Posted on 09/22/2010 2:37:37 AM PDT by tlb
As to tiller controls, they were still standard in New England Coastal waters in 1907. Similar confusion on the Larchmont(ex-Cumberland 1885) led to the Larchmont-Knowlton collision that year. (from an old Yankee Magazine article)
never heard that one before.
not sure if it would have helped much though. by the time they realized the state they were in, may have been too late for counterflooding to be effective.
also, while it may have kept the ship fairly level, it would not have prevented more water from coming in the in the bow, and would have added the additional water in the stern. it would sink level, instead of bow first, maybe change the amount of time by a few minutes, but not enough to make much difference to people in the water.
Whatever the guy at the wheel did or didn't do won't affect Titanic history any time soon. One fatal error is as good as another.
Human nature; imperfect decisions; moments of panic; bad judgement are neither old or new; they are just aspects of being human. Techonolog changes; human nature is timeless.
lol. . .
I am still not sure I understand what the mistake was. Was it in the command given?
“Hard to starboard!” meaning turn the ship to the right?
or
“Starboard you helm!” meaning turn the ship to the left?
The movie Titanic shows the wheel turning left while “A Night to Remember” shows the wheel turning to the right, I believe.
Was it an issue of the orders given or how the wheel worked. Under tiller orders, did turning the wheel left make the ship turn left or right?
If what she said is what happened, the reason we have never heard this before is because Lightoller is the only survivor from the bridge officers, I believe.
The was a change in officers at the last minute for this trip. Ranking officers came over from the Olympic and replaced the Titanic’s first and second officers. One of them left with the ship’s lookout binoculars.
The lookouts had no binoculars up the mast. One testified that binoculars would have saved the ship.
There was a neat article about a year or two ago (which I may have spotted here at FR) that implicated rivets made of inferior-quality metal as a major contributing factor to the loss of the Titanic.
there was a sci fi novel several years ago about a man sent back in time to keep the Titanic from sinking, which somehow would have prevented WWI. He manages to avoid the iceberg, only to have it sink for some other reason.
I doubt it
> The loss of the Andrea Doria was one of the first radar induced accidents in history.
Wow, I haven’t heard about the Andrea Doria for several years. My father, grandfather, and I took my grandfather’s fishing boat out to pick up survivors off the New Jersey coast while the Andrea Doria was sinking. We actually fished one lone Italian guy, who didn’t speak a word of English, out of the water. I was a kid then.
The Gimli Glider. At least they brought it in.
ping
Reminds me of the NASA metric confusion a few years ago...
A few lines from Thomas Hardy’s poem on the Titanic:
And as the smart ship grew
In stature, grace, and hue,
In shadowy silent distance grew the iceberg too.
Alien they seemed to be;
No mortal eye could see
The intimate welding of their later history.
Or sign that they were bent
By paths coincident
On being anon twin halves of one august event.
Till the Spinner of the Years
Said “NOW!” And each one hears,
And consummation comes, and jars two hemispheres.
Sounds more plausible than an “old wives tale” nearly a century later!
http://pajamasmedia.com/ejectejecteject/
THE ICEBERG - July 2nd, 2010
...
Some people know that if the lookouts aboard Titanic had spotted the iceberg as little as five or six seconds earlier, Titanic would have been able miss that wall of ice by a few feet and would have survived to come home.
But very few people know that if those lookouts had spotted that iceberg only five or six seconds later — Titanic still would have survived. You see, Titanic was designed to remain afloat with up to five or her forward watertight compartments flooded – but not six. Had the lookout on Titanic seen that iceberg only a few seconds later, she would have hit it straight-on. It would have crumpled the bow, and a few hundred people would have been killed in the collision – but she would have stayed afloat, and instead of 1,490 people drowning in those icy waters, she would have limped home to New York, been refitted and repaired, and continued to do what she was built to do: bring people to America – to freedom. She represented what was best in us: vision, industry, ingenuity and hard work. That ship deserved to come home.
Some people misinterpret this to mean that there were a few seconds where Titanic could have been saved. It’s just the opposite. There were only a few seconds – ten or fifteen seconds – where Titanic could have been sunk. That iceberg went right down the side of the ship, staving in compartment after compartment. Progressivism is doing the same thing to our culture: flooding academia…movies…television…news media…comedy…music…government policy… damaging and flooding, one by one, the social institutions that kept this ship of freedom, ingenuity and prosperity afloat.
...
was Legolas also aboard?
umm, no.
Let's fix this:
Bringing people to America and high Federal taxes, high State taxes, municipal tyranny and aggressive over-funded police powers.
Hell, sink the Titanic and stay with whatever form of tyranny you endure.
I do believe that ocean travel safety would have been much less if not downright dangerous for many decades if the Titanic hadn’t sunk.
Mankind seems to only advance after tragedy and hubris if I have that in the proper context.
And it was proven some years ago that the rivets and steel used were excessively inferior with a high sulfur content, basically by modern metallurgical standards the Titanic was a floating death trap. The steel if it could even be called that was very brittle, more so when cold. Some have theorized that within a few years of service in the cold Atlantic she would suffer a disastrous rivet failure.
If that is true, then it would make perfect sense to try and steer in back of the ice berg instead of in front of it.
The ship was moving west, the iceberg would have been moving south.
With the calm seas, the iceberg may not have been moving as fast as they assumed.
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