| I don't know of any Titanic-related conspiracy theories offhand, but have you heard of any? If so, what are some of the wackiest ones? Do any of them hold water? (zing!) | No Titanic conspiracies hold water, and I've heard 'em all -- that the builders cut costs with cheaper quality iron / rivets (there were low quality iron rivets on the ship, but only in particular areas, and for different reasons than cost), the insurance fraud, the mummy, that it was a curse from God for Lightoller's off-handed "God himself couldn't sink this ship!" claim (which probably didn't happen), the "NO POPE" thing... |
| Were there any other passengers with tales of heroism like Molly Brown? Any cool facts about her? Did the band really keep playing until the end? Any cool facts about them? We often hear the Titanic described as "unsinkable." I know she only took on this moniker after sinking, but was she really built as well as she could've been and this was just a freak accident? Or did they overestimate her capability? | Molly Brown wasn't all that heroic like common tales about her tell, regarding the Titanic, though she WAS an amazing person -- philanthropist, women's rights activist, a right decent gal. As far as the Titanic went, it's true that she didn't initially want to go into a lifeboat -- she kept giving her seats away, until three men dumped her overboard into one just as it was being launched. She also reportedly took up an oar (lots of women did) and gave her coat to one of the engineers that had survived, and had gone into a lifeboat in nothing but a tank top and pants. Yes! William Wallace Hartley's band really did play until the end, and they really did break before the ship went down, Hartley started to play solo, and then the band rejoined him. No cool facts necessarily, other than that their talent was unquestionable -- White Star Line musicians were expected to have complete memorization of over 500 pieces of music, and be able to perform them with the director simply giving the song's number in the book. The cellist had an interesting little fling with a 2nd class lady, often going to her cabin to give "private concerts". She survived -- the cellist didn't. The musicians travelled in 2nd class accommodations. The Titanic really was described as "nigh unsinkable", and for all practical purposes, she was -- designed to survive head-on collisions, beachings, impacts with other ships. In fact, her older sister ship was practically a hero in World War 1 -- she survived several torpedo and mine strikes as a troop transport, carrying over 400,000 soldiers across her tour. Titanic's accident truly was a freak accident of circumstance, of ignorance, and of confidence, to a lot of extent. The Olympic may have faired so well because after Titanic's sinking, Olympic's bulkhead doors were added and reinforced and a lot of other little security additions. |
| How do you know the band played untill the end? Wouldn't anyone who witnessed this also die? | A lot of witnesses from lifeboats who had stayed somewhat near the ship were able to clearly hear the band until the ship was listing too much to stay upright. |
| There seems to be a number of elements that contributed to this incident. Outside of simply "hitting an iceberg", what, in your opinion, is the single most important event/failure/person/whatever, that caused the tragedy? | Probably the Marconi wireless radio being down. Radio staff weren't hired by White Star Line, and they didn't take orders from the officers, except in times of emergencies. Any radio traffic coming to or from the ship was mostly based on the operators' whim, and they worked for tips, so mostly they were interested in relaying passenger messages to or from shore. The radio had been down April 13th, so on the 14th the operators were scrambling to catch up with the work load. So when important messages, such as the Californian's "Surrounded by ice on all sides" came through, they were either ignored, or worse, the operator snapped back negatively. Back then wireless communication was done on a single band, and the Californian's radio message jammed the operator's transmission to Cape Rice. So he replied to the Californian something like "Shutup, keep out, I'm in with Cape Rice", instead of relaying the message to the bridge. That /also/ upset the Californian's radio operator. He ended his shift hours early and didn't turn on the recorder for his radio (because it would keep him up). The Titanic's CQD / SOS messages fell on deaf ears for the Californian. |
| My husband's maternal grandfather is a descendant of the Phillips' family. The same family of one of the radio staff. | Amazing! There's lots of information on him. He was one of the true heroes that night, sending messages up until the second that the radio stopped working. |
| WOW. This is amazing. Someone not passing on communications is unfathomable to me, as a soldier. | It was pretty common, actually, though it was as a direct result of the Titanic disaster that all ships of a certain size were required to have 24 hour manned radios, and to prioritize any and all warnings. |
| I thought the guys in the watch tower watching Jack and Rose make out and not having binoculars was the cause of the crash... Sorry, just got back from the movie. | Haha.. Another bothersome part of the scene... Jack and Rose would be severely chastised for going onto the forecastle deck! |
| It's Cape Race. | Huh. |
| I may have been saying that wrong my entire career. |
| Changes that should have been put in place ages ago seldom are until some huge disaster happens. Sad really :( | Let's hope we don't forget that again too soon. |
| What inaccuracies, if any, did you see in James Cameron's "Titanic"? | Oh man, all kinds. They get the gist of the event right, but they put WAY too much effort into making J. Bruce Ismay look like the bad guy for suggesting the lifeboat situation was fine. Having 24 lifeboats instead of the "ideal" 60 was a practical decision -- having 60 full-sized lifeboats on top of the Titanic was a huge weight and storage issue, and would've rendered the boat deck largely useless. Plus, and this requires historical context, the Titanic was carrying far more lifeboats already than the boards of regulations had deemed necessary. The lifeboat regulations were based on information from the 1890's -- so 22 years of advancements in ship size wouldn't have been accounted for. They required a minimum # of lifeboats aboard a ship, -OR- a minimum # of deckspace devoted for lifeboats, both limits of which the Titanic already far exceeded. |
| According to Neil deGrasse Tyson, the night sky was also wrong. That's probably the biggest inaccuracy of them all. | "biggest", I see what you did there. :D. |
| Also when the ship was sinking the actors were just walking through what was supposed to be ICE COLD water like it was no big deal. | Yeah.. It wasn't convincing. |
| Isn't it also true the lifeboats were half empty? I read somewhere that if all of them would have been full 50% would have made it off. | A bit over, even, I believe the total lifeboat capacity was in the 1400's, out of 2,228 passengers and crew. The lifeboats were lowered early and half manned for a lot of reasons, from poor loading procedures to rushing to get them down to boats simply rolling off as the ship's list became more and more severe. |
| What do you think of the Titanic conspiracy? Could the Olympic have gone down that fateful night and not the Titanic? | Pardon me for cheating, but I'm gonna repost a reply I made in a previous thread. :) |
| The 'insurance fraud' stories are patently ridiculous, but they make for a good story. Happily I never retold those as half-truths in my time at the exhibition! :P For those who don't know, the Olympic was originally damaged pretty badly a few times, namely when she threw her screw in one accident and was rammed by the HMS Hawke another occasion. Conspiracy theorists suggest that the repairs to the Olympic were so costly and the Titanic insured so highly that they'd just call one ship the other, swim the Olympic (falsely called "Titanic") out to the sea, sink her, and collect a fat check. |
| It could never have happened for a few reasons, namely that the Titanic and Olympic were NOT completely identical ships. The Titanic included a covered promenade deck, a different layout for the first class cabins, unique restaurants and the grand staircase. Her steel was also labelled with her hull number, 401, or with her Board of Trade Registration number, 131428. The ship at the bottom of the ocean right now has those numbers, the covered promenade, the grand staircase, et cetera. Basically, if they had decided to swap ships for insurance fraud, they would have literally reconstructed the Olympic nearly bottom up, which would've easily negated any savings from the insurance fraud itself. |
| Any neat stories of heroism/humanity that you know of? | The story of one of the richest men aboard, Benjamin Guggenheim, escorting his "date" onto a lifeboat, then heading into the parlour with his valet. When someone tried to usher him to the deck, he said "We are dressed in our best, and prepared to go down like gentlemen." He went into the smoking room and played a hand of cards as the ship sank. It was represetnted in the movie more or less accurately. |
| What is your favorite story to tell regarding the Titanic? | The story about how the ship was on fire. O_O. |
| So one of the contributors to the tragedy (though it probably wouldn't have made a huge difference either way) was that, shortly after the ship left her berth in Belfast, she had a coal fire in one of her bunkers. It took days to put out because the fire had started deep in the coal pile. The captain was made aware of it, but decided to continue to steam on anyway. It took three days to get to where the fire was, and another day to put it out. Throughout this time it had very seriously damaged one of the bulkhead doors, and when the water pressed against this particular door, it most likely collapsed and hastened the Titanic's sinking. |
| Where was the ship when they realized there was a problem? Would it have been practical for them to head to port? | They were aware of the coal fire from day one, but they're somewhat common occurences. The clincher there was that, until they finally left Cove, there were only 3 people to dig out thousands of tons of coal, and it took days to get down to the smoldering coals and finally put them out. |
| Cobh. | Right, sorry -- "Queenstown" is more accurate, since Cobh wasn't called Cobh until the 1920's I believe, but I've never known its exact spelling. I only knew it because proud irishmen would pronounce it "Cove" while telling me the poster labeling the city "Queenstown" was inaccurate. :P. |
| What got you interested in Titanic? How did you start? | To be honest, I didn't give two shits about the Titanic until I got the job with the help of a family member who had connections. They originally hired me to be a greeter, but when I demonstrated a proficiency in some other things, they decided I was probably brainy enough to retain enough information to do it. So, I studied hard, and fell in love. :) |
| Just so you know, I've been studying everything Titanic since I was seven (that's over a decade of information collecting, here), and I love you and wish I had your job. | That's amazing -- definitely keep it up. Please feel free to inquire anything of me. Also, I love you too. <3. |
| Jebus McCreebus. It's not what you know, it's who you know. | On the strip, especially. |
| Have you ever talked to someone who has actually been to the real thing? If so, what did they tell you? (I WILL save enough money to go there before it dissolves.) | We had an iceberg for that purpose, a "real" one (in that it was a frozen wall of ice...) It was freshwater, though, so didn't measure up to the real chill. Still, we frequently had guests press their hands to it to see how long they could keep their hands to it. Once I had informed them that Carrot Top had licked the thing, they balk quickly. ;P. |
| Why didn't Rose share the door with Jack? Plus how funny was that one part where the dude fell from the back of the boat, hit the railing and spun into the water below? | Because Jack was 3rd class. Being seen with him on the same door would be a TOTAL social faux pas. |
| Who do you think has the most interesting survival story from the incident? and the most honorable death? | The most interesting survival story...... Probably Charles Joughin's, who was represented in the film even (the white-clad fellow beside Jack and Rose as they ride the forecastle railing down in the ship's final moments). He was a heavy set fellow, and allegedly, had wrapped leathers around himself and imbibed a fifth of scotch and other drinks before going into the water. Allegedly, he survived for hours in the icy water before being pulled onto the overturned collapsible B, where he stood for hours more until being pulled into another lifeboat with the other survivors of Collapsible B. |
| The most honorable death by far goes to the "firemen" -- a ship's crew who shovels coal into the fires to keep the ship powered. None of them survived. They continued powering coal to allow the radio to continue transmitting long until the lifeboats were completely gone -- the ship didn't lose power until just a few moments before she split and sank. To this day, I was told, many Cunard "firemen" and engineers still wear the patch that those 13 heroes wore in commemoration. |
| I always wondered if the power going out late in the film was real or not! Thanks. | Of course. =) |
| What do you think about the similarities between the ship Titan in the book Futility and the RMS Titanic? | OH MAN I FORGOT ABOUT THIS UNTIL YOU MENTIONED IT! |
| Crazy cool coincidences, so for those who don't know / don't want to click the link, basically this book came out in 1890's that was a social commentary about "the world's grandest liner", full of the world's wealthiest people, sailing across the north atlantic to New York and striking an ice berg and sinking, where nearly all passengers died because of a lack of lifeboats. It was pretty crazy! |
More interesting than that book in my opinion is the fact that the Titanic was screening a movie about a sinking ocean liner when it got hit by the iceberg! Nope! Snopes trolled me good! Link to www.snopes.com. | Gotta watch them troll posts ;P. |
| Is there any way the ship could have been saved from the moment it hit the iceberg? something they could have done, maybe? | They could've stopped instead of going straight to full reverse, they could've not let David Blair leave the ship with the key to the crow's nest binoculars in his pocket, they could've stayed in Belfast to put out the fire in the coal bunker, they could've relayed more iceberg warnings to the bridge, they could've pushed back the launch date to finish the ship (she was about 1/3 of her cabins empty because they weren't finished).... All kinds of things, tragically. :( |
| So if 1/3 of the cabins were empty, how many spots was that? At least those hypothetical guests didn't die. | Her total capacity was ~3,550. |
| Wow the ship wasn't finished? Is there anything else interesting related to that you might talk about? Great ama, thanks for doing it! | Hmm.. Lots of interesting little facts. Only three funnels on the ship were real -- the 4th funnel was fake, but added to make the ship look more grand. It was carrying a lot of weird things, too -- an interesting one is that one woman claimed as she wandered the ship the night of the collision that she heard a cock's crow, which was considered to be a deathly omen. She may well have -- the Titanic was carrying 13 chickens and a rooster! |
| Are there any artifacts from the sinking that you believe should not be recovered out of respect for the victims, as many claim? | I'm not much for "remembering the dead" as it were -- they're dead, they don't need things, they don't care about their stuff because they're dead. From a personal perspective, I don't think anything about the ship should be sacred, however I really enjoyed the policy of RMS Titanic, Inc. to return any artifacts to surviving family if they can prove it's theirs. I think that's definitely a social responsibility for recovered artifacts. |
| Are their still human remains recoverable trapped inside the hull, would you consider these should be left. | There would not be any remains, no. The entire ship is open to ocean life at the bottom, and crustaceans and fish would have cleaned out everything, including the bones. |
| What artifacts have been discovered and returned to families since you've worked there? If none, what do you know of? | A pocket watch was one -- returned to the daughter of a survivor, then returned to RMS Titanic, Inc. upon her death. |
| What's your favorite titanic related joke? Also, what's the spookiest fact you know... also, how do you feel about Battleship? | This horrifying gift-shop item is probably my favorite / most horrifying "joke". The spookiest "Facts" probably had to do with the exhibit themselves, and I retold them frequently, even though I'm a big skeptic and didn't believe a word of it until some really weird shit happened to me one night (though I still kind of rationalize that away as different things). Battleship the game? I love it. :o. |
| I'd say this is probably in poorer taste than that ice cube tray: Link to www.partyusa.com. | Yeeowch.... |
| Oh man, don't leave me hanging like that. Now you have to tell me EVERY spooky or weird fact you know about the Titanic. :P. | The big one was the story that a journalist aboard had told a woman to impress her, most likely -- he said there was a cursed mummy aboard the ship. This was "corraborated" by one couple who decided against boarding at the last moment because an old woman said "that ship is cursed". There was no mummy, though, and it's no surprise an old woman thought the ship was cursed -- hundreds of thousands of people saw her off and 2300 people were aboard. SOMEBODY had to be a doomsayer. |
| What happened that night? | I'll preface this by saying I was in a casino, underneath an empty IMAX theatre, and above a casino floor. Noises could've come from anywhere. |
| spooky voice |
| BUT THAT'S NOT WHAT IT WAS. |
| Okay so the place had 16 rooms, and near the end is a room that's designed to be completely dark. House lights shine special blue filtered lights on a 15 ton piece of the titanic's hull and the room it's in is huge. I was cleaning some cases after hours, and the house lights had come on, and I hear some voices on the other side of the room. The door is blocked from view by the big piece, and I think its my supervisor, so I go take a peek into the previous room. This room is /also/ dark, followed by an even darker hallway, and two even darker rooms after that, and I hear a sort've ghostly giggling noise. I assume some guests got stuck or I missed them or something and it's after hours, so I need to go get them out. Each preceeding room I walk into, the opposite door shuts, so I start hurrying, running through -- I go past the promenade deck exhibit, it's getting darker, the laughing gets louder, it's getting weirder. Finally, I get into the Grand Staircase room -- the stairs go up to a light gallery. I peek around, nothing up there, so I leave. As soon as I am back out that room, I hear what sounds like footsteps, like someone just took a running leap down the steps. TOTALLY freaks me the hell out. |
| At this point I get on my wrist radio (secret service style), telling my supervisor "There are kids playing around in here, check the cameras for me". He says he sees nothing, nobody's in there but me. I check all the doors, locked in and out, even the fire gate is down. So, a little freaked out, I return to that big piece room, and start hearing footsteps behind me. I turn around, and the footsteps sound like such that, were I looking at somebody, they'd have been stomping, hard, up to my face -- but, naturally, nobody's there. At THAT point, I just threw my rag and spray bottle, said "Nope!" and told my supervisor I'm done. He wouldn't go in afterwards either -- the cleaning lady had to recover my stuff the next morning. |
| I remember thinking when I went on one of these things in 8th grade that it might be in bad taste. I still went on it 50+ times tho, those things were ridiculously fun. | May you step on a lego for your disrespect! |
| I bet that old woman shook her head ruefully and said "I told them so" to herself. I wonder if she naysayed everything, and this was the big payoff of her life, or if she'd just had a weird feeling about this one. | Yeah, kind of like a hypochondriac getting cancer. It probably validated every worry she ever had in life. |
| You need to sex this up, flesh it out a bit, and submit it over at /nosleep. It'll be a hit. | I'll do just that. Sexin' things up is a personal favorite activity. |
| How many artifacts have been recovered in total? | During my time at the exhibition, over 5,500 artifacts had been recovered, ~320 of which were in my exhibit. A lot of it is coal -- RMS TItanic, Inc. and Premier Exhibitions, Inc. sell the coal in knick-knacks. |
| Where can I buy authentic titanic coal, btw? | Online or at any RMS Titanic gift shop, basically. |
| What would you say the coolest artifact recovered was and, if necessary, why? | My favorite artifacts were culturally related things -- it was apparently a practice for gentleman to carry "story cards" to entertain women or children in a pinch. They were small postcard-sized pages with tiny stories printed in them. I loved reading those! |
| Wow that's pretty cool so if conversations went dry they would, well, whip it out? | Hahahaha.. YES. |
| Any idea why they went out of style? Those sound awesome. | It was completely awesome! They had snarky cards too, for souvenirs, I suspect. We had an artifact postcard that said something like "If you see a woman in a pretty dress, don't talk to her -- go buy the dress. It's cheaper" or something. |
| Well, that sounds nice, but are there efforts to recover that freaking necklace that bitch threw back in the ocean? | The necklace was fictional. :) |
| Do you believe the theory that when the protestants were building the Titanic in Belfast, the Catholics were busy making the ice-berg? | As an ex-catholic, I can independently confirm that this is 100% true. :D. |
| If this is a bit too personal, please disregard: What's your story on becoming an ex-catholic? | It's Ask Me Anything, after all! Not a terrifically interesting story, though. I was raised as a softcore catholic for a while, and I kind of accepted that this Jesus dude had died for my sins around easter and is born around Christmas and I have to hang out with family on both occasions. Around high school I really started to pursue the priesthood as my mother pressured me to, but as a lot of ex-catholics will tell you, the #1 way to make an atheist is to make them read the bible. I became disenchanted with it, embraced rationalism, and the rest is history. |
| Knowing what you know, if you had been on the Titanic as she was going down, what would have been your approach to survive? | Sheesh... Find leathers, gathering mattresses. There was a little Japanese fellow (I wish I remembered his name, sorry!) who strapped himself to a door and a mattress. He survived, even, being pulled aboard by officer Lowe as he searched for survivors. He was frozen, and given a coat and a blanket by some of the passengers. When he warmed up though he even took an oar. Unfortunately, his home country didn't look so kindly on his survival. It shamed his family, and he died alone. |
| his home country didn't look so kindly on his survival. It shamed his family, and he died alone. Wait, what? Why? | An honor code, I think. That he survived where so many women and children didn't implied that he was somehow a coward -- that one of them could have survived if he hadn't. |
| So is it possible that as every person on board had a mattress, that they might have survived if they had been employed as flotation devices? | Or at least increased their chances, if they'd strapped a few mattresses to a door like Masabumi had. |
| Not all of them, certainly, but it might've helped. |
| You are referring to Masabumi Hosono and yes, in those days his behaviour would be looked upon as shameful. These days, not so much. | Exactly, that's his name! Thank you =) |
| Following up on that particular topic: could the eddies created by the ship sinking have been fightable for people sinking with the ship? If not, how far would one have had to be away from the sinking ship to not be pulled down? | Reports from witnesses indicated that was no suction whatsoever -- Charles Joughin was riding the stern rail down "like an elevator" and stepped off the ship into the water without getting his hair wet. Mythbusters has an episode about what forces are required to suck someone down into water after a sinking ship. |
| Did anything you find really catch you by surprise? | Tiny-ass clothing. I'm a bigger guy, and people were an average of a foot shorter back then than we are today. Some of the books were in immaculate condition, too. |
| Oh -- also, "Calling Cards". We had some. It's a phrase based on a real thing! You would call upon a visitor, and the butler / valet / greeter would take your calling card, take it to the master of the estate and recite its contents. Then they'd return, and give you your card back, or invite you in. |
| Have you ever given tours to survivors of the Titanic? How did they respond? Overall, how emotional do people get when learning about it? | Never to a survivor -- by the time I had the job, there was only one last living survivor, Melvina Dean, died shortly after. To living relatives of survivors, though, somewhat frequently, and they were always very overcome with emotion. |
| Given that this exhibit was on the strip, people's reactions were all over the place, but the cost was high enough ($32 for a single adult ticket O_O) that generally only people that really were interested came in. A lot of tears. |
| I've always heard that the Titanic's rudder was far too small to properly steer the ship around, say a floating iceberg. Are there any other fundamental design flaws like this that contributed to the disaster? Were these design flaws addressed in Titanic's sister ships like Olympic? | The Titanic's rudder size was fine -- the problem was that the rudder was directly in front of the largest of the ship's three screws, which was also the only reversing screw. This plays a huge part in the sinking -- when Lee called the bridge with "Iceberg right ahead", officer Murdoch put her screws into "full reverse" instead of stopping. The screw just slammed into gear and started turning immediately, churning millions of tiny bubbles -- think of it like locking your wheels in an emergency stop instead of edging the brakes to slow down. It's possible that this decision was the final nail in the coffin for Titanic. As far as I know, this was not addressed in the Titanic's sister ships. |
| The center screw was the smallest, and was the only one that did not reverse. | Edit** Position when the order to go hard to starboard was put, that is. In those days people didn't refer to which direction you wanted to turn by which direction you intended to go, but rather which direction to point the Rudder. The rudder turns to the right, "starboard", and pushes the nose of the ship left, "port". |
| Hindsight being 20/20...was there anything at all the crew, captain could have done to keep the ship afloat after the impact had they known immediately what happened, how bad the damage was? | Yes -- when the ship first hit, Murdoch ordered the ship full reverse, then stopped. Captain Smith then ordered the ship half ahead, changing the course to Halifax, thinking he could perhaps dock there as an emergency. (This also contributed to the difficulty in finding the ship -- she was some 13 miles I believe northwest of her last posted position because nobody was informed of this change of course.) The damage to the hull of the titanic acted like a "scoop" in that sense, pushing water in and causing greatly hastened flooding, before the Captain understood the extent of the damage and ordered the ship stopped. Keep in mind though that this ship was massive... it took 45 minutes for the ship's carpenter, then the Captain himself to "sound" the ship, walking back and forth along it to ascertain damage. |
| Would the ship have still sunk had they decided to stay dead in the water (no pun intended)? | Yes, it would still have sunk, but perhaps given them a few hours longer to fill the lifeboats. Chances are high the ship would still have been gone by the time the Carpathia arrived, though. |
| So was the sinking inevitable, then? | Yes -- after the strike, sinking was inevitable. |
| Given that the ship crashed the way it did, is there a possible scenario/way to save the ship at all? | Not if you're referring to once the ship collided, but there were a dozen ways beforehand that the tragedy may have been avoided entirely! |
| Did you ever play a PC game back in the 90s called Titanic: Adventure out of Time? What are your thoughts? I thought it was pretty cool the way they reconstructed the whole ship, but alas you can't walk through all the nooks and crannies. | I've heard about it, but never gotten to play it! I wish... |
| There are a small group of programmers that are rebuilding the game with the Cryengine 3 used to power Crysis 2. Here is an old video they did and their Facebook page, full of screenshots of their most recent work. I think they are trying to release it by the 100th anniversary on the 14th. | SO MANY AWESOMES. |
| What do you think fascinates people so much about the sinking of the Titanic in comparison to other "transport catastrophes" such as the Hindenburg disaster? | Only that it kept coming up. Even in context of the time, the Titanic was forgotten about fairly quickly -- the great war, the great depression and World War 2 were quick to follow, relatively. Larger ships were released just the following year. If it weren't for her discovery and subsequent dives, she'd have never been revived in the 80's, then James Cameron's film of course created a huge resurgence. |
