The History of the Titanic: Past and Present. The story of the Titanic: Past and Present What was it really like?

Almost 105 years have passed since the most famous shipwreck of the 20th century - the sinking of the passenger liner Titanic, but it seems that this story will give us reasons for conversation, investigation and inspire the creation of new films and books for a long time!

But I wonder if James Cameron will ever agree to remake the romantic story about Jack and Rose, knowing that it was not an iceberg that separated them, but a fire?

Yes, this is exactly the news brought by the new year 2017! British journalist Shanan Moloney, who has more than 30 years of experience in researching the Titanic shipwreck, confirmed the earlier version of experts that the cause of the death of the ship was a fire in the fuel storage! As indisputable evidence, Moloney cites the results of studying photographs taken by electrical engineers of the Titanic before it left the Harland and Wolfe shipyard in Belfast!

Construction of the Titanic

So, the journalist reports that the fuel in the three-story storage facility began to burn even before the ceremonial departure of the liner from Southampton in April 1912. And even more, a team of 12 people tried to put out the fire for several weeks, but, alas, to no avail. The owners of the ship were informed about what had happened, but they considered the cancellation of the first voyage of the “unsinkable” to be a greater disaster for their reputation than the possible consequences. The officers were ordered not to disclose this information to passengers, but before leaving, to turn the liner the other side towards the shore!

Ticket to the Titanic

According to Moloney's version, the hull of the ship at the site of the fire heated to more than 1000 degrees Celsius, and this made it 75% more fragile. And when, on the fifth day of the voyage, the Titanic collided with an iceberg, she could not withstand the load, and a huge hole appeared on board!

Rescue of Titanic Passengers

Let's be honest, blaming the iceberg as the only reason for the large-scale loss of life and the sinking of the ship would be unfair. A much larger role in the disaster was played by the negligent crime of the owners and the fire on the eve of sailing.

Titanic at the bottom

It is known that out of 2229 crew members and passengers of the Titanic, only 713 people were saved. Today, the wreckage of the liner rests at a depth of 3,750 meters in the waters of the North Atlantic, and artifacts found by adventurers and researchers from time to time excite the memory and excitement of everyone who is not indifferent to this story.

Newspaper report about the sinking of the Titanic

But it turns out that not only the fire was an obvious reason not to set sail... When Shipbuilder magazine called the Titanic a “practically unsinkable ship,” its owners seized on this phrase and began to demonstrate its greatness and reliability in every possible way.

Staircase under the dome in 1st grade

First of all, they broke the tradition of the fleet and did not break a bottle of champagne on the side of the ship during the first voyage - the Titanic is unsinkable, which means that subsequent voyages will be just as successful!

And troubles did not take long to arrive - before sailing far from Southampton, the Titanic almost collided with the American liner New York. The first disaster was avoided almost at the last minute!

Two of the Titanic's three propellers

Everything about the luxury of the interior and service on the Titanic is known down to the smallest detail. But for just one first class ticket, in modern terms, passengers paid several tens of thousands of dollars! And it is not surprising that greedy divers dream of a big jackpot - on the first (and last) voyage of the Titanic, 10 millionaires went on a trip with gold and jewelry in safes worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

Smoking room 1st class

It is impressive that “special cabins” were intended for such important people, made in eleven different interior styles - from Dutch and Adam style to interiors in the style of the French and Italian Renaissance! I wonder how many hours did it take for the richest passengers of the ship to walk all 7 km of its promenade decks?

Bedroom 1st class (B-64)

But how boring it is to re-read for the hundredth time about 40 tons of potatoes, 27 thousand bottles of mineral water and beer, 35 thousand eggs and 44 tons of meat, oysters from Baltimore and cheeses from Europe on board the Titanic. It's a matter of finding out the most impressive facts!

Captain Smith on deck

It is sad to admit that the cost of a ticket on the liner determined the chances of salvation. It is known that out of 143 first class passengers, only 4 died. And only because they did not board the lifeboat.

One of them was Ida Strauss. The woman did not want to part with her husband Isidor Strauss, co-owner of the largest supermarket chain Macy's.

Ida and Isidore Strauss

“I will not leave my husband. We have always been together, we will die together."

Ida declared, giving up her place in lifeboat No. 8 to the maid and giving her a fur coat, adding that she no longer needed it...

Eyewitnesses claim that at the time of the death of the ship, the Strauss spouses were calm. They sat in chairs on the deck, holding each other with one hand and waving goodbye to the rescued with their free hand. By the way, the maid not only survived, but even outlived her owners by 40 years!

Orchestra musicians

The Titanic sank to the music. Until the last minutes, the orchestra stood on the deck and played the church hymn “Closer, Lord, to You.” None of the musicians survived. Well, the body of the orchestra leader, 33-year-old violinist Wallace Hartley, was found 10 days later with a violin tied to his chest!

Thanks to the inscription on the instrument, it was established that the violin was given to the musician by his fiancée, Maria Robinson. Yes, the girl was found, but Maria still decided to say goodbye to the memorable instrument and handed it over to the British Salvation Army. In 2013, the violin was sold at auction for $1.5 million!

The icy waters of the Atlantic forever took with them the body of Captain Edward John Smith. A naval officer with 30 years of experience never completed his first transatlantic voyage, tragically sank to the bottom along with the entire crew without attempting to escape...

Captain Edward John Smith

Did you know that the last passenger of the Titanic, Elizabeth Gladys Milvina Dean, died just 8 years ago at the age of 97? At the time of the sad event, she was only 2 months and 13 days old.

The last passenger of the Titanic

But even Jack Dawson, played by our favorite Leonardo DiCaprio, is a real person! And let director Cameron prove as much as he wants that this character is a figment of his imagination, on the Titanic there was actually a coal miner named Jack Dawson, who, however, was not in love according to the script with Rose, but with a friend’s sister.

But this is not all mysticism. Get ready for the most interesting thing - it is known that on April 15, 1972 (do you remember that the Titanic sank on the night of April 14-15?) the radio operator of the battleship Theodore Roosevelt received an SOS signal.

Signal from the Titanic, which was received by the passenger ship Carpathia

Not impressive yet? But he received a signal for help from the Titanic! Then the poor fellow thought that he had “moved with his mind” and hurried to the military archive, where he found that radiograms from the sunken ship had already been received in 1924, 1930, 1936 and 1942. But that’s not all - the last signal from the Titanic was received by the Canadian ship Quebec in April 1996.

"Titanic" (eng. Titanic) is a British transatlantic steamer, the second liner of the Olympic class. Built in Belfast at the Harland and Wolfe shipyard from 1909 to 1912 for the White Star Line shipping company.

At the time of commissioning it was the largest ship in the world.

On the night of April 14-15, 1912, during her maiden voyage, she crashed in the North Atlantic, colliding with an iceberg.

Vessel information

The Titanic was equipped with two four-cylinder steam engines and a steam turbine.

• The entire power plant had a capacity of 55,000 hp. With.
• The ship could reach speeds of up to 23 knots (42 km/h).
• Its displacement, which exceeded the twin ship Olympic by 243 tons, was 52,310 tons.
• The ship's hull was made of steel.
• The hold and lower decks were divided into 16 compartments by bulkheads with sealed doors.
• If the bottom was damaged, the double bottom prevented water from entering the compartments.

Shipbuilder magazine called the Titanic virtually unsinkable, a statement that was widely circulated in the press and among the public.

In accordance with outdated rules, the Titanic was equipped with 20 lifeboats, with a total capacity of 1,178 people, which was only a third of the ship's maximum load.

The cabins and public areas of the Titanic were divided into three classes.

First class passengers were provided with a swimming pool, a squash court, an A la carte restaurant, two cafes, and a gym. All classes had dining and smoking lounges, open and closed promenades. The most luxurious and sophisticated were the first class interiors, made in various artistic styles using expensive materials such as mahogany, gilding, stained glass, silk and others. The third class cabins and salons were decorated as simply as possible: steel walls were painted white or lined with wood panels.

1 On April 0, 1912, the Titanic set sail from Southampton on its first and only voyage. After making stops in Cherbourg, France, and Queenstown, Ireland, the ship entered the Atlantic Ocean with 1,317 passengers and 908 crew members on board. The ship was commanded by Captain Edward Smith. On April 14, the Titanic's radio station received seven ice warnings, but the liner continued to move almost at top speed. To avoid encountering floating ice, the captain ordered to go slightly south of the usual route.

• At 23:39 on April 14, the lookout reported to the captain's bridge about an iceberg directly ahead. Less than a minute later there was a collision. Having received several holes, the ship began to sink. Women and children were put on the boats first.
• At 2:20 on April 15, the Titanic sank, breaking into two parts, killing 1,496 people. 712 survivors were picked up by the steamship Carpathia.

The wreckage of the Titanic rests at a depth of 3,750 m. They were first discovered by Robert Ballard's expedition in 1985. Subsequent expeditions recovered thousands of artifacts from the bottom. The bow and stern parts are deeply buried in the bottom silt and are in a deplorable condition; raising them to the surface intact is not possible.

The wreck of the Titanic

The disaster claimed the lives, according to various sources, from 1,495 to 1,635 people. Until December 20, 1987, when the Philippine ferry Dona Paz sank, killing more than 4,000 people, the sinking of the Titanic remained the deadliest peacetime maritime disaster. Informally, it is the most famous disaster of the 20th century.

Alternative versions of the ship's death

And now - alternative versions, each of which has its adherents in the worldwide club of mystery lovers.

Fire

A fire in the coal compartment that broke out before sailing and provoked first an explosion and then a collision with an iceberg. The ship's owners knew about the fire and tried to hide it from passengers. This version was put forward by British journalist Shanan Moloney, writes The Independent. Moloney has been researching the causes of the Titanic's sinking for more than 30 years.

In particular, he studied photographs taken before the ship left the Belfast shipyard. The journalist saw black marks along the right side of the ship's hull - exactly where the iceberg hit it. Experts subsequently confirmed that the marks were likely caused by a fire that started in a fuel storage facility. “We looked at the exact location where the iceberg was stuck and it appears that part of the hull was very vulnerable at that location, and that was before it even left the Belfast shipyard,” Moloney says. A team of 12 tried to put out the flames, but they were too big to bring under control quickly. It could reach temperatures of up to 1000 degrees Celsius, making the Titanic's hull very vulnerable in this area. And when it hit the ice, experts say, it immediately broke. The publication also added that the liner's management prohibited passengers from talking about the fire. “This is a perfect confluence of unusual factors: fire, ice and criminal negligence. No one had investigated these marks before. It changes the story completely,” says Moloney.

CONSPIRACY

Conspiracy theory: this is not the Titanic at all! This version was put forward by experts who studied the causes of the death of the ship, Robin Gardiner and Dan Van Der Watt, published in the book “The Mystery of the Titanic.” According to this theory, the sunken ship is not the Titanic at all, but its twin brother, the Olympic. These ships looked practically no different from each other. On September 20, 1911, the Olympic collided with the British Navy cruiser Hawk, causing both ships to be seriously damaged. The owners of "Olympic" suffered heavy losses, since the damage that was caused to "Olympic" was not enough for an insurance payment.

The theory is based on the assumption of possible fraud in order for the owners of the Titanic to receive insurance payments. According to this version, the owners of the Titanic intentionally sent the Olympic to an area of ​​possible ice formation and at the same time convinced the captain not to slow down so that the ship would suffer serious damage when colliding with a block of ice. This version was initially supported by the fact that a fairly large number of objects were raised from the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, where the Titanic lies, but nothing was found that bore the name “Titanic.” This theory was refuted after parts were brought to the surface, on which the Titanic’s side (construction) number was stamped - 401. The Olympic had a side number of 400. In addition, the minted side number of the Titanic was discovered and on the propeller of a sunken ship. And even despite this, the conspiracy theory still has a number of followers.

German attack

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 the fact 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?

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.

There was a collision with an iceberg - this is beyond doubt. The deck of the ship was even covered with snow and ice chips. 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, it’s absurd.

A curse

Mystical version: curse of the pharaohs. It is known for certain that one of the historians, Lord Canterville, transported on the Titanic in a wooden box a perfectly preserved Egyptian mummy of a priestess - a soothsayer. Since the mummy had a fairly high historical and cultural value, it was not placed in the hold, but placed directly next to the captain's bridge. The essence of the theory is that the mummy influenced the mind of Captain Smith, who, despite numerous warnings about ice in the area where the Titanic was sailing, did not slow down and thereby doomed the ship to certain death. This version is supported by well-known cases of mysterious deaths of people who disturbed the peace of ancient burials, especially mummified Egyptian rulers. Moreover, the deaths were associated precisely with clouding of mind, as a result of which people committed inappropriate actions, and cases of suicide often occurred. Did the pharaohs have a hand in the sinking of the Titanic?

Steering error

One of the latest versions of the sinking of the Titanic deserves special attention. She appeared after the novel by the granddaughter of the second mate of the Titanic, Charles Lightoller, Lady Patten, “Worth Its Weight in Gold,” was published. According to Patten's book, the ship had enough time to avoid the obstacle, but helmsman Robert Hitchens panicked and turned the wheel the wrong way.

A catastrophic mistake led to the iceberg causing fatal damage to the ship. The truth about what really happened that fateful night was kept secret by the family of Lightoller, the oldest surviving officer of the Titanic and the only survivor who knew exactly what caused the ship's sinking. Lightoller hid this information out of fear that the White Star Line, which owned the ship, would go bankrupt and his colleagues would lose their jobs. The only person to whom Lightoller told the truth was his wife Sylvia, who conveyed her husband’s words to her granddaughter. In addition, according to Patten, such a large and reliable liner as the Titanic sank so quickly because after colliding with an ice block it was not immediately stopped, and the rate of water entering the holds increased hundreds of times. The liner was not immediately stopped because White Star Line manager Bruce Ismay convinced the captain to continue sailing. He feared that the incident could cause considerable material damage to the company he headed.

Chasing the Atlantic Blue Riband

There were and still are many supporters of this theory, especially among writers, since it appeared precisely in literary circles. The Atlantic Blue Ribbon is a prestigious shipping prize awarded to ocean liners for achieving record speeds across the North Atlantic.

At the time of the Titanic, this prize was awarded to the ship Mauritania of the Cunard company, which, by the way, was the founder of this award, as well as the main competitor of the White Star Line. In defense of this theory, it is argued that the president of the company that owned the Titanic, Ismay, encouraged the captain of the Titanic, Smith, to arrive in New York a day ahead of schedule and receive an honorary prize. This supposedly explains the ship's high speed in a dangerous area of ​​the Atlantic. But this theory can easily be refuted, because the Titanic simply physically could not have reached the speed of 26 knots at which the Cunard Mauritania set a record that, by the way, lasted for more than 10 years after the disaster in the Atlantic.

But what was it really like?

Sadly, when studying the history of the most famous maritime disaster, we have to admit that the Titanic owes its death to a long chain of fatal accidents. If at least one link of the ominous chain had been destroyed, the tragedy could have been avoided.

Perhaps the first link was the successful start of the journey - yes, that’s right. On the morning of April 10, during the departure of the Titanic from the quay wall of the port of Southampton, the superliner passed too close to the American ship New York, and a phenomenon known in navigation as ship suction arose: the New York began to be attracted to the one moving nearby. "Titanic". However, thanks to the skill of Captain Edward Smith, a collision was avoided.

Ironically, if the accident had happened, it would have saved one and a half thousand lives: if the Titanic had been delayed in port, the ill-fated encounter with the iceberg would not have happened.

This time. It should also be mentioned that the radio operators who received the message from the Mesaba ship about the ice fields of icebergs did not transmit it to Edward Smith: the telegram was not marked with a special prefix “personally to the captain”, and was lost in a heap of papers. That's two.

However, this message was not the only one, and the captain knew about the ice danger. Why didn't he slow down the ship? Chasing the Blue Ribbon is, of course, a matter of honor (and, more importantly, big business), but why did he risk the lives of passengers? It wasn't that much of a risk, really. In those years, captains of ocean liners often passed through areas dangerous with ice without slowing down: it was like crossing the road at a red light: it seems like you shouldn’t do that, but it always works out. Almost always.

To the credit of Captain Smith, it must be said that he remained faithful to maritime traditions and remained on the dying ship until the very end.

But why was the bulk of the iceberg not noticed? Here everything came together: a moonless, dark night, windless weather. If there were even small waves on the water surface, those looking ahead could see whitecaps at the foot of the iceberg. Calm and moonless night are two more links in the fatal chain.

As it turned out later, the chain was continued by the fact that the iceberg, shortly before the collision with the Titanic, turned over with its underwater, water-saturated, dark part upward, which is why it was practically invisible at night from afar (an ordinary, white iceberg would have been visible a mile away ). The watchman saw him only 450 meters away, and there was almost no time left for maneuver. Perhaps the iceberg would have been noticed earlier, but here another link in the fatal chain played a role - there were no binoculars in the “crow’s nest”. The box where they were kept was locked, and the key to it was hastily taken with him by the second mate, who had been removed from the ship just before departure.

After the lookout nevertheless saw the danger and reported the iceberg to the captain's bridge, there was a little more than half a minute left before the collision. Officer of the watch Murdoch, who was on watch, gave the order to the helmsman to turn left, while simultaneously transmitting the command “full astern” to the engine room. Thus, he made a grave mistake, adding another link in the chain that led the liner to death: even if the Titanic had crashed into an iceberg head-on, the tragedy would have been less. The bow of the ship would have been crushed, part of the crew and those passengers whose cabins were located in front would have died. But only two watertight compartments would have been flooded. With such damage, the liner would have remained afloat and could have waited for help from other ships.

And if Murdoch, having turned the ship to the left, had ordered an increase rather than a decrease in speed, the collision might not have happened at all. However, frankly speaking, the order to change the speed hardly plays a significant role here: in thirty seconds it was hardly executed in the engine room.

So, the collision happened. The iceberg damaged the ship's fragile hull along six compartments on the starboard side.

Looking ahead, let's say that only seven hundred and four managed to escape: the next link in the chain of failures was that some sailors took too literally the captain's order to put women and children in the boats, and did not allow men there, even if there were empty seats. However, at first no one was particularly eager to get into the boats. The passengers did not understand what was happening and did not want to leave the huge, comfortably lit, such a reliable liner, and it was unclear why they should go down in a small unstable boat down to the icy water. However, pretty soon anyone could notice that the deck was tilting forward more and more, and panic began.

But why was there such a monstrous discrepancy between the places on the lifeboats? The owners of the Titanic, praising the merits of the new ship, stated that they even exceeded the instructions of the code: instead of the required 962 life-saving seats on the ship, there were 1178. Unfortunately, they did not attach any importance to the discrepancy between this number and the number of passengers on board.

It is especially sad that another passenger steamer, the Californian, stood very close to the sinking Titanic, waiting out the ice danger. A few hours ago, he notified neighboring ships that he was locked in ice and was forced to stop so as not to accidentally run into an ice block. The radio operator from the Titanic, who was almost deafened by the Morse code from the Californian (the ships were very close, and the signal of one echoed too loudly in the headphones of the other), impolitely interrupted the warning: “Go to hell, you are interfering with my work!” What was the radio operator of the Titanic so busy with?

The fact is that in those years, radio communication on a ship was more of a luxury than an urgent necessity, and this miracle of technology aroused great interest among the wealthy public. From the very beginning of the voyage, the radio operators were literally inundated with private messages - and no one saw anything reprehensible in the fact that the Titanic’s radio operators paid such attention to rich passengers who wished to send a telegram to the ground directly from the liner. So at that moment, when colleagues from other ships reported about floating ice, the radio operator transmitted another message to the continent. Radio communication was more like an expensive toy than a serious tool: ships of that time did not even have a 24-hour watch at the radio station.

On the night of April 14-15, 1912, the largest ship, the Titanic, which was considered the safest cruise liner at that time, sank upon an iceberg in the cold waters of Antarctica. The sinking of the Titanic is surrounded by many myths and legends. Many questions are still unanswered. There is an opinion that the White Star Line company sent not the Titanic on that ill-fated voyage, but another one, and at the bottom of the Arctic Ocean lies its twin brother called the Olympic. But is this really so?

There is a version that the White Star Line (hereinafter referred to as USL) sent the Olympic on the voyage instead of the Titanic, changing the names. The saddest thing is that most people believe that it was possible to replace these two ships. This article, I hope, will help dot all the i's.

Now let's move on to the theory itself. From the forum I quote the words of another person: “I wonder if any of the forum members have heard about the version of replacing the Titanic with the Olympic and deliberately creating an accident with an iceberg. In order to receive a large insurance premium." The essence of the theory is that the USL company decided to hastily patch up the Olympic and send it on its last voyage, setting up an accident in order to obtain insurance, the amount of which was five times the cost of the ship. And what? With this, the company kills two birds with one stone: it sends the old Olympic on the voyage, and receives the same money as for a brand new Titanic. The theory itself is interesting and has a right to life, but it is from the realm of science fiction. Experienced people know that it is impossible to replace the liner, because they were very different. Now let's go through this in more detail.

The White Star Line itself, to which both the Titanic and Olympic belonged, were unlikely to benefit from the accident. They needed to restore their reputation after the breakdown of the Olympic. The disaster that occurred with the Titanic only ruined the reputation of the large shipping company White Star Line. Following this version, the shipowner of the USL company was not thinking about the success of his company, but about how to quickly collapse the company. There is confirmation from more than one person that such an accident cannot be faked. It is unlikely that they swam throughout Antarctica in search of an iceberg. Regarding the replacement of signs. This is complete nonsense. About 15 thousand people worked at the shipyard, and as was written above, the ships could easily be distinguished from each other, it was especially easy to distinguish it for those who built it. The workers could not help but notice that the Olympic and the Titanic had switched places. Did USL really bribe everyone and no one let anything slip? This is complete nonsense. They probably also “transferred” the interiors from one ship to another.

All the surviving passengers on that fateful night unanimously said that they could smell the smell of fresh paint. This suggests that the ship was only recently built.

Before the first voyage of the Titanic, the Olympic had already been in operation for a year; it no longer had the feeling of being brand new. Their interiors were also very different. The stokers claimed that the boiler rooms were sterilely clean, and this is only possible in one case - if the ship is new. After a year of operation of the vessel, this is impossible. Carpets, furniture and other utensils cannot be moved overnight from one ship to another. Can you tell the difference between a used car and a new one? So and right there. The smell of fresh paint is a strong argument that the ship was completely new. An important factor is also that at the bottom of the ocean they found a part with number 401 - this is the number that was assigned to the Titanic; the Olympic had it 400. Now we can say with confidence that it is the Titanic that rests with the 1,500 souls of those who perished. the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, and not its brother called Olympic.

Titanic is a ship that challenged higher powers. A miracle of shipbuilding and the largest ship of its time. The builders and owners of this giant passenger fleet arrogantly declared: “The Lord God himself cannot sink this ship.” However, the ship launched on its maiden voyage and did not return. It was one of the largest disasters, forever etched in the history of navigation. In this topic I will talk about the most key points related to the Titanic. The topic consists of two parts, the first part is the history of the Titanic before the tragedy, where I will tell you about how the ship was built and went on its fateful voyage. In the second part we will visit the bottom of the ocean, where the remains of a drowned giant lie.

First, I will briefly talk about the history of the Titanic's structure. There are a lot of interesting photos of the ship, which depict the construction process, mechanisms and assemblies of the Titanic, and so on. And then the story will tell about the tragic circumstances that were destined to happen on this fateful day for the Titanic. As always happens with major disasters, the Titanic tragedy occurred due to a series of mistakes that coincided on one day. Each of these mistakes individually would not have entailed anything serious, but all together they resulted in death for the ship.

Titanic was laid down on March 31, 1909 at the shipyards of the Harland and Wolf shipbuilding company in Belfast, Northern Ireland, launched on May 31, 1911, and underwent sea trials on April 2, 1912. The ship's unsinkability was ensured by 15 watertight bulkheads in the hold, creating 16 conditionally watertight compartments; the space between the bottom and the second bottom flooring was divided by transverse and longitudinal partitions into 46 waterproof compartments. The first photo shows the Titanic slipway, construction is just beginning.


The photo shows the laying of the Titanic's keel

In this photo, the Titanic is on the slipway next to the Olympic, its twin brother

And these are the huge steam engines of the Titanic

Giant crankshaft

This photo shows the turbine rotor of the Titanic. The huge size of the rotor stands out especially against the background of the working

Titanic propeller shaft

Ceremonial photo - the Titanic hull is completely assembled

The launching process begins. The Titanic slowly sinks its hull into the water

The giant ship almost left the slipway

Titanic's launch is successful

And now the Titanic is ready, the morning before the first official launching in Belfast

The Titanic was officially launched and transported to England. The photo shows the ship in the port of Southampton before its fateful voyage. Few people know, but during the construction of the Titanic, 8 workers died. This information is available in a selection of interesting facts about the Titanic.

This is the last photograph of the Titanic taken from the shore in Ireland.

The first days of the voyage were successful for the ship, there were no signs of trouble, the ocean was completely calm. On the night of April 14, the sea remained calm, but icebergs were visible in some places in the sailing area. They did not embarrass Captain Smith... At 11:40 in the evening, a cry was suddenly heard from the observation post on the mast: “An iceberg is right on course!”... Everyone knows about further events that took place on the ship. The “unsinkable” Titanic was unable to withstand the elements of water and sank to the bottom. As already mentioned, many factors turned against the Titanic that day. It was fatal bad luck that killed the giant ship and more than 1,500 people

The official conclusion of the commission investigating the causes of the sinking of the Titanic stated: the steel used to sheath the hull of the Titanic was of low quality, with a large admixture of sulfur, which made it very brittle at low temperatures. If the casing were made of high-quality, tough steel with a low sulfur content, it would significantly soften the force of the impact. The metal sheets would simply bend inward and the damage to the body would not be so serious. Perhaps then the Titanic would have been saved, or at least would have remained afloat for a long time. However, for those times this steel was considered the best, there was simply no other. This was only the final conclusion; in fact, a number of other factors occurred that did not allow us to avoid a collision with the iceberg

Let us list in order all the factors that influenced the sinking of the Titanic. The absence of any of these factors could save the ship...

First of all, it is worth noting the work of the Titanic's radio operators: the main task of the telegraph operators was to serve especially wealthy passengers - it is known that in just 36 hours of work, the radio operators transmitted more than 250 telegrams. Payment for telegraph services was made on the spot, in the radio room, and at that time it was quite large, and tips flowed like a river. Radio operators were constantly busy sending telegrams, and although they received several messages about drifting ice, they did not pay attention to them

Some criticize the lookout's lack of binoculars. The reason for this lies in the tiny key to the binoculars box. A tiny key that opened the cabinet where the binoculars were kept could have saved the Titanic and the lives of 1,522 dead passengers. This should have happened if not for the fatal mistake of a certain David Blair. Keyman Blair was transferred from service on the “unsinkable” liner just a few days before the ill-fated voyage, but he forgot to give the key to the binocular locker to the employee who replaced him. That is why the sailors on duty at the observation tower of the liner had to rely solely on their eyes. They saw the iceberg too late. One of the crew members on watch that fateful night later said that if they had binoculars, they would have seen the ice block earlier (even if it was pitch black) and the Titanic would have had time to change course.”

Despite warnings about icebergs, the captain of the Titanic did not slow down or change the route, so confident was he that the ship was unsinkable. The speed of the ship was too high, due to which the iceberg hit the hull with maximum force. If the captain had ordered the ship's speed to be reduced in advance, upon entering the iceberg belt, then the force of the impact on the iceberg would not have been enough to break through the Titanic's hull. The captain also did not make sure that all the boats were filled with people. As a result, far fewer people were saved

The iceberg belonged to a rare type of so-called. “black icebergs” (overturned so that their dark underwater part reaches the surface), which is why it was noticed too late. The night was windless and moonless, otherwise the lookouts would have noticed the whitecaps around the iceberg. The photo shows the same iceberg that caused the sinking of the Titanic.

There were no red rescue flares on the ship to signal distress. Confidence in the ship's power was so high that no one even thought of equipping the Titanic with these missiles. But everything could have turned out differently. Less than half an hour after meeting the iceberg, the captain’s mate shouted:
Lights on port side, sir! The ship is five or six miles away! Boxhall clearly saw through his binoculars that it was a single-tube steamer. He tried to contact him using a signal lamp, but the unknown vessel did not respond. “Apparently, there is no radiotelegraph on the ship, they could not help but see us,” Captain Smith decided and ordered helmsman Rowe to signal with emergency flares. When the signalman opened the box with the missiles, both Boxhall and Rowe were dumbfounded: the box contained ordinary white missiles, not emergency red ones. “Sir,” Boxhall exclaimed in disbelief, “there are only white rockets here!” - Can't be! - Captain Smith was amazed. But, convinced that Boxhall was right, he ordered: “Shoot the whites.” Maybe they'll realize we're in trouble. But no one guessed, everyone thought it was a fireworks display on the Titanic

The cargo-passenger steamer California, on a London-Boston flight, missed the Titanic on the evening of April 14, and a little over an hour later it was covered in ice and lost speed. Its radio operator Evans contacted the Titanic at about 11 p.m. and wanted to warn about the difficult ice conditions and that they were covered in ice, but the Titanic’s radio operator Philippe, who had just had difficulty establishing contact with Cape Race, rudely interrupted him: “Leave me alone!” I'm busy working with Cape Race! And Evans “fell behind”: there was no second radio operator on the California, it was a difficult day, and Evans officially closed the radio watch at 23:30, having previously reported this to the captain. As a result, all the blame for the biased investigation into the sinking of the Titanic fell on the captain of the California, Stanley Lord, who proved his innocence until his death. He was acquitted only posthumously after Hendrik Ness, captain of the ship Samson, testified...


On the map the place where the Titanic sank

So, the night of April 14-15, 1912. Atlantic. On board the fishing vessel "Samson". "Samson" returns from a successful fishing trip, avoiding encounters with US ships. On board are several hundred slaughtered seals. The tired crew rested. The watch was kept by the captain himself and his first mate. Captain Ness was in good standing with his owners. The voyages of his ship were always successful and brought good profits. Hendrik Ness was known as an experienced and risk-taking captain, not too scrupulous about violating territorial waters or exceeding the number of animals killed. “Samson” often found himself in foreign or forbidden waters, and he was well known to US Coast Guard ships, with whom he successfully avoided close acquaintance. In a word, Hendrik Ness was an excellent navigator and a gambling, successful businessman. Here are the words of Ness, from which the whole picture of what is happening becomes clear:

“The night was amazing, starry, clear, the ocean was calm and gentle,” Ness said. “The assistant and I chatted, smoked, sometimes I went out of the control room onto the bridge, but I didn’t stay there for long - the air was absolutely freezing.” Suddenly, accidentally turning around, I saw two unusually bright stars in the southern part of the horizon. They surprised me with their brilliance and size. Shouting to the watchman to hand over the telescope, I pointed it at these stars and immediately realized that these were the masthead lights of a large ship. “Captain, I think this is a coast guard ship,” the mate said. But I thought about it myself. There was no time to figure it out on the map, but we both decided that we had entered the territorial waters of the United States. The meeting with their ships did not bode well for us. A few minutes later a white rocket flew over the horizon, and we realized that we had been discovered and were being asked to stop. I still hoped that everything would work out and we would be able to escape. But soon another rocket took off, and after some time a third... Things turned out badly: if we had been searched, I would have lost not only all the loot, but also, possibly, the ship, and we would all have gone to prison. I decided to leave.

He ordered to turn off all the lights and give full speed. For some reason we were not followed. After some time, the border ship disappeared altogether. (This is why witnesses from the Titanic claimed that they clearly saw a large steamer in the distance, leaving them. The ill-fated California at that time was sandwiched in ice and was not visible from the Titanic at all.) I ordered a change of course to the north, we were going at full speed and only slowed down in the morning. On the twenty-fifth of April we dropped anchor off Reykjavik in Iceland and only then did we learn about the Titanic tragedy from newspapers delivered by the Norwegian consul.

During the conversation with the consul, it was as if I had been hit on the head: I thought: weren’t we at the scene of the disaster then? As soon as the consul left our board, I immediately rushed to the cabin and, looking through the newspapers and my notes, realized that the dying people saw us not as the Californian, but as us. This means that it was us who were called to help with rockets. But they were white, not red, emergency ones. Who would have thought that people were dying very close to us, and we were leaving them at full speed on our reliable and large “Samson”, which had both boats and boats on board! And the sea was like a pond, quiet, calm... We could save them all! Everyone! Hundreds of people died there, and we saved stinking seal skins! But who could know about this? But we didn’t have a radiotelegraph. On the way to Norway, I explained to the crew what happened to us and warned that all of us had only one thing left to do - remain silent! If they find out the truth, we will become worse than lepers: everyone will shy away from us, we will be kicked out of the fleet, no one will want to serve with us on the same ship, no one will give us a hand or a crust of bread. And none of the team took any oath.

Hendrik Ness spoke about what happened only 50 years later, before his death. However, no one can be directly blamed for the sinking of the Titanic. If the rockets had been red, he would certainly have rushed to help. In the end, no one had time to help. Only the steamer "Carpathia", developing an unprecedented speed of 17 knots, rushed to the aid of the dying people. Captain Arthur H. Roston ordered the preparation of beds, spare clothing, food, and quarters for the rescued. At 2 hours 45 minutes, “Carpathia” began to encounter icebergs and their fragments, large ice fields. Despite the danger of a collision, the Carpathia did not slow down. At 3 hours 50 minutes on the Carpathia they saw the first boat from the Titanic, at 4 hours 10 minutes they began to save people, and by 8 hours 30 minutes the last living person was picked up. In total, Carpathia saved 705 people. And “Carpathia” delivered all those rescued to New York. The photo shows a boat from the Titanic

Now let's move on to the second part of the story. Here you will see the Titanic at the bottom of the ocean in the form in which it remained after the tragedy. For seventy-three years the ship lay in its deep underwater grave as one of the countless evidence of human carelessness. The word "Titanic" has become synonymous with adventures doomed to failure, heroism, cowardice, shock and adventure. Societies and associations of surviving passengers were created. Entrepreneurs involved in the recovery of sunken ships dreamed of raising a superliner with all its countless riches. In 1985, a team of divers led by American oceanographer Dr. Robert Ballard found it, and the world learned that under the enormous pressure of the water column, the giant ship broke into three parts. The wreckage of the Titanic was scattered over an area with a radius of 1600 meters. Ballard found the bow of the ship, deeply buried in the ground under its own weight. Eight hundred meters away from her lay the stern. Nearby were the ruins of the middle part of the hull. Among the wreckage of the ship, various objects of material culture of that distant time were scattered throughout the bottom: a set of kitchen utensils made of copper, wine bottles with corks, coffee cups with the emblem of the White Star shipping line, toiletries, door handles, candelabra, kitchen stoves and ceramic heads dolls with which small children played... One of the most stunning underwater images that Dr. Ballard's movie camera captured was a broken sloop beam hanging limply from the side of the ship - a silent witness to a tragic night that will forever remain on the list of world disasters. The photo shows the wreck of the Titanic, taken by the Mir submersible

Over the past 19 years, the hull of the Titanic has undergone serious destruction, the reason for which was not sea water at all, but souvenir hunters who are gradually plundering the remains of the liner. For example, the ship’s bell or mast lighthouse disappeared from the ship. In addition to direct plunder, damage to the ship is caused by time and the action of bacteria, leaving behind only rusty ruins

In this photo we see the Titanic's propeller

Huge ship anchor

One of the Titanic's piston engines

Preserved underwater cup from the Titanic

This is the same hole that formed after the encounter with the iceberg. Perhaps, in addition to weak steel, the rivets between the sheets of metal failed, and water poured into 4 compartments of the Titanic, leaving no chance of salvation. There was no point in pumping water out; it was equivalent to pumping water from ocean to ocean. The Titanic sank to the bottom, where it rests to this day. There is talk of raising the Titanic to the surface in order to set up a museum, meanwhile various souvenir lovers continue to take the ship apart piece by piece. How many more secrets does the Titanic keep? It is unlikely that anyone will answer this question in the near future.

Exactly ninety-seven years ago, on a cold night from the fourteenth to the fifteenth of April, 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? For almost a hundred years, the active human mind has been constructing versions of the catastrophe; fortunately, there is no shortage of riddles here. I have been interested in this story since childhood - now I probably don’t even remember how it all began. Today I want to tell you about the most famous versions of the tragedy.

Version one. Conspiracy theory

"Olympic and Titanic: the largest ships in the world"

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. I'll talk about them later, but for now let's not get ahead of ourselves. Twins: Titanic (right) and Olympic

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 rigging of the Titanic
at the shipyard in Belfast

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. Titanic's propeller. In this photo, however, you can’t see the numbers.

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.

John Pierpont Morgan Did you know that...

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.

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 Riband 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 any cost. 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. A piece of the Titanic's plating lifted from the bottom

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.

American press about the sinking of the Titanic Did you know that...

On the Internet you can find not only Western newspapers of that time (see photo on the right), but also pre-revolutionary Russian publications that reported on the crash in the Atlantic Ocean. A strange feeling arises when you read these dry lines - for the people of that time, the Titanic had not yet become a legend...

To the sinking of the Titanic.

LONDON. The proceedings of the commission to investigate the circumstances of the sinking of the Titanic were opened by a representative of the trade department, Isaacs, who pointed out that from the moment it went to sea, the Titanic was moving at a speed of 21 knots per hour, and this speed was not reduced until the very moment of the collision with the ice mountain despite receiving warnings about moving ice. During the investigation, special attention will be paid to the insufficient number of rescue boats on the ship and to the installation of watertight bulkheads.

* * * * *

But the Iskra publication, as befits an “artistic and literary magazine,” describes the situation in the best traditions of the yellow press:

The sinking of the Titanic.

Russian press about the sinking of the Titanic April 1, at 10 a.m. 25 p.m., a real floating city, the greatest in the world, the luxurious nine-story steamer Titanic (length ¼ verst (126 fathoms), displacement 66,000 tons, cost at 20,000,000 rubles, with machines of 55,000 horsepower, developing a speed of up to 38 versts per hour) on the way to New York, having 2,700 people on board, ran into floating ice at full speed. At midnight, the Titanic reported via wireless telegraph: “We’re going down.”

Stunning scenes played out on the deck of the dying ship. Millionaire passengers (there were 7 of them, with a total fortune of 3 billion) offered fabulous sums for seats on lifeboats. Because of these places, people fought, pushed each other into the water, smashed heads with oars...

1,410 people died.

William Stead died on board the Titanic. A committed journalist, with immense faith in the power of the printed word, Stead exposed the horrors of the debauchery of aristocratic London, its brothels, child trafficking, and energetically advocated for an end to the Anglo-Boer War and for rapprochement with Russia. In 1905, Stead came to Russia with the goal of reconciling Russian society with the government.

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. One of the Titanic's watertight bulkheads

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.

Did you know that...

The Titanic is one of the first, if not the first ship in history to send an SOS signal.

In the early twentieth century, the letters "CQD" - short for "Come Quick, Danger" - were adopted as a distress signal. But this signal was inconvenient in that it was also used to warn on land about train accidents. In 1906, at the International Radiotelegraph Conference, it was proposed to introduce a special signal for maritime disasters. It was then that the letters known today throughout the world – SOS – were chosen. Contrary to popular belief, it is not an acronym for a phrase like “Save Our Souls.” These letters were chosen simply because their combination is very easy to recognize in ethereal Morse code: three dots, three dashes, three dots.

However, habit is second nature, and the CQD signal was still used in water accidents. The Titanic’s radio operator, twenty-five-year-old John Phillips, also sent it: “CQD, here are our coordinates: 41.46 north 50.14 west. We require immediate assistance. We're drowning. You can’t hear anything over the roar of the steam pipes.” He repeated this message for the next quarter of an hour, until his partner suggested sending a new distress signal on the air, cynically joking: “Dude, try knocking out the SOS signal - we won’t have such an opportunity again in our lives.” Phillips smiled sadly at the joke and at 00.45 on April 15, 1912, one of the first SOS signals in history was sent from the Titanic.

Fourth version. German torpedo

German submarine from World War I

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 the fact 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?

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. 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, it’s absurd.

Did you know that...

Before filming Titanic, director James Cameron worked closely with the crew of the Russian scientific vessel Akademik Mstislav Keldysh and personally made twelve dives with a film camera to the remains of the ship on the Mir-1 and Mir-2 bathyscaphes - they can be seen in the documentaries fragments of the film. During each dive, Cameron could only film for fifteen minutes due to the fact that only so much film could fit in the camera.

Five years later, the bathyscaphes Mir-1 and Mir-2 will be used to dive to the sunken Kursk submarine.

Fifth version. Curse of the Egyptian Mummy

The very first horror movie about a mummy

Yes, yes, imagine, there is such a version! I specifically saved it for the end.

So, 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.

The mummy was acquired by one collector, then another, a third, and all the previous owners, of course, died under the most mysterious and mysterious circumstances. That is, perhaps, in fact, each of them lived to be ninety-nine years old and rested in the arms of a young beauty, but who will check this? Owners of mummies, as everyone knows, are supposed to die, preferably a capital death.

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 mummy’s precious body - it would hardly 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.

Did you know that...

Immediately after the sinking of the Titanic, various projects for raising the ship to the surface began to be proposed. One of them was a proposal to fill the hull of the liner with ping pong balls.

Oh yes, there is another version

She's all in the picture, and there's nothing more to say about her:

Ex-Gigantik. What will you name the ship... Did you know that...

The Titanic had not only an older brother (Olympic), but also a younger brother, the Gigantic. At the time of the death of the middle brother in the abyss of the Atlantic, the youngest was still just building on the ropes. To prevent a similar tragedy from happening to it again, modifications began to be made to its design while it was moving - for example, the number of lifeboats was increased (you can see them in the photo - on the upper deck, one above the other). And the most unexpected of the security measures taken was - what did you think? Changing the name of the vessel. Recalling from ancient Greek myths that the fate of both titans and giants was very deplorable, the owners of the ship decided not to step on the same rake again and abandoned the name “Gigantic”. What the hell is not joking about, really?

The new ship was named patriotically: Britannic. Typically, this did not help: in World War I, the youngest of the ships was sunk by a German submarine.

But what was it really like?

Sadly, when studying the history of the most famous maritime disaster, we have to admit that the Titanic owes its death to a long chain of fatal accidents. If at least one link of the ominous chain had been destroyed, the tragedy could have been avoided.

Perhaps the first link was the successful start of the journey - yes, that’s right. On the morning of April 10, during the departure of the Titanic from the quay wall of the port of Southampton, the superliner passed too close to the American ship New York, and a phenomenon known in navigation as ship suction arose: the New York began to be attracted to the one moving nearby. "Titanic". However, thanks to the skill of Captain Edward Smith, a collision was avoided. Ironically, if the accident had happened, it would have saved one and a half thousand lives: if the Titanic had been delayed in port, the ill-fated encounter with the iceberg would not have happened. This time. Captain of the Titanic Edward Smith

It should also be mentioned that the radio operators who received the message from the Mesaba ship about the ice fields of icebergs did not transmit it to Edward Smith: the telegram was not marked with a special prefix “personally to the captain”, and was lost in a heap of papers. That's two.

However, this message was not the only one, and the captain knew about the ice danger. Why didn't he slow down the ship? Chasing the Blue Ribbon is, of course, a matter of honor (and, more importantly, big business), but why did he risk the lives of passengers? It wasn't that much of a risk, really. In those years, captains of ocean liners often passed through areas dangerous with ice without slowing down: it was like crossing the road at a red light: it seems like you shouldn’t do that, but it always works out. Almost always. To the credit of Captain Smith, it must be said that he remained faithful to maritime traditions and remained on the dying ship until the very end.

But why was the bulk of the iceberg not noticed? Here everything came together: a moonless, dark night, windless weather. If there were even small waves on the water surface, those looking ahead could see whitecaps at the foot of the iceberg. Calm and moonless night are two more links in the fatal chain.

As it turned out later, the chain was continued by the fact that the iceberg, shortly before the collision with the Titanic, turned over with its underwater, water-saturated, dark part upward, which is why it was practically invisible at night from afar (an ordinary, white iceberg would have been visible a mile away ). The watchman saw him only 450 meters away, and there was almost no time left for maneuver. Perhaps the iceberg would have been noticed earlier, but here another link in the fatal chain played a role - there were no binoculars in the “crow’s nest”. The box where they were kept was locked, and the key to it was hastily taken with him by the second mate, who had been removed from the ship just before departure. It is believed that this photo shows the same iceberg

After the lookout nevertheless saw the danger and reported the iceberg to the captain's bridge, there was a little more than half a minute left before the collision. Officer of the watch Murdoch, who was on watch, gave the order to the helmsman to turn left, while simultaneously transmitting the command “full astern” to the engine room. Thus, he made a grave mistake, adding another link in the chain that led the liner to death: even if the Titanic had crashed into an iceberg head-on, the tragedy would have been less. The bow of the ship would have been crushed, part of the crew and those passengers whose cabins were located in front would have died. But only two watertight compartments would have been flooded. With such damage, the liner would have remained afloat and could have waited for help from other ships.

And if Murdoch, having turned the ship to the left, had ordered an increase rather than a decrease in speed, the collision might not have happened at all. However, frankly speaking, the order to change the speed hardly plays a significant role here: in thirty seconds it was hardly executed in the engine room. Thomas Andrews

So, the collision happened. The iceberg damaged the ship's fragile hull along six compartments on the starboard side.

It should be said that Thomas Andrews himself, a talented designer who built this liner, traveled on the Titanic. Of course, after the tragedy there were people who blamed him for the unsuccessful design of the ship. These reproaches are without any basis - Andrews actually built the most advanced ship of his time. It is to him that the survivors of the crash owe it to him that they had almost three hours to leave the ship and move to a safe distance.

After the accident, Captain Smith woke Mr. Andrews and invited him to inspect the hold in order to obtain an authoritative opinion on the fate of the ship. The designer's verdict was disappointing: it was impossible to save the Titanic. We urgently need to begin evacuating passengers.

And here we come to one of the most dramatic circumstances. There were 2,208 people on board the ship (fortunately, not the 3,500 it was designed for), but the boats had room for only 1,178 people. Looking ahead, let's say that only seven hundred and four managed to escape: the next link in the chain of failures was that some sailors took too literally the captain's order to put women and children in the boats, and did not allow men there, even if there were empty seats. However, at first no one was particularly eager to get into the boats. The passengers did not understand what was happening and did not want to leave the huge, comfortably lit, such a reliable liner, and it was unclear why they should go down in a small unstable boat down to the icy water. However, pretty soon anyone could notice that the deck was tilting forward more and more, and panic began. Boat deck. Walk for your health.

But why was there such a monstrous discrepancy between the places on the lifeboats? Initially, there were more boats - as many as thirty-five, but it was decided to abandon fifteen of them. Firstly, they “could cause a feeling of insecurity,” but most importantly, they interfered with first-class passengers walking along the deck, and this was quickly corrected: the Titanic’s motto was “comfort above all.” But how could a ship so poorly equipped with life-saving equipment be set sail? It's all about the outdated rules of the British Navigation Code, adopted back in 1894. In accordance with it, a ship of a certain size was assigned a certain number of boats. And since the displacement of the largest passenger ships of that time rarely exceeded 10,000 tons, all such giant ships were combined into a single category with instructions for them to have on board a number of boats sufficient to save 962 people. In 1894, they could not even imagine a ship like the Titanic - with a tonnage of as much as 52,310 tons!

The owners of the Titanic, praising the merits of the new ship, stated that they even exceeded the instructions of the code: instead of the required 962 life-saving seats on the ship, there were 1178. Unfortunately, they did not attach any importance to the discrepancy between this number and the number of passengers on board. Photo of the Titanic's radio operator, taken by a crooked photographer

It is especially sad that another passenger steamer, the Californian, stood very close to the sinking Titanic, waiting out the ice danger. A few hours ago, he notified neighboring ships that he was locked in ice and was forced to stop so as not to accidentally run into an ice block. The radio operator from the Titanic, who was almost deafened by the Morse code from the Californian (the ships were very close, and the signal of one echoed too loudly in the headphones of the other), impolitely interrupted the warning: “Go to hell, you are interfering with my work!” What was the radio operator of the Titanic so busy with? The fact is that in those years, radio communication on a ship was more of a luxury than an urgent necessity, and this miracle of technology aroused great interest among the wealthy public. From the very beginning of the voyage, the radio operators were literally inundated with private messages - and no one saw anything reprehensible in the fact that the Titanic’s radio operators paid such attention to rich passengers who wished to send a telegram to the ground directly from the liner. So at that moment, when colleagues from other ships reported about floating ice, the radio operator transmitted another message to the continent. Radio communication was more like an expensive toy than a serious tool: ships of that time did not even have a 24-hour watch at the radio station. So the radio operator from the Californian, having completed his assigned shift, went to bed in the evening and could not receive a desperate distress signal - SOS. If it had been possible to inform the Californian about the collision, it could have come to the rescue in less than an hour, but the Titanic sank for two and a half hours! They say that from the Californian they even saw signal flares sent by the sinking liner into the night sky, but did not attach any importance to it. Well, rockets, and rockets. The moneybags from the Titanic are probably celebrating something. Look, they set off fireworks for themselves...

But, fortunately for the passengers, several ships still responded to the distress signal. Among them was the Olympic, the twin of the Titanic, but it was too far away - a full five hundred miles. Apart from the Californian, the closest ship to the sinking ship was the Carpathia, less than sixty miles away. Having received an SOS signal, he changed his course and rushed to the rescue at top speed. At about two o'clock in the morning, the radio operator of the Carpathia received the last message from the liner in distress: “Go as quickly as possible, the engine room is flooded to the boilers.” There were no more radio signals from the superliner... Surviving passengers of the Titanic on board the Carpathia

There were about seven hundred people in boats in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. The agonizing hours of waiting for help dragged on. Some of the lifeboats searched for and picked up drowning people all night, while some, on the contrary, sailed away from the scene of the tragedy, fearing that the people overboard, trying to escape, might overturn the boat.

At four in the morning, four and a half hours after the Titanic collided with the ice mass, and two hours after its stern disappeared into the depths of the sea, the Carpathia approached the scene of the tragedy and began rescuing the survivors. At eight thirty the passengers of the last boat were on board. There were 704 people alive. Searching the water for the others was futile. At this water temperature, a life jacket does not save: a person dies from the cold in a few minutes.

At eight-fifty, the Carpathia, ironically owned by the same Cunard Line shipping company whose laurels the Titanic wanted to take for itself by winning the Blue Ribbon, heads for New York.

P.S.

And finally: a few photographs of the Titanic, the legendary ship. Each of them can be increased.

Before:

"Titanic" at the Harland and Wolfe shipyard before launching (colorized photograph) Titanic leaving Belfast (colorized photograph) Here you can see the “crow’s nest” for the lookout on the mast First class cabin First class cabin (colorized photo) Third class cabin (reconstruction) Cafe "Palm Yard" Café Parisien with ocean view (colorized photo) Gym on the Titanic The famous grand staircase with the clock (here DiCaprio waited for Kate Winslet on a date) Glass dome over the main staircase. Only first class passengers were allowed to admire this beauty.

You will find many more colored photographs of the Titanic on titanic-in-color.com

After:

3D model of the Titanic on the ocean floor The remains of the Titanic at the bottom Bow of the ship Fragment of a ship's hull Opened left side window Captain's helm Anchor Davit for launching rescue boats Once upon a time a man lay here Ceramic cup at the bottom The wooden china box is long gone, but the porcelain remains there There is still glass in the windows of Captain Smith's cabin. Captain Smith's bath with hot water, salt or fresh as desired