Why and how did the unsinkable Titanic sink? The History of the Titanic: Past and Present Titanic How the Tragedy Occurred

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Although not the worst in terms of the number of victims, the sinking of the Titanic remains the most famous shipwreck in history. Real interesting facts about the crash and death of a famous ship have occupied scientists, specialists and ordinary people for more than a century, at whose service are books, television shows, documentaries and feature films, among which the famous film by James Cameron stands out as a mighty lump. But the sea giant's disaster leaves blank spots that need filling. Here we want to present 15 real facts about the death of the legendary ship Titanic, which sank on April 14, 1912 when it collided with an iceberg in the Atlantic Ocean. The ship sank two and a half hours later, when the 15th had already arrived.

On April 10, 1912, the eight-deck steamship Titanic solemnly set sail from Southampton to New York on its first and last voyage. Four days later, the ship suffered multiple holes below the waterline after colliding with a mountain of ice in the North Atlantic. First Mate William Murdock spotted the approaching iceberg a minute before impact, but for some unknown reason waited thirty seconds before sounding the alarm. This was far from the only mistake that ultimately led to the sinking of the Titanic. Below are other tragic entertaining interesting facts.

1. After the Titanic's collision with an iceberg, the deck of the ship was strewn with snow and ice, which many passengers perceived as an unexpected trick and began to play football with ice fragments, not even suspecting the nightmare that had ensued.

John Jacob Astor IV
2. A first-class ticket, according to modern calculations, cost about $100,000, so the truly wealthy sailed on the upper deck, and the richest among them was John Jacob Astor IV, whose fortune was estimated at $85 million. In this century, Astor would be considered a billionaire. The rich man set sail with his wife, whom he put in a rescue boat, and he himself, with discipline (his army background), began to wait his turn. Astor IV did not survive.

3. According to statistics, 74% of women and 20% of men survived on the sunken ship giant, so despite all the scandals and shameful acts of panic, the strong half of the passenger population behaved with dignity. Without exaggeration, what the heroic members of the ship’s orchestra did, who until the last minute supported their colleagues in misfortune with their playing.

4. A Parisian-style café, Turkish bath, gymnasium, large library with reading room, squash court, living garden, hair salon, heated swimming pool, elevators and other luxurious furnishings constituted the daily comfort of first-class passengers, who were encouraged to feel at home. At the same time, seven hundred people from the third class were using two tiny bathrooms.

Last photo of Titanic passengers
5. A photo of first-class travelers happy with life and the transatlantic voyage was taken in the ballroom of the ship on the night of April 14, 1912, just minutes before the accident.

6. News about the real situation with the surviving and dead passengers remained a secret to the rest of the world for several days, and the first newspapers even reported that all tourists and crew members survived the sinking of the Titanic.

7. According to the construction plans, the Titanic was equipped with 64 lifeboats, but to reduce the cost of the project and not to spoil the appearance of the ship for tourists walking on the upper tiers, only 20 boats were available at the fateful moment. During rescue operations, many of the boats were only half filled, because the crew was practically unprepared for an emergency situation and, in a state of panic, made a lot of mistakes.

The ship's band of the Titanic
8. The most miraculous rescue story happened to Charles Jufin, a staff cook on the Titanic. The cook was unlucky to make it into one of the rescue groups, so the cook dangled in the water for two and a half hours and miraculously did not freeze from the cold, which happened to the others trying to survive in the icy water. Subsequently, Dzhufin claimed that he was saved by a mighty amount of whiskey, which the cook carefully stuffed into himself before throwing himself overboard.

9. Science fiction writer Morgan Robertson in his novel “Futility, or the Wreck of the Titan” described a shipwreck that was strangely reminiscent of the April 1912 disaster, also with an almost exact coincidence of the name of the floating transport. It’s just that the novel was written in 1898, when the Titanic was just a figment of the imagination of its future designers.

10. The Titanic took thirteen couples on their honeymoon, for whom the romantic vacation turned into a nightmare attraction.

11. One of the reasons why the team showed itself to be incompetent in rescue procedures is the fact that the training lecture and practical exercises with passengers in case of an emergency at sea were scheduled for April 15 - too late, because the tragedy happened on the eve of X-day.

12. Almost immediately after the sinking, wealthy relatives of the dead tourists began to discuss the possibility of lifting the ship up and delivering it to New York, but years and decades passed without the desired results. The depth in this area of ​​​​the ocean reaches several kilometers, so before the invention of deep-sea bathyscaphes there was no question of saving the Titanic, which was considered lost for more than seventy years. Only on September 1, 1985, the ultra-modern Argo apparatus recorded the first frames with details of the lost ship at a depth of about 4000 meters.

13. Halomonas titanica, a new metal-eating bacterium, is named after the steamship lying at the bottom, which will be completely “gobbled up” in the next twenty to thirty years unless the ship is raised to the surface.

14. James Cameron created a great work dedicated to love and epic tragedy, but on the Titanic, even without the director’s imagination, there were people who showed the world an amazing romantic and tragic story that will forever remain in the annals of human civilization.
American-German businessman Isidor Strauss and his wife Ida lived for more than forty years before traveling on the famous ship. The entrepreneur had the opportunity to be among the rescued, but refused to take a place in a boat filled with women and children. But Ida did not want to leave her beloved husband, so she refused to escape without her husband. Therefore, the Strauss spouses, holding hands, remained on deck and met death with dignity.

15. In addition to the Strauss, the shipwreck was fatal for one and a half thousand people. Experts put the figure at 1513, which could have been much lower if all safety rules had been followed on the Titanic or at least there had been no cases of outright bungling. Like, for example, with the key to the box with binoculars.

David Blair, previously responsible for this function as an assistant captain, was removed from the flight and replaced with a more experienced officer. And Blair forgot to give the key to the box, which led to the absence of binoculars on the fateful night. Looking ahead, Fred Fleet survived the sinking of the ship and subsequently claimed that he would have noticed the approaching ice disaster much earlier if he had had ordinary marine binoculars at hand.

More than a century has passed since these huge liners plied the waters of the Atlantic. But their research does not stop to this day.

British journalist Shanan Meloni studied the history of the Titanic for 30 years and came to "sensational" conclusion: the main cause of the crash was a fire in the fuel storage facility, which lasted about two weeks. This is certainly interesting, but don’t you think that he didn’t tell us anything new?

After all, it’s still the twentieth of September 1987 French television told the world "sensational news": the cause of the death of the Titanic, it turns out, was a fire that broke out in the hold of the ill-fated liner, and not at all a collision with an iceberg.

Since after 30 years they come up again "sensational" versions, then let us remember all of them as they exist. Maybe you will also find something sensational for yourself :-)

Here they are...

On the cold night from the fourteenth to the fifteenth of April 1912, the most famous maritime disaster in the history of mankind occurred in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. The ship of the White Star Line, bearing the proud name "Titanic", having died in the middle of its first voyage and taking with it one thousand five hundred and four human lives, was doomed to become the most famous ship in the world.

Why did the most perfect ship of that era, a ship that was considered completely unsinkable, sank? Let's use a blogger prosto_serge Let's collect all the proposed versions:

Twins: Titanic (right) and Olympic

Version one. Conspiracy theory

Few people know that the Titanic had a twin brother - the ship Olympic, an exact copy of it, also owned by the White Star Line. How is this possible, the reader may be surprised, since the Titanic was considered a unique ship, the largest ship of that era, and now it turns out that there was another ship that was not inferior in size to it? No, the Titanic was indeed longer than its twin. Two inches. Just imagine - the length of a matchbox! - but still longer. Another thing is that it was almost impossible to notice these inches with the naked eye (and, perhaps, with the armed eye too), so that an outsider, looking at the twins standing side by side, could not tell which one was which.

The Olympic was a year older than its brother (so it would be more correct to call the Titanic a copy), and not much luckier. Probably, one should have written something like “from the very beginning, an evil fate hovered over each of the ships,” but more on that a little later: of course, the greatest naval disaster could not help but be surrounded by mystical rumors.

Well, rock, not rock, but the fate of the Olympic was indeed full of troubles. His career began when the ship crashed into a dam during launching. After that, small and large accidents rained down on him one after another, and the ship did not even seem to be insured. There are rumors that after a number of accidents, the owners would be happy to insure their ship, but insurance companies refused to deal with the failed liner. The most serious accident was a collision with the British war cruiser Hawk, which led the White Star Line to significant financial problems: expensive repairs were needed, and the company's financial situation was very sad. So the Olympic was placed in the Belfast docks to await a decision on its future fate. And now - attention! Look at the photo on the left - this is almost the only photo in existence that shows the Titanic and Olympic standing side by side. It was made in Belfast.

Final fitting out of the Titanic at the Belfast shipyard

Why not assume, some researchers said, that the White Star Line decided to pull off a huge fraud. Quickly patch up the old Olympic and... pass it off as the new Titanic! Technically, this would not be at all difficult: swapping the plates with the names of the ships, and even interior items on which the monogram of the ships is applied - for example, cutlery (the Olympic and the Titanic had, of course, some design differences - well, yes who knows about them?). Then the Olympic, under the guise of the new, prestigious, widely advertised (and, of course, honorably insured) Titanic, will set off on a journey across the Atlantic, where it will collide (completely by accident, of course) with an iceberg (fortunately, there is a shortage of them at this time it hasn't been a year). Of course, no one was going to sink the liner - and no one believed that some iceberg was capable of sending the most reliable ship in the world to the bottom. It was planned to arrange a small collision, after which the ship would slowly reach New York, and its owners would receive a tidy insurance amount, which would come in handy for the company.

This version is supported by the strange behavior of the ship's captain, Edward Smith. Why was such a seasoned, experienced sea wolf so careless about the safety of his ship? Why did he stubbornly ignore messages coming from other ships about drifting icebergs, and even himself, it seems, directed the liner along the course on which it would be easiest to encounter an ice mountain? Why did he do this, if not to carry out the White Star plan? Personally, it seems to me that this was precisely for this purpose, but... the plan was completely different. But more on that later.

John Pierpont Morgan

It turned out to be quite difficult to refute the conspiracy theory, especially since White Star went out of its way to save its reputation: it distorted information about the disaster in every possible way, bribed witnesses, and so on. Actually, convincing arguments were found only after the sunken liner itself was discovered (and this happened only seventy-three years later - the remains of the ship were discovered by Robert Ballard's expedition in September '85). So, the participants of one of the expeditions, descending to the lost ship, took photographs of the propeller, on which the minted serial number of the Titanic is clearly visible - 401 (its older brother had the number exactly 400). Proponents of the conspiracy theory claim, however, that the Olympic damaged its propeller after a collision with the cruiser Hawk, and White Star replaced it with a propeller from the then unfinished Titanic. But number 401 is also found on other parts of the sunken ship, so the accusation of a planned disaster on the White Star Line can be dropped. The following theory looks much more plausible - we’ll talk about it now.

One of the arguments in favor of the conspiracy theory was the fact that industrialist John Morgan, one of the owners of the Titanic, was supposed to sail on board his ship, but canceled his ticket a day before the ship left the port.

They also say (this is where the mysticism began) that the tycoon was dissuaded from going by Nikola Tesla, endowed with the gift of foresight, whose development was financed by Morgan.

A piece of the Titanic's plating lifted from the bottom

Second version. Chasing the Blue Ribbon

It all started a long time ago, when regular maritime communications were established between England and America, and, therefore, competition between ship-owning companies began to flare up. The faster the ship crossed the Atlantic, the more popular it became. In 1840, the Cunard company invented a prize for ships that set a speed record: now the ship that crossed the Atlantic Ocean faster than all its predecessors received the Blue Riband of the Atlantic as an award.

Actually, there was no material prize. The winner did not receive a cash prize, nor was the captain given a commemorative cup, which could be placed in a prominent place in the wardroom. But the ship acquired something more - priceless prestige that could not be achieved by other means. In addition to honor in maritime circles (and, therefore, fame and popularity), the winner of the award received a contract for the transportation of mail (including diplomatic mail) between America and Europe, and this is a very profitable item in shipping. And in general - see for yourself: if you are a rich businessman, maybe even a millionaire, which ship would you prefer to travel on? Isn't it the most prestigious and fastest?

At the time of the Titanic's departure from Southampton, the Blue Ribbon was owned by the Mauritania, a ship owned by White Star's main competitor. Naturally, this could not be tolerated, and White Star decided to bet on its favorite. The Titanic's winning of the Blue Riband would be a triumph for the corporation, helping to improve its shaky position: the All Atlantic Ribbon typically carried four times as many passengers as other similar ships.

Due to the threat of a collision with floating ice, the prescribed route of the Titanic (and any other ship following the same course) did not run in a straight line, but made a small detour, skirting the dangerous ocean area where most icebergs drift. Of course, this maneuver lengthens the road. That's why it might seem that Captain Smith was steering his ship straight into a cluster of icebergs - he just needed to take a shortcut and get the Blue Ribbon at all costs. That is why the Titanic was moving at full speed and did not slow down even after receiving several radio warnings about ice danger from other ships. Let other ships worry, but the Titanic has nothing to fear. In the “crow’s nest” - a special observation platform on the front mast - there are two lookouts who, in case of danger, can instantly report it to the captain’s bridge via telephone: the Titanic is equipped with the latest technology. And if a collision does occur, well, that just means that the record will be set another time. Icebergs do not pose a danger to the ship - after all, it is known that the Titanic is completely unsinkable. Its hold is divided into sixteen waterproof compartments, so that if it suddenly gets a hole (which, of course, cannot be), then only one of the compartments will be filled with water, and the ship will calmly continue its journey. That's one thing - the liner will not sink, even if four compartments are filled! And a ship can receive such damage only in war.

Well, it’s not for nothing that pride is one of the deadly sins. She played a cruel joke on the Titanic: the iceberg damaged five compartments - one more than was permissible.

But how could the ice break through the steel of the ship's plating? In the mid-nineties, a piece of the Titanic's skin was raised to the surface and subjected to a fragility test: a sheet of metal, fixed in clamps, had to withstand the blow of a thirty-kilogram pendulum. For comparison, a piece of steel used in shipbuilding today was also tested. Before the experiment, both samples were placed in an alcohol bath with a temperature of just over a degree - this is exactly what the ocean water was like on that fateful night. Modern metal came out of the test with honor: under the blow of a hammer it bent, but remained intact. The one raised from the bottom split into two parts. Maybe it became so fragile after lying on the ocean floor for eighty years? Researchers managed to obtain a sample of steel from those years at the Belfast shipyard where the Titanic was built. He passed the strength test no better than his brother. The experts' conclusion was that the steel used in the Titanic's construction was of very low quality, with a large admixture of sulfur, which made it brittle at low temperatures. Alas, at the beginning of the twentieth century, the level of development of metallurgy was far from what it is today. If the liner's skin had been made of high-quality steel, the hull would have simply bent inward from the impact, and the tragedy could have been avoided.

One of the Titanic's watertight bulkheads

Third version. Fire in the hold

On September 20, 1987, French television told the world sensational news: the cause of the death of the Titanic, it turns out, was a fire that broke out in the hold of the ill-fated liner, and not a collision with an iceberg. Apparently, supporters of the new hypothesis assured, spontaneous combustion of coal occurred in one of the ship’s coal storages (well, this is indeed possible), the fire spread throughout the hold, reached the steam boilers, which exploded, causing the ship to go to the bottom. As for the iceberg, it just happened to be nearby, so it was blamed for the crash of the liner.

Yes, indeed, there was a fire on the Titanic - and this is no longer speculation, but an established fact. However, could it have caused the disaster? Oh, that's unlikely. How do you imagine a fire in a coal bunker? A roaring flame casting ominous crimson reflections on the metal cladding of the walls, bare-chested sailors rushing about, someone pumping a pump, and a stream of water disappearing into a raging wall of fire? I must disappoint you - in fact, everything is much more prosaic. In general, a fire in a coal bunker on ships of that time was a fairly common thing. In such a fire, coal does not glow, does not burn, but quietly and peacefully smolders, sometimes for several days. They fought such fires in the simplest way - they burned smoldering coal out of turn in steamship fireboxes. So a fire in a coal hold is, of course, an unpleasant phenomenon, but, as a rule, it does not promise any serious troubles for the ship. And certainly not, under any circumstances, capable of causing such monstrous destruction as is attributed to it by supporters of the version of the Titanic’s death from flames. Moreover, the fire on the ship was extinguished even before it left for its last voyage. The bunker was emptied and inspected by specialists from the shipyard where the Titanic was located. It seems that the most serious consequence of the fire was a slight deformation of one of the watertight bulkheads, which could not in any way affect the fate of the liner.

But Shenan Meloni still believes that the iceberg is only one of the factors that destroyed the ship. In the process of meticulously studying photographs taken ten days before the Titanic left Southampton, the journalist discovered traces of soot on the inside of the hull. Exactly in the place that was subsequently damaged in the collision. A fire in a fuel storage facility is believed to have started during high-speed testing at a dock in Belfast.

The owners of the ship knew that a fire was raging in the bowels of the Titanic, but they turned out to be so greedy that they decided not to cancel the voyage. To prevent passengers from suspecting anything, the ship was turned around in the port of Southampton. The officers were ordered to keep their mouths shut.

The liner set sail, but the crew of 12 people could not cope with the fire. Gradually the casing heated up to a thousand degrees Celsius. Metallurgy experts consulted by Meloni said steel becomes brittle at this temperature, losing up to 75% of its strength. For this reason, when it hit the iceberg, six holes with a total length of about 90 meters were immediately formed in the bow compartments of the vessel. The ship's unsinkability system could not cope with such serious damage.

So Ray Boston, who studied the documents of this disaster for many years, found evidence. According to him, the fireman Dilley, who survived the disaster, testified to the fire, who said: “We could not put out the fire, and there were rumors that as soon as we disembarked the passengers at the port of New York and unloaded the coal bunkers, we would immediately call fire boats to help to put out the fire."

The iceberg tore through the skin of the liner just under bunker number six, where the largest hole was formed, and no one had to put out the fire. But for unknown reasons, the commission investigating the death of the liner did not pay attention to the stoker’s statement.

Fourth version. German torpedo

1912 With the First World War two years away, the prospect of armed conflict between Germany and Great Britain is becoming increasingly likely. Germany owns several dozen submarines, which during the war will launch a merciless hunt for enemy ships trying to cross the ocean. For example, the reason for America’s entry into the war will be that the U-20 submarine will sink the Lusitania in 1915 - a twin of the same Mauritania that set the speed record and won the Atlantic Blue Ribbon - remember? We are very detailed.

Based on these facts, some Western publications proposed their own version of the death of the Titanic in the mid-nineties: a torpedo attack by a German submarine secretly accompanying the liner. The purpose of the attack was to discredit the British fleet, famous for its power throughout the world. In accordance with this theory, the Titanic either did not collide with the iceberg at all, or received very minor damage in the collision and would have remained afloat if the Germans had not finished off the ship with a torpedo.

What speaks in favor of this version? Honestly, nothing.

Firstly, there was a collision with an iceberg - this is beyond doubt. The deck of the ship was even covered with snow and ice chips. The cheerful passengers started playing football with ice cubes - it would become clear later that the ship was doomed. The collision itself was surprisingly quiet - almost none of the passengers felt it. The torpedo, you must admit, could hardly have exploded completely silently (especially since some claim that the submarine fired as many as six torpedoes at the ship!). Supporters of the theory of the German attack claim, however, that people in the boats heard a terrible roar just before the Titanic sank - well, this was two and a half hours later, when only the stern raised into the sky remained above the water and the death of the ship did not raise any doubts. It’s unlikely that the Germans would have fired a torpedo at an almost sunken ship, would it? And the roar that the survivors heard was explained by the fact that the stern of the Titanic rose almost vertically and huge steam boilers fell from their places. Also, do not forget that at about the same minutes the Titanic broke in half - the keel could not withstand the weight of the rising stern (however, they will learn about this only after the liner is discovered at the bottom: the break occurred below the water level), and this, too, is unlikely to have happened silently . And why would the Germans suddenly start sinking a passenger liner two years before the start of the war? This seems dubious, to put it mildly. And to put it bluntly - absurd.

The very first horror movie about a mummy

Fifth version. Curse of the Egyptian Mummy

In the eighties of the nineteenth century, a perfectly preserved mummy from the time of Amenhotep IV was discovered near Cairo, named either Amen-Otu, or Amen-Ra, or Amennophis (lovers of mysticism, as you know, do not bother with such trifles. Mummy, and mummy ). During her life, the mummy worked as a famous soothsayer, and therefore after her death she was awarded a magnificent burial: with jewelry, figurines of gods, and, of course, magic amulets. Among them was an image of Osiris, decorated with the inscription: “Wake up from your swoon, and your gaze will crush everyone who stands in your way.” Others, however, insisted that it was written “Rise from the dust, and one look from your eyes will triumph over any intrigues against you,” but what difference does it really make? When still others timidly suggested that nothing like that was written on the mummy, it was certainly clear that this was nonsense.

Ticket to the Titanic

Finally, our mummy was purchased from a British museum by an American millionaire and sent to his American residence on board a ship. Well, guess which airliner was chosen for this purpose?

The sarcophagus along the way was an ordinary box, either glass or wood (not tin, at least for sure), and it was kept right next to the captain's bridge. Mystics of all stripes enthusiastically claim that Captain Edward Smith, of course, could not resist the temptation and looked into this box with the mummy: their eyes met and... no, they did not fall in love with each other; quite the opposite: a monstrous curse came true. Otherwise, judge for yourself, how to explain that the captain’s head went dark, and with his own intrepid hand he directed the Titanic straight to certain death?

And, in fact, why is it believed that the captain’s head went blank, and with his own hand he directed the Titanic to certain death? Well, how could he not get confused in his head if he met the eyes of the mummy? As you can see, there is nothing to object to.

It's a shame that the mummy died a thousand years before Aristotle was born, so she had trouble with logic. Otherwise, she would have realized that the immediate consequence of the ship ramming the iceberg would be the death of her mummified, precious body - it was unlikely to survive in ocean water for more than a few days. And the destruction of the body is the worst thing that can happen to a mummy: its soul will have nowhere to return. So if the mummy really had magical powers, it would be in her interests to protect the Titanic as the apple of her magical eye. Or maybe she also bought into the advertising rhetoric about an unsinkable ship and did not pay attention to the dangerous icebergs?

Be that as it may, the mummy died in the ocean depths, disappeared without a trace, and cannot stand up for its honest name; The yellow press shamelessly takes advantage of this, regularly publishing accusations against her under monotonous headlines: “Sensation! The Titanic was destroyed by the curse of the pharaohs! Let's leave this to the conscience of journalists.

The mummy, by the way, was not the only historical relic that died on board the Titanic. For art, much more tragic is the death in the Atlantic Ocean of the original manuscript of Omar Khayyam “Rubaiyat” - a relic that truly had no price.

Version six. Steering error and human factor

The recently published book by the granddaughter of the second mate of the Titanic, Charles Lightoller, Lady Patten, “Worth Its Weight in Gold,” about the tragic fate of the Titanic, reveals new sensational aspects of the disaster. It turns out that the Titanic crew discovered the iceberg in advance, which made it possible to avoid a collision. The cause of the collision was the panic of the helmsman, who performed the wrong maneuver.

The revelation, which was hidden for about 100 years by the family of one of the Titanic officers, is published in a new book. Second officer Charles Lightoler, who survived the disaster, hid the mistake from commissions on both sides of the Atlantic for fear of bankrupting the shipowners and putting his colleagues out of work. And even after his death, for fear of damaging his reputation, his relatives hid the truth.

But now his granddaughter, the writer Patten, has opened the curtain of secrecy in a new novel. When first mate William Murdoch spotted an iceberg 2 miles away, his order “To starboard” was misinterpreted in the control room by Robert Hitchins. He first turned the ship to the right, and although he immediately corrected the course, due to the high speed of the Titanic, its starboard side was torn open by an iceberg.

At first glance, it seems amazing that anyone - especially the man who stood at the helm of the maiden voyage of the world's most expensive ocean liner - could make such a schoolboy mistake. However, Patten explains, this seemingly incredible error actually had a very specific technical reason.

“The Titanic was launched at a time when the world was transitioning from sailing ships to steam ships. Her grandfather, like the rest of the senior officers on the Titanic, started out on sailing ships. On sailboats, commands were given “at the tiller.” If you need to turn the ship in one direction, then the tiller is turned in the other (say, if the ship needs to be turned to the left, then the tiller is turned to the right). Now it looks unnatural, but at one time it was customary to give commands this way. The rudder commands used on steam ships are reminiscent of driving a car - the ship is directed in the direction in which it should turn. Further complicating the situation was the fact that, although the Titanic was a steamship, the North Atlantic at that time used "tiller" commands. Accordingly, Murdoch gave the command “to the tiller,” but the panicked Hitchins mechanically carried out the command “to the steering wheel,” as he had been taught. They had only four minutes to change course, and by the time Murdoch noticed Hitchins' mistake and tried to correct it, it was too late."

Grandfather Patten, who later set up his own ship repair business in Richmond-upon-Thames (where his small shipyard was located, now has a memorial plaque), shared another, potentially even more damning secret with his wife, whose name was Sylvia. If helmsman Hitchins was simply mistaken, then Bruce Ismay, also a survivor of the disaster, the head of the White Star Line, which owned the Titanic, gave a disastrous order.

“The iceberg hit the Titanic in its most vulnerable place,” continues Patten, “but, as my grandfather believed, the liner could remain afloat for a long time. However, then Ismay came to the bridge. He did not want the ship, in which huge amounts of money had been invested, to either slowly sink in the middle of the Atlantic or be towed to port. Too bad advertising! Therefore, he ordered the captain to give a small forward. “Titanic” was considered unsinkable!

Captain of the Titanic Edward Smith

To this we can also add that shortly before this sad anniversary, a letter from a passenger from the Titanic who managed to survive was put up for auction in one of the UK auction houses. This letter had not appeared anywhere before. The passenger writes in her letter that on the day the Titanic sank, she saw the ship's captain drunk.

According to the woman, she also saw how the captain of the Titanic, having handed over control to someone from the crew, sat at the bar and drank whiskey. Thus, it may turn out that the Titanic sank not because of a fatal coincidence, but because of simple criminal negligence.

What versions did we miss besides the official one?

And a little more about the legendary ship: here you go

105 years ago, on April 15, 1912, the “unsinkable ship,” “the largest and most luxurious ocean liner,” crashed into an iceberg on its first voyage and took more than one and a half thousand passengers with it to the bottom of the ocean. It would seem that after many decades there are no more mysteries and secrets about this terrible catastrophe. And yet, let's remember how it was.

First official version

Two government investigations that followed the disaster determined that it was the iceberg, and not the ship's defects, that caused the death of the liner. Both commissions of inquiry concluded that the Titanic sank not in parts, but as a whole - there were no major faults.

The blame for this tragedy was placed entirely on the shoulders of the ship's captain, Edward Smith, who died along with his crew and passengers of the Atlantic liner. Experts reproached Smith for the fact that the ship was traveling at a speed of 22 knots (41 km) through a dangerous ice field - in dark waters, off the coast of Newfoundland.

Robert Ballard's discovery

In 1985, oceanographer Robert Ballard, after a long unsuccessful search, finally managed to find the remains of a ship at a depth of about four kilometers on the ocean floor. It was then that he discovered that the Titanic had actually split in half before sinking.

A couple of years later, the wreckage of the ship was brought to the surface for the first time, and a new hypothesis immediately appeared - low-grade steel was used to build an “unsinkable ship.” However, according to experts, it was not the steel that turned out to be of low quality, but the rivets - the most important metal pins that tie together the steel plates of the airliner's hull. And the found wreckage of the Titanic does indicate that the stern of the ship did not rise high into the air, as many believed. It is believed that the Titanic split into parts while relatively level on the surface of the ocean - this is a clear sign of miscalculations in the design of the ship, which were hidden after the disaster.

Design miscalculations

The Titanic was built in a short time - in response to the production of a new generation of high-speed liners by competitors.

The Titanic could stay afloat even if 4 of its 16 watertight compartments were flooded - this is amazing for a ship of such gigantic size.

However, on the night of April 14-15, 1912, just a few days into the liner’s debut voyage, its Achilles’ heel was revealed. The ship, due to its size, was not agile enough to avoid a collision with the iceberg, which the watchmen had been shouting about for the last minute. The Titanic did not collide with the fatal iceberg head-on, but drove along it on its right side - the ice punched holes in the steel plates, flooding six “watertight” compartments. And after a couple of hours the ship was completely filled with water and sank.

According to experts studying the potential weak point of the Titanic - the rivets, they found that due to the fact that time was running out, builders began to use low-grade material. When the liner hit an iceberg, the weak steel rods in the bow of the ship cracked. It is believed that it was no coincidence that the water, having flooded six compartments held together by low-grade steel rods, stopped exactly where the high-quality steel rivets began.

In 2005, another expedition studying the crash site was able to establish from the wreckage of the bottom that during the crash the ship tilted only about 11 degrees, and not 45, as had long been believed.

Memories of Passengers

Because the ship tilted only slightly, passengers and crew were lulled into a false sense of security—many of them did not understand the gravity of the situation. When the water sufficiently flooded the bow of the hull, the ship, while remaining afloat, split in two and sank in minutes.

Charlie Jugin, the Titanic's chef, was standing near the stern when the ship sank and did not notice any signs of hull fracture. Nor did he notice the suction funnel or the colossal splash. According to his information, he calmly sailed away from the ship, without even getting his hair wet.

However, some passengers sitting in lifeboats claimed to have seen the stern of the Titanic raised high in the air. However, this could only be an optical illusion. With a tilt of 11 degrees, propellers sticking out in the air, the Titanic, the height of a 20-story building, seemed even taller, and its roll into the water even greater.

How the Titanic sank: a real-time model

The menu for the last dinner on the Titanic, which sank in 1912, has been sold in New York. The price for it was 88 thousand dollars (about 1.9 million hryvnia).

Blue Star Line announced the construction of Titanic 2. According to the designers, the ship will be an exact copy of the famous liner that sank in 1912. However, the liner will be equipped with modern safety equipment. Australian mining magnate Clive Palmer undertook to finance the project.

Now this 105-year-old cracker is considered the most expensive in the world.

It turns out that a cracker made by Spillers and Bakers called "Pilot" was included in the survival kit that was placed on each lifeboat. Later, one of these products went to a man who kept it as a souvenir. It was James Fenwick, a passenger on the ship Carpathia, which was picking up shipwreck survivors.

REFERENCE

On the night of April 15, 1912, the Titanic collided with an iceberg and sank. He sailed in the Atlantic Ocean on his way from Southampton (England) to New York. About 1.5 thousand people died then, mostly third class passengers. In total there were more than 2.2 thousand people there.

On April 14, 1912, the world was still well-fed, insolent and unsinkable. Humanity had mastered the power of steam and electricity—it no longer needed God. Therefore, by the end of Black Saturday on April 14, rock reminded itself. Heavy salty waves closed over the most ambitious dream of mankind after the Tower of Babel - the luxurious Titanic. No one was supposed to survive. It was an execution.

Studying the details of the shipwreck, researchers cannot get rid of a strange feeling: everything that happened was built into an endless stream of absurd, inexplicable and tragic misunderstandings. Thousands of small human mistakes merged into one monstrous absurdity, as if everyone around was consciously working to bury the giant liner in the black Atlantic depths.

Literally a week before the disaster, when the liner was sailing from Southampton to Sherba, all the watchmen had binoculars. And when the four-pipe ship rushed at full speed into the ice-clogged Atlantic, no one had binoculars except the captain, but he had no intention of being the lookout.

Second-class passenger Miss Mary Young had opera glasses and saw the fatal iceberg half an hour before the collision, but did not tell anyone. A sailor in the observation “nest” on the mast noticed him two and a half minutes before the edge of the ice floe cut through the side of the Titanic and water rushed into the “watertight” compartments of the hold.

But even without binoculars, an experienced watchman is able to see much earlier - unless, of course, we are talking about a “black” iceberg. They are found extremely rarely, violating all the laws of physics, ice blocks for some reason turn over in the water, exposing to the surface not the white frosted crown of the iceberg, but a translucent dark green part. It is believed that the chance of encountering a “black iceberg” is approximately one in a thousand. Of course, Titanic got this chance.

Meanwhile, the black ice killer was spotted by one of the ships ahead of the Titanic on the busy route to New York. Usually, information about dangerous ice floes is immediately transmitted to the ships behind. But... it was on April 14 that the Titanic's ship's radio station went out of order. Radiotelegraphists Phillips and Bride spent seven hours straight fiddling with the Marconi apparatus and repaired it a few hours before the disaster.

However, in seven hours, 250 telegrams accumulated at once, which had to be sent to New York. They were paid for in advance by passengers rushing to tell their relatives that the Titanic had arrived at its destination a day ahead of schedule, setting a new record for the speed of crossing the Atlantic Ocean. Therefore, telegraph operators simply did not have time to receive warning messages coming from other ships.

A thousand absurdities! For some reason, out of 32 boats, only 20 were on the liner. But these 20, in turn, left the ship only half loaded, which is why 473 more people remained on the sinking ship. The third class passengers did not have life jackets. Moreover, none of the crew members were trained to use the vests until they left Queenstown for the ocean.

The ship's captain had no direct telephone connection to the radio room, although there were telephones in the 50 first-class passenger cabins. At the same time, in the tragedy of absurdities and mistakes there are several fatal scenes that cannot be explained from the point of view of human logic. Twelve miles from the sinking ship was the steamer Californian, frozen overnight, whose crew watched with interest as white flares flashed on the horizon above the unfamiliar ship.

"Falling stars?" - suggested the Californian's watch officer. “No - crackers!” — the cabin boy answered with a smile. In vain, the fourth officer Boxhall, barely holding on to the tilting deck of the Titanic, fired his “crackers” eight times into the starry sky. After all, signal flares, meaning a call for help, are red. Everyone at sea knows this. And if the officer from the Titanic had fired a red rocket, the Californian would have managed to bring on board 1,400 people frozen in the icy water among the wreckage.

But he released white ones. Because on board the ship there were Turkish baths and swimming pools, palm trees and chapels, parrots in cages and boxes of first-class Burgundy, but there were no red flares. By whose will the radio operator of the Californian turned off his receiver and went to bed just a few minutes before the first help signal was broadcast from the nearby Titanic.

“CQD” - the then analogue of “SOS” - was heard even in... Egypt, in Port Said, 3000 miles from the site of the tragedy, but not on the Californian, in the line of sight. An impenetrable magical wall grew between the two ships that night - they were close, but forever far from each other. And therefore, on the sinking steamer, they did not even notice the signals that the Californian officer was giving with a lantern.

And he submitted them just in case, but did not receive an answer. Of the two thousand people rushing along the heaving deck of the liner, no one noticed the flashes of light on the horizon.
Bitter coincidences the very next day after the tragedy gave rise to persistent rumors about the mystical doom of the Titanic. They remembered the “bad sign” - in the very first minutes of the voyage, leaving the port of Southampton, the Titanic almost collided with the ship New York, which was standing at the neighboring pier.

The powerful propellers of the Titanic created underwater currents of such strength that the New York was uncontrollably pulled towards the giant liner - a collision was barely avoided. Then the surviving passengers began to talk about more and more mysterious signs that did not foretell anything good for the Titanic from the very first minutes of its voyage.

The ceremony of launching the Titanic on May 31, 1911 was organized with great pomp: thousands of guests and journalists were invited, special postcards and souvenirs were issued, 23 tons were used to lubricate the “sleigh” on which the monstrous carcass of the steamship slid from the slipway into the water locomotive oil and liquid soap. Rockets were launched into the sky, dozens of bottles of champagne were broken... For some reason, the organizers forgot only one thing - they did not consecrate the ship according to Christian maritime custom.

Maybe it all started when the ship was named? The Titans, children of the earth goddess Gaia, in Hellenic mythology personified the blind, uncontrollable and aggressive forces of nature. The Titans challenged the Olympian celestials, intending to seize power over the world, and each time they were defeated and driven back into the deep bowels of their mother earth.

The creators of the Titanic - the bosses of the transatlantic company White Star, Bruce Ismay and Lord James Pirrie - conceived their brainchild as a kind of ultra-modern challenge to nature, thrown at it by the scientific and technological revolution. Like the Eiffel Tower, the ship was designed to demonstrate the triumph of the daring human mind. It was a hundred feet longer than the previous Atlantic champion, the Lusitania, owned by rival Cunard, and 1,004 tons heavier than its younger brother, the Olympic.

An attack of gigantomania took hold of the creators so much that they built four chimneys on the Titanic, although in reality only three worked (that’s why the scenes from films where smoke pours out of all four chimneys of the Titanic make you smile). The fourth was ordered to be added by the owner of the holding, multimillionaire Pierson Morgan...

The maiden voyage of the Titanic was conceived as an event comparable in scale to the main super shows of the century. A first class ticket cost about $50,000 in today's money. Hundreds of people paid money not because they needed to go to New York. They bought tickets to the show. They got it.

All newspapers wrote about the “unsinkability” of the Titanic: a system was created that put an end to the centuries-old struggle of man with the elements. Even icebergs are no longer scary, because not for the first time, having encountered ice floes, steamships remained afloat - in 1879 this happened with the Arizona, in 1879 with the Concordia, in 1911 with the Columbia. All ships were hit below the waterline, but none of them sank. The Titanic was much better prepared for the iceberg than any of these ships.

It sank in an hour and a half. When the news of his death reached London, one of the warlock masters there figured out that the liner’s ship number - 390904 - after the operation of “transforming” the numbers into letters, reads like the short blasphemous phrase “No Pope”. This observation became another argument in the collection of “facts” and “prophecies” that, in the opinion of many, predetermined the fate of the Titanic.

Among the first, by the way, a version arose about a mysterious “cursed diamond” that was allegedly in the possession of one of the passengers (information about the diamond could not be verified, but it is known for certain that the pearl necklace of the safely escaped Mrs. Widener was then worth 16 million). They also talked about a certain “universal villain” who was on board the liner: as if providence, sending one and a half thousand people to the bottom, actually pursued the goal of killing only one of the passengers. The search for the villain is still ongoing.

The list of famous personalities is very long - Colonel Archibald Butt, military adviser to US President Taft, millionaire Gutenheim, who, according to legend, managed to change into a tailcoat in order to meet his death like a gentleman in a flooded cabin, died along with the Titanic. Another millionaire, 21-year-old Asley Widener, became a victim of the Titanic (his mother came to the port of New York to meet the Titanic on her own train of four Pullman cars).

The ocean floor became the grave of the Strauss, owners of the Macy's chain of stores that is still thriving in the United States. The death of these people is also inexplicable. If we think logically, anyone but millionaires and aristocrats would find places in the lifeboats first of all.

There were almost three times as many people of lower classes among the dead - statistics show. And the controversy still rages: is it true that third-class passengers were locked in the holds. This forces some scientists to put forward their version of the fatal doom of the ship. In their opinion, the fatal purpose of the disaster was to intensify the class struggle in the Old and New Worlds.

Indeed, the total wealth of first class passengers on the Titanic exceeded $500 million. And more men from first class survived than women and children from third class. And this despite the strict maritime rules “Places in boats are for women and children!” “Using the example of the Titanic, the poor were convinced that if the world was dying, only the rich would survive,” said a surviving third-class passenger in an interview...

However, if you follow this logic, among the 705 survivors there must have been John Jacob Astor, one of the richest people of his Time. He was returning with his young wife (his second and already pregnant) from a trip to Egypt. A day after the death of the liner, the secular publication American published a 4-page article about the deceased Mr. Astor and only at the end mentioned the other victims of the disaster.

Astor’s wife escaped, but her husband’s disfigured body could only be identified by the monogram on his shirt—he was caught from the water a week later. Astor had to be saved, the amazed New York rich people repeated to each other in shock. Many things should not have happened that night, but providence had its own view of the Titanic. Isn’t every word dictated by pride in the book of the deceased John Jacob Astor, in which he tells how man in the year 2000 will live on Mars and Saturn, and giant steamships “will cross the Atlantic in four and a half days” and “will be as stable as a fortress?” "?

As the Titanic sank into the depths of the ocean, eight musicians on the mangled deck continued to play - they died, all eight, when the waves washed them overboard overnight. When the bow of the ship broke away and went deep into the depths, they played “Autumn.” And then they started the last song. It was called "God is getting closer."

The dead carcass of the Titanic fell into the depths, and now the people in the lifeboats were slowly freezing to death. The Californian standing nearby, as if in the grip of an obsession, was still unable to notice them and come to their aid. The rest of the ships were terribly far away - the Russian steamer Burma heard the “SOS” and hurried to the rescue, but even at full speed it could only make it in the morning.

Mount Temple is 60 miles away, Baltic is 55 miles away, Olympic is 70 miles away... Salt water does not freeze at minus one degree Celsius. The crests of cold waves rolled over the low sides of the boats, which were mostly women and children, many of them in hysterics trying to jump overboard to share the fate of their loved ones.

In boat “A” people sat waist-deep in icy water, and after half an hour they had to throw the corpses of two women overboard - they froze right in the boat. Rescue boat number 12 was covered twice by waves - it was only a miracle that it did not sink. As doctors later calculated, any of the 705 surviving passengers had no chance of surviving more than 12 hours...

The small, underpowered ship Carpathia was 58 miles southeast of the disaster site when the ship's radio operator, Francis Cottam, heard a hysterical "CQD" from the sinking Titanic. He later recalled that he caught the signal at the very last moment, already taking off his headphones and getting ready to sleep. Cottam did not have a replacement. If he had fallen asleep five minutes earlier, the captain of the Carpathia would never have known that the Titanic was already sinking. The captain's name was Arthur Rostron. He never drank, smoked or cursed. Even in the age of steam and electricity, in the era of the most ambitious dreams of mankind, he did not forget how to pray.

Rostron was nicknamed “electric spark” by his subordinates for his ability to instantly make strong-willed decisions. The man's willpower was well known. At the age of 23, when Rostron joined the Cunard company, he once and for all banned himself from drinking alcohol. Two years later I stopped smoking. He swore extremely rarely—exactly once a month, as one of the officers counted—and every time then he loudly asked the Lord for forgiveness for the foul language that escaped his tongue.

Arthur Rostron first went to sea as a boy, at the age of 13, with his father. They say that it was during the boy’s “sea baptism” that a certain incident occurred that had a strong impact on his psyche - since then Rostron prayed every day.

When radio operator Cottam, his face contorted with horror, burst onto the captain's bridge and confusedly muttered something about the sinking Titanic, Arthur Rostron, as usual, made a decision instantly. First, he turned to the crucifix hanging on the wall and whispered a few words. Then he turned to his subordinates. “We’re turning the ship around,” he said. This was a very risky decision - there were already eight hundred passengers on board the Carpathia.

Rushing to help the victims of the disaster, the captain directed the ship to a terrible area of ​​iceberg accumulation, one of which turned out to be fatal for the Titanic. "Carpathia" with its only pipe developed a speed of only 14 knots - so Rostron ordered all additional resources of steam, hot water and electricity to be transferred to the boilers. At full speed, the small and unprepossessing ship flew into the kingdom of icebergs. Needless to say, the watchmen, alas, also did not have binoculars? Providence took a lot into account; it did not take into account the will of Arthur Rostron.

The owners of the Titanic were going to bring the liner to New York a day ahead of schedule so that there would be a record. The record was set by "Carpathia" - it arrived at the scene of the disaster almost an hour earlier than it could and than everyone expected. Captain Rostron won only an hour of time from fate, but an hour turned out to be more valuable than a whole day. They made it in time. 705 passengers were boarded.

“Carpathia” now really resembled an overcrowded Noah’s Ark: dining rooms and corridors were hastily converted into hospital wards, tables were turned into beds, and yet dozens of people only had room on the floor.. All doctors from among the passengers of “Carpathia” were mobilized for treatment sick and wounded, all healthy women were sent to the kitchen to cook hot broth and coffee...

When the overloaded Carpathia slowly and carefully entered the New York port and moored at Pier 41, when the crowd on the pier sobbed and the flashbulbs flashed, the second officer of the Carpathia recalled one detail in a conversation with journalists: throughout the entire four-hour raid to at the site of the sinking of the Titanic, Captain Rostron... prayed.

“His lips were moving,” the officer said, “this is quite understandable: at such speed, we also had almost no chance of noticing the iceberg in time.” A few days later, Rostron himself admitted to one of the journalists: “I still can’t get rid of a strange feeling.

When we walked among the ice, it seemed to me that someone else's hand was on the steering wheel. She was the one who steered the ship.” It is possible that it was this feeling that led him to order a short church service to be held on board the Carpathia immediately after the last of the victims was brought on board. Only after the end of the service did Rostron give the order to move on to New York.

Arthur Rostron overcame the will of providence. Or maybe it was just crowded out. After all, the main thing has already been done: a terrible blow has been dealt to the pride of humanity. That's enough... And in honor of Arthur Rostron, a special medal of the US Congress was issued.

He was knighted by British royal decree. After some time, Sir Arthur headed the entire passenger fleet of the Cunard company. There are monuments to him in many cities in England, the USA, France and Ireland. On one of them, in the vicinity of Southampton, there is an inscription: “To Sir Arthur Rostron. Who transformed the “age of steam” into the “age of spirit.”

Noah's Ark, called "Carpathia", sank quietly and unnoticed by everyone on July 1, 1918. The old 13,600-ton ship was hit by three torpedoes fired by a German submarine. Of the 75 people, five died from the explosion, the remaining 70 safely reached the nearby British warship Snowdrop. "Carpathia" disappeared under water very quickly in just 15 minutes. However, she never claimed the title “unsinkable”.

And what happened to the other captain, Stanley Lord, who stole his Californian from under the very nose of trouble? Both the British and American commissions investigating the circumstances of the sinking of the Titanic found him indirectly guilty of this. He was removed from naval service and died in obscurity. Stanley Lord's son persistently tried to rehabilitate his father's name. In the 50s, he repeatedly appealed to both commissions with requests for a re-investigation. But it was all in vain. Stanley Lord fulfilled the will of providence. It no longer needed him and rewarded him with oblivion.

Many have seen the film about the disaster of the largest liner in human history, the Titanic. They know, for example, in which ocean the Titanic sank, and that the cause of its death was a collision with an iceberg, but, unfortunately, not everyone is well aware of the history of this disaster, as well as the true causes of the ship's sinking.

This ship was truly a miracle of that time, built by the English company White StarLine. In height it was approximately the same as an eleven-story high-rise building, and in length as three large blocks. The ship was equipped with 8 decks and had 16 waterproof compartments, which ensured a high level of safety for this liner.

Despite such a powerful and strong design, the Titanic sank to the bottom during its first voyage. There is still a lot of discussion around the death of this giant of shipbuilding and many questions arise related to its disaster. For example, how and why the ship sank, in what year the Titanic sank, etc.

In what year did the Titanic sank, the first test and entry into the ocean?

Let's try to sort out all the nuances in order and reveal all the secrets of the death of this giant ship. So, the Titanic set off on its maiden voyage on April 10, 1912. Before this, in 1911, the liner was first released into the waters of the World Ocean for a test voyage. The ship remained on this test cruise until April 1912, when it arrived at the English port of Southampton, and on April 10 of the same year, the Titanic set off on its first and, unfortunately, last voyage. Just five days later, on the night of April 14-15, the ship collided with an iceberg, as a result of which it sank in the waters of the Atlantic Ocean. Of all the passengers on board, more than 1,500 people died.

Secrets and mysteries of the Titanic disaster

The commission that investigated the death of this ship was unequivocal in its conclusions and placed full responsibility on the ship's captain, Smith. He was accused of driving too fast on an ice field at night even though he had been warned of the danger. But there are many other mysteries and secrets in this story.

So, in 1985, a group of oceanographers led by Robert Ballard managed to lift a lot of debris from the ship from the bottom and study them in detail. As a result, scientists made a sensational discovery. It turns out that the structure of the ship was made of low grade steel, which caused the bottom of the ship to split.

There was also a hypothesis that the Titanic broke up even before it hit the iceberg. Low quality steel could not withstand such loads and cracked. After carefully examining the metal from which the rods and rivets in the ship's structure were made, scientists discovered a high level of scale concentration in it. It makes the steel very brittle, which can subsequently lead to its rapid destruction. Proof of the validity of this version is the fact that the creators of the Titanic planned to complete its construction as soon as possible. This haste became the second reason for the death of the ship.

Scientists believe that if high-quality steel had been used as a material for the manufacture of rods and rivets, which play a major role in the safety of the ship, then perhaps the disaster could have been avoided.

Of course, in the sinking of the Titanic, in addition to the use of low-quality material, other factors also played a role:

• ignoring the ice danger at night by the captains;
• the negligent attitude of the ship's crew to their duties (after all, the entire captain's staff was warned that there was an iceberg ahead);
• inconsistency of seats in lifeboats - thus, out of more than 2 thousand passengers, only about 700 were able to be landed on lifeboats, the rest went under water. But this is also confirmed by the fact that these boats were originally designed for only 1,178 people, and, according to various sources, there were more than 2 thousand people on board.

conclusions

As you can see, despite the fact that the Titanic was one of the largest liners of that time and was equipped with all safety rules, the slightest neglect of simple rules, the negligent attitude of the captain to their duties and the haste in the process of building this ship led to its sinking during the first exit into the open ocean. Until 1985, not all the facts were known about this terrible disaster. People knew in which ocean the Titanic sank, approximately how many people died, and also that the ship was wrecked as a result of a collision with an iceberg. But after research, a team of scientists led by Ballard was able to reveal many new details about the true cause of the disaster of this ship.