The Biggest Titanic Disaster Myths Debunked!

[Music] at noon on the 10th of april 1912 crowds gathered here to watch the maiden voyage of the world's largest ship rms titanic she cruised down southampton water on her maiden voyage to north america but she would never arrive in new york [Music] even though it was a cold overcast windy day these huge crowds had gathered to watch a piece of history they were watching a monument to modernity a sleek modern luxurious liner that was offering a safe fast comfortable way of crossing the atlantic ocean an ocean in which until so recently had been fraught with danger and uncertainty titanic was said to be unsinkable but just five days later she was gone swallowed up by the icy waters of the north atlantic after striking an iceberg it's one of the worst disasters in maritime history around 1500 people were killed and yet bizarrely it made her the most famous ship in history [Music] i've always been fascinated by the myths around the titanic and i always want to know exactly what is true and i know just the man to ask [Music] i get to meet a lot of historians researchers and collectors doing this job but i'm not sure i've ever met anyone quite like tim moulton titanic expert he doesn't just research and write about the edwardian period he lives it in his edwardian garden complete with his edwardian tennis court i think he's just turning up in his edwardian wheels now [Music] so this beauty is actually a contemporary of the titanic that's absolutely right dan this is a woolsey designed in 1910 and i like to think that you know one could have driven this car down to meet the titanic at southampton [Laughter] the titanic is a story we all think we know so well but when you're looking as an expert is it accurate well sadly not um we we all know the main point about titanic well when i started reading and learning about the titanic what i found was that captain smith wasn't drunk the rudder wasn't too small the rivets actually weren't weak they were just the weakest point in a very strong structure and the more i looked into it the more i thought well what really did cause this incredible disaster that we're still talking about today all right well hit me what are some of what are some of the key myths you want to spell let's start with the one i've heard of the the lookouts and have binoculars so they were they they couldn't see the iceberg coming i think dan the reason why that myth is so persistent is because you are right and it is true that there were in fact no binoculars in the crow's nest that night however what we need to remember is that when you're looking for icebergs at night the best way to detect them is with the naked eye and that's because the naked eye has a wide field of vision and that helps the way that we detect objects whereas if you're trying to look through binoculars it's really hopeless because the binoculars are used to inspect an object you've already detected whereas the best way to detect them is with the naked eye and funnily enough had they had binoculars it would have slowed them down and they'd have spent longer before they rang the warning bell because instead of thinking is that an iceberg or not and checking it out with the binoculars they just rang the bell three times which meant iceberg dead ahead and what about all this stuff that'd be an unsinkable ship was it properly constructed and designed titanic was one of the best built ships in history she was so well built i've been lucky enough to go and see a huge 40 ton piece of the titanic and just the scale of it and the size and the weight of it it's utterly incredible the reason why the white star line said it was unsinkable is that you could actually have sliced it into three pieces and each piece would have floated she was also designed to float even with the first four watertight compartments flooded and she was designed to float even with a collision at the point of two watertight compartments but what she wasn't designed for is a kind of side swipe disaster that did a little bit of damage along 200 feet of titanic's length and that dan was five watertight compartments and she could sail with the first four flooded but not the fifth one [Music] in fact dan she sank on an even keel and it took her two and a half hours to sink whereas if you think of the cor costa concordia for example recently she rolled over much more quickly so actually you could say titanic's hull was safer than modern ships today you're going to tell me now that i'm wrong even about the sort of the famous profile the titanic lifting out of the water and sliding beneath the icy north atlantic sadly dan even that is a myth um titanic as soon as she got about 15 degrees tipping up because remember the iceberg scored in the starboard side along the bow area what that did is the water filled in at the front of the ship and that meant that it dragged down like that and rather like an ice cube cells filling up with water she just slowly sank at the head like that but as soon as her 30 000 tonne stern section was no longer supported by the water she was then out of her design build envelope and then the stern broke away at a very low level but interestingly because the stern was so well subdivided it actually crashed back down and people on the stern which was almost everyone at that stage they thought we're gonna be fine we're gonna survive but sadly as the submerged water saturated bow kited down towards the seabed two miles below she was trying to have a tug of war with the floating stern and she did so much damage pulling at her keel that the damage to the stern that was caused by the bow was greater than the damage caused by the iceberg so eventually the stern itself sank very quietly and in fact we hear from one passenger they didn't even get his head wet as he swam off the stern so the rudder wasn't wasn't too small well interestingly about the rotterdam um the rudder on the titanic was the same size as that of her sister ship the olympic now the olympics survived until 1935 but her wartime captain said that the olympic which had the same size rudder as the titanic was the best handling ship he ever had the pleasure to command so much so that in fact the olympic had the distinction in the first world war of being the only merchant ship to sink a u-boat and he did this by on the bridge of olympic seeing a u-boat putting hard rudder and swerving and actually rammed into the u-boat and got it got it that way as well as all the written records we got all the photographs of titanic as well even though titanic didn't last very long we have a good photographic record of her i love this this dockyard shot here that's amazing isn't all the activity so titanic was built in belfast at a shipyard called holland and wolf who as you can see employed thousands and thousands of workers and it's incredible here to see that almost uh all of this area of belfast was employed on the ships and in fact this photograph is taken between the olympic being launched and the titanic and that's why when you look at these giant arrow gantries in the background which were a major landmark on the horizon of belfast at the time you can see the titanic there on the left-hand side and the olympic has already just been launched and the olympic was painted white when she was launched and that's how we know that is in fact an early shot of the titanic just an astonishing number of workers involved that's absolutely right and they were only allowed one minute to go to the loo and that's why the the lose at holland the wolf are still today known as the minutes what do we got is this so is this both the two sisters side by side i guess slightly later on a lot of people don't realize when they think of the titanic as the biggest ship in the world they perhaps don't realize that she was the middle sister of a planned trio of ships it was going to be the olympic the titanic and the gigantic and what happened was that the olympic was launched very successfully and then she had um an accident in fact where captain smith who liked going very fast he was trying to race a royal navy vessel out of southampton called the hms hawk and the huge power of olympic sucked the hawk into the side of olympic and her ram went through the hull of olympic underwater and the olympics started to fill with water and magnets were automatically released and the heavy doors slammed down and olympic was saved and this is one of the reasons why people felt so safe on olympic and titanic olympic had damage to her propellers from that and so she had to go into belfast for emergency repairs but titanic was being completed in belfast at the same time and there was only one dock the thompson engraving dock that was the largest in the world and it was the only dock big enough to take these ships so titanic her building had to be delayed and this photograph here shows titanic being warped out of her fitting out basin and it shows the olympic actually coming into that basin to take that space and if that hadn't happened titanic would have sailed in march as planned and there wouldn't have been any ice on the sea track ah so that collision caused that collision that's exactly right what about captain smith what kind of character was he was he the right man for the job and was he too desperate to break that record between europe and america well with the hindsight that they crashed into an iceberg of course you could argue they were indeed going too fast but what we have to remember is that in 1912 in clear weather in ice every captain and captain after captain testified this in the british inquiry they would have done the same thing the night the titanic sank it was actually extremely clear and they were keeping a very sharp look out they knew they were getting into the ice region but critically dan they believed they could see the ice in time so he wasn't just whining and dining with the pastures he was he was he was on the spot he was in the right place well in fact the captain did dine with the passengers at about seven or eight p.m that night but remember titanic didn't strike eyes till 11 40. and people believe that maybe captain smith was drunk or maybe he wasn't on the bridge now in fact captain smith was on the bridge the whole time in fact his suite of rooms his navigating room and his sort of shades long area where he rests and also his bedroom area are actually part of the bridge he was always on the bridge and he had left instructions to be called immediately anything happened and in fact as soon as they went full of stern and he heard the ship starting to stop he came straight through and he was there but he was working out positions and he was alert and around the bridge the whole time there's the man himself is that captain smith there that's right that's captain smith he was soon to retire from the white star line he was the commodore of the white star line and as such he captained all of their flagship vessels now the white star line and because technology was growing so rapidly every new ship they made was the biggest ship in the world so for example he captained the adriatic when she was the biggest ship he kept in the olympic when she was the biggest ship and then with titanic coming along being the biggest ship he was captaining her as well but the thing is although he could handle the biggest ships in the world titanic was almost twice the size of the adriatic so he was still on a steep learning curve he was known as the millionaires captain and he looked like a traditional gruff typical north atlantic captain almost from the days of sale but in fact he spoke in a very quiet voice never really above a conversational tone but if he noticed something out of line he would be able to bark out an order that would bring a man to his feet with a jump and he was so popular with the crew that they loved sailing under him and in fact it used to make them flush with pride the speed with which captain smith could con his ship into new york and he would do it with feet to spare at either end just swinging it in he was very well liked and he was very loved by his team and he was always going to go down with that that's right because um captain smith chose to help women and children get onto the lifeboats and unfortunately perhaps because he was an older man as well the cold being minus two degrees he would probably have gone unconscious within about 20 minutes what about the behavior of people on board after after the crash i mean stories of of third class pastors being locked below decks while the first class guys all escaped i'm very glad you brought that up as well because absolutely not in fact dan first class stewards were sent straight down to the third class to tell people exactly where the boats were the reason tragically why third more third class died than first and second is not because they weren't allowed access to the boats it's because and i'll say this controversially is because they didn't want to get in them and i'll tell you why they didn't want to get in them it was women and children first and in 1912 you were an adult male when you were 13. you could work down a mine you were a proper adult so you can imagine these women and men with families going to america what you don't want to do is um is leave behind your 13 year old son your 14 year old son your 15 year old daughter so what they did is they decided they'd be better off sticking together the other thing about that dan is they were they had everything with them on the titanic they were going for a new life in america many were poor immigrants going to america to to find their fortunes and when the breadwinner if they were going to leave the breadwinner behind dead in the icy waters of the atlantic what hope would that be for the mother on her own in new york before the welfare system what hope would that be for those children so the families of the third class actually elected to stay on the titanic so there was no violent crowd control and people shooting one another absolutely not in fact um on the crowd control you're partly right because there were these birth and gates and these these were big iron gates that were drawn across the passengers to keep third class and second class and first class segregated but the reason for that was because it was required by the u.s immigration authorities because they wanted to stop the spread of infectious diseases so the law the law was that no passenger ship could go to america without these gates shut and it was only in a state of emergency that the gates were allowed to be opened now remember it took them 47 minutes to work out that it was a state of emergency so the minute they worked that out they opened the gates but of course titanic was stationary she'd hit the iceberg and there was that period of 47 minutes before it became a state of emergency when indeed those gates were shut as they were legally required to be people always talk about there not being enough lifeboats on the titanic well it's a brilliant question because everyone says oh that didn't have enough lifespans the fact is if you want to have enough lifeboats on a ship for everyone you need to have twice as many lifeboats as everyone needs and i'll tell you why every ship almost settles on an uneven keel like that it lists to the port or the starboard and when it's listing half of the lifeboats are put out of action so if the titanic needed 30 lifeboats then she actually needed to carry 60 to allow for that eventuality so what the board of trade decided was instead of having ships piled high with lifeboats and becoming unstable and most disasters not having the time to launch all those lifeboats that what they wanted to do was have ships properly built and properly subdivided and what the british authorities said was that any properly subdivided ships could actually carry a limited number of lifeboats in order for the lifeboats to act as a ferry from a stricken liner to get people to nearby vessels and just on that point let me say people think of the wide atlantic with little ships a long way away from each other it wasn't like that dan the atlantic in 1912 was like a railway it was like the great western railway carrying on to new york and what you had was you had a basically an up line and a down line across the atlantic and these lines were 60 miles apart to avoid collisions of the vessels going each way in fog the point about this was that because the titanic was right on her track where she should be and because the eventual rescue ship the carpathia was right on her track where she should be as well they believed utterly that the lifeboats only had to ferry them to a nearby ship of course the tragedy of that night was that the nearby ship the californian did not wish to risk the lives of her own passengers and crew in the icy and very dangerous conditions that she found herself in because captain lord of the californian had actually nearly run into an ice barrier and he'd actually come to a stop because he was at the ice barrier so have we found our true villain is this captain lord of the californian is he is he to blame well dan wouldn't that be easy but in in history you know no one narrative tends to fit everything because we like to create narratives after the event in our armchairs but actually what really happened was he thought this liner was coming to a stop so he thought i will signal her with the moore slam because she seems very near now in fact because of the very strange conditions caused by the ice she was a lot further away than he thought so although he was he was sending more slam signals and by the way titanic was morsing back to him but they couldn't read the morse because in the still air at the night of the titanic because of the freezing ice everywhere the air was slightly fluctuating and it scrambled the more slam signals so then they thought well let's get the radio out but the titanic her radio operator was awake because she had two but the californian only had one radio operator he'd been on a 16-hour shift and he'd gone to bed about uh gosh actually he was awake when the titanic hit the iceberg but with the time she sent a distress signal he'd gone to bed in fact the distressed one was sent out into nothingness and the eventual rescue ship the carpathia only picked it up about it by ringing titanic she was randomly telephone titanic and said you've got some mail waiting for you at cape race and they came in incredulous and said who's that we're sinking coming quickly and he couldn't believe it you've got such my new knowledge about the titanic how do you how do you work this out how do you sift out the myth from the reality of what happened that night well titanic is actually one of the best documented disasters in history and there's a good reason for that as soon as the disaster struck it shocked the world because radio told the story before even the survivors had got back to new york and waiting on the dock at new york was senator smith who immediately ordered a full and detailed inquiry into the disaster when the witnesses were given their evidence there was a stenographer there who was recording everything and this volume here is all the evidence from the american inquiry and from the british inquiry so the first thing to do to get to the truth of what really happened is listen to the people who were there now it took me about six years to go through all this properly but it is there for everyone to go through and it's now online so you can check out what anyone says against this document so that's very important what you also need is to read what people who were there actually said and these are the three key books so what we have here is this is lawrence beasley he was a math teacher and he wrote this excellent book about the titanic he was interested in science that tells us a lot about the conditions that night and then this one here is a first class passenger colonel archibald grace and this tells us a lot about what it was like in first class and also he didn't get away in a lifeboat he actually was swimming in the water and actually climbed into a lifeboat so he tells us things about what it's like being sucked down by titanic he went down and down and down and he thought that he was going to drown but then just miraculously came up to the surface and then the third and final really key one here is lytol's book now lightly was the most senior surviving officer of the titanic and his book is quite detailed about what the officers were thinking and what was going on that night so from all this reading what do you think really did cause the sinking of the titanic well the remarkable thing is dan that the sinking of the titanic was caused by the weather now when we think of the weather causing ships sinking we think of huge storms while the night the titanic sank it was the opposite it was a perfectly calm night and in fact titanic was sunk in a perfect storm of calm because the water was so cold that it was causing the air to reflect refract light differently so it was refracting light downwards around the curvature of the earth so everyone knows about the hot desert mirage where you're desperate for a drink of water and you think there's water there but there isn't now that's because the light's bending upwards in the hot air and it's bringing the sky onto the ground and your brain is interpreting that as water when of course it's not it's sky on the ground whereas the exact same thing happens in reverse in an icy area like where the titanic sank and what happens is instead of the light bending upwards of bringing the sky down to the ground the light bends downwards around the curvature of the earth so instead of the normal horizon of being able to see seven miles or 12 miles or whatever it is the night the titanic sank they could probably see about 80 miles so you might think as they did that's great we're gonna see everything but because they could see so much they couldn't see the birds and that's because the depth of air they could see through was scattering light and when light scatters off the molecules it makes a silvery white haze precisely the same color as the iceberg they were looking out for so if it had been less icy cold crystal clear they might have seen that iceberg quicker that's absolutely right then well this is just so emotional this image what we can see here is this is actually taken from the last tender to leave titanic before she went off on her own across the atlantic on her ill-fated maiden voyage and what you can actually see in this photograph is the smiling faces of the hopeful expectant immigrants and families who are traveling to america for a new life and they're waving goodbye to the tenders they're having their last look at the green shores of ireland and of course what none of them knows and what we sadly know today is that within four days of this photograph being taken 1 500 of these poor souls have drowned in the freezing waters of the north atlantic and then that's the olympic there that's what it would have looked like when she was underway visually the titanic differed slightly from the olympic in that she had an enclosed promenade deck and that stopped spray coming onto the passengers which people had complained of on the olympic but what i think is interesting about this photograph dan is that this was kind of taken if you like in the long edwardian summer before the first world war and this photograph is the pride of the white star line and the pride of holland and wolf the best at the time shipbuilders in the world and what they're showing is they're showing that they can beat the lusitania they can beat the mauritania not in speed but in size luxury comfort efficiency and regularity so not content with all these pictures of titanic in your house i believe you're making another one well that's right dan because you may have spotted these photographs are all black and white and what i like to do is actually bring titanic to life and at the moment i'm working on a painting of titanic in ireland and what you can do is you can see in the background the land behind her and it's all historically accurate and seeing titanic set against the hills of ireland just really makes her so much more real you're a man of many talents let's have a look [Music] that's pretty good well i don't know dan it still needs a lot of work and um you may have noticed that i haven't put a lot of detail in the sea yet and that's because it's the hardest bit well i listen i meet a lot of historians and i don't know anything that can paint their subject as well as write about it what what is i'm looking at that ship it's obviously very beautiful but what is it about this vessel and it's sinking that has you know consumed you and so many other people well dan i think the reason why i'm interested in it but also why so many people are interested in titanic still today is that she's kind of the perfect tragedy in the sense that the ancients had the famous tragedians and it was all about man's struggle against nature and the elements and the gods as it were and i think what titanic shows us in a modern context is the best that man could do the best ship the best technology the best of everything and then she is just felled on her first voyage by what a a primeval block of ice and i think there's something that speaks to the human condition about the fact that we can throw anything we like at nature but at the end of the day the universe is all powerful well pretty good so i think you might have convinced me i'm gonna become a titanic buff like you uh thank you so much for sharing your uh incredible enthusiasm and knowledge today my pleasure dan thanks very much indeed i'm gonna let you get on with this scene all right that's the habit thanks a lot dan see hi folks i'm dan tonight on a history hit tv adventure in antarctica you should subscribe because we got a lot more this kind of thing coming up including digs on the former battlefields of the western front as subscribers you can use the code youtube to get 50 of your first three months

Channel: History Hit

Views: 444,857

Keywords: titanic sinking, titanic ship, white star line, titanic truth, facts about titanic, titanic iceberg, ship crashing, titanic theories, titanic secrets, the sinking of the titanic, the titanic, titanic theory, rms titanic, edward smith, titanic documentary, titanic mystery, ship crash, iceberg, why did titanic sink, why did titanics funnels collapse, why did titanic break in half, why did titanic hit an iceberg, what titanic looks like, how titanic sank, titanic shipwreck

Id: P0bCi_tqvoE

Length: 25min 26sec (1526 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 07 2022