving on the deck.^note The mystery ship would have been at least ten miles away, if not more, and appeared as a few lights on the horizon.
• Lifesaving Misfortune: There are stories of potential steerage passengers who lost their tickets, thereby saving them. One man who was hired as a stoker had his workbook stolen; whoever took it more than likely perished. In addition, a number of wealthy individuals had booked passage on the ship but cancelled for whatever reason. This includes banker J.P. Morgan, chocolatier Milton Hershey, and Alfred Vanderbilt. Sadly, Vanderbilt would later book passage on another doomed liner: RMS Lusitania. He did not survive.
• May–December Romance: John and Madeleine Astor, forty-eight and nineteen respectively. The reason they were in Europe in the first place was to attempt to wait out the media frenzy that resulted from their age difference, but they decided to go back when Madeleine got pregnant.
• Meaningful Name: The first two ships of the Olympic Class were named after generations of gods from Classical Mythology
  • Olympic was named after the Olympians (Zeus, Hera, Hades, that group).
  • Titanic after the preceding generation, the Titans (Cronos, Rheia, Iapetos, them), the children of Gaia and Ouranos, thus leading to a spooky coincidence in that the Titans were imprisoned in the deepest, darkest depths of Tartarus for all eternity and Titanic... Sank into the deepest, darkest depths of the Atlantic Ocean for all eternity...
  • Britannic was two fold — Firstly after Britannia, the Anthropomorphic Personification of Britain, and after... Britannic, one of White Star's first and most beloved liners. Dead Guy Junior as applied to ships one could say.
    • There is an urban legend that Britannic was originally to be named Gigantic after the Giants, the another group of children of Gaia, and that the name was quickly changed after the loss of Titanic for fears it was too soon to have such an arrogant-sounding name. There are a few records in H&W listing Hull 433 as "Gigantic," however, the name was a common name popular amongst the workers of the yard for a name for a White Star liner.
• Men Are the Expendable Gender: A "women and children first" policy was operated as the lifeboats were being loaded. As a result, 74% of the women aboard Titanic survived, compared with only 20% of the men.
• Middle Child Syndrome: Inverted: Titanic is the most [in]famous ship in all of history, while the First Child Olympic is reduced to a glorified footnote (in spite of her 23-year service record and war hero status in sinking a U-Boat and saving the crew of the HMS Audacious), and the Baby Britannic, while talked about, is not mentioned nearly as much as Titanic, despite having struck a mine in 1916 and sinking itself while serving as a hospital ship in WWI, having never carried a single paying customer.
• A Million Is a Statistic: The death toll was just over one thousand, five hundred men, women, and children. Even though there are whole towns on both sides of the Atlantic that are smaller than that, it's hard to picture that many dead bodies bobbing in the sea, until you read up on some of the victims, especially the more unknown individuals.
• Missed Him by That Much: As Titanic was leaving Southampton, its powerful suction pulled a nearby vessel, the SS City of New York, from its moorings and towards the bigger ship. A collision was narrowly averted when Captain Smith ordered Titanic's port propeller into reverse; the resulting wash pushed the New York away from Titanic, allowing several tugs to manouevre the New York out of harm's away. Strangely, despite the drama and clearly ominious nature of the incident, it is usually omitted from dramatizations of the disaster.
• Never My Fault: Captain Stanley Lord of the Californian for the rest of his life kept swearing furiously up and down that he did nothing wrong that night, even though his crew were thoroughly cornered into admitting in cross-examination during the inquiries that they ignored obvious distress signal rockets from a ship which all evidence points to have been the Titanic.
  • One theory proposes that, due to unusual atmospheric conditions, Lord mistook the Titanic for the "Mystery Ship" the Titanic saw. The theory's sequence of events goes like this: Captain Lord sees the Mystery Ship, which he doesn't think is the Titanic (the clarity of its lights made it look like a 400-foot ship 5 miles away instead of an 800-foot ship 10 miles away). He asks the wireless operator about ships in their wireless range, but is informed that the only ship within range is the Titanic (because that ship actually was the Titanic). Lord, having already made the wrong assumption that the ship he could see wasn't the Titanic, made a second wrong assumption: The ship didn't have wireless. He attempted to communicate with morse lamps, but fails due to the ten-mile distance between the ships. Later, when the distress rockets are fired, the same atmospheric conditions that made the Titanic look like the mystery ship made the rockets look like they were farther on the horizon than they really were. Captain Lord does see the rockets, but he thinks that if they were distress rockets and were fired from the ship that he could see, they were being fired from a stranger that didn't have wireless and ignored his attempts at morse code. Given those circumstances, he decided that whatever it was could wait until morning. Unfortunately for everyone involved, the ship was indeed the Titanic and its matter couldn't wait until morning- the ship sunk in a couple of hours.
• No OSHA Compliance: Titanic actually was in compliance with all the maritime safety laws of the day. Trouble was, the laws were last updated in 1894 and had failed to keep pace with the large increase in the size of passenger ships since then.^note As a British registered vessel, Titanic fell under the auspices of the British Merchant Shipping Act, although American and German regulations were equally lax Moreover, the rules did not stipulate that there should be enough lifeboats to accommodate everyone aboard, but only that any ship weighing more than 10,000 tonnes (Titanic weighed 46,000 tonnes) was required to carry sixteen lifeboats with a total capacity of 9,625 cubic feet (enough for about 900 people).
• The Perfectionist: Thomas Andrews was described as this. He spent much of the voyage making notes on various cosmetic changes he felt were needed.
• Ramming Always Works: Many have suggested that had Officer Murdoch just kept going straight, the ship would have survived. While certain ships had survived head-on collisions with icebergs in the past the Titanic's unprecedented size made it a different beast, and as such ramming the berg could have produced even more disastrous results for the vessel. The reasons for why this Defied Trope is also an Averted Trope are thus:
  • One: the ships that have been cited as having survived a head-on collision with an iceberg were all either much smaller in mass than Titanic, moving much slower than Titanic, or some combination of the two. As a thought experiment, imagine a minivan hitting a reinforced cement bridge support at thirty miles an hour. Violent, but a reasonable chance for survival with something resembling a car afterward. Now, imagine a fully loaded 18-wheeler hitting the same support at sixty miles an hour. Not a pretty sight, is it? Furthermore, they don't take into account that modern ships are welded together, whereas Titanic was held together by rivets. Had Titanic hit the iceberg as suggested, the whole ship would have folded like an accordion, opening the seams of the plates from stem to stern, resulting in the ship sinking in minutes, rather than hours.
  • Two: The front end of the bow was not a battering ram loaded with nothing more than cargo that would regrettably be destroyed but covered by insurance. The bunks for the firemen for the boilers were in there, loaded up with the hundreds of men off-shift and asleep, in addition to the single male and married couples of third-class being berthed in the front end. Even if by some miracle Titanic survived, William Murdoch would have been tried for mass manslaughter and seen as the most incompetent sailor ever put in charge of a ship for all time.
  • Besides the fact that any competent sailor would act to prevent his vessel colliding with an obstacle, advocates of the head-on collision theory overlook that due to Murdoch's manoeuvre the Titanic came very close to evading the iceberg altogether.
  • Lastly, many shipbuilding experts and engineers say that the Titanic would have had so much momentum from her size and speed that the inertial forces caused by an instantaneous stop from a head-on collision could have ripped the engines of the Titanic completely free of their bases, causing them to probably tear completely through the hull. The resultant damage (several large holes open to the sea, each the size of a school bus) would have caused the Titanic to go down in seconds with probably all hands being lost. Anyone who escaped the boat would have either drowned or died of hypothermia in minutes.
• Retirony:
  • There is a persistent myth that Captain Smith planned on retiring after the Titanic returned to England. Most depictions of the sinking include this claim, but there's little evidence to substantiate it. However, some comments were made that Smith was going to retain command of Titanic and then retire after Britannic launched in 1915.
  • A variation with Wallace Hartley, the bandleader. He had recently proposed to his fiancée, and although he was hesitant to leave her so soon, he signed on for entertaining on Titanic in the hope that it would provide potential contacts for future work.
• Sole Survivor: Millvina Dean was Titanic's last living survivor. She was two months old when she boarded Titanic with her family. Her father died in the sinking, but her mother and older brother survived. She died in 2009, aged 97.
• Survivor Guilt: A number of survivors would later regret not even trying to go back and save some of the victims in the water. Doing so would have been suicide mind you, what with 1,000+ people trying to get into boats with only a couple hundred total seats vacant, but that's psychology for you.
• Tempting Fate: On the maiden voyage of the RMS Adriatic, one of the Big Four (White Star's major Ocean Liner project before the Olympic-Class) in 1907, Captain Smith gave this quote to the press concerning ship safety:
  "I cannot imagine any condition which would cause a ship to founder. I cannot conceive of any vital disaster happening to this vessel. Modern shipbuilding has gone beyond that..."
  • Describing a large floating piece of metal as 'unsinkable' practically defines this trope. Although the makers themselves never actually made the claim directly (the phrase they used was 'virtually unsinkable', which is still this to a degree), newspapers of the day were fond of trumpeting the line that 'God himself could not sink this ship'. Perhaps God thought they needed a lesson in humility.
  • Thomas Andrews, the head designer, remarked to a friend that Titanic was "as nearly perfect as human brains can make her." He said this on April 14th, only a few hours before the sinking.
• 13 Is Unlucky: Lifeboat thirteen was pushed backwards by Titanic's condenser discharge before they could unhook the falls. Meanwhile, lifeboat 15 started down the falls... Thirteen was nearly crushed before they managed to escape from under fifteen.
• Tim Taylor Technology: Courtesy of how steam engines run. When Captain Rostron of the Carpathia learned that the Titanic was in trouble, he immediately ordered all available power diverted to the propellers. Chief Engineer Johnston accomplished this by shutting off steam, hot water, and electricity to non-essential portions of the ship. Every available fireman began shoveling coal into the boiler furnaces as if their own lives depended on it, and all the steam pressure safety valves were closed off. Carpathia's fastest rated speed was 14 knots, and her engines were already 10 years old and due for an overhaul... but she was coaxed up to 17.5 knots that fateful night, shaving nearly an hour off her mad dash to the sinking Titanic. The engines of the Carpathia would never achieve that speed again over the course of her life.
  • Adding to the awesome, one of the engineers put his hat over the gauge showing the steam pressure. If they couldn't see how dangerously high above maximum safe level the pressure was, they didn't have to worry about it.
• Together in Death: Isidor Straus, one of the early owners of Macy's Department Store, and his wife Ida. She was offered a seat in a boat, but refused to leave her husband. When Isidor was offered a place, as "no one would object to an older gentleman having a place," he declined, not desiring an opportunity not given to every other man. Subverted in that only Isidor's body was recovered and identified.
• Underwater Ruins: Titanic herself, but especially the bow section. ROVs have been sent into the deepest parts of the ship and have found chandeliers still hanging from the ceiling, used drinking glasses still on their shelves, windows in the reception room completely whole, and tile from the Turkish bath (think sauna) still in place and retaining their vibrant colors.
• Unspoken Plan Guarantee: For the Passenger Trade for emergencies: With the advent of wireless, and the fact that most incidents happen close to shore, it was common wisdom that other ships would be near enough to provide assistance, and that the lifeboats would be used to ferry passengers and crew from one ship to the other before the final plunge. And if it was out at sea, the North Atlantic was, and is, among the busiest shipping routes in the world, so it was inconceivable for there to be no one nearby. Shipbuilders just needed to make sure the ship could float long enough for help to arrive. In fact, just three years previous this system worked out flawlessly with the ''RMS Republic'', which managed to linger for almost forty hours. What they didn't count on was what happened that night with the damage that occurred (see God Never Said That), and the fact that the nearest ship's radio was turned off for the night at the time of the disaster.
• "Well Done, Son!" Guy: William Murdoch. In his immediate family, his own father, two uncles, his grandfather and four great-uncles were captains, and here Will was, nearly forty, and he had hit a glass ceiling at First Officer. This is all speculation, but he may have felt pressured, in reality or not, to gain his own command.
  • Murdoch was originally picked to serve as Chief Officer, which is the actual executive officer. However, Captain Smith decided at the last minute to bring on Henry Wilde, his Chief Officer aboard Olympic, for the position, which caused Murdoch and Lightoller to be demoted in position.
• You Are Too Late: Though among the heroes of the night, the Carpathia arrived too late to save 1500 of those aboard Titanic.
• You Can't Fight Fate: In theory, the sinking of the Titanic specifically may have been avoidable. In practice, considering the nature of the Atlantic passenger business in 1912, a disaster of the same scale, if not worse, was basically doomed to happen — regulations were too fast and loose. It was simply a question of Which ship, When, Where, and How many people were going to die. Had things gone different, audiences might have seen the struggles of Jack and Rose to survive the sinking of the RMS Queen Mary, or RMS Britannic.

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