10 Mistakes That Sank The Titanic | The History of The Titanic | Channel 5 #History

on the 20th of September 1911 Titanic's sister ship the Olympic was steaming down the Solent the Olympic is about to set off for her fifth voyage across the Atlantic and she's sailing through the Solent parallels were Navy warship called HMS Hawke [Music] and they were having a bit of a race so there was a bit of fun going on between the two ships due to the restricted channel the Olympic tried to maneuver out of the way of the Hulk and it was misjudged the Olympic effectively cuts up the hawk and he couldn't stop the collision the Olympic like the Titanic featured a series of internal bulkheads dividing the ship into watertight compartments even though the warship had punched a hole in her side the bulkhead compartments prevented water from flooding the whole ship allowing her to stay afloat I think the spectacular survival of the Olympic from the Hawke collision planted a dangerous idea in people's minds if a warship can take you on and you can just sail home again and get fixed then it's giving people the wrong idea many would have thought well that really does make the ship relatively unsinkable invariably most captain's operating on a transatlantic voyage will want to go as fast as possible in the early part of the voyage to have something in hand in case they encounter fault fog is very prevalent on the North Atlantic and it generally means you have to slow down so by going faster at the beginning you have something in hand just in case you meet the unexpected fault Smith would not have been unduly worried by the iceberg risk seven months earlier he'd been captain of the Olympic when she survived a serious collision if you are Smith and you have captained Olympic and she survived being rammed by a scary-looking spike on the front of a royal naval vessel then you are not going to be that concerned about what a little iceberg might do to you because in your mind if there's a big iceberg your people are going to see it and steer away from it no doubt the perceived risk of striking an iceberg was so small that it was discounted but there was the very real risk if the ship arrived late in New York there would be a lot of adverse publicity titanic's fireman revealed that a fire had taken hold in the coal bunker in boiler room five the fire had been going since Belfast when Titanic would have sailed with a skeleton crew round to Southampton to make the voyage so when the Titanic left Southampton the fire was already there the three-story high bunker was only finally emptied on Saturday the 13th of April one day before the collision fire was burning for something in region of about 10 days it took that long to actually empty the bunker the sheet of steel that formed the bunkers rear wall did another critical job it was part of a watertight bulkhead the safety feature specifically designed to stop the ship from flooding if she got a hole in the hull what two of the surviving firemen actually said was that once the coal was taken out of bunker number five that you could see how the bunker had walked because of the continued he had been exposed to so the warping of the steel plates may have weakened one of Titanic's vital watertight bulkheads we know from the inquiry into the Titanic disaster that the intense heat of the banca fire on the Titanic had actually deflected the metal of the hull and this meant that there was no longer a perfect seal and in fact a fire damage plate in the bulkhead may have been weeping about one or two buckets of water per hour even before the collision to be a wireless operator on one of these big transatlantic liners you had to be really good at your job you had to be really Swift at sending and receiving Morse code as well as incoming passenger messages the operators received urgent safety alerts from nearby shipping they were marked with three letters to highlight their importance MSG master service Graham was a priority message that was intended to be sent to the captain and it was used for things such as ice warnings and the like several ice warnings from other ships earlier that day were marked msg and were duly relayed to captain smith captain smith saw and receive all these messages so he decided to go a little bit further on about half an hour additional travel before turning west toward new york while Smith entertained first-class passengers to attend course dinner featuring oysters fillet mignon in the Marconi room the messages were piled at 9:52 p.m. another nice warning arrived this one from the SS Mesaba a few hours ahead of the Titanic heading for New York on almost exactly the same course it was a clear warning that Titanic's new route would take her straight into an ice-filled bristling with giant Berg's but the message never reached Captain Smith the problem of Mousavi misuse is that there was no MSG prefix almost an hour later Titanic received an even starker warning from a ship just ten miles away but again the three critical letters MSG were missing at 10:30 p.m. on the night the Titanic sank so only an hour before the collision a vital message came in from the nearby Californian who radioed the Titanic to say that they were stopped and surrounded by ice now unfortunately right at the moment that it arrived the wireless operators on the Titanic were really busy doing what's called working Cape Race Titanic was trying to communicate with Newfoundland over 400 miles away so it would have had its radio set switched on to a very high level audio fairly close to the Titanic when it sent out the message to the ship it would have come through extremely loud it nearly blasted their ears off so the Titanic replied keep out old man which meant please be quiet we're busy and sadly with that the operator on the Californian quaint event if you look at this glass of water here as the pencil is behind it what you can start to see is the different shapes that are being made and that's simply because light is bending according to the density of the water behind it and this was the same the night the Titanic sank because the air was different densities and therefore the light was bending everyone has heard of a desert Mirage well this actually created what we call a mere arching haze at the horizon behind the iceberg so in effect the haze on the distant horizon actually camouflaged the iceberg in the near ground lookouts Fred fleet and Reginald Lee have no idea that they are staring into an optical illusion if they'd had binoculars theoretically they could have seen that base of the Berg a little bit earlier and those few seconds could have been crucial for Titanic Titanic central propeller gives its rudder more power to change direction but only when it's rotating crucially when the order was given to stop the engines and then laterally reverse them the center propeller would have been stopped cutting power to the central propeller would have stopped it pushing water across the rudder for a few crucial seconds we're talking about a marginal situation here and perhaps the rudder working a few percentage points more efficiently may may have swung round just a little bit more to actually miss the iceberg instead Titanic struck the giant bird a rivet is a way of fastening two sheets of metal together you would take this rivet and heat it up and then put it in through a hole that was punched through the two pieces of metal that are lined up on top of each other and the rivet is put in through that hole and then hammered at the flat end and that deforms the flat end into another heads and fasteners these two pieces of metal together these rivets hold up well under normal circumstances but the North Atlantic was unusually cold at night because Titanic was cutting through smooth icy waters her hull would have actually been below freezing at the time of the closure but that's not all high quality steel rivets could only be inserted using a bulky hydraulic machine which in the bow section was a challenge the hydraulic Riveter was a very very large unwieldy piece of equipment where the hydraulic Riveter was not so efficient was in the parts which are not straight the turn of the bilge or in the bow of the ship where the hull is more angled as a result we had to use manual riveting throughs there but steel rivets required too much force to be hammered in by hand so the plates of the ship's bow section had to be fixed together by rivets made not of steel I and I had significant drawbacks wrought-iron is not quite as versatile as steel and when it's made in the smelting process it produces a by-product called slag which is just all the stuff in the ore that you don't really want in your EIN the slag in the rivets can make them even more prone to fracture when struck by a heavy force in low temperatures as the iceberg hits the Titanic that force and that impact has to be absorbed it has to go somewhere and it's going to impact the weaker sections of the ship that it's hitting and those are along the seams along the rivets so the ship basically gets unzips and water floods in and we know what happens after that after the collision the Titanic came to a stop and people wondered what had happened so their natural reaction was to open the portholes and have a look as the ship's fate became clear the crew ordered passengers up on deck ready for evacuation and then when they went up to the lifeboats they left the portholes open as Titanic's passenger accommodation began to dip under the Atlantic the open portholes meant that water flooded in at a much greater rate in fact twelve open portholes would have doubled the iceberg damage to Titanic and of course there were hundreds of for holes in Titanic's back standing an average of 12 meters high the bulkheads weren't tall enough to reach the passenger deck level a deliberate choice by Titanic's designers once the water reaches the top of the bulkheads they become useless water spills over them flooding all the compartments and rampages unchecked through the public spaces above it's the final straw Titanic's boughs dip below the surface hoisting her Stern high in the air in the final moments there were thunderous crashes as two steel was heard down below to be breaking apart at the key level and then higher up there was almost a stampede of passengers towards the stern of the ship she rises so high in the water and then she seems to write herself again and people think they're safe [Music] everything might be alright briefly but all that is is the stern snapping off and falling back down you have all-out chaos in the final death throes the lights went out and then the ship bobbed for a bit and then disappeared for them the Titanic's foremost bow section was a collision okay like the crumple zone in the modern car it was designed to absorb the worst of a head-on impact protecting the integrity of the compartments behind and reducing the inflow of water scraping the underside of the ship that long the iceberg arguably caused more structural damage than a head-on crash but Murdoch could never have made that call

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Id: 2RRFhkzTU0M

Length: 14min 50sec (890 seconds)

Published: Tue May 26 2020