Well There‘s Your Problem - Episode 88: Titanic (Part 1)

Episode Date: November 17, 2021

it's actually a pic of the RMS Olympic because we want to make you mad kyle's twitter: https://twitter.com/BoldlyBuilding2 kyle's project, titanic: honor and glory: https://www.titanichg.com/ the associated twitter: https://twitter.com/TitanicHG_VDR  Our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/wtyppod/ Our Merch: https://www.solidaritysuperstore.com/wtypp Send us stuff! our address: Well There's Your Podcasting Company PO Box 40178 Philadelphia, PA 19106 DO NOT SEND US LETTER BOMBS thanks in advance

Hello. Hello. Hello, and welcome to Well, There's Your Problem. It's a podcast about engineering disasters with slides. Yeah. And we promised you a big fucking disaster this time. We promised you a mega death delivered. This is a killer death. It's a killer death. Not a mega death. A million deaths or a decent ish thrash metal band. Yeah. Don't come for me. Don't come for me.

Anthrax are the king of of thrash. Right. I'm Justin Rosniak. I'm the person who's talking right now. My pronouns are he and him. OK, go. I'm Alice Gauval. Kelly, I am the person talking now. My pronouns are she and her. Yeah, Liam. Hi, I'm Liam Anderson. My pronouns are he and him.

And we have a guest. We have a guest back again. It's Kyle. Yes. Kyle Hudak. My pronouns are he and him. You may you may remember Kyle from the Grover House episode many years ago. Yes, and on to legal complications. We couldn't have him back on until low tax was dead. So.

Here he is now. Proud to announce that United States forces have caught out of permanently compromised. Richard Lottak, Skianko. All right. Well, what we see in front of us is a boat. And it's underwater. That's supposed to be there.

It's not supposed to be like that. Oh, shit, I have to load the slide. God damn it. Oh, my God. I closed the slides tab by accident. Cool. Cool. How the whole thing has like a like ver degree on it. That's nice, though. That's very aesthetic. Yeah, we have we have we have Kyle on because he knows everything there is to know about the Titanic, which is which.

And do you want to know why there's water all over the place? Oh, I. Yes. Yes. Somebody left the water running. Oh, my God. All right, good podcast, guys. Yeah, actually, when it's sunk, it blocked the big drain at the bottom of the ocean.

And that's why we have sea level rise. Yeah, we can show it must and will go down there to blow up the wreck of the Titanic. Aren't the metal eating bacteria doing that anymore? That's the best course of action. It's good that we have Kyle on because he knows all the stuff about the Titanic because I only know one thing about the Titanic, a fun fact, if you will, which is that when they discovered the wreck of the Titanic and they went inside, the swimming pool was still full.

I only know one thing about the Titanic, and that's that the theme song from the movie Titanic is. And I. Yes. Yes. All right. That is the theme song of the night. It's a film Titanic. Yes. Yes. So we landed the joke that time.

So but before we talk about Titanic, we have to talk about the goddamn news. No one's going to fucking do it. So there was there was a concert and a bunch of people got killed in a crushing accident. Was it after the kills for a shit? No, what happened was they injected the crowd with needles from some sort of satanic sacrifice ritual because we're really just going to do full blown satanic panic again.

We're going to do domestic Havana syndrome. Yeah, instead of like concert promoters not giving a shit about your safety, what we're going to do is a guy is secretly injecting people with drugs. The fentanyl comes in through your skin because that's how fent works. Yeah, I mean, it literally does, I suppose, pierced the dermal layer in a needle. But as somebody who used to regularly use fentanyl to get high, nobody is sharing their fent for free. I can tell you that right now.

And nobody's injecting you with stuff surreptitiously. No, no one is doing that. You are noticing that shit if someone tries to inject you with anything. And also, they're not. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Like, I mean, no one's going to fucking like inject you with haloperidol and then secretly lie on top of you for an hour until it starts working. Oh, man, haloperidol. Taking me back to my grippy sock days.

Yeah, don't we all have grippy sock days? Well, horror of horrors, they injected you with the Pfizer vaccine. I actually I got my booster shot, but my booster shot was Moderna. So now I'm just like, oh, I got the the mix and match. Yeah. I keep going to concerts and I'm quintuple vaxxed. Yeah, I had a cold since 2016, actually. All right, everyone's running around trying to blame this concert.

I'm like, I don't I don't know what Satanism or something. And really, it was the vaccines all along. Yeah, so there are there are gross videos of the Travis Scott still singing while people are being like carried out. Yeah, and his people climbing on ambulances and shit. And hopefully the only time I ever have to fucking mention Kylie Jenner on this podcast, her saying we didn't know what was happening as her Snapchat included like an ambulance to the bottom left shot is some real is some real good shit.

Yeah, they didn't have like any medical provision at the venue. It's all like none of the medical is new CPR. Yeah, no, I obviously this is a changing story. But yeah, this continues our theme of capitalists and the wealthy. Don't literally don't give a shit if you live or die as long as you paid full price for your ticket. Mm hmm. Yeah. I'm amazed we haven't seen more concert crush injuries before.

But yeah. Yeah. Planning a concert safely takes a shitload of work. And if you don't do it, you can kill a load of people. It's expensive as it turns out. Yeah. And I mean, honestly, this happens so little that when I first heard about it, I assumed there was some shooting at first. I was like, oh, yeah, happened. Yeah, no, just a waist height barriers and no crowd control.

That's, you know, an overcrowding recipe for disaster. Go and listen to the Hillsborough episode. It's very easy to fuck up. Yep. Yep. You know, they're yep. News. There was a big tire fire here in Philly. It was really smelly. That actually. Yeah. Nice. It's a shame that we're all dead here.

Yeah. I just assumed that Philly like just always had tire fires. We guess it's like a photo. Why'd you put a photo of City Hall in here? Looks like those clowns in Congress did it again. What a bunch of clowns. I mean, I mean, I I I've been to Philly a couple of times and I just remember stepping off the train

and immediately got hit in the face by a bunch of burning tires. Good. Good birds. Bad things happen in Philadelphia. So it's the motto of the Philadelphia of the Pennsylvania Secret Service. Well, they told us that nothing bad was released into the atmosphere. I don't I don't believe that because I walked out. I walked out my my kitchen door and it was just haze. Yeah, I I could smell it here in in Poplar.

Corinne was having trouble breathing. We dropped the prince's sister and her boyfriend off at the movie theater at 40th and Walnut, and it was literally hard to see and it just it stank, man. It was it was rough. We love a great smog. Fantastic. Yeah, but you do. Mm hmm. Wait, what?

I bet you because you're from the land. Oh, OK. Yeah, sure. OK. And you love a big nice dragon. That's also true. Yeah. I have known you to enjoy a big nice dragon in your day. And I used to smoke that much back in the day. But I miss smoking. About a Marlboro backpack.

Yeah. Oh, smoking is cool. Don't ever do it. Never do it. But smoking does make you cool. It does make you cool. Vapes don't. Vapes just hit different. They're not the same. They're not all so bad for you. But like that is good.

They're also like not as good. We need to invent healthy cigarettes. Where the fuck is science on healthy cigarettes? Good idea. Me and my T zone suits. Yeah. Scientists get on it. Maybe you can make a healthy tire fire

and then sort of distribute health benefits to the whole community. Oh, it's very handy. Yes. All right. That was the goddamn news. We put two things in there this time. Stop yelling at us. That's right.

All right. Kyle, tell us about icebergs. Yeah, we're done. This is your show now. Yeah, we're just going to sit back for the next two hours. Kick my feet up. I'll tell you this. They're birds, right?

And they're made of ice. Interesting. Fascinating. They're also very hard. Essentially, somewhere around 100,000 years ago, there's some snow that fell in Greenland. And, you know, later on, it became a glacier. And, you know, basically, you know, it calved into the ocean.

And then it became, you know, the world's most famous iceberg soon thereafter. This is this is this photo fascinates me because it is an identity photo of what they believe to be the actual iceberg, right? This is the ice with the Koltraski. Oh, that's why the CIA has it. The iceberg, the iceberg that Titanic hit,

they don't actually we don't know for sure which one it was. Several are photographed in the vicinity of the sinking afterwards and rounding up the usual suspects. Yeah, yeah, put them put them up next to the next to the police lineup thing. And the one the one at bottom left there, that one is seems to be like a likely culprit because it was described as looking like like the rock of Gibraltar.

I think they mentioned something about it being like dirty, like it had like maybe paint scraped off on it. But like, yeah, I mean, of course, we know that, you know, a lot of ice would have been shaved off the Berg. Some of it went into portholes onto the deck. So who knows? And that's when iceberg is. That's when it is.

You can see here how it may have gone from Greenland to where it hit Titanic. Yeah, likely from the I'm not going to pronounce that name. Glacier. Jakobshoff. Yes, I know that Danes are going to get mad at me here because I have too many I have too many consonants and every Danish word just sounds like. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Inga, dinga, Durgan. Congratulations, you're fluent in Danish. Yes. Yeah. Now, if you like try and eat an apple at the same time, you're fluent in Norwegian. Do it. Duolingo ain't got shit on me. Oh, my God. The guy who stands in front of the chains.

What? What? Isn't barred king than Brunel? Oh, isn't barred king? OK, OK. It's it's yeah, for huge fans of gigantic chains, a queer anarchist flag and some more boats. The question is, was Brunel, you know, was he a small man or were the chains big?

I think he was a little guy. I think he was a little guy. Yeah, I'm going to I'm going to look up Brunel height because I want to see if he was a manlet. Brunel height. Just over five feet tall. Pathetic. Wow. Surprising considering his father, Mark, you know, played football.

You really have got a lot of miles out of that joke. Apparently, this is the reason why he's wearing the top hat in this picture is he never took off a top hat, even when it became slightly out of fashion. Because he needed like the like lips in your shoes. He needed the extra I just I always had the feeling he was just this little dude. And I know that it's confirmed that my life is complete. A five foot tall man creating a railway filled with horse viscera

and pushing it pneumatically around Devon. Fantastic. And of course, you know, starting the race on the Atlantic for speed. Hmm. Paddle steam ships. That's the is that the Great Eastern or the Great Western? That is the Great Eastern because it's the big one. Oh, OK. Big Jungus. Basically, in, you know, basically, once the industrial evolution in the early 19th century sped up, there was a need for like a stable

shipping lanes and especially with the British Empire, you know, you're taking over the whole world. You got to get things to and fro fast. Right. Of course. So at the same time, international waters were established. And, you know, that suddenly you could just start any kind of like, you know, line to you to just carry passengers to and fro. So, you know, at the same time, you know, by 1807, the steam engines

were proved to be a viable way of pelling commercial vessels across the ocean. So, you know, the black ball line was the first in the establishing liner services will be gross. It's got a cool it's got a cool flag. It's got a cool little pen in there. I like that a lot. A respectable podcast. Very pink, which, yeah, I guess it's recognition. I mean, it would be very funny if that were the line behind Titanic.

I'll say that white Starline. What is that? Yeah. It is some of these some of these old shipping line pennants because they get more and more elaborate, but they're still crammed into that form factor of like the two tailed pennant. So like some of them, like Hapag or whatever, they're just like cramming tiny text on there in 1837. The SS Sirius had made one of the first successful steamship voyages between Liverpool and New York.

Apparently, it ran out of fuel and the crew had to burn furnishings to keep it going. Oh, dear. Nice. Oops. Just stokers throwing chairs into a fire. Fantastic. Oh, yeah. And that's weight savings, baby. Yeah. And apparently, it was even made possible by the use of a technology. Some called a condenser so that they could just cycle fresh water through the boilers without having to clean the salt out of the boilers every now and then.

Um, of course, that record, that ship set didn't last long because literally the next day it was beaten by our friend is in Bard Kingdom, Brunel's SS Great Western. Yeah. Manlet victory. Um, and what we what we have here on the bottom right is the thing that makes this all into a competition, a blue ribbon that doesn't look like a blue ribbon. About to say that's it seems to be a trophy of some kind. It was more like the blue reband. Yeah.

But that's because they spelled things wrong in the past on purpose as a joke. Yeah, that's true. And it was basically with the Great Western's little record breaker that this fight for speed on the Atlantic began. And I guess, in a way, size as well. So, you know, by the mid 19th century, the liners began using iron for their steel halls, you know, and and, you know, and then steel holes themselves because that, you know, they were getting bigger, getting faster.

You know, you didn't want them falling apart, right? Wood just wasn't good enough. And so by 1858, the Great Eastern was built by Brunel, largest ship in the world for 43 years. Yep. And by the 1860s, Q-Nard and the White Star Line had gotten quite big and they were competing, you know, for the bigger and faster ships. And from 1880 on, ships just continued to grow in size and luxury. Now, it wasn't it wasn't the Great Eastern like built on the flawed premise

that there was no coal in Australia and they had to make the round trip without refueling. I don't know, but that sounds true. That is a hell of a thing to just randomly extract from your brain. It's like, there's no coal in Australia. It turns out there is a lot of coal in Australia and it's in a place called Newcastle, ironically. Right. Sort of nominative undeterminism. Right. I didn't know the Blue Ribbon was actually a physical thing.

Like, where is it now? That's what I want to know. That's a great question, actually. I did. I did research that unofficial Blue Ribbon trophy. I'm going to find out if I had to guess it wasn't. It was never really this like super official big thing, per se. Although, fun fact, the last ever holder of the Blue Ribbon is the SS United States currently, Dr. Philly. Oh, yeah. So it's probably still in Philadelphia.

Yeah, exactly. It's such floating around somewhere. Maybe it's in like it's in a closet on the ship. Like melted down for scrap. All right, I've gone under the idea. So, you know, here we got, you know, the ever increasing size of ships. You know, the rivalry between the British and German lines at this point was also picking up because the Germans, you know, these people were like, you know what, we're just going to feel bigger.

And so, you know, the. Yeah. So the the Nordic, I'm not going to say that. The Lloyd and the hamburger, hamburger, American. Delicious. Oh, I found a America line. The Ribbon trophy is in Copenhagen right now. Oh, wow. It's in the main office of Scandaline's ferries.

It doesn't belong there. No, silly. We need we need a national treasure style heist by the Pennsylvania Secret Service. That's because I believe because one of their ferries was manufactured in Canada and it was one of those high speed ferries and it came over very quickly. Now, the thing is, I thought the Blue Ribbon, you had to go both ways fast and not just one way. No, it's one way.

The here it is. Yeah, the current holder is Fjord Kat, which is a catamaran. Oh, well, well, so they get the trophy. So what we need to do is steal that trophy back. Yeah, I was about to say. Well, if we got the SS United States up to a good clip, we could probably do it. Put a real big motor in there. Oh, yeah.

So, yeah, the German lines are competing heavily with the British lines, as they would. And the Germans were building these bigger and better ships, you know, starting with like the the Kaiser Wilhelm de Groza or something like that. And, you know, the Kaiser won the Blue Ribbon for speed in 1897, followed by the, you know, the the Kaiser class of ships being built. In fact, even even in 1912, while Titanic was setting sail, the Germans already had a ship called the SS Imperator at 906 feet

and 52,000 tons, which is bigger than Titanic on the it being built at the time. So Titanic wouldn't have lasted long as the biggest ship. Sort of misremembered as this like unprecedented act of hubris, but rather those like long chain of continual improvement. Yeah, yeah, I mean, Titanic wasn't even unique. I mean, it was literally a helicopter flying overhead. But it was literally the carbon copy of its sister ship, the Olympic. So, you know, even that wasn't that unique.

It was just one in a chain of ships, everyone trying out, do each other. And, you know, that's how you got the Q-Nard, you know, they came in and they built the Lusitania and the Mauritania in response to the Kaiser class. You know, the Mauritania won the Blue Ribbon and apparently it kept that for 20 years. So then, you know, the White Star Line had to build a new set of ships to keep up because, you know, you have to. So this is where the story of the Olympic class liners really starts. In 1907, it was decided by White Star President Jay Bruce Ismay

and Harlan and Wolf Shipyard Director William Perry to build a new set of three ships. I enjoy Ismay's moustaches. I'll say that much for him. Oh, yeah, Ismay had quite a mustache. So, you know, these ships would eventually eventually be known as Olympic, Titanic and Britannic. Olympic was laid down first on December 16th, 1908. Titanic followed on March 1st, 1909. And built in Belfast. So Glasgow is off the hook.

Clyde Shipbuilding remains untarnished. And Britannic came much later. It was laid down in November 30th, 1911, but it never got completed because of World War One and it got converted to a hospital ship. And then it got blowed up in the near the island of Kyah in Greece. And that's a whole story on its own. It involves people getting chopped up in propellers. So that could be a whole episode.

It's fun. Yeah, we'll get you back on this. So, yeah, all three ships were built mainly from the same design. You know, I was like, yeah, take this, build it. Yeah, it's mostly the same. But, you know, they would improve over time as they learned from the different disasters and the voyages. It's meant to be fast, but also luxurious, right? So like it has a lot of amenities on it.

It has like a squash court and a smoking room and shit. Oh, yeah. The thing about White Star, though, is they they they had this weird thing where they, you know, that they wanted the ships to be fast, I think. But they didn't have too much of a concern about it. It was Q-Nard that was really into the speed. White Star was more about luxury, I think. It's the kind of thing you go on if you're a billionaire

and you want to, like, get there in a reasonable time scale, but also you want to be able to smoke your cigars and, like, look at your gold pocket watch. Yeah, sure. Or, you know, it's of course back then, the big thing at the time was the, you know, the the immigrant flow. So ships were built basically just for that. And it was a bonus that rich people would, you know, be able to travel and maybe some, you know, middle class people in second class.

Well, we have to talk about classes, both in the sense of a class system in society, but also in terms of tickets, right? Because you have a very rigid class distinction in 1912, Britain still. Oh, yeah. Like upper class, emerging middle class and then working class. Oh, well, that's carriage. Yeah, exactly.

And of course, we'll be getting to that. First, we have to go over the design and designers, more or less. So. Oh, wrong slide. Wrong slide. OK, I'm still here. OK. Yeah. So, you know, the ship Titanic, when it had to being eight or eight hundred eight, two and a half feet long, more or less. Well, nine inches, actually, 92 feet wide and a half.

The design was relatively modern for the time. And, you know, it was a very sleek, clean, you know, sort of exterior lines. It didn't it wasn't covered in vents and all that stuff. You had vents, you know, it was primarily designed by Alexander Carlisle, William Perry and Thomas Andrews of Harlan and Wolf. Although Andrews was more prominent later, whereas Carlisle would retire some way through the building process.

And finishing off your career with your magnum opus and assuming nothing bad is ever going to happen. And, you know, it's Carlisle was apparently very much for more lifeboats, but I'll get to that. The ship, of course, had watertight compartments, 16 divided by 15 bulkheads. The highest ones ending at D deck and many, most of them ending at like E deck. You got a little diagram of that.

Yeah. And it wasn't unique, you know, ships at the time generally had watertight compartments, so the Q and R and liners and all that. It was standard technology by then. You know, of course, you know, they had to be divided by watertight doors, although on the next slide. Yeah, that's good enough. And on Titanic, though, not all the watertight doors were automatically

controlled from the bridge. If you press the switch on there, it would only close the lowest doors between the boiler rooms and engine rooms. So for everything else, everything else, it either has to close when it detects water or when a guy comes and cranks a big hand crank. You're actually not wrong. Well, the ones lower down had floats that could drop them automatically

if it started flooding, but the ones up top, fully manual, they had to stick in this weird tool into a hole and turn it. And it was a whole thing. Great. Perfect. And we have some some like permissible flooding conditions in the top right here, which I like. Yeah, Titanic was technically rated for any two compartments to be flooded, but she could also stay afloat with all four of her forward ones

or her aft compartments or flooding in four compartments from the reciprocating engine room to boiler room three and probably some other scenarios, too. So she was pretty reliable, you know, in theory. Would you say unsinkable? Yeah, actually. That's at least that's what that's what they said back then. So, yeah, and then famously unsinkable.

The the hall, of course, you know, built from next slide. But I'm going to say it was not unsinkable on account of its sunk. Yes, nothing. So. Oh, wait, there's a conspiracy theory about that. I didn't even put that in my notes. I've also seen the intentionally sanks for the insurance money conspiracy theory. No, the Titanic never sank. It's it's parked next to M.H. 370.

Yeah, and all of the 911 planes and JFK is on it. Oh, he's going to become president again. A campaign for Trump. That's right. Yeah, that's right. That's not it. The Constitution is zombie JFK. But I guess why am I lying? The Constitution doesn't matter. Who cares? Nothing matters. We got a hole here. Yeah, we do have a hole or a hole

built from just a hole. Yeah, just a bunch of ribs and, you know, frames and the whole plating riveted on and all kinds of stuff. You see, it's just just a bunch of stuff, right? Of course, instead of welds is interesting. Yeah, I mean, welding was coming into it. You know, it wasn't there yet. Riveting was the preferred method of putting ships together.

Welding existed, of course. And they I think they use it on a few areas very, very limited, but it was mainly riveting. Hmm. Well, I riveting is always funny to me because the way in which you did it in the shipyard was literally a guy throwing a red hot rivet at you so you could catch it and fucking riveted into the thing with the gun. Oh, yeah, one of the most like sort of like

unnecessarily dangerous things you can do. Yeah. Do we know if. Sorry, you mentioned that welding wasn't used, was it used on Titanic? Or are you talking about it was just used sort of experimentally on other ship? I think it was used on Titanic, but I'm not sure we are. No, I got you. I just wasn't sure.

But the main the main thing with the river is these whole plates, right? The red bits on the outside, if you like. Yeah, the meaning of those is the plates had this alternating pattern of in and out and they overlapped a bit and in rows and all that. And basically, it was divided between the hall and the superstructure at the bottom right.

The superstructure is the thing in blue. The hall is green superstructure was built on top. It wasn't part of the ship structure proper, which meant that the superstructure didn't add any strength to the ship. And that's where they had on the superstructure, these expansion joints, you know, so the ship could twist in the sea and the structure wouldn't fall apart. People have like like to claim

that the expansion joints led to the Titanic breaking apart. But that's impossible. Like they they just didn't do anything for the structure. Much to consider, yeah. Yes. And and Titanic also had a double bottom, as well as Olympic, blah, blah, blah. It was also a common thing at the time. The main concern was grounding. So they never thought, oh, what if we ran into something on the side?

So they just didn't bother to extend it up the side. No, OK. Turned out to be turned out that actually that was the type of accident that was going to happen first by its own hubris. Yes. Oh, oh, oh, my God. I just realized I put on my notes. They were not load bearing expansion joints. Yeah.

Of course, the ship had a dummy funnel that you all famously that's what people like to say, you know, the fun fact that I had a dummy funnel. It's true in that it wasn't used to vent the boiler rooms, but it was used to vent the waste gases from the galley's and some other stuff like the first class smoke room fireplace. These days get JJ Astor's cigarette smoke mixed with your fucking like a lamb or whatever. Yeah, great, perfect.

You know, the ship had twenty nine Scotch boilers, cross six boiler rooms, double ended, five single ended ones. And, you know, the boiler room one was furthest aft that had the single ended boilers was next to the engine room. Six was furthest forward and had four boilers. So you need like an army of stokers to physically take coal out of the bunkers and shovel it into these motherfuckers. Yep. Yep.

They had between the boiler rooms and above them were these huge coal bunkers with literally just thousands of tons of coal. And it was a job of tremors to take the coal out and bring it to the firemen so they could shove it into the boilers. Did they not have automatic stokers? No. Wow. You think that, you know, a big stationary boiler like that would be relatively easy to do. But what do I know? Why do that when you can have the Irish do it? Exactly.

Cheaper to hire an Irishman or 50 Irishman. Yeah. And, you know, the ship also had four dynamos. They these generated a ton of electricity. There was an emergency set on the higher decks. You know, it was distributed through a whole bunch of electricity lines through breakers and fuses and all that. You know, what's about it? You know, what's annoying? I was looking for automatic stokers. First 20 results of Google are all male sex toys.

It's just like masturbatory aid. And I'm like, oh, Stoker. Yeah. Oh, boy. Wow. So, you know, speaking of things that stroked, Titanic had to triple expansion for super gaining steam engines. Beautiful. Thank you. These engines are capable of 30,000 horsepower. That's a lot of stroke.

Yes, several stories tall. They are just massive, massive pieces of machinery. And, you know, they drove two outer wing propellers, which are 23 feet in diameter, via two very long shafts mode, which also ran through thrust blocks. That's what they were called. I'm not being dirty. Because the first mechanical stoker wasn't invented until 1905. Oh, but the Pennsylvania Railroad was the first to use it.

Oh, yes. So when they were on the bleeding edge of technology, they were brand new. Yeah, that's probably. I guess the same thing with the welds. So what do you use all of this electricity for? Obviously lights. But like, there's not a lot of sort of conveniences at this time that you would use electricity for, right? You'd be surprised.

Titanic had, well, first of all, yeah, a bunch of lights, but all kinds of motorized things, a bunch of fans for ventilation. And in the kitchens, you'd be shocked how much stuff they had in the kitchens, like in terms of gizmos to help the cooks. And, you know, they had egg boilers and electric griddles and electric, you know, like salamanders and all kinds of electric gizmos and steam ovens, all just a crazy amount of stuff that they could use. It was super modern for the time.

Is our old timey microwave. Yeah, it just kills the guy who uses it every time you just dump his body overboard. Yeah, get another Irish. In addition to a big bunker full of Irish guys along with a cold bunker. He's pulling out whenever you need one. I mean, it's true. This is like closet on Irish men. Yeah.

So Titanic also had a big 16,000 horsepower steam turbine. It was a big turbine, of course. He drove steam through a bunch of fine blades and it turned to center propeller, which is about 17 feet in diameter. That ran from steam that had already come through the main engines. So if the main engines weren't going, the center propeller couldn't go. And then that center propeller could only go forward. And a fun fact, you know, it's thought that Titanic center

propeller had only three blades and we in the Titanic community constantly debate about it. Oh, hmm. No one went down and checked. Really, like bad faith debating, too. Like, really, it gets personal. It's all it does. Everything in that happens often in the Titanic. Fucking dweebs. Exactly.

We're the worst. We're awful. I actually think it had five blades. No one can prove me wrong. Sixteen blades. Are we seriously going to clean on Apple podcasts? Apparently, yes, we are. Oh, hmm. You know, see if that sticks around after the thrust blocks.

Yes. Oh, yeah. Way to go, Kyle. Of course, the ship also had a macaroni system. No, Marconi system. Oh, famous. Of course, you pick up the handset and a bunch of pasta get squeezed out. It's no, no, it's made out of it.

It's made out of potatoes, though. That's all we know down there. That's how they powered it. So it was around 1894, 1890. Why is it? Why does my notes say 1995? So it was during the Clinton administration and they installed a Marconi system on the Titanic. They went down there, wired it in.

Well, they couldn't install it. They had to install it before the movie came out, of course. Yeah, that's true. That's why it was 95. So, of course, you know, Italian event inventor, electrical engineer and future fascist, Gugliela Marconi, you know, of course, invented the first practical radio transmitters and receivers. And so by Titanic's time, the Marconi company was a huge thing.

And it had a wire Marconi wireless set up on board. They wholly owned that, too, didn't they? Like it was a Marconi TM office operated by Marconi employees. Yes. And Marconi owns all the equipment and like leases it to you. It's a good business model if you can if you can corner the market that quickly. Yeah. And, you know, the wireless operators on Titanic were not like actual crew.

They were Marconi company employees, which has led to some some intriguing allegations of like sort of like different loyalties there. Interesting. Of course, you know, Titanic's Marconi system. You know, it had a huge antenna wired between the two masts that were either either under the ship and there were keys and controls and stuff in a

in an office in the by the bridge. And there was also a silent room, which housed the dangerous equipment, you know, the stuff that you don't want to touch when it's going. Oh, cool. Oh, boy. I love a silent room. And like as well as just doing shipping traffic, they also did passenger traffic, right? They did like send and receive telegrams for passengers.

Yeah. Yeah. They they actually had between between the Marconi office and the first class and Cori office. There were these pneumatic tubes like you have at the bank so they could just go just send like Marconi grams and stuff through there. That's like wild that you wouldn't have any kind of separation, like you're you're sort of your ship. Critical traffic is also just mixed in with, again,

John Jacob Astor writing home for more cigarettes. Yeah, I speedboat comes up alongside. Speedboat, a literal cigarette boat, if you will. And people at the time, you know, they, yeah, people saw it as a bit of a novelty at the time, too. So it was like, oh, I'm going to send a message home to my family and all this. Or I'm going to send ahead for a train to be, you know, slated for my arrival, you know.

So the same novelty of phones on airplanes. Yeah, except you get a little like a Marconi gram that you can keep at the other end. Yeah. Oh, I just ripped the phone off the thing, usually. That's a souvenir. Yeah. It's coming with me, baby. I haven't wanted to say this for a long time. Next slide, please. Oh, boy.

Nice. So, yeah, Titanic, you know, had about glory hole. Oh, I just knew you were going to spot that instantly. So fun story. The glory holes were basically the crew dormitories and they called them that because it was an ironic thing. You know, because they were generally very bad places on ships, like just not good conditions.

You could put your penis through a hole in the bulkheads. Yes, that's not water time. See, that's the fucking real expansion joint that killed the Titanic. So you just stick in his dogger and yeah. That's what will plug the holes. If all the Irish had just stuck their dicks in the holes. That's true. That's absolutely true. That would not have sunk.

So Titanic had eight letter decks and three lower decks, you know, for the engines and stuff. You know, you had the boat deck at different facilities on it, mainly first class passengers and crew. And that's, of course, where the lifeboats are stored and that was at the top of the ship. Then you had a through F decks. You know, of course, you see a ship's plan at the left.

And those decks were passenger and crew accommodations. First class was mostly up top. Third class is mostly lower down for an aft. Second was more aft. And, you know, you had the G and Orlop decks, mostly third class of crew spaces. And, you know, you had the perishable provisions, you know, the the refrigerated rooms and aft.

And then you had the post office and mail room and blah, blah, blah. The refrigerated rooms are pretty cool. They were run by two refrigerated engines, refrigerating engines. And they connected to these rooms via just a just a load of brine pipes running all over the place. And it kept them nice and cool. It's full of brine. Yeah, yeah, the brine carries the heat away.

Enjoying the disparity between these sort of amenities here. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Of course, the map on the map that I have there, it's color coded. The green is first class. Yellow is second. Red is third. Purple is like the engineering areas and blue is the rest of the crew areas. So like they keep like third class completely walled off from everyone else, right?

Yes and no. I'll be getting to that later. Check out this deck wall, though. Yeah. There's like pounds and like tons of like excess fucking decoration on here. Oh, yeah. Of course, you know, it looks heavier than it was. It's a common misconception that the ship was like this is just so luxurious that it was just full of marble and stuff cursed by its own hubris. Yeah, this is like floating sort of grand piano thing. Yeah. God, do you want to know what the fanciest?

Do you want to know what the fanciest flooring on board was? Yes, please. Yes, please. Linolium. Oh, well, brand new state of the art. Yeah, I had asbestos in it, too. Wipes clean. I mean, what else do you want? Very handy stuff. I mean, you know, that Linolium was tiled everywhere, including the famous Grand Staircase and a whole bunch of other places

that they just used it as much as they could. And of course, the exterior decks, which are somewhat relevant to the events of the sinking, you know, you had the well decks, they were for an aft. They were the lowest exterior decks. You had the forecastle. That was the furthest deck forward, the pointy bit. You had the poop deck, which has nothing to do with poop. That was fast.

The folks all the bit where Whitney Houston and Kevin Costner do the like arms out thing and the movie Titanic. Although in reality, they wouldn't have been allowed in that spot. There was a breakwater on the folksole with a sign that said passengers weren't allowed forward to that. They just climb over. It's fine. Yeah. What are they going to do? It's going to shoot off the boat. Kevin Costner is literally a criminal in that movie.

It's not it's fine. Yeah, who cares? And on the on the poop deck, of course, there was a docking bridge that had an extra helm and some telegraphs, you know, in case, you know, to use while they were docking. Then you had B and a deck. They were the exterior, like the passenger promenades mostly. A deck was a whole wraparound promenade,

which also meant to double as like a place to load the lifeboats from. But that didn't quite work out on Titanic. And we'll get to that. Promenades are cool. Back when there was so little going on, that going for a walk was like an activity in itself, like a hobby. These people just loved going to the promenade. And on there, they also had hundreds of deck chairs, and all of them are numbered.

And you could just rent one out, and it was nice, apparently. Yeah, you could rearrange them. Yes. Yeah. Although, technically, you couldn't because every chair had an assigned spot. There were number boards up on the ceiling showing where they should go. And I'm sure there was no 13th chair. In fact, they avoided the number 13 on board in a lot of places,

except for lifeboat 13. And that itself is also a story. I I'm just a man. I know that this is white star and not Hamburg line, but I'm just imagining some German guy up front. There's some German guy up front. Yelling at people are trying to rearrange the chairs. Nine, nine, nine movement.

That's chair. You try and rearrange the chairs on the Titanic, and you find there's already a German flag towel on one of them. You're just like, God, he came to rent chair nine. It's his chair, Roz. That did happen. I'm sure that did happen in the Nazi Titanic. So, you know, you know, I was like,

oh, yeah, absolutely. We'll get to the Nazi Titanic. I insisted on putting in the Nazi Titanic. Oh, yeah, I got that in here. The Zeppelin wasn't good enough. And of course, the boat deck again, lifeboats. Well, the bridge is at the forward end of it. So the classes, you know, you know, first, second, third plus crew.

You know, the first class, there's definitely the purview of like the upper crust and the millionaires and those who could afford a ticket. But it wasn't necessarily it wasn't just millionaires and billionaires. I mean, you know, there were a lot of cheaper rooms that you could get. And basically, you know, in the movie, how Molly Brown and all every cabin you see in the movie is super fancy, right?

In reality, most of the cabins in first class were very simple. The four the four photos in kind of the middle top, you see some different cabins. The two on the right is what most of the cabins looks like. Plane paneling, standard furnishings, exposed ceiling beams and all kinds of stuff like that. They spent all that money on the piano.

Yeah, yeah, it was very standard stuff. And I'm sure those were a lot cheaper. And, you know, if you had the money, you could, you know, you wouldn't have to be rich. You could probably travel in first, you know, as a treat. Second class, you know, it was effectively the middle class. You know, it was apparently very common for people who could afford the travel first to go in second because, you know, one, they wanted to save money into they preferred laid back atmosphere of second class.

You know, it was a little less stuffy, you know. You don't have to like dress as much for dinner sort of thing. I have to run into a millionaire and have to talk to him. Oh, God. Oh, yeah. And, you know, I think even today, it's still a standard, a common thing on ships, cruise ships. But, you know, at dinner, you had to go to a sign tables and, you know, the period with people and sort of first class is sort of white tie.

Second class is black tie. Third class, as we know from the Kevin Costner movie, is like a bunch of filthy Irish people dancing reels with each other. Yes. It's where we blog, Alice. And third class, of course, yeah, it was primarily for the immigrants and the poor people. Again, the immigrant trade back then was just a massive, massive moneymaker for them. So they just stuffed them in where they could.

And there were strict measures in place to prevent contact between them and the upper classes, but primarily due to concerns about diseases because you don't want everyone catching COVID. Yeah. Yeah, you don't you don't want Mr. Astor to get like fucking Serbian fever news. Newsflash, you can't catch alcoholism. Has sudden craving for potatoes. I've caught the Irish.

Always to wear a mask when you're in an enclosed space with Irish people. Except that the mask is a ski mask and you guys want to go call some problems. And you know, the thing about Kyle Cowley tried to run me on top of it. And, you know, it's a comment. The thing about Titanic, they had this weird. I've often I've often heard people say, ah, did you know that black people were banned from Titanic?

That that wasn't true. I mean, prejudices of the time, not withstanding, you know, they were allowed on the ship. There was a black man named Joseph LaRosha, who was a second class passenger. He was a Haitian traveling back to Haiti with his white French wife and their two children. There was also a Japanese man in second class and several Chinese men aboard, six of whom survived sinking and they were in third class.

He just based on the nature of the itinerary that most of the people who would be getting on in Europe would be, you know, Europeans. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. But of course, you know, there were still, you know, racism was a thing still. As I understand it, LaRosha, the black passenger, he generally stayed in his cabin for most of the for the most parts. Socks. Yeah.

He ended, sadly, he ended up dying in the sinking. His wife and children survived, though. But, you know, it was because he was a man. And these people just they stood back on the decks while their wife's and children and all that went off lifeboat. It's just the saddest thing. Also, apparently, LaRosha was related to the one of the presidents of Haiti. So that was the thing.

So, yeah, anyway. Yeah. But despite. The crew did have this weird obsession with Italians. They hated Italians. OK, OK, sure. You're actually going to, you know, if we even get there with all the how much we have to go through there, that did come up later in the sinking.

When did that come up? Just like, you know, the ship's going to get to the second officer catches a guy. No, no, no, stay on the boat. The second officer try like catches a guy making hand gestures and shoots him to discourage the others. Yeah, you'd be surprised. Like, for example,

Titanic had this restaurant aboard. It was called the Alicarte restaurant. Very fancy. It was not a standard dining saloon. It was separate from your ticket price. He had to pay per meal. Walking into the Alicarte restaurant, ordering spaghetti, carbonara and getting thrown on the board.

It was fully murdered, right? It was managed separately from like the White Star Line. Essentially, it was an independent business on Titanic. It had its own staff, its own manager. His name was Gotti. The restaurant had 69 employees. No, it's nice. Three of them, three of them survived.

Damn, that's nice. And apparently a lot of them were Italians, and that also probably contributed a bit to the fact that so few survived. So, yeah, the ship had various amenities. You know, you had your squash courts, your one squash court. You had a Turkish bath. Don't ask what a Turkish bath is. I don't even know.

I think it's the place where, like, if you're a millionaire, you go to get jerked off. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, you know what? We'll go with that. They also had they also had this thing called an electric bath. It was like a. It looked like a tanning bed and there were bright lights attached to it.

But I don't know what the hell it did. Suicide Booth. I believe. You know, it had a swimming pool or a plunge of bath, if you will. Apparently, it may have been heated. I think there were like steam pipes or something for that. Of course, modern cruise liners knock this out of the water, both in terms of amenities and also size, right? Like we went over stuff that's on modern cruise ships.

And I think the Estonia episode. Oh, yeah. We both decided where we get to see the man. Yeah. Yeah. Where it was a man's hubris against God. Yes. And the Titanic did not have a climbing wall, I assume. No, no, I mean, it did by the end.

It didn't. It didn't have a ladder or a roller coaster. One roller coaster. Oh, is it just me or is this plunge pool getting bigger? Maybe. The decor on the ship, you know, was standard at the time. Like I said, it wasn't really that fancy. They just used a shitload of linoleum.

And a lot of standard, like most of the corridors on the ship and most of the rooms were just this same kind of plain white paneling. It was just ridiculous. The white Star Line was actually they were pretty cheap when it came to like saving money on like interior decor. If they didn't have to like go out of their way to decorate this or that space outside of a public room, they wouldn't bother with it. Savings Titanic, Super Lagara.

Without standardization of signage, you have to imagine a maze of identical whitewashed corridors. Pretty easy to get lost in. Yeah, that's going to come up later with third class, unfortunately. So. Next slide, please. We're talking about Davits. Yes. So the lifeboat capacity on the final ship was 20 lifeboats

with a capacity of one thousand one hundred and seventy eight. They had different kinds of boats. They were sixteen thirty footers. They could hold the sixty five each. Two of the boats are twenty five foot emergency cutters. They had a capacity of forty. The cutters were kept overboard, hung overboard at all times in case that, you know, a guy fell overboard or something like that.

Four of the boats were these twenty five and a half foot collapsible Inglehart collapsibles. It was this weird boat, which is like a pontoon and a low structure. And then you could raise canvas sides. It was very weird. I don't even know why they had it. But those could hold a total of one hundred and eighty eight together. And this is where we get into, you know, one of the biggest things

about Titanic, you know, the lifeboat regulations. So this is good. This is going to be a big one. So the Merchant Shipping Act of 1894 called for ships over ten thousand tons to have sixteen lifeboats at minimum. Naturally, of course, ships kept growing. And, you know, White Star Lines, Oceanic of 1899 was seventeen thousand tons. Lusitania and Mauritania in 1907 were triple that minimum tonnage. And Olympic and Titanic, by the time they came along,

were four and a half times the ten thousand tons. So the regulation didn't keep pace at all. So now the sixteen lifeboats was specified. How many passengers the lifeboats had to be able to carry? I don't think so. I think it was just based on tonnage. Oh, OK, that's helpful. Some at the Board of Trade did feel that the regulations needed to be updated.

By 1909, Alexander Carlisle, the Titanic's chief designer then, had already expected that the regulations might be updated. They were thinking at the time, you know, that these ships are so big, they're going to update these regulations any day now. So Carlisle took it upon himself to design a new type of davit in lifeboat arrangement. He submitted the designs to White Star, who approved it. And then they were sent to the Wallin Quadrant Davit Davit Company. They think they were Swedish or something.

Carlisle's idea was to have davits that could each hold four lifeboats with the possibility of holding 64 total lifeboats on the ship. And and Carlisle, you know, he was definitely for the having more boats. And but the plan, you know, yeah, the plan was to follow through with the regulations, whatever they called for. So, you know, if they called for 32 boats, they'd put 32. If it called for basically the minimum, whatever they could do. So by October 1909, there was a meeting between Carlisle

and Holland and Wolf Chairman William Peary, J. Bruce Ismay and his right hand man, Harold Sanderson. Carlisle had suggested that duty uncertainty over the future of the law. They might be prepared to carry a large number of lifeboats, you know, by using these new davits, Ismay agreed. But they never discussed whether they would actually have more lifeboats just that they would have davits that would hold more lifeboats. It's future proof in case they changed the regulations, but nobody did.

Yeah. Was there like a theory of evacuating the ship at all? Was like, you know, the idea being that the shipping lanes are so crowded and other boats going to come along and we can, you know, that's exactly that's exactly the thought they had at the time. Basically, the ship itself was seen as a lifeboat and the lifeboats are seen as ferries to get people to another ship. And you don't have any kind of like evacuation drill either, right? Like you don't make passengers practice to get to the lifeboats

or have them know the lifeboats are necessarily on Titanic at the time. I I'm not sure. I don't think so. The crew had to do drills to, you know, to the the muster drills. Like the crew were assigned in different parts of the in different areas different departments, there were lists showing what crew were assigned to what lifeboats. But I don't know quite what it was with the passengers. Although I think there were some rudimentary evacuation

procedures that would have been on papers in their rooms. They had life vests, too, right? Like, yeah, they had. Oh, they had they had they had life belts for everyone aboard. I forgot how many, though. They were the every cabin had life belts. They were all over the place. The lifeboats were a cork at this point, I believe. Yeah. And they were also dangerous.

Apparently, some people, when they jumped into the water, you know, the life belt shot up when they hit the water and it like broke their necks, basically. If you look at that, that's gone poorly. Just kill me on the boat, man. Yeah. Yeah. They were just not good. Really, all this show is an elaborate exercise

of how would you like to die the least? But the actual number of boats, yeah, of course, he was left to the board of trade. Despite the regulations, Carl Isle still felt that the ships should have 32 boats, even if they didn't update the regulations. So three per davit set. He even made plans showing how this layout would look after Welland submitted the davit plans to the board of trade for approval.

It was noted that Olympic and Titanic were apparently going to be fitted with 32 lifeboats. But the BOT had still not decided on updating the regulations. And although Harlan and Wolf had leeway and design decisions, they felt that the number of boats was up to the White Star Line. So they just didn't do anything about it. Also launching the boats like that because of these new davits, they never really trained the crew on them, as I understand it.

They trained some of the crew. There is a drill on the daily left Southampton with the for the board of trade to show that the lifeboats worked and everything. But I think it is safe to say that by the time Titanic sank, the crew didn't really they weren't overly familiar with how the lifeboat systems worked and that led to issues. So, you know, you have to ask yourself, why did the White Star Line drag their feet on the matter?

Carl Isle suggested that the White Star basically they were considering their other fleets and their other steamers as he put it, in other words, if White Star Line may changes to Olympic and Titanic, they'd have to go back and change their other ships and add more lifeboats to those. And, you know, it's just expensive. And they didn't they probably didn't want to do it because, of course, you know, you know, they were very conservative with their money.

Spoilers show a nice view from the boat deck, ruins the beautiful like lines of the ship. That actually I don't think that's true. It's a common myth that they basically just didn't have lifeboats because, you know, they wanted more space on the deck. But as far as I know, it was mainly complacency and like this this weird obsession with just waiting on the board of trade to tell them what to do.

Big government overreach right there. I am shocked and appalled. Carl Isle, you know, he was still involved in the lifeboat debate even after he retired. He joined the committee to advise the board of trade on lifeboat regulations. There was a meeting with the committee that was held in May, 1911. The lifeboat plans were discussed. And Carl Isle said outright at the meeting that he didn't think

there were enough lifeboats aboard Olympic and Titanic. But despite that, the committee decided not to recommend changing lifeboat regulations and submitted their final report in July, 1911. That's awesome. That's so cool. Carl Isle signed off on the reports. Later, he would say he regretted it, saying he did not know why he signed off on it when he didn't agree with it. Other than that, he said he was soft that day when he normally wouldn't be.

Remember when the boat designers were hard? If you don't have pre-epism by the time this boat launches, you're fired. So. So, of course. So, of course, you know, the BOT following the recommendations just stayed with the current regulations, 20 boats. Yep. 20 boats. And so, you know, yeah, there's also, you know, more deck space and a cover up. So, you know, again, the popular claim, deck space.

I don't think that's true. You know, the lifeboats were thought of as ferries, not life saving devices themselves. But apparently there was one person who was extremely concerned about the lack of boats, Captain Maurice Clark. He was in charge of basically overseeing Titanic's safety and, you know, signing off on it before she left port. Apparently, in documents that were unsealed after, you know, around a century, he's found that Clark wrote his concerns

in basically in private documents. He said that he wanted 50 percent more lifeboats on the ship but was ignored by White Star. This is this is another myth, right? Is that like everybody thought, oh, this was unsinkable rather than people at the time in the field were like, this is dangerous. Yeah, they're yeah. I mean, obviously, Carly, the Titanic's very chief designer wanted more boats.

And, you know, there were other people who thought, you know, maybe it's a good idea if we had more boats, you know, just in case. And of course, you know, some people wouldn't have wanted to push back. And Clark was one of them. He wrote that to deviate would leave me without support. I might be shifted as suggested to me by others if I enforced my views as to efficiency. I'm talking about construction.

Yeah. Oh, we're getting to that. So, yeah, the unsinkable ship. Yeah, I see here. Covet encoders. Yes. Oh, yeah. Um, you know, it's the ships were said to be practically unsinkable, quote, unquote. The White Star Line put out a pamphlet in 1910 describing the new class of ships as unsinkable. There was another publication in 1911 that said, as far as it is possible to do, these two wonderful vessels are designed to be unsinkable.

When Sylvia Caldwell, the Caldwell family on Titanic, had asked the deck. Yeah. You're dissented, Salis. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, yeah, apparently, yeah, they asked in here by deckhand, supposedly, if the ship was really unsinkable and he answered, yes, Leedy, God himself could not sink the ship. Hubris. That's your hubris is that guy's fault. I mean, I think it's I think it's telling that you have to reassure people because these days, right, if you put an ad for a cruise ship, practically unsinkable,

it would like it would make people more nervous that you have felt that you had to say it. You would think that, I mean, yes, obviously, in the light of popular culture. But the funny thing is, back in those days, it was a little different. So for one thing, the media and the people ran with the unsinkable idea, you know, practically unsinkable under certain circumstances became God himself couldn't sink the ship. Um, and so because, yeah, it was not that it was supposed to be absolutely unsinkable, just that it was unsinkable for the most part, sometimes, depending on what happened. We have this this sort of implicit suggestion that the the other ship you might take is, in fact, sinkable.

Yeah. And, you know, most assumed scenarios with limited damage, yeah, run head on into something, you have a small hole. Nobody thought, what would happen if you just ground an iceberg across the side, you know? Hmm. Um, very, very difficult to sink, though. I think we can say that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You have to really screw up the sink to ship. In normal disaster conditions.

Yeah. Yeah. This is a kill of death, baby. The funny the funny thing is, even after Titanic sink, Olympic underwent some upgrades to make it safer. Like they raised the double bottom up to along the sides, you know, wonderful. And they did some other stuff. They raised the height of the bulkheads and all that. And the press after the sinking of Titanic stated that her builders had finally realized

the quest of it on sinkable ship, even after Titanic sink. All right, this one's unsinkable. Unsinkable too. HMS, HMS hubris. I mean, to be fair, Operation cannot possibly fail a second time. I mean, I mean, to be fair, you know, oh, this is my next part in the notes. So, you know, Olympic was, you know, the first to be built and launched.

She was completed by May 31, 1911, beginner maiden voyage on June 14, 1911, which fun fact is also apparently Trump's birthday. So that's, I don't know what to make of that. Olympic was a success, of course, and her first few voyages went well. But on her maiden voyage in New York, she had a small incident. A couple of, basically, you know, there was one bit where like a tug got caught in her propeller wash and almost got like smashed under the stern. And then at the same time, she like scraped along the side of the dock very slightly and

rubbed off some paint. And she was being, yeah, back in it, back in it. Stop. It's funny because you can see a fault. There's a photo of Olympic doing this. And you can see, like, it's still touching the pier. And there's just people standing at the, standing at the corner of the pier, like, I think that'll buff out.

Nice and easy now. Nice and easy. Oh, old timey NTSB guys. Got a fault in the mirrors. All right, cut it. And, you know, Smith was captaining the ship at the time, of course. You know, because, yeah, so wouldn't that have been the pilot's fault, though? Yeah, yeah.

He wasn't Smith was on the bridge, but there would have been a pilot on board. So that was a whole thing. But, you know, Olympic went on to have a successful career. Served in World War One as a troop ship. I will be right back. All right. It rammed and sank a German U-boat. Down down.

Late in her, late Olympics career, I forgot when exactly. I don't remember dates. It, it was sailing in fog off of the east coast. And it ran down the Nantucket light ship. It split the ship in half. And most of the crew on board died. Imagine seeing that prowl bearing down on you. You're supposed to go out of the fog.

The light is not the place you go. You go around the light and you don't go straight towards it. The thing is, at that point, the helmsman was a moth. So, you know, construction, you know, Titanic, of course, it was built at Holland and Wolf shipyard to Belfast. I guess Ireland at the time, the keel was laid March 31st, 1909. The hull was built on a slipway under this huge ass gantry that they had been built specifically for the Olympic class liners.

It provided a solid platform for cranes and other tools and stuff to build the ships. It had two slipways, you know, Titanic and Olympic were being built alongside at one point for a lot of that time. Now, some 15,000 workers helped to build Titanic, of course, and it was dangerous and difficult work. Safety was basically an afterthought. Most of it was done. The work was done without, like, their protective gear.

They didn't have hard hats. I even saw a picture of, like, a guy, you know, doing ship breaking at the time, you know, doing the thing with the welding, like, cutting stuff. And he wasn't wearing anything. Ah, just close your eyes. Construction in the nude. I'm out here with the sparks everywhere. A settling torch in my in nature, you know.

Yeah, fuck corneas. As God intended. Don't need them. And during Titanic's construction, there were 246 injuries, 28 of them severe, with, like, crushed arms and the fingers and apparently severed arms. Oh, my God. Wait, savings. I wrote in my notes, shake hands with danger.

You can't. You lost your arm. Shake hands with danger. And all six workers died on the ship itself during its construction. And another two in the yard during the construction. So once the hull was completed up to the superstructure, the ship still largely unfinished, was launched backwards from the slipway and on May 31st, 1911.

During the launch, a shipyard worker was struck by a piece of wood as it was being, you know, as it was, as all this was happening. And he was rushed to a hospital and later died of his injuries. So he became a fated. Cursed ship. Fun fact, they didn't, they didn't christen Titanic. White Starline didn't, Harlan and Wolfe didn't do that with their ships. They were said to just build them and push them out.

Cursed ship. Onto the next one. Cubris against the seagods. Oh, I was like, well, you know, you don't have time for christening because you've got to get everyone over to start building the next ship, which is slightly bigger. It didn't christen it because the Titanic was a Muslim. So yeah, once Titanic was launched, you know, it alternated between a wharf and a dry dock that she was being fitted out.

The boilers and engines are installed and blah, blah, blah. The fittings and interiors are put in place. So, you know, you know, as Olympic was completed first and had already been sailing by the time Titanic was launched, they observed a bunch of stuff that they wanted to improve. So they took those things and they applied them to Titanic. This including getting rid of Titanic's BDIC promenades, filling them with more cabins, expanding the Ella Cart restaurant, which had proved to be extremely successful on Olympic, adding a whole new cafe, the Cafe Parisien.

The layouts of other spaces were changed, a whole different layout for the Turkish bath and a bunch of other stuff. And because of the changes to BDIC, they had to rip off a bunch of plating along BDIC and put new plating on with the new layout of windows. And as well, they had to add port holes here and there, and there were other changes. And apparently, these are also the basis of some really dumb conspiracy theories about the ships being switched. Because people would be like...

Yeah, guys shot JFK from one of them. Yeah. Yeah, because people would be like, well, in this photo, this ship has, you know, 16 port holes and this photo has 14. Why is that? It must be that they were switched, you know? Mm-hmm. So, you know, typical wonderful conspiracy theories thinking.

Yeah. There's another big claim about Titanic, which is that it had weak steel or rivets. You know, basically, the ideas Holland and Wolf or the White Star cheaped out with the steel, which considering how conservative they were with other things, that's probably easy to believe. Yeah. Basically, they used substandard materials and steel that was high in carbon content, leading to brittle metal. But the fact is that I think it's technically true that the steel on Titanic wasn't the best.

Like, you know, there was more like carbon and whatnot. But the caveat is that all of the steel back then was like that. Yeah. Mm-hmm. But, yeah, compared to modern steel, sure. And, you know, it's true that some of the iron rivets that were tested, they brought up from the wreck and tested, you know, they didn't hold up very well. But let's say you hold up so well after 90 years on a seabed, you know?

Yeah. And, you know, they were the Titanic had regular steel rivets that, you know, they met the quality of standards and shipbuilding practices at the time. The hall plates were the same. They were tested back then before installation by the Board of Trade. You know, I know you can't trust the Board of Trade at this point, but, you know, it met the standards of the time. And even modern analysis is showing that Titanic's plates were plenty strong.

This misunderstanding in large part is due to the, you know, the, yeah, it's the media, basically, like they hear Titanic had, you know, steel that wasn't as good as modern. What? You said it, didn't have good steel? I don't know how much the carbon content would have contributed to the sinking, though. It's hit an iceberg. That's kind of heavy. Yeah. It's like a perfectly adequate ship for its time. You know, that's all the impression I've gotten is that it was fine.

Yeah. And that is true. I mean, it basically, it's, it was fine. It was by all standards and accounts, the fine ship. And, you know, like I said, Olympic sailed for, you know, however many, you know, until the late thirties and ran into a bunch of shit and she was fine. It's fine so long as you hit it directly, like directly on the prow. So essentially go to ramming speed and don't turn the Titanic's fine. On his reign of terror, smashing every boat in its way. Straight through New York Harbor. The Olympic is like a bear, you know, you have to put it down because it gets a taste

for other ships, you know. It's tasted blood now. Speaking of running in the things, the Hawke Collision. So on September 20th, 1911. Next slide, please. Oh yeah, next slide. Oh wait, that's the slide. I need to keep up. So on September 20th, 1911, during her fifth voyage, Olympic was sailing through the Solent under the command of Captain Smith. She was running parallel with the British cruiser HMS Hawke. Olympic apparently began to make a wide turn at the same time the Hawke was sailing pretty close and probably got caught in Olympics, you know, the dynamics around the

hull and unable to take evasive action. The Hawke just, you know, it had a bow designed for ramming basically. It just slammed straight into the Olympic on her starboard side on the stern just under the aft well deck and it created this huge like V shaped gash above the waterline as well as some damage below. Two of Olympic's watertight compartments were flooded and a propeller shaft was bent and one of the propellers was damaged as well. Olympic was patched up over the next two weeks and returned to Belfast and was fully repaired over six weeks. Of course, this led to delays for Titanic due to really messed up the Hawke though. Look at that on the top right. Wish that bow over to the right hand side.

Yeah. The Hawke, of course, survived as well, you know, but I'm sure it was very costly to fix. You've angered the ship. This is when Olympic gets the taste for blood. And after that, it gets sets out onto the open ocean in search of more things to run into. You know, of course delays due to the Hawke mishap and then urgent need for repairs. Titanic's fitting out was delayed while Olympic was repaired. Primarily due to the fact that it was decided to save time by replacing Olympic's damaged propeller shaft with one meant for Titanic. The delays wouldn't end here, though. On February 24th, 1912, Olympic lost a propeller blade while

sailing from New York. Sometimes ships would just throw propeller blades. Oh, man, those are really just riveted on, huh? Because it can't be like cast in one piece or whatever. So they're just attached to me. Yeah. The center propeller was one solid cast piece. But the wing propellers, no, they were they were giant blades that were bolted on with huge bolts and they could be changed in their pitch, depending on what they wanted. Huh. Interesting. But, you know, because I like the like six foot diameter bolt there. Oh, yeah. Yeah. But, you know, because of the throwing propeller blade, they decided to take one from Titanic. And that just delayed Titanic further to the point where originally Titanic was meant

to sail on March 20th in 1912. But because of all these delays in the Hawke and the propeller incident, Titanic was pushed to April 10th, 1912 for a maiden voyage. Hmm. Hmm. Titanic was effectively completed on April 2nd, 1912, mere eight days before her maiden voyage. So they were cutting it close. So Titanic went on her sea trials, April 12th. The sea trials were held from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. They consisted primarily of running the ship to various speeds and making various maneuvers under different conditions, you know, backing up, going forward, having the engines at different speeds and all that, with and without the center propeller. They wanted to get a smaller boat and

destroying it. Yeah. Yeah. They wanted to get a quench its bloodlust, unable to quench its bloodlust. Yeah, they wanted to get a full rundown, basically, on how many ships Titanic could kill. She is hungry for a ferry. Just painting one of the catamaran. One of the, like, flying tigers, like, eye and jaw with the teeth on the side of the bow. It's got a, it's like the side of a bomber or whatever. It's got how many? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Three barges and a car float, you know, and a Staten Island ferry. So, you know, one example is that they did a full stop test. Basically, from 18 knots, they reversed the engines as quickly as they could. It took just over three minutes to come

to a full stop over the course of 3,000 feet. It was actually a fairly short stopping distance for a ship her size. They said that the Titanic had performed extremely well during your trials, past flying colors. Once the trials were done, Titanic set sail for Southampton and arrived there after midnight at the end of April 3rd. Getting into ice season. Yeah. So, at this time, something else was happening. Coal miners were striking for a minimum wage in the UK and, I think, America. Ungrateful. So when Titanic arrived in Southampton, it was in the middle of this huge coal strike. It had begun on February 29th in 1912. They demanded a minimum wage. The unions had about 10 million in their coffers at the start of the strike

used to provide pay for the striking workers. Of course, the strike had a ripple effect. The coal dwindled. Ships had to be laid up because, you know, no coal, which meant that employment among the ship's crews increased and many of the ships ended up getting tied up around the Southampton docks. Many of them side by side, you know, they'd be doubled up, including some of the American line ships, which are near Titanic's birth. One being called the New York. Another was the Philadelphia, the St. Louis, the St. Paul. These are also near Titanic. The strike itself wouldn't delay Titanic's voyage, at least not directly. We'll get to that. But it did force White Star to pull what coal they could from other ships in order to fill

Titanic's bunkers. You know, the strike began to reach its limits with the companies claiming the workers couldn't hold out much longer and the unions claiming they could at least another two weeks. But, you know, soon the workers themselves started breaking the picket lines and returned to work on their own. Well, apparently with 30,000 returning to work by April 3rd and another 10,000 the next day. God damn it. On April 6th, in a 440 to 125 vote, the miners federation ended the strike. So, you know, at this point, you know, Titanic's, Titanic had its crew and officers pretty much laid out. You know, most of the crew signed on for the main voyage. The day the coal strike ended, usually it took crew some getting used to the new design of the new ships. But some of the crew had

already sailed on Olympic, so they basically knew Titanic already in that sense. Let's meet the crew. Yeah. Many of the crew came from a densely packed like portion of Southampton. And a lot of them would die in the sinking. And, you know, that led to like a huge part of like the local population of Southampton being cutted because of it. It was, it hit them pretty hard. Can we pause for a second to talk about on the bottom left, the surviving crew, how sick that guy's white Starline sweatshirt is? Oh, yeah, I was pretty dope. I want that. I want that white star, that white Starline shirt. What color do you suppose that is? Is that red? I think they would have been black or blue. I don't recall. It's like it's still though.

It's like a varsity sweatshirt. Very like Steve's this. Oh, I like it a lot. The Titanic's crew comprised of several departments, the deck department that included the captain and officers, the Abled Seaman, the No Dirty Jokes, please. Oh, you can make a couple. Why would we do that? This is a clean podcast. Yeah, this is a family podcast. That's right. You know, the quarter masters. Maybe single people listen to this podcast? We don't know. We don't want to know. You know, the quarter masters were part of that department. You know, the people they were at the helm, you know, the steering wheel and, you know, making sure not to hit things, I guess, keeping the ship on track, issuing the cool sweaters.

Yeah. The lookouts and the various other duties around the ship. And then there was the engine department. These are the engineers, the greasers, the firemen, the trimmers, you know, firemen shoveled coal, the trimmers moved it around, the greasers, you know, kept the engines lubed up, made sure they worked nice and good. Nice. And also electricians and others and these people involved with running the technical side of the ship. And then there were oils. Yeah. And then there were the the victualing departments. They were separated according to class. Each class had its own stewards. Cooks may. Well, they were designed by the level of like snootiness and Italianness,

respectively. Basically. Now, the Titanic had eight officers, including Smith. The other officers were Chief Officer Henry Tingle Wilde, First Officer William McMaster Murdoch, Second Officer Charles Herbert Lyt taller, Third Officer Herbert John Pittman, Fourth Officer Joseph Groves Box Hall, Fifth Officer Harold Godfrey Low, and Sixth Officer James Paul Moody. That's too many officers. You've got to have fewer officers, I think. Oh, they come in useful later. I've just found I've just found that white starline sweatshirt. And you can you can get one from the production of Titanic, the Kevin Costner movie for me 700

pounds. I was also looking at it and all the ones I found were the kerning is wrong. Oh, yeah. You need that like hand embroidered sort of thing. Yeah, you need the, you know, it has to be like the wider, you know, as the old time is sort of there's some there's something as Jenna said, Qua about old type, you know, especially like sans-serif. Right. Where everything was just slightly different. On board was the Guarantee Group. They were, when ships first sailed, they would have a group of people from the shipyard come aboard. This included then, you know, the new chief designer, Thomas Andrews, along with other

people from various Holland and Wolfe departments to just make sure the ship was working and all that. Yeah. Sadly, none, no, none of the nine member Guarantee Group survived the sinking. Then there's Captain Smith himself, you know, you know, you know, he was born in Hanley Staffordshire, England, January 27th, 1850. You know, he kind of grew up eventually taking, going on the course of becoming a seaman basically. You know, in 1887, he married, he had a daughter. He joined the White Star Line in 1880, starting his fourth officer on the Celtic or the Celtic, I don't really know. 1887, he got his first

command to board the Republic. He earned his extra master's certificate the next year. He joined the Royal Naval Reserve and retired from the R&R in 1905 with the commander rank. All of the, all of these guys were like, to captain these, you had to be essentially like available for the Navy to just like press gangie whenever. Yeah. Starting in 1895, Smith was captain of the Majestic for nine years, including a brief service during the Boer War, where he was awarded the transport medal. Smith gained a reputation with passengers at the time as a safe captain. And, you know, he eventually became known as the millionaire's captain.

Starting in 1904, he was tapped to command all of White Star Line's newest vessels for their maiden voyages and given command of their largest ship, Baltic in 1904. As we've seen with the fucking Tenerife, Ed Zaster, celebrity captains and celebrity pilots, never a good idea. Nope. Nope. Yeah. So Smith moved to the Adriatic and by 1911 on Olympics voyage, maiden voyage, he was one of the most experienced captains in the world at that point. He also used a natural choice for Olympic. Regardless of the recent incidents at the Olympic, he was given command of Titanic. It's often been claimed that Smith had planned to retire after Titanic. It's hard to tell, but it's evidence seems to indicate that he probably

did intend to retire, although exactly when I don't know. He was 62 years old at the time, though. So, you know, he's getting up there. Smith was paid £1,250 per year as a master with a bonus of £200 if the year was free of accidents. Oh, so he's against his economic interest here. So I immediately like, yeah. Just like scraping against this iceberg and like distraught because you're losing your no-claims bonus. Passengers on board at the time of sailing. The ship was only half booked, actually. It had a total passenger capacity of 2,435 if you include crew, 3,547. Of this total 3,500 capacity, Titanic had 2,200 on board for the main voyage by the time she left Queenstown.

So, you know, right away, you see, it could have been a lot worse. You know, the first paying passenger to board Titanic was a guy who made Wiccoth Vanderhoof, who boarded in Belfast, and then he re-boarded in Southampton, and he'd end up dying in the sinking, naturally. Then he had other passengers. Wiccoth Vanderhoof. And then he had other people. You had other passengers. You know, John Jacob Astor, he was the richest man on the ship, and apparently he also has my birthday. He had a pregnant wife with him. You know, he died, of course. Benjamin Guggeheim and his valet, Victor Gillio, they died, of course. Major Archibald Butt was the passenger. Major Butt. Major Archibald.

Molly Brown, the unseekable Molly Brown, although they call them Margaret. Father Francis Brown, he was a Jesuit priest, and a guy named Raymond Artigai Devesha. I am so sorry. He's dead. It's okay. Yeah, you don't need to hold us down. So he was a... Raymond was an Argentinian businessman. In 1871, he survived the fire and sinking of a ship called America, one of only 65 survivors. We're all on a sinking ship called America. For the next 40 years, Raymond was haunted by it, and he never felt safe on another ship. Yeah, that's Titanic. That's all, buddy. First by zone hubris. In letters, Raymond wrote that he finally felt safe on Titanic. At least I will be able to travel,

and above all, I will be able to sleep calm. And he felt that the advent of Marconi wireless meant that he'd be safe, because the thing with the sinking that he was involved in was that the ship was close to land, but nobody came to rescue, at least not fast. So that was his big concern. Where's here? You're in like a big, a busy shipping lane. Yeah, the ship hit something. You just sit in the smoking room, smoking for an hour until the next ship along comes and rescues you. Yeah. Assuming the thing you hit wasn't another ship. Now you're both sinking. Yeah. Yeah. Sadly, of course, he would die in the sinking. There were also a few voyage cancellations. A few were known to cancel the trips.

One of them was Milton Hershey, Hershey chocolate name. He canceled this trip to attend to business matters. Others included JP Morgan. He was slated to be on Titanic. He owned the parent company of the White Star Line, but he left for some reason. I forgot. There was novelist Theodore Dreiser, Pittsburgh Steel Baron Henry Frick, and Vanderbilt Air offered to Owen Vanderbilt. Yeah, we could have had Revolution of the United States in like three days. Yeah. These bricks had just been on this boat. Apparently, Guglielmo Marconi was also offered free passage, but he decided to take the Lusitania days earlier. Women with access to the time machine. Mr. Frick, you have to wake up. Your ship's about to leave.

I think both the heirs to the widener fortune were on board. They died, and Linwood Hall has been vacant ever since. Yeah. Then what? The president of the Grand Drunk Western Railroad was aboard. Don't you mean the Grand Funk Railroad? Yeah, the president of Jefferson App, you mean the Grand Funk? I believe that was Jefferson Ocean Liner at the time. Yeah, they had to rename themselves in 1911. They renamed themselves after the fastest way to cross the Atlantic Ocean. So the funny thing about Marconi is that he apparently took Lusitania because he preferred the stenographer that they provided on board.

What a fucking dweeb. And he he would escape disaster again on Lusitania because he was on Lusitania's last voyage before the one that it was sunk on. Damn. We're so bad at killing billionaires. Yeah. And fascists, you know. All in all, you'd be surprised how many freaking people have claimed to have relatives like who were supposed to be on Titanic and missed the boat. I was I was driving through mission or me and some friends from my Titanic project were going through Michigan one time. We stopped to the antique store and this guy in there started talking about how his relatives missed the boat. And it's like if you added up all the people who supposedly missed Titanic, it would sink the ship.

Hey, you know, the kind of they overbook. It's like the airlines, right? And then you get bumped on to another ship. Flight, man. I don't mind. I got a flight today. So, you know, on April 10th, I think the day before that there was a board of trade inspection, the Titanic had to undergo it and pass it, you know, they had to check all their safety equipment, their life belts and players, rockets, life, life boats and all that stuff. You know, so, you know, even even by April 10th, the work on Titanic was just crazy because they still hadn't technically like completed the ship. Like they were still bringing on furniture and fittings and all kinds of crap. You know, it was even claimed

that the grand staircase clock hadn't been installed yet, but I don't know if that's true. So, you know, they were even touching up the paint. You know, Thomas Andrews boarded at 6 a.m. by 6 a.m. Most of the crew had arrived. Captain Smith left his home around 7 a.m. He got his paper from the paper boy. He arrived by 7 30. There was a formal muster crew at 8 a.m. And it was after this that so they had like a lifeboat drill at around 9 a.m. Most of the officers were at the drill along with some of the crew, not all of them. Two life boats were lowered into the water. They were swung out and all that. And they were thrown around for a bit, brought back on deck. The way they brought the boats back on deck was

through these electric boat winches. Although, yeah, because, you know, of course, they lowered them by hand, you know, they're letting out the rope. But of course, they needed the winches to get them back. So, you know, passengers arrived over the course of the morning, mainly from 9 30 a.m. And many arrived via the boat trains from London or from local hotels. They would have been unloaded and boarded Titanic from birth 44, where Titanic was moored. There were gangways attached to the ship. There were also many guests who were allowed on the ship, like people who weren't paying passengers or, you know, like if or if they were friends of passengers or journalists, they were basically allowed free run of the ship with it. What's the

what's the stowaway situation like? We don't know about that. Of course, we'll never know. I don't know of any stowaways. I mean, they were pretty strict. But of course, people get in now. Mainly it was first and second class passengers. Yeah, basically these people, the journalists and the friends and all that, they could tour the public areas. For example, second class passenger Lawrence Beasley and a friend of his, they toured first class. Check it out, see what's going on. Yeah. And apparently some were even allowed to like tour third class. So basically, it was a brand new ship. People were allowed to walk around and go, wow. Looking into third class like, wow, those men sure are Irish. Yep.

Can you take me to these glory holes I've heard so much about just for my own personal observation? You understand. Um, among the last aboard Titanic at Southampton were some Stokers and Firemen who were late to reboard because the Stokers had been allowed to go ashore if they weren't on duty. They could go to the pub and all that, but they had to be back before the ship left. And, you know, two of them, John Podesta and William Nutbean made it onto the ship. John Podesta, like the Democrat guy. Yeah. They made it up the gangplank at the last moment just before it was starting to get pulled back.

And at this point, six officer Moody was just standing watch being like, that's enough of this shit. So by that point, Firemen and brothers Alfred Bertram and Tom Slade and a trimmer named Penny, they were rushing along the dock. And by the time they got to the gangplank, it was being pulled back and Moody was like, he had enough. He refused to let him board. And so, you know, they, you know, I'm announced to them it was their lucky day. Yeah, they just got some more Irishmen out of the bunker. Come on, fit against, stretch those legs. All right. So now we're sailing. Yeah. Oh, yeah, we are. Oh, yeah. Okay. So after merely one hour, 42 minutes into the episode, we are away from the dark. This is going to crack four hours. Almost underway. So the departure. Oh, yeah,

though, there's going to be more. So the gangways are pulled back. This is revenge for the Gulf State Microprojects thing. We tortured Seamus. Now Kyle is torturing us. Yep. That's why I made literally 60 pages of notes. You'll be fine, you big baby. So yeah, the crew went to their stations, blah, blah, blah. It pulled away from the dock. You know, passengers are being happy and calling blah, blah, blah. But, you know, as Titanic was rounding the corner being guided by tugs into the Deepwater Channel, the pilot on board named Boyer, he ordered the engines slow ahead. You know, and of course, you know, the, you know, source, they started going slow ahead. Only two outer wing propellers would have been turning, not the center one.

And as the propellers are turning, the ship was moving, there was a complex series of forces around the ship and the water, you know, like what happened with the hawk. And, but you know, to maneuver these things. Yeah. Titanic was meant to leave by noon, but I think it was 15 minutes late. But it would about to be even later. So as Titanic was passing, you know, the various docks, she passed two of the ships docked side by side, one of them being the New York. As Titanic passed, the dynamics of the water flowing around put stress on the New York's moorings and they started to snap with loud reports. Some of the ropes, some of the ropes flew backwards into the dock, almost hitting people.

Cuss chip. Cuss chip. Yeah, already hungering for smaller ships. As Titanic continued to pass by, and remember, the New York is only there because of the cold strike. So like we're seeing how events are coming together to form this put Titanic on this path. So, you know, as Titanic passed by, the New York stern swung out at a channel. Titanic's port engine was ordered to reverse to try to push to New York away. The tug Vulcan was nearby. It was ordered by someone to move between the New York and the Titanic. Yeah, just get in between these two things. Yeah. Captain Gale was like, fuck that. And he decided to attach a line to the stern of the New York instead, which immediately snapped.

And then he attached a second line and, you know, this held and the Vulcan was able to slowly pull the New York away or at least arrest its movement. Unfortunately, this aroused the Titanic's blood loss. It never got to kill that tugboat. And as such, it had to kill everyone else aboard. That's why they were gone so fast as Titanic was excited to go get to New York Harbor and whack right into the Staten Island ferry. Just aiming directly for the Statue of Liberty. Car floats. So the New York, the New York came within about four feet of hitting Titanic by some accounts. But finally, the Titanic started to reverse a bit. Then New York finally pulled away. And Titanic backed up for a bit assisted by tugs. New York was swung around and pulled to

the other side of the dock, as you see in the diagram. Top right, of course. As a tight. Yeah. So what's always in order, though, Titanic begins stealing, steaming down the river again. Probably some have claimed that it was delayed about an hour, but it was probably more like 15 minutes, maybe half an hour. You know, the reaction from passengers varied. Some were like, you know, one passenger remarked as it was happening now for a crash. Oh, my. Comically, like wiping my brow of sweat has been a joker-fied, but 1912 style. Yeah. First class passenger, Jacques Futrell, said, well, she got that out of her system anyway.

Oh, no. Oh, no. You thought the bloodlust was over? One Norman Chambers, on the other hand, he knew it was up. He said that it was an evil omen. Cursed ship. Cursed ship. Cursed ship. Man's humorous. It'll get you, kids. So, yeah. I would simply sail on a ship that was not cursed. Oh, yeah, me too. I guess I'm just built different than all the dead people. RIP to your great grandma, but I'm just built different. Next slide, please. All right. As all this is happening, there was a coal fire going on below Dex. Yeah, it's called a steam engine. That's supposed to happen.

So, coal fires were not uncommon on ships of the time. You had these big bunkers full of coal. Sometimes it would self-combust and they would start to smolder. This happened in Titanic's case. There's a small coal fire in the forward starboard bunker, boiler room five. That's marked on the plans here where the fire would have been. I'm just looking at all the coal bunkers and they've actually run out of letters. They go like this coal bunker, RSTUV. This starts in W and then the one after Y is a beta. Just incredible. It's a lot of coal. I have a question. Strict ship, Alice. Presumably, this is all the same grade of coal, right? Presumably. So, why are there dividers in the coal bunker?

Ah, well, the main reason is that these are watertight bulkheads. Oh, I see. And then, of course, they were divided on the lower levels by the passageways and such. Why does it just say do, do, do, do in the bits in the middle? That means ditto. Boilers. It says boiler room, yeah. Quick aside, a friend of mine named Matt DeWinklers, he's been making his own set of plans for the last two years and these are some of the samples of that. Those should be released soon. So, let's talk about this fire. So, the fire. So, let's talk about this fire. So, it had been burning since Belfast, basically.

It had probably been going around 10 days by the time it was put out. It's important to note, though, that this wasn't really like a massive raging fire. It was probably a spot of smoldering coal, but it was up against the bulkhead, I think. The trimmers dug through the coal bunker. They used, they prioritized using coal from this bunker in order to empty it. And yeah, you know, finally the fire was put out. It would eventually be put out on April 13th. And, you know, it was when they cleared out the coal, apparently the fire had left a bit of a scorch mark on the steel watertight bulkhead. With a demon's face on it. Yeah.

Yeah. There was a slight bulge. So, you know, it's unclear, you know, obviously, I don't, I personally don't think it contributed to any failure in the bulkhead or anything like that. I don't think it ever failed. Yeah, but, you know, in the approximate words of a leading fireman, Fred Barrett, you know, he said the bulkhead was damaged from the bottom, the bottom of the watertight compartment was dinged aft and the other part dinged forward. Another fireman said that he could see where the bulkhead had been red hot. All the paint and everything was off and it was dented. So, they got some black oil and rubbed it on there.

Well, this is another one of the conspiracies, right? As they were speeding because of the coal bunker situation, they want to get the port where they could fight the fire more effectively. Yeah. And that wasn't even true. I mean, they were fighting it and they had it out before the sinking. Yeah. No speeding because they wanted to get to New York Harbor and mow down a railroad tug. Yeah. I didn't get that cool trophy. Yeah. Of course, in the last, this is one of, this leads to one of the dumber chapters of Titanic, like documentary crap, because like in the last couple of years, on the top right, there's that photo of Titanic that was taken in in Belfast and there was another photo and you see that little mark, that dark mark in the circle.

So, the documentary tried to claim that the coal fire was a big factor in the sinking. It said that, you know, the main piece of evidence was the photos. Oh, this smudge is a scorch mark caused by the coal fire. Reality is that it's just a reflection. I mean, you know, the mark is nowhere near where the fire was. I mean, if that had been a scorch mark, that would have meant the mail room was on fire. And it was a lot of stuff like that. Like, you know, they claim the fire was never extinguished, it was. They claim that the fire was hushed up. They didn't mention it to the passengers, but, you know, why would you? So they could panic, you know? It was claimed that... I'm just gonna terrify you, but I don't mean to alarm you, but there may be a coal fire or coal fires.

Also, the ship has an unquenchable lust for blood in your next. It was claimed that it was covered up at the British Enquiry. It wasn't. I just don't think it was talked about much. It was claimed that the fire began to spread. It got worse, didn't. It was claimed that Titanic was short on coal. Also not true. It had reserve coal for up to 1.8 days at 21 knots or even slower. It was claimed that Thomas Andrews believed the ship would survive. No, he knew it was doomed from the moment he saw the damage and did the calculations. You know, it was claimed that the fire damage bulkhead gave way, but that's probably not true. There are other explanations, because basically the fireman, Fred Barrett,

had seen a wall of water rushing through the boiler room in that area at the time during the sinking. And, you know, I tell that out of there, but they like to claim that this is because the bulkhead collapse, but it probably may have came from the door of the bunker collapsing or something like that because the bunker was flooding at the time. And, you know, the bottom left, that's one of the bunker doors. Fireman destroyed with facts and logic. Yes. At any rate, because of the coal fire and because they were using more coal from the starboard bunker, Titanic took on a port list of about 2.3, 2.5 degrees or so. And it had that for the entire rest of the voyage. You see at the bottom right,

it's it leaned about that much. Imagine playing squash on a 2.3 degree incline. Voyage ruined, literally unplayable. Takes away some of the romance of the voyage when you realize, you know, that entire entire time, everyone was like just leaning slightly slightly. Did they capture that in the movie? I never seen the movie. Yeah, you see Kevin Costner, like leaning slightly. If you want to if you want to watch the movie and make it more accurate, what you should do is lean your television over like one. Just do a bit of a Dutch angle. Yeah.

Yeah. Next slide. So, you know, at this point, Titanic is sailing towards Cherbourg, France for her first stop. You know, the crew settled into their routine, the passengers too, down in boiler room five, you know, that they were still fighting the fire. You know, Chief Engineer Joseph Bell decided it was time to do something about it for good. So, we ordered later, Leaning Fireman Fred Barrett to begin the efforts to extinguish the fire. And, you know, of course, that's when they began to really prioritize use of the coal from that bunker and all that. And also at the time, they were also using a hose to pour water

into the bunker. So, they weren't just digging it out. Titanic dropped anchor near Cherbourg around 6.30 p.m. April 10th. The tender's nomadic in traffic, specifically built for Olympic class-liners, delivered more passengers. I like the tenders. They're cute. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Tendies. They're like, yeah, a little miniature Titanic. One of them's still around, right? Yeah. The nomadic is still there in Belfast. It's been restored. It's the last remaining, I think, White Star vessel. Didn't they got bought by someone a few years ago? Yeah. They've bought a Cunard now, I think. Yeah. But they're owned by, I want to say, Royal Caribbean. You're wrong on that. Carnival. Carnival. Carnival owns everything.

They even own Cunard. Oh, the muddy a phone. So, you know, among the passengers who boarded was Molly Brown. You know, they went to dinner and all that and Titanic weighed anchor around 8.10 p.m. and it set sail for Queenstown, Ireland. By late morning, April 11th, Titanic dropped anchor off the coast of Queenstown Harbor by 11.30 a.m. And, you know, apparently by the morning of the 11th, some passengers were writing letters that could be sent off by the mail, including Chief Officer Wilde, who wrote in the letter saying, I still don't like this ship. I have a queer feeling about it. Just you wait, buddy. I'm experiencing some foreshadowing. Yes.

Uh, we're queering the Titanic. Over the next two hours, the Tenders Island in America ferryed new batches of passengers to Titanic, along with cargo and mail. And some passengers also left the ship. Some only booked passage at that point, including Father Francis Brown and his Kodak Vest Pocket Camera. He used it to take pictures and, you know, luckily he got off the ship. And there's some of the best pictures we have of Titanic's, you know, final time near the shore sailing and all that. Brown had befriended some passengers on board in first class and they offered to pay him passage all the way to New York. But when he asked his, his parish in Ireland about it, they were like,

get off that ship. He got off that ship. And who said the Roman Catholic Church was good for nothing? Yeah. So yeah, Titanic weight anchor around 1 30 p.m. April 11th and set sail for the final time. They were 2,208 people aboard, 891 crew and officers, 324 first class, 284 second class, that's 284, and 709 third class. So Titanic passed Donce Rock light vessel by 1.55 p.m. Frushing it entirely. Opening its gaping ball off. Yeah. April 11th. When ships passed Donce Rock, this marked the official starting point to the transatlantic crossing. And yeah, so April 12th, you know, the next day, they began with the usual routines and breakfast. But apparently, not all was well on the ship.

For example, they were having trouble with the ship's heating systems. The heating was done a couple of ways. One was through the use of electric heaters that there were in a lot of cabins, mainly in first class and public rooms. And another was using steam radiators. They were like in floors, along floors and stuff. But those are mainly in public spaces. But most extensively were the ship's ventilation systems. Air was basically sucked in through these huge electric fans and forced through a series of steam tubes to heat it before being forced through the ton of ventilation shafts. And apparently, this didn't work very well. Some passengers complained of too much heat, some of too little. And apparently, they weren't fussing around with that. And

Andrews was concerned about it for much of the voyage. First class didn't worry too much about it because they had heaters. In the Marconi Suites, the Marconi operators, Jack Phillips and Harold Bride, were working, sending, receiving messages between ships and shore. It was at this point that they received one of the first ice messages from the la terrain. It read in part dense fog since the night crossed the ice field. Harris saw another ice field and two icebergs. You know, obviously, at that time of year, it wasn't unusual. They expected ice. By this point. It's the ice season. The stuff starts to melt. And by this point, it's already drifted into the path of the like shipping corridors. Yeah. Later that night, Captain

Smith dined with Bruce Ismay in the Ellicott restaurant. Ismay invited some people back to his suite for a game of bridge. Earlier that day, lists were posted for the different departments showing what lifeboats they would be assigned to with the intention of having a crew muster the next day for the boats. By midnight, the Titanic's 21st boiler was brought online after being fired for most of the day because at this point, not all the boilers were running. They still, the boiler room one was still offline and a boiler room two, it seemed, was also mostly offline. By noon on April 13th, Titanic had covered about 519 miles with an average speed of 20.91 knots over the course of 24 hours. You know, as they brought these more boilers online,

Titanic was sped up from 72 to 75 RPM. And, yeah, so, yeah, over the course of that, they just kind of sped up a bit. Also, a little incident occurred in the first class when passenger Irene Harris slipped and fell while descending the grand staircase and broke her arm. We've got linoleum. Yeah. Yeah, she had to be taken care of by the ship's Dr. O'Loughlin. And as far as the other passengers were concerned, this was the event of the crossing. Terrifying. First ship, anyway. Hungered for blood and had only got an arm. So far. On the night of April 13th, transformer in the silent room of the Marconi suite started having issues. It ended up being due to a short because a lead had come in contact with a metal part of

the wooden enclosure. And the Philips and Bride were unable to use it. The maintenance manual called for the Marconi equipment to explicitly stated that operators should not attempt to diagnose or fix the faults that might be in the system and instead to use an emergency set. But Philips and Bride, they weren't having any of that crap. So they decided to take it about themselves to diagnose and fix the issue. They spent a good few hours doing it and by 5 a.m. on the April 14th, they had it fixed basically by using some electrical tape. So yeah, the Marconi equipment was up and running. There may have been something of a backlog of passenger messages that they worked through. Yeah, send more cigarettes, send more cigarettes again.

Desperately send more cigarettes. Work my arm on the stupid linoleum. Send more cigarettes. Yeah. Resorted to cannibalism. Crush any sign of strikes. Yes. Arrange for a trap steamer to cross our path in New York Harbor. Please move Statue of Liberty into path of ship. So on April. They're sending these in Morse too, by the way. Takes a long ass time. I wouldn't want to do that. So on April 13th, passenger Elizabeth Lines had been sitting in the first class reception room and she saw Captain Smith and Ismay come in and converse at a nearby table. Apparently they were men of habit because like they kept sitting at that table in multiple days. So at any rate, Lines overheard their

conversation, particularly when they started talking about the ship's daily run. It was a common topic for people to talk about. That's all they had to talk about on ships back then. How much distance it covered? It was clear that Ismay was excited about the apparent success of Titanic. He was apparently gushing about it, just going over and over about how great the steam pressure was that Titanic was beating Olympics time. Some guy next to him thinking, I wish this guy would shut the fuck up about this boat. The monkey paw curls. Possibly Smith because reportedly Smith just sat there and listened to him and he didn't reply the entire time. Oh, damn. Ismay was appointed to have said,

you know, he was repeating himself. You see, the boilers are standing the pressure. Everything is going well. The boilers are working well. We can do better tomorrow. At this point, you could get cocaine over the counter at this time. He's got a parasocial relationship with the captain. Ismay's early SWTYP fan, 1912. So Ismay reportedly said, we will beat the Olympic and get into New York on Tuesday because they were scheduled to get there on Wednesday morning. Ismay also believed, apparently, that they could squeeze a bit more speed out of Titanic by putting more steam on. Or once Ismay finished, they got up and he said, you know, come on, captain, we'll get somebody and go down to the squash courts. If Smith had any reservations about Ismay,

the statements, he didn't show it. They played squash on a list. By noon, the 14th Titanic's run over that last 24 hours had been 546 miles with an average speed of 22.06 knots. With that being the best run yet. Titanic, so far, had traveled 1,549 miles over total 2,891 nautical mile course. At the rate Titanic was sailing, it's very possible that she could have arrived in New York before the scheduled arrival of 5am Wednesday the 17th. She could have gotten in maybe on Tuesday night if she had kept up the pace. That point is still hotly debated. And another point, Ismay also met with Chief Engineer Joseph Bell in his cabin to discuss the ship's speed. Ismay apparently wanted Titanic to be driven

to full speed if only for a few hours, if the weather was good enough on Monday, the 15th or the 16th. It just seems very, very excitable. He seems almost quite juvenile about this. Yeah, Ismay did see, his personality did seem like he was very excitable during the voyage. By all accounts, he was actually a pretty nice guy. Oh yeah, we'll get into some of the portrayals of him in popular culture, Lysa, but like, yeah, no, he just seems very, very like enthused. Yeah, maybe he was a bit naive, I don't know. But yeah, I mean, he seemed to be pretty nice. He cared about the passengers. He checked on people all the time.

Just for a guy who basically owned the ship, I guess that's notable. The officers also wanted to raise the ship's speed though, because they wanted to see what she could do. A big reason for this was something called the slip table. It was a document that was meant to allow the crew to gauge how fast the ship was going, just by how many revolutions the engines were running at. And they wanted to go faster to try to complete the slip table. So basically that was planned for April 15th or 16th, not the 14th. The day of the 14th started out bright and clear. For several days, Titanic had been sailing on calm seas. It had been gradually. Nothing to look at. Totally flat blue expanse. Nothing to do, nothing to talk about.

Play some bridge, smoke some cigars, send some telegrams. Yeah, and sending a midnight telegram. You up. Stop. More cigarettes. Send the fucking right flyer out over the Atlantic and have them drop some cigarettes over the side to me. I mean, hey, if they wanted cigarettes, they could buy them in the first class smoke room. Yeah, but they couldn't buy and buy the crate, which is what you need. That's true. That's true. You need more cigarettes. No, I need my cigarettes, my special brand. My specific cigarettes. Oh, jazz cigarettes. So yeah, it had been increasing your speed. You know, because it was a Sunday on the 14th, church services were held across the ship. Smith conducted services at the first class saloon, assistant purser Reginald Barker. I forgot that

when you're a captain of a ship, you can just kind of do whatever. I'm a priest now. I'm a priest. But even the purser, Reginald Barker, he conducted services for second class and second class passenger Thomas Biles. He was a pastor. He also conducted his own Catholic mass in the second class library and held services for third class. During the morning, the remaining three main double ended boilers were lit to be brought online once they were up to temperature and pressure. This left five single ended boilers in boiler room one yet to be lit. So by this, so probably, you know, by this point, by the time Titanic hit the iceberg, she had one entire boiler room that probably wasn't being used.

So a bunch of guys standing around job easy. It was mainly meant to be used in port, I believe. So, you know, and that's one of the myths of Titanic. So, you know, you need the extra boiler to get up, get up to ramming speed. It's like the turbo button on an old Pentium. Yeah. Yeah. Apparently, when Smith was asked if he would slow down the ship for ice, Smith was reported to have said, on the contrary, and said that they would speed through the ice field. It speaks to me in my dreams. So, yeah, you know, the myth of the extra lit boilers. Yeah, it's the 97 film famously

shows Smith saying, you know, we're speeding up. We just ordered the last boilers lit. And, you know, the simple answer is that no, all accounts appoint to the last boiler room for the first one technically being public. Why even bother? They were making pretty good speed. Yeah. I mean, also, you know, once you light those boilers, I'm sure it takes like 10 hours for them to come up to pressure. Yeah, they needed to. Yeah, once they took all day for them to bring them up to temperature and pressure. However, there is possible evidence that at least two of the boilers in boiler room one may have at least been fired up during the sinking. A possible explanation, if it's true, is that it was done after the collision.

Once it became clear that the forward boiler rooms were trying or were flooding, maybe they lit the boilers and were trying to get them up to pressure and never to get the hell out of there. And to keep the lights going to the bottom of the ocean faster and drive it vertically downwards. You know, the funny thing is there, I know of a couple of shipwrecks where they went down so fast at an almost vertical angle that they literally dug themselves sticking out of the mud at the bottom of the ocean. That's how if I ever crash a ship, that's how I want to crash a Christ Alice. No, it's perfect. You just leave a perfect like a perfectly ship shaped French. Okay. No, you know what that actually does rule. I realized what earlier thinking.

So, you know, you know, Izmay was reported to have said to some passengers, two more boilers are to be opened up today. But that doesn't mean he was referring to those boilers. He could have been referring to the ones that had already been lit and they were about to be opened up to the steam lines. It seems pretty suspicious. But you know, if Titanic hadn't sunk the last boilers, probably surely would have been lit the next day, maybe after midnight. Yes, you can use them in the port. Who knows? Maybe they did light them before midnight and with the intention of running them the next day, but they wouldn't have been with the intention of destroying the Statue of Liberty. But yeah, but they wouldn't have been anywhere in a state to

be contributing to the ship's speed. Next slide. I was finally getting into the iceberg mode. Yes. I'm excited. This thing is that cool. You could do it, Roz. There we go. So, you know, ships on the Atlantic back then, they followed it. Well, I mean ships today follow predetermined routes or lanes. In Titanic's case, this involved a turn. Basically, when they got to a certain point like level with New York, they, you know, they were going on a kind of southwestern course. And when they got to the corner, as it was called, they made a right hand turn slightly straight towards New York.

And, you know, Titanic turned the corner at 5.50 pm on April 14th, about three nautical miles off from the actual location of the corner. So pretty good for 1912 navigation. Yes, some have claimed that it turned the corner too late. That Captain Smith intentionally delayed the turn for some reason or another or that conspiracy sabotage. Yeah. And that some officers questioned this. In reality, it doesn't seem to be the case in all likelihood. Smith was just off in his calculations when he wrote down the orders for the turn. You know, he slightly underestimated the ship's speed, probably. In the end, the turn was only off by three nautical miles, suggesting that Smith intended to stick closely to the course,

even if it perked imperfectly. But, you know, three nautical miles, this was, you know, this course change meant that Titanic was now heading for the iceberg, but just didn't know it yet. Yeah, this iceberg, which has taken this wandering path from the years, glacier. Yeah. Glacier. Glacier. It's French. It's from the French for ice, glass, glacier. I don't know what it's from. So the ice warnings, over the course of the 14th, she received several ice warnings. You know, the ice from the glacier. You know, the cronies said that they had reported birds and growlers.

That was delivered. It's a growler. I don't know. I think it's bits of ice. Oh, okay. They were reported vaginas. It's something you can take to the brewery and they filled the beer. Yeah, they did the beer. Yeah. Texting back here. You've seen the pussy out here? This is a Rated Clean podcast on Apple. You know, the message was delivered to the bridge. Smith posted it for the officers. The Baltic twos sent in a report saying that the Greek steamer Athenia reported icebergs and large quantities of field ice. That was delivered directly to Smith. While he was talking to Bruce Ismay, this may then put the ice warning in his pocket and later showed it to several passengers. Again, this guy just had ass burges. He was just

like, oh man, it's so cool that I get to be on this thing. I got to tell everybody all of the details about this thing that I'm on. By all accounts, Ismay was generally kept apprised of the progress on the ship because of course, you know, you know, it did effectively. Because he was having a great time. Yeah. By 7.15 p.m., Smith asked for the paper back so he could post it in the chart room, which they did. So, you know, and then another one from the America with a K past two large icebergs. That's the hamburger line for you. Yeah, that's the hamburger line. I've seen Ben in the High Castle. This message was actually overheard. It was being sent to the Hydrographic Office in D.C., but it was never sent to the bridge from the California.

It doesn't have that it was the S.S. America with a K. They received ice warning from Californian, three large bergs, five miles to the southwest. How Californian German is so fucked with the K and Californian? But this was just Californian with a C. You know, it was sent to another ship, but Titanic overheard it and was delivered to the bridge. I held bride, but Smith was never made aware of it. He was down in the restaurant having dinner. Then they received a message from the Masaba, saw much heavy pack ice, great number of large icebergs, also field ice, weather good, clear. Captain can't answer you. He's busy eating a shitload of boiled meat. Yeah. Yeah. That last message, the third class menu includes literal

gruel. The menu says gruel on it. The last message was delivered to the to the bridge and yeah. Bride was sleeping by then and Jack Phillips was busy sending messages to Cape Race. Earlier that day, you know, it was customary to have a lifeboat drill on every crossing, usually Sundays if they could. This was planned for Titanic, but they canceled it because of high winds in the afternoon. Again, we're good thing we won't need them. Yeah. You don't want to be banging those lifeboats against the hull. So in case you do need them, it's going to be like, you know. Yeah. Plus the ship already had a drill before it left Southampton for its certification. So they felt they probably felt like, yeah, we don't need it. Yeah.

So, you know, by late night around 11 p.m., passengers were getting to bed and, you know, they were up in smoke room, various other places. You know, some were just reading and stuff in their cabins. In the first class dining saloon stewards are setting up tables for breakfast. You know, first officer Murdoch was left in charge of the bridge. Captain Smith retired to his quarters. You know, what he was doing, who knows? Jacking off. Loading cases of cigarettes. Yeah. Yeah. His cabin is just like 90% cigarette by volume. You know, other debt crew went about their duties. Quartermaster George Rowe was at his

post on the docking bridge. Quartermaster Alfred Oliver was on the compass platform. By over the lounge working on a compass. Project Fleet, Reginald Lee were, you know, freezing her butts off high into crow's nest. Watching for ice, right? Yeah. Doing a subpar job of it. They were busy looking at Jack and Rose, not Jack and Rose. Who are they? Oh, Kevin Carstner and Whitney Houston. Yes. On the film, The Totaic. Wasn't there a thing about them not having binoculars? Oh, I'm getting to that.

That saves way to Alice. So for one thing, oh, next slide. I don't know. We really are getting to it. Yeah. So there's a theory that there was a mirage that night. The sky was clear, no moon. That alone made it difficult to spot anything. You can't just spot things by starlight. The air was getting colder over the course of the day. It dropped below freezing. By that, you know, the ocean was a flat calm perfectly still. The water temperature, you know, by the time of the sinking was 28 degrees Fahrenheit, well below freezing.

Fun. No, thank you. And so historian Tim Moulton did research on the weather in the area of Titanic on that night. Basically, there are perfect conditions for a mirage. Titanic was crossing in that area from the Wurmer Gulf Stream to the you know, to the colder Labrador current. And it was cooling from the bottom up the air. So it created a thermal inversion, most likely. And that would have probably led to a superior mirage for the iceberg that met the Berg, which probably, you know, it could have been obscured by the horizon until it was much closer. And for the Californian, which we'll talk about,

it probably obscured some of Titanic's lights and possibly the more more slamps between the two ships. Well, of course, we'll never know for sure, but it's a definite possibility at least. Sort of a nightmare scenario. Another one of those unfortunate circumstances. So the binoculars. It was commonly, you know, it's obviously it's often claimed that the lookouts on Titanic were, you know, if only they had binoculars, they would have seen it. And that, you know, oh, they were supposed to have binoculars, but they didn't have them. Frederick Fleet himself claimed at the American Inquiry that, you know, maybe he could have spotted the Berg sooner if he had binoculars. In reality, all of Titanic's officers had pairs

of binoculars. Whether the lookouts were meant to be given to sets is unknown. I think that would be the people you would want to have. That was a weird thing. Like on a trip from Belfast, Second Officer Blair, he was the original Second Officer of Titanic before being replaced by a light taller. So, you know, Blair escaped, you know, got off lucky. During that, during the Belfast to the South Afton voyage, Blair had via the lookouts his pair of binoculars. But light taller, light taller was asked by the lookouts about binoculars, but he apparently didn't think to give them his kind of a dick. Light taller kind of was a little bit of a dick.

Yeah. And also survived, survived and lived into the Second World War, where he was a very, a very hard man, very tough man. Yes. Yeah. Prickly, I think the word might be. But apparently, you know, light taller was, you know, aside from his own, he wasn't able to find a pair. But, you know, there are caveats to this. Even if they had binoculars, lookouts often trusted their own eyes before anything else. You know, Fleet also said that he would have, you know, he would have only used binoculars if he thought he saw something on the horizon. And another lookout on Titanic named Hog also stated that he did depend on his eyesight

before resorting to binoculars. Inquiry testimony was nearly unanimous that binoculars would have been useless for spotting ice objects like bergs under the conditions of that night. Even modern tests, you know, people trying to look at stuff through binoculars, it's just useless. Like, imagine you're just looking ahead of you and you're trying to look at, you're looking through binoculars. You probably miss the iceberg. You're looking somewhere else. You're looking somewhere else. You're looking for a three-masted schooner you can wreck into. So, yeah. It's a shoveling Irishman into the firebox. So, you know, at the end of the day, I think it's safe to say that binoculars almost certainly

wouldn't have done anything. They just wouldn't have been using them at the time. But, you know, now we're getting to the famous part where we talk about the exact time the disaster happens. You're about to say a time. Oh, boy. Right. Yeah. So, at 11.39 p.m. April 14th. There it is. What's going to happen? Lookouts. At 11.39, a guy asks for some ice in his drink in the bar. Irony ensues. Yes. Lookouts, Reginald Lee and Frederick Fleet up in the crow's nest, spot a dark mast directly ahead of the ship in the water. Fleet reaches for the bell and rings it three times. Then he picks up the phone that was in the crow's nest. Threat connections to the bridge. After a few rings, Sixth Officer Moody

answered, asking, yes, what do you see? Iceberg right ahead. Moody said, thank you. And then he hung up and then he relayed. Very polite. Yeah, very polite. And then he relayed iceberg right ahead to Murdoch. Now, the hard to starboard order was given by Murdoch as he rushed from the bridge wing, which he was on at the time, to the navigating bridge, which meant that quartermaster Robert Hitchens needed to turn the helm to the left as far as it could go. So the ship began to turn. If the ship had continued turning to port, it would have ground against the Berg along most of its length. And Murdoch knew this.

So as Titanic was passing the Berg, he port rounded it, but that's showing later here. As Hitchens turned the wheel, he would have felt more resistance as he got closer to the going hard over. And the wheel was attached to a telemotor, which was attached to hydraulic lines that went to the steering engines at the back of the ship. And they turned the rudder. So the steering engines would have immediately began turning the rudder. But as we've seen, these are sort of hard things to manoeuvre. Is that what it says in the inquiry? Kaida? It gives you directions to make that noise. Well, so back in the crow's nest,

you know, Reginald Lee noticed a ship beginning the turn basically right after Moody had replied, thank you. So, you know, there's a claim that they mixed up the rudder orders and they're like, oh, well, the quartermaster actually left. Yeah. My left is stage left. Stop. And that's not true. Yeah, that's just it was a random person in a book making a claim. The ship resisted the turn because it thought that's a that is a sloop right ahead. I need to run it down. It actually didn't resist the turn. Just a job. Titanic Titanic. Well, actually, I'm getting to that. But, you know, the starboard versus port, you know, in the days of sail and tillers, you would move the tiller to the left to turn right.

And they just kept those orders even after you just turned the wheel to the right, you know, so, you know, there were another thing about Titanic is the rudder size. People like to say, oh, the rudder was too small. You know, in fact, the rudder was actually plenty sufficient, especially if you consider how much, you know, you know, how much of the rudder was below the water. It was especially effective due to the central propeller, which is located directly behind the behind the rudder, basically, which created in effect a stream or jet of water that could be directed one way or another. It should also be noted that Titanic had the same size designer rudder as Olympic.

And, you know, Olympic had no problems navigating with it. I mean, you know, she was able to quickly turn and run down a German U-boat. Couldn't get out of the way of the light ship, but, you know, she probably was trying to get to it, you know. Yeah. And fog, you know. But there's also a photo that was taken by Father Brown from Titanic during the early part of the crossing. And you could see a serpentine S-shaped course. And it was a very sharp turn in the wake. Like, Titanic was clearly able to turn fast and effectively. So, you know, but it's, you know, the engine orders, you know, next after he ordered the turn, Murdoch rushed to the main engine order, telegraphed to the bridge.

Yeah, this is the next slide, actually. And, of course, there's the rudders and stuff in the turning engine. So, yeah, he ordered the, you know, he rushed to the main order engine telegraph. He swung the handles to stop. Which is cool. That's a cool thing to do. It's a cool piece of machinery. I've always wanted to swing one of those directly to, like, all ahead stuff or, like, flank speed or something. They were really cool. They were basically how they worked is they were attached. When you move the handles, it turned a bunch of gears. These were attached to some cables and chains that ran all the way through the ship

to the engine rooms or wherever they were meant to go. A bunch of massive pulley system down in the engine room. They had their own set of telegraphs. There would be an arrow pointer that would swing to stop. They would see that. They would turn the handles on their telegraph down there, which would move a pointer on the bridge, indicating that they got the order. So, you know, the stop order was given, you know, at least from the evidence we have. Down in boiler room six, leading fireman Barrett was talking to second engineer John Hesketh when he saw a stop order on the telegraph and shouted, shut all the dampers. The engines couldn't be stopped or reversed on a dime, though. You know, by the time Titanic

struck the Berg, it's very likely the propellers didn't even stop yet. How far away was it? Do we know? Or is it just, like, best guess when they... It's difficult to say. Well, for one thing, we don't know. It's claimed that the engines reversed. Obviously, in Titanic, you know, the scene, they reversed them. But Boxall, fourth officer Boxall, was the only person to testify that there was a full stern order. There were others in positions to see what order was given, and they all said it was a stop order. Quartermaster Hitchens and Oliver on the bridge gave detailed testimonies. They never mentioned full stern. Others in the engine and boiler rooms also testified to stop orders.

It is known that the engines went into reverse after the collision for about a half a minute or so. And after they came to a stop, whether this was the order referred to by Boxall or given during the collision, we'll never know. But that brings us to the timing, because how much time did Titanic have from spotting the Berg? It's often claimed that the time from the Berg being spotted to the collision was 37 seconds. This is probably not accurate. It comes from a combination of accounts from survivors on the bridge and a comparison to Olympic's time that it took to turn two points, because it's claimed that Titanic turned two points on the compass before hitting the Berg. You have to consider

other things, though, like the port rounding order. So we don't know, basically. Yeah, we don't know. But it's probably safe to say that they barely had any time at all, maybe 30 seconds, maybe less, maybe more. But in this context, there's nothing. Yeah. I mean, by the time the Berg was spotted, they were effectively right up on top of it. There was very little time to act. And it's also worth noting that there may have been some considerable time that elapsed after the ringing of the bell and before the turn order, maybe as much as 20 to 30 seconds. Yeah. Yeah. At any rate, there was barely any time at all, like none turn like Titan.

It doesn't matter how good Titanic was at turning. It just just barely it just couldn't get out of the way. So at 1141, next slide, the collision. This took mere seconds. The ship was going at a pretty good clip still. The iceberg would have passed by very quickly. Ice was shaved off the Berg, fell on the forward well deck. Later in the sinking, passengers were seen kicking it around like soccer, playing with it. What else are you going to do? You might as well have some fun. Yeah. You know, most barely felt the collision, some very much, depending on where they were. One said that it was like rolling over a thousand marbles. The blow was glancing,

but the force was enough to bend plates and pop rivets, it seems. Oof. Yeah. You can see the joints where it's like where the plate fails, right? Yeah. But as it passed the Berg, the stern began swinging the port as the Berg was passing the middle because of Murdoch's port round order and good thing too, probably. The Berg passed close by the stern and a quartermaster, George Rowe, who was on the docking bridge over the poop deck. You know, he thought it was a, he thought the Berg was about a hundred feet high. Others describe the Berg as being like the rock of Gibraltar. I kind of love that it could still have been worse. Yeah.

In boiler room six, Fred Barrett was looking to the starboard side of the room and he literally saw the iceberg damage happen. He saw water starting to pour in two feet above the floor plates in the room. Nope. Don't like that. Nope. You know, there are numerous stories from the collision, you know. You know, first class passenger, Eith Rosenbaum felt several jolts and noticed the lack of engine vibrations. She looked her away. The joke about a guy asking for ice is sometimes presented as like an apocryphal, like a true story. You know, she saw a ghostly wall of light outside the window. You know, other people saw the same thing.

First class passenger, Edwin Kimball, he was in cabin D19 with his wife when the Berg passed standing in the middle of the room. You know, he noticed a scraping and tearing sound and suddenly pieces of ice came in through his porthole. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Very nice. Yeah. Yeah. He worried his wife a bit. Yeah, it would. It would really wouldn't worry. Yeah. I would be I would be perturbed at this point. Jack there was getting ready for bed and C-66 when he felt the collision. It caused him to sway a bit and he felt as if the ship was being pushed to the side slightly. The ship's being bullied. Yeah. Major Arthur Pusion was getting ready for bed and C-104 when he said something of a, you know, he says as if the ship had struck

something causing a slight quiver. What do you know? He was immediately suspicious because he knew the sea was calm. So he dressed and left his room to investigate. Yeah. You would not catch me in a sort of like a dressing gown situation here, I think. I'm going down in suit and tie. God damn it. Yeah. It goes down formally. It doesn't go down at all. You know, Philadelphia and Emma Bucknell was in D-15 on the starboard side. She felt the jar and then she saw the birds pass. Yeah. The birds. The birds. Do not go Bucknell though, those fucking dweebs. Yeah. Generally, that story was the same for many passengers. They many were jarred awake. Some were woken up or noticed the engines stopping. Some sold Asperg,

Pass, blah, blah, blah. At any rate, the, you know, as this was happening, Murdoch went to the watertight door switch on the bridge. He sounded the alarm before he closed the doors, then he turned the switch and the watertight doors in the lowest levels started to drop. There was no big control panel like in the movie, probably, just a switch. Crucially, only those ones, because everything else, you have to send a guy to do. Yeah. The crew in the boiler rooms also were not trapped by the doors. There were catwalks and ladders going up through the casings to Edeck and the very top. Well, that's handy. I was always like, that was always my nightmare about like ship sinking is like if they close a waterproof compartment, just trap me in there. Yeah, no

thanks. I don't need claustrophobia as I'm going to die of exposure. You have to do a horrible thing no one wants to do, which is climb stairs. Shut up. You climb the stairs, the pusher robot is waiting for you at the top. Of course, some crew stayed behind to draw the fires and the boilers and pump water out, even as water was rushing into like boiler room six. That's nice, sometimes I wouldn't do that shit. A few did rush through the closing doors. You're not going to catch redo at my job. No, fuck that. You know, by about 11.42, the ship was slowing. You know, there was a possible reversal of the engines and then a slow ahead order for a short time. And then after that, a stop order was given and the ship came to a stop for the last time.

Yes. And 11.45 or so, they began letting off steam from the boilers. These were, this is via large pipes on the foreign aft sides of the funnels. They see in the picture there. It was just a bit of drama. So you get a lot of steam from the funnels. These are incredibly loud, right? Yeah, they were unbelievably loud. They were heard all over the ship. People could barely talk to each other, even in the ship. Just a very loud, low roar. Another thing, if you're watching the Titanic movie, you should put on a sort of overwhelmingly loud steam rushing off sound while watching the entire film. I'm almost saying yes. Of course, they did this because the steam from the boilers wasn't being used. And, you know,

if they didn't, kaboom. But once the boilers were cold after some time, the venting stopped. Next slide. The iceberg struck the hull on the starboard side below the waterline. There is no big gas, just about one to six inch wide gaps approximately. From visual inspections of the wreck and solar mappings, we basically found that there's trace damage in the forward peak tank in the flooding the first compartment, five and six foot openings in the cargo hold on the Orlap deck, which flooded the second compartment, a 16 foot opening running across watertight bulkhead B and a 33 foot opening across watertight bulkhead C, which flooded the third and fourth compartments. Then there was a

45 foot opening through most of the fifth watertight compartment. So it could have survived that first glancing blow, but then it's scraping down the side is what did for it. Yeah. And this last gas, especially, is what did it 45 foot opening. You know, that took out boiler room six. And it also it also extended slightly past watertight bulkhead E into the sixth compartment, which was boiler room five, but it only went in slightly to to the coal bunker. Coincidentally, the same coal bunker that was on fire, though, you know, fires that now, definitely. So. But for a while, this boiler room five was kept dry. Like they were able to get pumps in

and keep the water low and keep the bunker closed. So for now, that room didn't flood. But, you know, the gashes are sped out over about 230 feet. Even with just the five compartments, it was more than enough to doom the ship. Nice. Kill a death. You know, so yeah, the initial flooding is seen in the diagram bottom left. You know, those areas just started flooding immediately. So, you know, cargo holds, peak tank, fireman's tunnel, which is the main access way between the boiler room. Yeah, basically. Reserve coal bunkers, boiler room six, absolutely screwed. By 1150,

the mail within 10 minutes of the collision, water began flooding into the mail room on the Orlop deck. Pulse to work on my mail. Yeah. Pulse to workers tried to haul sex. Yeah. The Pulse to workers famously tried to haul sex and mail to hire decks, of course. Again, I would not be doing this. Yeah. Yeah. And of course, none of them survived. Again, reason why I would not be doing this shit. Fuck your mail. I heard, I heard something interesting, which is that if somebody were to recover mail from

the Titanic, it would need to be delivered and it would be illegal to like keep it or something. Oh yeah. That's like mail fraud. You don't want to fuck around with that. Postal inspector wearing one of those like deep weather saturation diving suits. You know, passengers started to get roused after the collision, obviously, either by themselves from feeling the collision or from stewards going around to wake people up. There were no alarms on the ship, no sirens, no flashing lights, no nothing. Well, because that would be gauche. Yeah, that's about to say.

Now, let's see. Next slide. Bad news, folks. I'm going to have to leave you there. This episode is very long already and only got longer from here on out. So if you want more Titanic, you'll have to wait until next week or maybe you could pirate the movie or you could read the Wikipedia article. I mean, you know, it sinks. I think we all know that, right? Next week, we'll talk about the sinking part in excruciating detail. Um, anyway, good luck all and good night. Or excuse me, good morning, because I released these things at 8 a.m.