Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Speaker 1: Stuff Works dot com. Hello, welcome to the podcast. I'm
Speaker 1: editor Candice Gibson, joined by staff writer Jane McGrath. Jane,
Speaker 1: I don't think that there's anything as big and posh
Speaker 1: and attention catching in the annals of naval history as
Speaker 1: the Titanic, but it's true. I don't think many people
Speaker 1: who do not have up. I guess I should say
Speaker 1: a marine history rather than naval history. So it was
Speaker 1: a seagoing vessel, and it was almost like a hotel
Speaker 1: on the water. And the idea behind it was precisely
Speaker 1: that Jay Bruce is May and Lord Pierry of Harlem
Speaker 1: and Wolf shipbuilders. They were at dinner one night and
Speaker 1: they were talking about the Cunard lines newest liners, the
Speaker 1: Mauritania and Lusitania, and they said to themselves, we can
Speaker 1: make one or three. Even with their plan, we're gonna
Speaker 1: have a triumvirate of ships that were even bigger and
Speaker 1: better the Olympic, the Gigantic and the Titanic. That's right.
Speaker 1: And they wanted to make these not only fast like
Speaker 1: the Kuniard line, but but luxurious and attractive for for
Speaker 1: the you know, the aristocratic passengers have spend you know,
Speaker 1: a pretty penny to go on exactly the idea of
Speaker 1: being that the more comfortable and luxurious the ship, the
Speaker 1: longer distance people would be willing to travel. And so
Speaker 1: they weren't just selling you know, a couple of dollars
Speaker 1: worth of tickets to people. We're talking about a first
Speaker 1: class ticket then in today's dollars, is equivalent to about
Speaker 1: forty three thousand dollars to about eighty thousand dollars, which
Speaker 1: is a ton of money. I mean, I don't even
Speaker 1: know people who spend that on airfare, you know, flying
Speaker 1: halfway across the world. A good point. Maybe you do,
Speaker 1: if you do, write me because I want to travel
Speaker 1: with you. So then what made the Titanic so special? Well,
Speaker 1: it's interesting because it was so incredibly lush, and you
Speaker 1: know the first class passengers, you know, they were they
Speaker 1: were used to being treated nicely, but not as nicely
Speaker 1: as on this as on this ship, I mean they
Speaker 1: had such Uh they had a squash court, I think,
Speaker 1: and that you mentioned in the article, and uh there's
Speaker 1: gem there were a Turkish baths. Yeah, that and these
Speaker 1: things are amenities that people had to pay a little
Speaker 1: bit extra for But you bring up an important point
Speaker 1: about the first class and what they had access to.
Speaker 1: And I'm sure that all of you know this, but
Speaker 1: there were three distinct classes on board the Titanic, first, second,
Speaker 1: and steerage, and so it's really important to sort of
Speaker 1: go ahead in your mind as you're picturing the Titanic
Speaker 1: and that I think the nine different deck levels of it,
Speaker 1: that it was very stratified. There were places that first
Speaker 1: class were permitted to go. I mean, they could go
Speaker 1: anywhere they wanted, really because they paid that much, but
Speaker 1: they weren't going to wander down to steerage cabins. But
Speaker 1: then the third class was pretty much restricted to the
Speaker 1: bottom of the boat. Second class sort of in the middle.
Speaker 1: And this was such a gigantic ship that it required
Speaker 1: some really special engineering to make it go. And I'm
Speaker 1: not gonna lie to you. I'm no engineer. I'm not
Speaker 1: going to profess to know everything about horsepower, etcetera, etcetera.
Speaker 1: But I do know that it had two giant engines
Speaker 1: that were about four stories tall and these two three
Speaker 1: blade propellers that were like twenty three ft across, and
Speaker 1: so that's big and it enabled the ship to go
Speaker 1: about twenty four knots, and that may sound slow to
Speaker 1: us today, but back then it was really fast, that's true.
Speaker 1: And they put it in the running against the Juniord Line,
Speaker 1: which is the ships that they wanted to compete against,
Speaker 1: and it was faster than them. But it's sort of
Speaker 1: broke down in the process. But we'll get see that
Speaker 1: in a minute. Yeah, it was interesting you mentioned with
Speaker 1: the class distinctions, you know that might strike our modern sensibilities.
Speaker 1: Is classism, which I yeah, it is. But it's interesting
Speaker 1: to notice that UM the third class were even treated,
Speaker 1: maybe even better than other ships UM of the time
Speaker 1: because they had their own enclosed rooms and that was
Speaker 1: kind of a luxury in itself. It was a lot
Speaker 1: of them didn't even have that where they were coming from.
Speaker 1: And the White Star Line, which was the manufacturer of
Speaker 1: these three ships, knew that many of the Steerage members
Speaker 1: were European immigrants who were going to New York to
Speaker 1: start a new life, and they really sort of approached
Speaker 1: this with a delicate sensibility and they wanted to make
Speaker 1: this a very special and memorable passage for them. And
Speaker 1: to that end, the quarters they had aboard the Titanic
Speaker 1: were so much nicer than anything they would have seen
Speaker 1: in any other ship. For instance, there were real mattresses,
Speaker 1: whereas on other ships steerage would have had straw filled
Speaker 1: sacks to sleep on. Now that's not to say that
Speaker 1: it compared with the private and semi private baths of
Speaker 1: the upper class ducks, but I think that there was
Speaker 1: sort of a continuous design and feeling that pervaded the
Speaker 1: entirity of the ship. But it wasn't just the third
Speaker 1: class it had top of the line, it was everyone.
Speaker 1: That's true. If you look at the China and and
Speaker 1: everything like they had this the whole ship had the
Speaker 1: sort of airy designed to it, with palm trees. Everything
Speaker 1: was lush, and you know, they wanted to promote this
Speaker 1: this luxurious atmosphere so much that if you look at
Speaker 1: like the decks, they didn't want to clutter them up
Speaker 1: too much with even safety equipment for instance fatal mistake. Yes,
Speaker 1: so we have these wide open swaths of gleaming wood
Speaker 1: decks and Thomas Andrews, who was the ship's designer, he
Speaker 1: designed this ship to be unsinkable. And it's interesting too.
Speaker 1: I mean you look at both the engineers and the
Speaker 1: passengers aboard were pretty confident. Um just the sheer size
Speaker 1: of the Titanic. It was so gigantic that they felt
Speaker 1: really comfortable there that you know, it was a safe rode,
Speaker 1: sort of like when you're an evolving station wagon. Yeah, nothing,
Speaker 1: nothing can harm you. It's just so large. And it
Speaker 1: wasn't just the size of the ship that made people
Speaker 1: think it was unsinkable. The ship's designer, Thomas Andrews, designed
Speaker 1: watertight doors to drop down between each of the sixteen
Speaker 1: compartments and the bottom of the ship, the idea being
Speaker 1: that if something happened to the ship, up to three
Speaker 1: of those compartments could flood and the ship wouldn't sink,
Speaker 1: And even in a stretch, four could take on some
Speaker 1: water and the ship would still stay afloats. And that
Speaker 1: makes me feel pretty secure, I mean, and we go
Speaker 1: back to the idea that they didn't have a lot
Speaker 1: of safety equipment on the decks, and that leads me
Speaker 1: to my question actually that I have for you, is
Speaker 1: that is it true? A lot of people say that
Speaker 1: if they did have enough life boasts, they would have
Speaker 1: been able to save a lot more people from the sinking.
Speaker 1: That sadly is fiction. Really Yeah, And it's funny because
Speaker 1: that's a point that people really harp on and attached
Speaker 1: to it, that there were not enough lifeboats to save
Speaker 1: everyone on the Titanic. I think people really latch onto
Speaker 1: this idea because we would like to think that history
Speaker 1: could be changed if there were more precautions. But the
Speaker 1: fact of the matter is, there were so many things
Speaker 1: that went wrong with the Titanic even before I picked
Speaker 1: up passengers that I think it was doomed to sink
Speaker 1: from the start. That's right, even if you look as
Speaker 1: far back as the construction of it. I mean people
Speaker 1: say that, um, the constructors used substandard iron, even in
Speaker 1: in the materials to you to bank to make the
Speaker 1: ship and uh, and even the the technology, the Marconi
Speaker 1: wireless telegraphy, it was seen as maybe two cutting in
Speaker 1: because a lot of people out there on the boats
Speaker 1: they didn't know how to use it necessarily or to
Speaker 1: decipher it right. So when the Titanic was sinking and
Speaker 1: it sent out it's distress calls, people couldn't interpret it.
Speaker 1: It was like speaking a totally different language. And there's
Speaker 1: some information out there about there not being enough for
Speaker 1: rivets and the ship or the rivets weren't tightened properly,
Speaker 1: and we know for a fact that it only underwent
Speaker 1: about six or seven hours worth of testing, and I
Speaker 1: think it turned once or twice, but it was never
Speaker 1: even sailed at its top speed. And what's more, a
Speaker 1: lot of the crew didn't get on board until an
Speaker 1: hour or say, before the passengers did, and they weren't
Speaker 1: even told what their jobs were until after they got
Speaker 1: on the ship. So how can you be a proper
Speaker 1: lookout for a ship when you haven't been trained in
Speaker 1: that post. That's sure, it doesn't leave a lot of
Speaker 1: time for training. And also if you look at the
Speaker 1: design of the ship, even um I read that the
Speaker 1: rudder was actually kind of an old fashioned design and
Speaker 1: it was smaller even the competition's rudders, And so this
Speaker 1: made it so the ship itself a little less maneuverable,
Speaker 1: and they couldn't shift out of an emergency situation as
Speaker 1: fast as they should have. So when you have something
Speaker 1: that large, it's like if you're you're driving an RV
Speaker 1: and all of a sudden you're you're nearing a stop sign.
Speaker 1: You need to know ahead of time that you need
Speaker 1: to go ahead and start breaking slowly You can't just
Speaker 1: slam on the brakes and expect things do okay. It's
Speaker 1: not like you know, my idi bety Honda Civic, where
Speaker 1: I haven't have time to do that. The Titanic was
Speaker 1: the same way. If they saw something in the water
Speaker 1: that they needed to avoid um and Iceberg, they had
Speaker 1: to think about it a couple of miles ahead. And
Speaker 1: the same goes for turning. You still need you know,
Speaker 1: a bigger radius to turn something that large. And what
Speaker 1: of my favorite points about how ill prepared the Titanic
Speaker 1: was for this voyage, and it's just smacks of conspiracy,
Speaker 1: is that JP Morgan was one of the big financial backers,
Speaker 1: and there's some recent evidence lightly that he kept encouraging
Speaker 1: the shipbuilders to use cheaper and cheaper materials because he
Speaker 1: wanted as much bang for his buck as he could get.
Speaker 1: Scandalous scandalous. Well, here's where it gets even juiced here.
Speaker 1: He was supposed to be on the maiden voyage and
Speaker 1: then just a couple of hours beforehand, Summa business came
Speaker 1: up and he didn't ride. It's a little suspicious, I know,
Speaker 1: I know, But all that aside back to the live
Speaker 1: boats in question. So I'm gonna give you guys some
Speaker 1: numbers just so you can help visualize it. And I
Speaker 1: wanted to clarify too that there are so many numbers
Speaker 1: out there when it comes to the Titanic, because Parliament
Speaker 1: conducted an inquiry since it sets sail from England, but
Speaker 1: the US Senate also conducted an inquiry. And that may
Speaker 1: sound kind of funny, and it kind of is. One
Speaker 1: of the senators, Senator William Smith, knew the captain of
Speaker 1: the Titanic, John Smith, and he'd sailed with him before
Speaker 1: and thought, he said, to get captain, how could this
Speaker 1: have happened? And so the Senate got involved to again
Speaker 1: kind of marking conspiratorial. So did the different investigations come
Speaker 1: up with different different results? No, just about the same thing,
Speaker 1: but the numbers are a little bit different. So we
Speaker 1: know that there were enough lifeboats to hold one thousand,
Speaker 1: one seventy six passengers, and that's only if they were
Speaker 1: filled to capacity. So on board again numbers from the
Speaker 1: U S and it we know there were two thousand
Speaker 1: people and eight crew members. So even if you're doing
Speaker 1: the math that fast, you know that's not enough. If
Speaker 1: you can't get all those people into boats and The
Speaker 1: reason why they had so few lifeboats on board sixteen
Speaker 1: is that the Board of Trade was the governing body
Speaker 1: that set the rules for ocean liners at this time,
Speaker 1: and the number of requisite lifeboats for ships up to
Speaker 1: ten thousand tons was sixteen. Well, the Titanic was forty
Speaker 1: five thousand tons, but no one had bothered to sit
Speaker 1: down and do the math and say we need this
Speaker 1: many more lifeboats to combinate that difference. So the Board
Speaker 1: of Trades regulations sort of went up to it was
Speaker 1: sort of an old fashioned maximum. They weren't sort of
Speaker 1: expecting something as big as a Titanic needing regulation exactly.
Speaker 1: And you hit on the point earlier day when you
Speaker 1: were talking about not wanting to clutter up the decks.
Speaker 1: I think that Titanic X builders and designers conveniently misinterpreted
Speaker 1: the guidelines. They could have filled in the number they needed,
Speaker 1: but they didn't because they wanted their their decks to
Speaker 1: look shiny and open and clean. But okay, so you asked,
Speaker 1: could everyone have been saved if there have been enough
Speaker 1: life But it didn't matter now, not really, because when
Speaker 1: I was talking about how inefficient the crew wise and
Speaker 1: how ill prepared they were and how little testing this
Speaker 1: ship had undergone. I think they only practice lowering what
Speaker 1: two to four lifeboats? Is that right? I think yeah,
Speaker 1: I think I remember hearing those stuff. So they didn't
Speaker 1: have an accurate time estimation for how long it would
Speaker 1: take to get that many people ever board. And if
Speaker 1: you you look at the survivors talk about it, you'll
Speaker 1: notice that not even all of the lifeboats, they weren't
Speaker 1: filled to capacity some of them, and that's pretty scandalous. Um.
Speaker 1: There was one survivor who wrote um that passengers saw
Speaker 1: that these lofe boats would have to take a fifty
Speaker 1: foot drop, and I kind of scared them, and they thought, well,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna stick on the unsinkable Titanic. You guys can
Speaker 1: go ahead. And this one survivor claims that he asked
Speaker 1: to be on this this on on the filled lifeboat,
Speaker 1: and they said women and children first, see you later,
Speaker 1: and they lowered the boat. And so that's it's a
Speaker 1: kind of testament too. They didn't really know what they
Speaker 1: were doing when they were flowering these boats. No one did.
Speaker 1: And there were two evacuations on either side of the ship,
Speaker 1: and one of the people conducting the investigation on one
Speaker 1: side said women and children first. The guy on the
Speaker 1: other side was letting anyone who could get in get in.
Speaker 1: But when we say anyone, we mean first class and
Speaker 1: then second class. Third class wasn't even told that the
Speaker 1: ship was sinking until well after the fact. And it
Speaker 1: was such a quiet disaster. When the ship scraped the iceberg.
Speaker 1: It happens so quickly and so quietly that no one
Speaker 1: really realized any damage had been done until Thomas Andrews
Speaker 1: inspected and said, yeah, it's certain it's going to sink.
Speaker 1: And it's sort of scary to think about the panic
Speaker 1: that must have ensued down to the steerage decks because
Speaker 1: even if people saw water filling up their cabins, like
Speaker 1: we said, they weren't allowed is free room over the
Speaker 1: ship like the other class passengers were. Can you imagine
Speaker 1: them just getting lost in the bottom as you know,
Speaker 1: imagine they'd be riots and and you know, fights all
Speaker 1: over the place. It was crazy, It was, I mean,
Speaker 1: it was essentially a struggle to survive. And later on
Speaker 1: when White Star Line sent out rescue craft to search
Speaker 1: for the bodies or any survivors, they got really confused
Speaker 1: because they saw so many corpses wearing garments of first
Speaker 1: class passengers, but essentially crew and steerage had raided the
Speaker 1: cabins and put on whatever they could to stay warm.
Speaker 1: As a terrible it sounds like they went through a
Speaker 1: lot of havoc and panics. Yeah, I can't even imagine
Speaker 1: how scary it was. And the recovery efforts for disasters too.
Speaker 1: I mean, when the news broke that the Titanic had sunk,
Speaker 1: the world was stunned. I mean, this was the unsinkable ship,
Speaker 1: and I think it took nearly a week to even
Speaker 1: compile a list of all the survivors and all that deceased.
Speaker 1: So and it sort of captures the imagination even to today.
Speaker 1: I mean, people are obsessed with no what actually happened,
Speaker 1: you know, um people they have deferring historical accounts, whose
Speaker 1: to blame and and it's it's a pretty intense debate
Speaker 1: all around the board. And people are obsessed with the
Speaker 1: story of the titan The Titanic. Yeah, and that's because
Speaker 1: there were so many passengers on board, and everyone had
Speaker 1: a different story, and everyone had a different eye witness account.
Speaker 1: There were people who said that the ship broke in
Speaker 1: half before I sink. There are people who didn't report that,
Speaker 1: and later on I think people called it a litigation
Speaker 1: nightmare because, like we said, Parliament and the Senate conducted investigations,
Speaker 1: but any lawsuits that were brought on the White Star
Speaker 1: Line were brought on by families of the individual passengers
Speaker 1: for either people lost or property lost. And how I mean,
Speaker 1: how could you even prove anything with all the different testimonies.
Speaker 1: That's right, And one uh, one scandal that people disagree
Speaker 1: on is about the chairman and managing director of the
Speaker 1: Star the White Star is that it the White Star Line.
Speaker 1: There was always start line. His name was Bruce is May,
Speaker 1: as you said, and he actually jumped on one of
Speaker 1: these not quite filled lifeboats, and um, people say, oh,
Speaker 1: what a coward, like he took someone else's space when
Speaker 1: really like it would not have been taken by by
Speaker 1: another person. At least some organizations like the Titanic Historical
Speaker 1: Society tried to defend him and say, like he had
Speaker 1: a wife and kids and no one else was around,
Speaker 1: and he just took his opportunity to save his life
Speaker 1: and otherwise he just would have been, you know, sunk
Speaker 1: with the ship. And it was sad because after he
Speaker 1: he survived, and after he got to America he was
Speaker 1: sort of ridiculed by uh like William Randolph Hurst and
Speaker 1: his newspapers. And in England sort of they accepted him,
Speaker 1: but America he got maligned. I'm sure he did. And
Speaker 1: if you look at the other two arguably other important
Speaker 1: figures on board from like Thomas Andrews, the ship's designer,
Speaker 1: and then the captain of the ship, Captain Smith, they
Speaker 1: both sort of quietly waited on board and went down
Speaker 1: with the ship. And Thomas Andrews in particular. I mean,
Speaker 1: even if you think about James Cameron's Titanic, that really
Speaker 1: poignant scene where he says, I wish I could have
Speaker 1: reality a better ship ms Rose, that really is sort
Speaker 1: of how it happened that which where it is necessarily
Speaker 1: but he didn't put on a life vest and he
Speaker 1: sat in one of the first class lounges and just
Speaker 1: quietly waited. And it's just so eerie even today if
Speaker 1: you go and you look at pictures of artifacts that
Speaker 1: have been um like photographed underneath the surface of the water,
Speaker 1: or artifacts that have been brought up like one of
Speaker 1: the most haunting things I saw that UM there's a
Speaker 1: traveling Titanic exhibit called Titanic Aquatic, and you can see
Speaker 1: all these things that are ms. Titanic has recovered that
Speaker 1: particular society and they have sole ownership over the shipwreck.
Speaker 1: And one of them, it's just um. It was a
Speaker 1: China hutch that went down and was made of wood
Speaker 1: and it had these porcelain and gratten dishes in it.
Speaker 1: And over time the wood from the China cabinet disintegrated,
Speaker 1: but the gratten dishes were left perfectly stacked and neat
Speaker 1: Little Rose And that's how they are of right now
Speaker 1: in the display. They're stacked and neat Little Rose. And
Speaker 1: it's so creepy. That is fascinating because like the best
Speaker 1: of the Titanic and you just see like even the
Speaker 1: exterior of the ship underwater. It's it's really creepy to
Speaker 1: see because of what what the pressure and the water
Speaker 1: has done to it. Um. But to see something that
Speaker 1: has survived that is that's really weird. It is And
Speaker 1: I know what you're talking about. Like if you see pictures,
Speaker 1: haven't you see this sort of like weird seaweed things
Speaker 1: sort of waving in the water off the ship's rail
Speaker 1: archaeologists have a word for them. They're called rusticles, because
Speaker 1: essentially all these little tiny microbs underwater are just feasting
Speaker 1: on the ship, and they suspect that in another I think,
Speaker 1: like fifty to ninety years time, the ship is just
Speaker 1: going to collapse and implode in on itself and it's
Speaker 1: going to be over. So there's a lot of argument
Speaker 1: right now about whether or not we should actually raise
Speaker 1: what's left of the hall. That's that's really interesting because
Speaker 1: I mean, as someone who's fascinated with the story, I
Speaker 1: of course like I want to be in supportive, like
Speaker 1: bring it up, because I don't want to see such
Speaker 1: an interesting artifact of history destroyed just by you know, nature,
Speaker 1: And I think I'm going to take a SHMV on
Speaker 1: the other side, and not even just to play Devil's advocate.
Speaker 1: I really feel that that's where it belongs. Because even
Speaker 1: in the recovery efforts of those bodies, not all of
Speaker 1: them were brought up, and a lot of the steerage
Speaker 1: and crew members that were recovered, their bodies were actually
Speaker 1: tied to iron rods and thrown beneath the water, so
Speaker 1: they were in essence buried at sea. And so I
Speaker 1: think that you know, that's where the ship belongs to them. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's true. There's so much history about the Titanic, and
Speaker 1: there's so much that we haven't covered, and you can
Speaker 1: learn even more when you read How Titanic Worked on
Speaker 1: how stuff work dot com for moralness and thousands of
Speaker 1: other topics because it how stuff works dot com. Let
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