"Titanic: From Belfast to the Bottom"

If you know much about me you know I have been interested in and studied the Titanic disaster for 15 years or more. Read many books like Walter Lord’s Night to Remember, seen every movie, and pursued membership in the Titanic Historical Society and so forth. 3 of my very favorite pieces of wall art are full pictures of the Titanic. You also know that the 15th of April, 1912 the Titanic sank off the coast of Halifax, Nova Scotia. Approximately 1500+ died and 750+ survived. NO, Jack Dawson, Rose and company were not on board. There was no star of the sea diamond, no jealous Cal running around firing a silver plated .45 automatic. The life and death struggle of those on board was quite enough!!

I researched the passenger list and found (4) Bailey’s on board. One Mr. Bailey was a second class passenger and he died in the water. There were (3) Bailey’s in the crew. One survived and 2 perished. It makes sense there would be a Bailey on board since the crew was overwhelmingly Irish and English.


You all know the basics of the disaster. The ship was cruising too fast through an unusually large ice field with icebergs that were taller than the Titanic and the Titanic stood over 7 stories up from the deck. The icebergs (many of them) were larger than an 8 floor apartment building on the Upper East Side. If you also understand that in most cases 70% of an iceberg is below the water line you can visualize the insanity of going 21 knots (various reports say 20-22) or about 30+ MPH through that kind of ice on a moonless night.

You all know the life boats were not fully filled. Consider, 16 lifeboats + 2 collapsible life boats each capable of a minimum of 60-65 fully grown men. That math adds up to 1,170 at a minimum that should have been saved. Yet only 750 were saved so you know the boats were not full. When you consider women and children are smaller than fully grown men, that alone would account for more saved and they could have packed the boats because the water was absolutely flat. They wouldn't swamp with flat water. There could/should have been 1,300+ saved.


I won’t go into the already told story of the sighting of the berg, evasive action, time it took to sink (2 hrs. and 40 minutes), nor the story of the ship California close enough (17 miles) to have saved all or most all but didn’t, and the ship Carpathia that sailed 275+ miles through ice to reach the site but too late. I want to spend my blog time on the incredible list of things that had to go wrong, and did go wrong for this disaster to happen. If any one or two of these things had gone right the ship likely would not have sunk. I list them in no particular order:

1. The ship was built with less than the best steel. There had been difficulty getting the best steel and so many of the large plates were made with steel that was mixed with lesser strength alloys. It means that under stress (collision) it would cave in more easily. IT DID
2. Welding had not been invented by 1911, so the plates were held together by rivets. Not nails but rivets bigger than your hand. The rivets at the bottom of the boat were blasted into place by an electronic drill. The other 3 million rivets were installed by hand (4 man crews, paid a penny a rivet). The rivets were also made with less than the best steel and since the men made money by going fast, some were not fully put in place. Those that were correctly installed (and those that weren’t) when exposed to the unusually cold water of the North Atlantic were compromised. The ice berg popped the rivets like poorly sewn on buttons. Shoddy workmanship
3. The White Star Line built the biggest ships and went for luxury. Olympic was first, Titanic was second and the third was to be called Gigantic. White Star was in direct competition with another British Company the Cunard Line. The Cunard’s were the Mauritania, Lusitania, and they planned the Aquitania . They went for speed and were somewhat less luxurious. My point is there was no need to go as fast as the Titanic did, it wasn’t going to beat the Mauritania’s record. Yet the managing partner J. Bruce Ismay wanted to beat his own ship (the Olympic’s) record. foolish
4. A smoldering fire broke out in one of the large coal bunkers even before the ship left port. It broke out because there had been a coal strike for months and getting coal was very difficult. In fact the Titanic had to secure coal from other White Star ships to get enough. The upshot is most of the purchased for this cruise was substandard quality. This coal often would spontaneously com bust if in a hot enclosed place (coal bunker). What should have happened is that the ship’s departure should have been delayed a day, the bunker cleaned out, the fire put out and then refilled with good coal. But there wasn't going to be any delays so this coal bunker continued to smolder and burn for the duration of the trip. While the coal stokers kept it from getting out of control the continual heat weaken the metal plates in the first five compartments. When the iceberg scraped the side, the cheap rivets popped, the cheaper steel (now heated for 3+ days) buckled. Bad Decision
5. No binoculars in the crow’s nest. It was standard operating system that the 2-man look outs in the crow’s nest use binoculars but in all the hoopla surrounding the initial leaving, someone forgot the binoculars. While I am on the subject, since this was the first voyage, all crew members were assembled from other ships or hired new. They did not know each other; most had never worked together before. All the officers were mostly new to each other. No wonder then that when the shit hit the fan they were ineffective at best and worthless at worse. If the crow’s nest team had binoculars, they would have seen the berg in time to avoid it. Dumb
6. The wireless operator Harold Bride had not been able to send personal wireless (Morse code) messages to relatives in the US or in Europe. That is because the system broke down for 6-7 hours on the final day, until he and Jack Lord (other operator) could repair it. When it was repaired, the number of personal messages had backlogged and Bride was sending them out as fast as he could. Remember, all those 1st class and 2nd class passengers had NEVER before been able to send wires on a journey. It was as new and fun to send messages as it was for us when we could first take cell phones on a plane. So when the California (ship) operator sent an urgent message to the Titanic about 9pm that night stating that they had stopped because of the ice in the area, Harold Bride told that operator to shut up, that he was busy. Captain Smith of the Titanic never got that message; the California operator (now pissed off) shut off his wireless and went to bed. So when the SOS was sent out at 12:10 there was no California operator on duty to receive it. Stupid!
7. The first Officer Murdoch when told there was an iceberg right ahead made a logical (to you and me) decision to stop the ship, then put the engines in reverse. All the while turning the wheel hard over (turning the ship). Had he been familiar with the operations of this ship he would have known that it’s turning radius was like no other ship he’d known. Stopping and going in reverse churned up the water and slowed the ship down so it couldn’t turn sufficiently to miss the berg. If he had remembered (or known even) this ships turning radius he would have known to turn the wheel over and not slow down. It would have missed the berg. Ignorance
8. The ship’s number of life boats exceeded the legal requirements by 4 yet clearly they were enough for only half the passengers at best. Bruce Ismay wanted 4 less than what was eventually on the boat but was overruled by the ship’s designer Thomas Andrews. It was thought extra boats (while smart) would make the passengers “feel” like something could go wrong. Vanity
9. The design of the bottom of the ship (keel) was that it was divided into 16 compartments. Each compartment had heavy metal automatic operated water tight doors. The theory was if water comes into one, drop the doors and the water would not get into any of the others EXCEPT Andrews didn’t account for the fact that he did not put lids on these compartments. When one filled to the top (like an ice cube tray) it would spill over the top into the next one and continue to do so as long as water kept coming in. Once enough compartments had filled the weight would pull the boat down into the water. That is exactly what it did. Inexcusable
10. Why was so much ice off the coast of Nova Scotia? Because it had been one of the warmest winters on record in the far north and the ice that melted and broke away from larger bergs did so sooner in the calendar year. They also did so in greater numbers. Normally you find the bergs in June not April. They drift south with the current and were much, much farther south than they should have been. If it had been a normal winter there wouldn’t have been ice in the path of the Titanic. To the credit of Captain Smith he did alter course and took a more southerly route but it wasn’t enough. Fate
11. There was not only a moonless night but the berg they hit was what was known as a “black berg” or “blue berg”. These bergs are very unusual because being a dark (not white) berg it means that the berg became top heavy and turtled over in the water. You couldn't see this berg until it was too late. Bad Luck


12. The water was unusually calm. NO waves. The normal way of detecting an ice berg was to see water flapping up against the side of it. There was NO water flapping up against the side of this berg. More bad luck!

There were other things but you do get the idea. Certain things had to happen. There had to be a confluence of weird events, bad decisions, and bad luck to have the Titanic hit that berg and be fatally injured. Everything that could go wrong went wrong. Every decision that could have been made to save the ship or increase its chances of surviving was NOT made. It was everyone’s fault and no one’s fault. The arrogance of the 1st class passengers (the simple inability to understand money could not insulate them from all danger) cost many of them their lives. The unwillingness of passengers to BELIEVE this could happen insured their demise. People could have gotten in a boat but refused because it would inconvenience them. They died. The lack of understanding English doomed many third class passengers. They didn’t know what was going on until it was too late.

BUT more than anything else, the people that designed the ship, outfitted the ship, made decisions about life boats, insisted on speed in the middle of the night, and hired crew that were not seasoned or even had worked together before, doomed the Titanic before it even left its berth. When you create something you think is perfect, you often don’t make allowances for the fact that it might not be. The ship was fallible because the men that designed, built and ran it were.