The Titanic Disaster Essay Research Paper The

The Titanic Disaster Essay, Research Paper

The Titanic Disaster

In its time the TITANIC was a state of the art ocean liner and deemed unsinkable. It was 85 years ago, that the Royal Mail Steamer (R.M.S.) Titanic, on her maiden voyage in 1912, struck an iceberg. The collision was not head-on. The berg bumped and ground along the starboard side and then was gone into the calm, moonless night. At first, few thought the damage serious. It was difficult to coax passengers into the lifeboats. Yet three hours later, the Titanic slammed into the ocean floor almost 4000 meters below, torn in two. Over 1500 of her passengers and crew were dead. And the design and operation of sea vessels changed dramatically and permanently.

Most of the discussion of the accident revolves around specific problems. There was the lack of sufficient lifeboats (enough for at most 1200 on a ship carrying 2200). There was the steaming ahead at full-speed despite various warnings about the ice field. There was the lack of binoculars for the lookout. There were the poor procedures with the new invention, the wireless (not all warnings sent to the ship reached the bridge, and a nearby ship, the operator abed, missed Titanic’s SOS). Very recently, from recovered wreckage, we find that the iron of the hull was particularly brittle even for the metallurgy of the time. Each has at one time or another been put forward as “THE reason the Titanic sank”.

What gets far less comment is that most of the problems all came from a larger, systemic problem: the owners and operators of steamships had for five decades taken larger and larger risks to save money – risks to which they had methodically blinded themselves. The Titanic disaster suddenly ripped away the blindfolds and changed dozens of attitudes, practices, and standards almost literally overnight.

The perception persists that the Titanic was, if obviously not “unsinkable” (though the White Star line actually never used that word in advertising), then very safe, as safe as the art could build her. That, despite various errors, the accident was mostly enormous bad luck. Nothing could be further from the truth. It was amazing good luck that there had been no similar accidents years earlier. For over 50 years, safety standards had been steadily deteriorating in various ways – almost always because of pressures to be “competitive”.

Walter Lord, author of the classic “A Night to Remember”, describes the process vividly in his 1986 sequel, “The Night Lives On”. He compares the ships of Titanic’s day to the first great liner, the “Great Eastern”, built in 1858. I.K. Brunel, England’s most celebrated engineer, who got every feature he wanted, designed her. The Great Eastern was not the most profitable ship, but she was a triumph of safety. She had an entire inner hull two feet inside the outer. Inside that, 15 transverse bulkheads, and one lengthwise into 32 compartments divided the ship. Watertight lower decks further divided those.

The decades passed, and dozens, then hundreds of liners were built. Competitive pressures between some 11 lines were fierce. As Walter Lord relates:

“But the engineers did not have the last word for very long…the perfect ship was no longer the vessel that best expressed the art of the shipbuilder. It was the ship that made the most money.”

“Passengers demanded attention; stewards could serve them more easily if doors were cut in the watertight bulkheads. A grand staircase required a spacious opening at every level, making a watertight deck impossible. … Stokers could work more efficiently if longitudinal bulkheads were omitted… A double hull ate up valuable passenger & cargo space; a double bottom would be enough.”

“One by one the safety precautions that marked the Great Eastern were chipped away in the interests of a more competitive ship. … When the “unsinkable” Titanic was completed in 1912, she matched the Great Eastern in only one respect: she, too, had 15 transverse bulkheads.”

“But even this was misleading. The Great Eastern’s bulkheads were carried 30 feet above the waterline; the Titanic’s, only 10 feet.”

-”The Night Lives On”, pg. 21

The Titanic’s designers thought her quite safe enough, because she could float with any two of her 16 compartments flooded, and only the worst possible accident, a collision right at a bulkhead, could even flood two. Indeed, at the bow where the ship was narrowest and the compartments much smaller, she could float with the first four flooded, and collisions were most likely at the bow.

As the Titanic nudged and shouldered her way past the huge iceberg, we can now estimate that a gash was torn in her almost 100 meters long. It was probably more an irregular series of holes and rips, but the cumulative area along that great length was square meters. The ship’s builder, Thomas Andrews, was aboard and inspected the damage with the Captain. They found that the first five compartments were flooding rapidly, and the sixth leaking.

Andrews quickly visualized the awful, inevitable mathematics. As the front compartments filled, and the bow sank, the transverse hull between the fifth and sixth compartments would drop over 10 feet – below the waterline. The water would spill over into the next compartment. So the ship would sink further, and water would spill into the next, and the nex