10 Key Mistakes That Sank The RMS Titanic (History Documentary)
One of history's most notorious naval disasters gets re-examined in this explorative history documentary. We follow the Titanic’s journey from construction to catastrophe, and chart the ten key mistakes that were made along the way. The sinking of the Titanic after hitting an iceberg made it the most famous naval disaster in history.
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TVTranscript
00:00:00400 miles south of Newfoundland, a million-ton chunk of Greenland ice drifts into the North
00:00:10Atlantic shipping lanes. After a journey of more than 1,900 miles, it is about to become
00:00:18the most notorious iceberg in history.
00:00:24Everyone knows that the Titanic hit an iceberg and sank.
00:00:29Titanic's story is as iconic as the ship herself. She was the largest and most luxurious liner
00:00:36of her era, and supposedly unsinkable. But a giant iceberg is only part of Titanic's
00:00:44story.
00:00:45If anyone tells you that they found the one reason Titanic sank, then they haven't read
00:00:50enough.
00:00:51The bow section of the ship couldn't properly fit into the yard that the ship was being
00:00:57built in, and that's the reason they decided to go for hand rivers.
00:01:01Because the second officer had been changed over before the sinking, they didn't actually
00:01:06have a key for the binoculars.
00:01:08A number of passengers opened their portholes to see if they could see what was going on.
00:01:15A tragedy on the scale of the Titanic disaster was caused by hundreds of little events, but
00:01:20there are about ten that are the key events.
00:01:23All of these things combined led to the inevitable fact that the Titanic would hit the iceberg
00:01:27and sink.
00:01:30Ten mistakes. On their own, each of these was survivable, but they piled one on top
00:01:36of the other to cause a catastrophe.
00:01:46The seeds of the Titanic disaster were sown in 1908, three years before she was even launched.
00:01:54It's been a warm, wet season in Greenland. Basically, it snowed more.
00:02:00And that snow was accumulating on top of the ice sheets, and as that snow built up, the
00:02:05weight weighed down on those ice sheets and caused them to crack.
00:02:11Over the next two years, moisture crept into the cracks, weakening the ice.
00:02:16The cracks grew. The snow continued to build.
00:02:24And eventually the weight of that causes this iceberg to carve off.
00:02:30And a massive iceberg started drifting south towards the Atlantic.
00:02:41September 1911.
00:02:43As the giant berg began its journey, Titanic was completing her construction at the Harland
00:02:49and Wolff shipyard in Belfast.
00:02:53She was the second of three identical ships, Olympic, Titanic and Britannic, commissioned
00:02:59by the White Star Line shipping company and designed to wow the world.
00:03:04This sounds a cliché, but she really was beautiful.
00:03:13The Titanic was the largest passenger ship in the world at the time of her introduction
00:03:20into service.
00:03:21882 feet long, which made her the longest ship afloat.
00:03:25In fact, she was the largest moving object made by man at the time.
00:03:32If you stood her on the end, she's nearly as tall as the Empire State Building.
00:03:36And yet she's only as wide as one third of a football field.
00:03:41So she's very long. She's very sleek.
00:03:43She's very graceful on the outside.
00:03:46On the inside, she is opulent beyond belief.
00:03:54They wanted to create the most comfortable Atlantic crossing you can possibly imagine.
00:04:07Alongside all that luxury, Titanic boasted the latest safety features.
00:04:12More lifeboats than any other ship afloat.
00:04:15The brand new technology of radio.
00:04:20And watertight bulkheads designed to stop the ship from sinking.
00:04:26The effectiveness of these bulkheads was about to be tested in real life.
00:04:31In an incident that would trigger the first great mistake in Titanic's story.
00:04:42On the 20th of September, 1911, Titanic's sister ship, the Olympic, was steaming down
00:04:48the Solent.
00:04:51The Olympic is about to set off for her fifth voyage across the Atlantic.
00:04:55And she's sailing through the Solent parallel to a Navy warship called HMS Hawke.
00:05:04And they were having a bit of a race.
00:05:06So there was a bit of fun going on between the two ships.
00:05:09Due to the restricted channel, the Olympic tried to manoeuvre out of the way of the Hawke,
00:05:16but it was misjudged.
00:05:19The Olympic effectively cuts up the Hawke, and he couldn't stop the collision.
00:05:28Unfortunately, HMS Hawke was designed to spike other ships.
00:05:32Her hull was built as a battering ram, so this huge ram actually went straight into
00:05:38the side of Olympic.
00:05:39It cracked plates, it popped rivets.
00:05:41There were very few ships in 1912 that could have survived such a disaster.
00:05:47But the fact is, Olympic's bulkheads had contained the flooding.
00:05:51The Olympic, like the Titanic, featured a series of internal bulkheads dividing the
00:05:56ship into watertight compartments.
00:06:00Even though the warship had punched a hole in her side, the bulkhead compartments prevented
00:06:05water from flooding the whole ship, allowing her to stay afloat.
00:06:09I think the spectacular survival of the Olympic from the Hawke collision planted a dangerous
00:06:15idea in people's minds.
00:06:17If a warship can take you on, and you can just sail home again and get fixed, then it's
00:06:22giving people the wrong idea.
00:06:25Many would have thought, well, that really does make the ship relatively unsinkable.
00:06:35But that attitude wasn't just confined to the uninitiated.
00:06:39The captain of the Olympic at the time of her collision with Hawke is Edward Smith,
00:06:44and he will be Titanic's captain on her maiden voyage.
00:06:49Captain Smith was the commodore of the White Star Line, and as such, he got to take out
00:06:53all the new ships on their maiden voyages.
00:06:55And he became extremely confident, because with each new ship, they got more powerful,
00:07:00they got more safe, they got more technologically advanced.
00:07:03And by the time he got to Olympic and Titanic, he really believed there was nothing that
00:07:07could sink these vessels.
00:07:10In 1907, he spoke about, I cannot conceive of a situation whereby a disaster could happen
00:07:15at sea now.
00:07:16Modern shipbuilding has gone beyond that.
00:07:18So to his mind, he's had a practical demonstration of how one of these Olympic-class ships can
00:07:24be severely damaged and yet not sink.
00:07:26And this helps build this public perception that Titanic is unsinkable when she sails.
00:07:34Not only did the crash lull White Star into a state of dangerous complacency, it had another
00:07:40serious consequence for the Titanic.
00:07:43Following Olympic's collision, she had to be rushed to Belfast for repairs.
00:07:49For White Star, it was a matter of urgency to get Olympic back up and running as soon
00:07:54as possible.
00:07:55Don't forget, she's already got bookings to ferry people across the Atlantic.
00:07:59So in terms of your priorities, if you're White Star Line, you're losing revenue.
00:08:02So you set Titanic aside and you fix Olympic before you go back to finishing Titanic.
00:08:10Prioritising the repairs to Olympic halted Titanic's construction and delayed her maiden
00:08:15voyage by three weeks.
00:08:17The delay of a month into service put Titanic's entry into commission in April, right at the
00:08:27beginning of the ice period on the North Atlantic.
00:08:31A season which is notorious for icebergs.
00:08:35If that wasn't bad enough, freak weather meant that spring 1912 would see more icebergs than
00:08:41usual on the shipping routes.
00:08:48April 1912.
00:08:51Thanks to the Olympic, the launch of the Titanic has slipped by three weeks.
00:08:57The delay would push her maiden voyage into what was shaping up to be a bad season for
00:09:02icebergs in the North Atlantic.
00:09:05Usually, in any April, you'd expect sight of about 125 of them.
00:09:11That year, there were over 400.
00:09:14It's about the worst that they've seen for 50 years.
00:09:17More than three times the seasonal average of icebergs was drifting into the Atlantic
00:09:22shipping lanes, pushed south by a particularly unusual set of weather conditions.
00:09:29There were a number of factors that brought the ice across the shipping lanes in April 1912.
00:09:34One of them was a warm winter in 1911, and this had created a huge amount of freezing
00:09:40meltwater.
00:09:41There was so much ice in the Labrador Current in April 1912 that instead of the bergs melting
00:09:47away as soon as they hit the Gulf Stream, this actual floodwater, this freezing river,
00:09:53flowed very far south into the Atlantic.
00:09:58But the iceberg that would be Titanic's nemesis was on a circuitous journey.
00:10:05The iceberg doesn't drift straight into the Atlantic.
00:10:09It follows the currents.
00:10:10It travels north for a little while, and it's journeying around for about six months until
00:10:15eventually it drifts into the shipping lanes just south of Newfoundland in Canada.
00:10:22It was slowly melting, but the way that it was melting would make it particularly dangerous.
00:10:30Because of the way it's melting in the water, we've got this ridge that's formed just
00:10:36underneath the surface, this jaggedy, sharp ridge that is really, really dangerous to
00:10:40ships and can't actually be seen by them because it's under the water.
00:10:45This was part of a minefield of ice forming in the Atlantic shipping lanes, a minefield
00:10:51that Titanic would soon have to navigate.
00:10:5510th of April, 1912.
00:10:58The RMS Titanic pulled out of Southampton Harbour with 2,224 passengers and crew and
00:11:04set out on a seven-day maiden voyage for New York.
00:11:10Titanic was planning to be at Pier 59 in New York on the 17th of April.
00:11:15Now, in fact, given the distance from Europe to New York, she only had to maintain an average
00:11:20of 18 knots.
00:11:21But when she hit the iceberg, she was going much faster than that.
00:11:26The simple fact is she was going too fast, 22 knots in an ice field.
00:11:29Had she been going slower, she may have missed the berg, everything else would have been academic.
00:11:34This excessive speed is the second major mistake that caught out the Titanic and perhaps the
00:11:40most avoidable, because the Titanic's captain, Edward Smith, had a reputation for speed.
00:11:47Captain Smith was the White Star Line's best captain.
00:11:50He was known as the millionaire's captain, and that's because people loved travelling with him.
00:11:56Not only is he a competent captain and a captain that you would trust with your big shiny new
00:12:01ship, but more importantly, he has the patter.
00:12:05He was a bane, he was sophisticated, he looked the part.
00:12:09The millionaire's captain, Edward Smith, had a reputation for speed.
00:12:14He looked the part.
00:12:16The millionaires and the first class passengers, they love him.
00:12:19He's very good at schmoozing.
00:12:22After all, being the master of one of these big ships is really being in charge of a big
00:12:29group of passengers, socialising with them.
00:12:34People would book on to a ship to sail with Captain Smith, so nobody else was going to get the job.
00:12:41He really liked going fast as well.
00:12:44He liked to get his passengers there as fast as possible.
00:12:47And let's face it, these passengers wanted to get there on time, and they knew that come
00:12:51hell or high water, Smith would get them there.
00:12:56The White Star Line pitched themselves as the reliable option.
00:12:59If they say that they will get you to New York on Wednesday, then you will be there
00:13:03on Wednesday, come what may.
00:13:06The pressure was increased by the fact that this was Titanic's first voyage.
00:13:11Captain Smith and the White Star Line wanted to surprise New York on this maiden voyage
00:13:16arrival by Titanic being at Pier 59 when the sun came up.
00:13:21In order to do that, Captain Smith had to reach the Ambrose Channel lightship by Tuesday afternoon.
00:13:28The Ambrose lightship sits at the entrance to the Ambrose Channel, which is essentially
00:13:32where you approach New York.
00:13:34The aim was to arrive at the Ambrose Channel on Tuesday afternoon that would then facilitate
00:13:41a good entry into New York with the tides.
00:13:45And that essentially is what everybody wants.
00:13:50So there was a lot riding on the success of Titanic's maiden voyage, which is why J.
00:13:56Bruce Ismay, chairman of the White Star Line, was on board.
00:14:00Bruce Ismay was effectively the owner of the Titanic, and this voyage was extremely
00:14:05important to him.
00:14:06He had many guests that he had personally invited onto the trip, and he wanted to show
00:14:11off the opulence and excellence of his new vessel.
00:14:15In the first-class restaurant, passengers ate French haute cuisine served on Titanic's
00:14:20tailor-made spode china before working it off in the well-equipped gymnasium.
00:14:26There was even a heated swimming pool, along with a smoking room with stained-glass windows,
00:14:33strictly for the gentlemen.
00:14:35White Star Line is saying we can make it more comfortable.
00:14:38What they're trying to do is make their passengers forget they're at sea.
00:14:50On board were all the aliens.
00:14:53On board were all the A-listers of Edwardian society.
00:14:58It's a statement.
00:14:59It's a way of saying, look at how much money I've got and what I can do with it.
00:15:04The Guggenheims, JJ Astor.
00:15:06These are high-class Americans, so you really had the cream of American society on board.
00:15:11It would have been very embarrassing for Captain Smith and the White Star Line to have had
00:15:17Titanic arrive late, inconveniencing all these celebrity passengers.
00:15:22It would have certainly hit the headlines in New York.
00:15:26Less high-profile, but just as important, were the hundreds of third-class passengers
00:15:31emigrating to America on the lower decks.
00:15:35Surprisingly, their fares would contribute up to 50% of the profits for the voyage.
00:15:41The simple fact is that vessels that big only existed because of steerage or third class.
00:15:46Immigrants, basically, they were travelling from the old world to the new, from Europe to America.
00:15:51They're going in search of the American dream.
00:15:55You would find them in the less well-to-do parts of the ship, in the third-class quarters.
00:16:00There was less in terms of sort of high-class wooden finishing there.
00:16:04Everything was far more utilitarian in the third class.
00:16:08It was a hugely symbolic voyage for these people in choosing to do it on Titanic.
00:16:13They're sailing, as promised, with more comfort and steerage than they could have expected
00:16:18with anyone else or on any other ship.
00:16:20And there's certainly documented accounts of how impressed they were
00:16:24with their quarters once they got on board.
00:16:27So, everybody talks about first class on the Titanic and how amazing it was.
00:16:31But White Star Line didn't make their massive profits with first class.
00:16:35They made it in taking steerage passengers to the new world.
00:16:40These are the people that made the ships pay their way.
00:16:42Without the immigrant traffic, these ships would not have been possible.
00:16:46Captain Smith knew that speed was the key to getting these people to their new life in good time.
00:16:53What we know from Smith's logbook is he was gradually going faster and faster.
00:16:57As the engines of these new liners settled down, he was putting on more speed.
00:17:01So, Smith would usually average a speed of around 21 knots.
00:17:05Two or three knots faster than the minimum required.
00:17:10Invariably, most captains operating on a transatlantic voyage
00:17:15will want to go as fast as possible in the early part of the voyage
00:17:20to have something in hand in case they encounter fog.
00:17:24Fog is very prevalent on the North Atlantic and it generally means you have to slow down.
00:17:31So, by going faster at the beginning, you have something in hand just in case you meet the unexpected fog.
00:17:40This was quite the norm in 1912.
00:17:42Skippers tended not to slow down until they had visibility problems.
00:17:46They always felt they could see far enough ahead to turn or to stop.
00:17:50Icebergs were a navigational hazard which you had to take into account.
00:17:53But it was more usual for ships to arrive late than hit icebergs.
00:17:57Smith would not have been unduly worried by the iceberg risk.
00:18:01Seven months earlier, he'd been captain of the Olympic when she survived a serious collision.
00:18:07If you are Smith and you are captain of the Olympic and she survived being rammed
00:18:12by a scary-looking spike on the front of a Royal Naval vessel,
00:18:17then you are not going to be that concerned about what a little iceberg might do to you.
00:18:23Because in your mind, if there's a big iceberg, your people are going to see it and steer away from it.
00:18:29No doubt the perceived risk of striking an iceberg was so small that it was discounted.
00:18:38But there was the very real risk if the ship arrived late in New York, there would be a lot of adverse publicity.
00:18:46But on this particular voyage, the captain had something else to worry about, smouldering in the decks below.
00:18:53Something that the company had expressly concealed from its passengers.
00:18:59It is now quite well known that Titanic was in fact on fire when she left Southampton on her maiden voyage.
00:19:07In 1912, ships were powered by steam and the boilers were powered by coal.
00:19:13And Titanic used 600 tonnes of coal a day, which was shoveled into the boilers by a team of firemen.
00:19:21The whole idea is that the coal would power the ships and the ships would be powered by steam.
00:19:26And the Titanic was powered by coal.
00:19:29And the Titanic was powered by steam.
00:19:33The whole idea is that the coal would power the ship from one side of the Atlantic to the other.
00:19:38Sometimes in some of the bunkers you could get combustion of a piece of coal, which would result in a bunker fire.
00:19:44When you have a pile of coal stored in a bunker, oxygen or water can get in and start reacting with the coal.
00:19:52The ingredients for a fire are oxygen, which we've got, a heat source, which we have again here, and fuel, which is our coal.
00:20:00So all the ingredients are there.
00:20:02And as more of this coal combusts, the heat goes up in that room and therefore more coal will catch fire.
00:20:11And it's almost like a chain reaction.
00:20:14When they gave evidence to the inquiry into the sinking, Titanic's firemen revealed that a fire had taken hold in the coal bunker in Boiler Room 5.
00:20:23The fire had been going since Belfast, when Titanic would have sailed with a skeleton crew round to Southampton to make the voyage.
00:20:30So when the Titanic left Southampton, the fire was already there?
00:20:33The firemen testified that they were under strict instructions to keep the bunker blaze secret from the passengers.
00:20:40It's not really surprising that the crew were told not to let the passengers know.
00:20:44Just like if a 747 took off with a slightly dodgy engine, but you let it fly because it doesn't threaten the integrity of the other three,
00:20:55it wouldn't announce to the passengers, oh, by the way, we think we've got a problem with this engine.
00:20:59Bunker fires were commonplace in the steam age, and the standard solution was to dig out the burning coal as quickly as possible.
00:21:07It was not difficult to deal with, but hard work.
00:21:10The coal fire gets so hot that if you play hoses on it, it evaporates the water.
00:21:15So the only way to put a coal fire out is to rake the coal out and feed it to the boilers.
00:21:21The fireman in question in this case was Fred Barrett.
00:21:24He would have a crew of anything between 8 and 10 men working on shift 24 hours a day.
00:21:29The whole idea was to empty that bunker, get the coal to the furnaces and the boilers.
00:21:33Once the bunker's empty, the fire goes with it.
00:21:37Barrett says that the fire was strong enough so that they had to completely empty that bunker of coal to get rid of the flames.
00:21:44The three-storey high bunker was only finally emptied on Saturday the 13th of April, one day before the collision.
00:21:52Fire was burning for something in the region of about 10 days. It took that long to actually empty the bunker.
00:21:57Taking 10 days to put out such a serious fire was bound to have consequences.
00:22:04When you think about it, it's quite obvious that days and days of fire heat on something is going to have an effect on the bunker.
00:22:13Burning at between 500 and 1,000 degrees Celsius, the fire would have made the steel walls of the bunker red hot.
00:22:20If you imagine a sheet of metal, which the Titanic was made of, if you imagine that is made up of individual building blocks,
00:22:29imagine those building blocks are attached together with glue.
00:22:32That glue is going to get warmer and it's going to make that sheet of metal more bendy, so that's what happens when it heats up.
00:22:40They're not really designed to withstand that kind of heat and it could have been much hotter than 500 degrees in there.
00:22:48The sheet of steel that formed the bunker's rear wall did another critical job.
00:22:53It was part of a watertight bulkhead, the safety feature specifically designed to stop the ship from flooding if she got a hole in the hull.
00:23:02We know for a fact that the heat caused by the fire did affect the bulkhead between boiler room six and five.
00:23:09What two of the surviving firemen actually said was that once the coal was taken out of bunker number five,
00:23:15that you could see how the bunker had warped because of the continued heat it had been exposed to.
00:23:20Barrett described it as being dinged in on one side and out on the other side.
00:23:24So the warping of the steel plates may have weakened one of Titanic's vital watertight bulkheads.
00:23:30We know from the inquiry into the Titanic disaster that the intense heat of the bunker fire on the Titanic had actually deflected the metal of the hull
00:23:40and this meant that there was no longer a perfect seal and in fact a fire-damaged plate in the bulkhead
00:23:46may have been weeping about one or two buckets of water per hour even before the collision.
00:23:53So there was a degree of the bulkhead being compromised.
00:23:56To what degree, no one's really sure.
00:23:58But the mere fact that it was dinged at all suggests that there was something wrong.
00:24:02Under normal conditions, this would have had very little effect on the safety of the ship.
00:24:07It's an inconvenience of the job. It's something they would have dealt with before successfully.
00:24:12They wouldn't have been obsessing about the integrity of the ship because of the bunker fire.
00:24:19It would take something really extraordinary to exploit any weakness caused by the fire.
00:24:3111th of April, 1912.
00:24:34In the freezing waters of the North Atlantic, massive icebergs have drifted over the Atlantic.
00:24:39In the freezing waters of the North Atlantic, massive icebergs have drifted south into the transatlantic shipping lanes.
00:24:46Bergs come in all sorts of different shapes and sizes.
00:24:49Some of them were just things called growlers, which is really just huge lumps of ice floating near the surface.
00:24:56The berg the Titanic actually crashed into was larger than this five-storey engine behind me.
00:25:10The luxurious RMS Titanic is a day into her maiden voyage.
00:25:15Her 1,317 passengers enjoying the finest White Star has to offer.
00:25:23But as she steamed towards New York at a brisk 22 knots, the gigantic iceberg was drifting slowly south.
00:25:40When it hit warmer waters, it started to change shape.
00:25:45The iceberg started off being about 500 metres long.
00:25:50And as it drifted through the sea, it started to melt away.
00:25:55It's about 100 metres across and there's a huge section of it still under the water.
00:26:02She has more than a million tonnes of ice and most of it is below the surface.
00:26:08And there's a huge jagged edge of it just waiting to snag you as you go past.
00:26:16If Titanic maintained her current course, she would miss the berg by several miles.
00:26:23And this was one iceberg no captain wanted to meet.
00:26:27Once you get out to sea, it's up to you to navigate through an ice field.
00:26:33By 1912, ships weren't sailing entirely in the dark.
00:26:39Most transatlantic passenger liners had cutting-edge wireless radio invented by Marconi
00:26:45and were expected to alert each other to the location of dangerous bergs.
00:26:50Early 20th century, Marconi and wireless was a big thing.
00:26:53Basically, the telegraphists were trained in what they called Morse code.
00:26:57The whole idea was that they would signal using a key to a ship which could be,
00:27:02in the case of the Titanic, several hundred miles away,
00:27:05depending on how big and how high your antenna was.
00:27:08But on the night of Sunday the 14th, the wireless operators in Titanic's Marconi room
00:27:14were about to make a mistake because they weren't worrying about ice warnings
00:27:18they had other priorities.
00:27:26In 1912, radio was a novelty.
00:27:30The radio operators were employed by the Marconi company and not the White Star Line
00:27:36and what they were interested in doing is getting paid to send messages from passengers
00:27:41to the shore of Marconi.
00:27:42It's the equivalent of having Wi-Fi now.
00:27:45It was something for passengers to communicate about stocks and shares
00:27:50or what time people would meet other people.
00:28:13The wireless operators, they are there as a commercial entity to send passenger traffic
00:28:20so there's a conflict of interest between what they prioritise
00:28:25and how urgently certain messages are dealt with.
00:28:30The volume of passenger messages that Sunday night
00:28:34was putting Titanic's senior wireless operator, Jack Phillips, under extreme pressure.
00:28:39To be a wireless operator on one of these big transatlantic liners
00:28:43you had to be really good at your job.
00:28:45You had to be really swift at sending and receiving morse code.
00:28:49This was a brand new technology and it attracted young people
00:28:54equivalent of computer geeks today.
00:28:56You have to be able to fix your own set on the move as well.
00:28:59You can't call an engineer when you're in the middle of the Atlantic.
00:29:02As well as incoming passenger messages,
00:29:04the operators received urgent safety alerts from nearby shipping.
00:29:09They were marked with three letters to highlight their importance.
00:29:14MSG, Master Servicegram, was a priority message
00:29:20that was intended to be sent to the captain
00:29:23and it was used for things such as ice warnings and the like.
00:29:28If they have the MSG prefix, you make sure that the captain gets it.
00:29:32Several ice warnings from other ships earlier that day were marked MSG
00:29:37and were duly relayed to Captain Smith.
00:29:42Captain Smith saw and received all these messages
00:29:45so he decided to go a little bit further on about half an hour additional travel
00:29:50before turning west towards New York.
00:29:53Heading a little bit further south just to sort of give himself a little bit more leeway
00:29:57to what he thought lay ahead.
00:30:02At 5.50pm, the ship changed course.
00:30:07Soon afterwards, Captain Smith quit the bridge to go to dinner,
00:30:11unaware of what the change of course would mean.
00:30:17While Smith entertained first class passengers to a ten-course dinner
00:30:22featuring oysters and filet mignon,
00:30:24in the Marconi room, the messages were piling up.
00:30:32Saturday night, Sunday morning on the Titanic
00:30:34had been very, very difficult for the two telegraphists.
00:30:37They had a major failure of the equipment.
00:30:40In fact, they spent about six or seven hours trying to repair it.
00:30:43As a result, during this time,
00:30:45a very, very large backlog of communications had built up.
00:30:50At 9.52pm, another ice warning arrived.
00:30:54This one from the SS Masaba, a few hours ahead of the Titanic,
00:30:58heading for New York on almost exactly the same course.
00:31:05So much heavy pack ice and a great number of large icebergs.
00:31:09Also, field ice.
00:31:13It was a clear warning that Titanic's new route
00:31:16would take her straight into an ice field, bristling with giant bergs.
00:31:21But the message never reached Captain Smith.
00:31:25The problem with the Masaba message is that there was no MSG prefix.
00:31:30Now, Jack Phillips was not a navigator,
00:31:33so when the Masaba message came in, all he saw was numbers there.
00:31:36It would have meant nothing to him.
00:31:38Had the letters MSG been on that message when it was received by Jack Phillips,
00:31:42then that message, he would have known to prioritise it
00:31:45and send it to the bridge.
00:31:47As it was, it didn't have them,
00:31:49so he set the message aside for later
00:31:51and carried on with his passenger traffic.
00:31:55Almost an hour later, Titanic received an even starker warning
00:32:00from a ship just 10 miles away.
00:32:02But again, the three critical letters, MSG, were missing.
00:32:09At 10.30pm on the night the Titanic sank,
00:32:12so only an hour before the collision,
00:32:15a vital message came in from the nearby Californian,
00:32:18who radioed the Titanic to say that they were stopped and surrounded by ice.
00:32:23Now, unfortunately, right at the moment that it arrived,
00:32:27the wireless operators on the Titanic were really busy
00:32:30doing what's called Working Cape Race.
00:32:33Titanic was trying to communicate with Newfoundland over 400 miles away,
00:32:39so it would have had its radio set switched on to a very high level.
00:32:46The Californian, fairly close to the Titanic,
00:32:50when it sent out the message to the ship,
00:32:53it would have come through extremely loud.
00:32:56It nearly blasted their ears off,
00:32:58so the Titanic replied,
00:33:00keep out, old man, which meant, please be quiet, we're busy,
00:33:03and sadly, with that, the operator on the Californian went to bed.
00:33:08Before the Californian could repeat its message
00:33:11or even give the MSG prefix,
00:33:14Titanic cut them off.
00:33:19So the last chance to warn the Titanic of ice in the area was lost.
00:33:25The Californian's radio operator had been about to deliver a warning.
00:33:31The iceberg risk was so bad,
00:33:33his ship had stopped her engines until sunrise.
00:33:37If the message had reached Captain Smith,
00:33:40he might have done the same.
00:33:43This is one of the great what-ifs of the Titanic,
00:33:46and you could say it was a mistake, most definitely.
00:33:49When the radio operator on the Californian was told to shut up,
00:33:53he basically shut up.
00:33:55He was going to bed that night anyway, he just closed down, went to bed.
00:33:58Ten minutes later, that's how they get the iceberg.
00:34:04Radio wasn't the only way of averting iceberg danger.
00:34:08Fifteen metres above Titanic's foredeck,
00:34:11a crow's nest perched on her forward mast.
00:34:15It was manned day and night by lookouts
00:34:17whose job was to spot for hazards up ahead.
00:34:21Captain Smith and Titanic's officers knew jolly well
00:34:25they were going into an ice area
00:34:27and they would have to keep a very sharp lookout indeed.
00:34:30And the White Star Line was one of the only shipping companies
00:34:33that employed dedicated lookouts.
00:34:35It's a pretty horrific job.
00:34:38You sit in this little crow's nest with another guy
00:34:41and freeze whilst you do nothing but stare at the horizon
00:34:48in case something presents itself for you to look at.
00:34:51I mean, it's an essential job, but not one that I'd want.
00:34:56The lookouts on that night were Reginald Lee and Frederick Fleet.
00:35:03Between them, they had years of experience at spotting icebergs.
00:35:07But on the night of April the 14th, they lacked a critical piece of kit.
00:35:16The best way of spotting an iceberg was basically
00:35:19using your natural eyesight as wide as possible on the horizon.
00:35:25When you saw something ahead,
00:35:27then you would identify it with the binoculars.
00:35:30The binoculars for the crow's nest were stored in the second officer's cabin.
00:35:35But on this particular voyage, the lookouts couldn't get at them.
00:35:40Nobody really knows what happened.
00:35:43The only thing we know for a fact is that before the Titanic left Southampton,
00:35:48there was a reordering of the officers.
00:35:51Henry Wilde came over from the Olympic with Captain Smith,
00:35:54and as a result, Second Officer David Blair left the Titanic.
00:35:58When Blair left the ship, it's thought that he took the key to his ship.
00:36:02It's thought that he took the key to his cabin with him.
00:36:07Because the second officer had been changed over before the sinking,
00:36:11they didn't actually have a key for the binoculars.
00:36:14Interestingly enough, the lack of binoculars wasn't a major concern on the bridge.
00:36:18At nine o'clock that night, they were talking about the fact that,
00:36:21well, there's no wind, but it's still clear, we've still got good visibility.
00:36:25They still believed they would see a berg in plenty of time to avoid it.
00:36:29The binoculars don't supersede the tried and tested methods of observation
00:36:35that Smith has got in his head and that he's relying on
00:36:39to ensure that no grief comes to his ship.
00:36:42As a result, there were no binoculars available in the crow's nest on that night.
00:36:48In ordinary conditions, the lack of binoculars might not have proven a problem.
00:36:53But on the night of the collision, things were far from ordinary.
00:37:04The conditions the night the Titanic sank were truly extraordinary.
00:37:08It was one of the clearest nights in history.
00:37:11The pressure was very high, which meant that the air was crystal clear.
00:37:17In fact, the starlight was so bright the night the Titanic sank
00:37:20that one crew member said you could have played a game of football.
00:37:25This gave them confidence that they could go fast and still see the iceberg.
00:37:30You think you're looking at a clear sea, but what you're actually looking at is a haze.
00:37:35There's kind of like an optical illusion happening
00:37:38and it's masking things like icebergs from sight,
00:37:41so it really is a bit of a mind twist.
00:37:44If you look at this glass of water here, as the pencil is behind it,
00:37:48what you can start to see is the different shapes that are being made.
00:37:53And that's simply because light is bending according to the density of the water behind it.
00:37:59And this was the same the night the Titanic sank,
00:38:02because the air was different densities and therefore the light was bending.
00:38:08Everyone has heard of a desert mirage.
00:38:11Well, this actually created what we call a miraging haze at the horizon
00:38:15behind the iceberg.
00:38:17So, in effect, the haze on the distant horizon
00:38:20actually camouflaged the iceberg in the near ground.
00:38:25Lookouts Fred Fleet and Reginald Lee have no idea
00:38:29that they are staring into an optical illusion.
00:38:35If they'd had binoculars, theoretically,
00:38:38they could have seen that base of the berg a little bit earlier
00:38:41and those few seconds would have been enough
00:38:43to see the iceberg a little bit earlier
00:38:45and those few seconds could have been crucial for Titanic.
00:38:55In the inquiry that followed the disaster,
00:38:58Fleet was asked about the missing binoculars.
00:39:01His reply was telling.
00:39:03I'd have seen the iceberg a bit sooner.
00:39:06How much sooner?
00:39:08Well enough to get out of the way.
00:39:14By 11.30 p.m., Titanic was steaming into the ice field
00:39:19at a brisk 22 knots,
00:39:21armed only with the eyesight of her two lookouts.
00:39:25She was travelling at over 10 meters a second,
00:39:28covering her entire length in less than 30 seconds.
00:39:32Too fast to react to anything coming out of the haze.
00:39:3711.39 p.m.
00:39:39On the bridge, First Officer Andrew Murdoch stands watch.
00:39:43While the captain gets some sleep in his cabin.
00:39:4737 seconds before the Titanic strikes the iceberg,
00:39:51Frederick Fleet spots something in the way.
00:39:54The cry rings out, iceberg dead ahead.
00:40:00Murdoch hears the bell ring three times.
00:40:04The signal for danger on the bow.
00:40:08As soon as the three strikes of the bell were heard,
00:40:11Murdoch looked ahead to assess the situation.
00:40:15He could see a berg coming directly towards them
00:40:18and he decided to turn.
00:40:20He immediately had the helm put over,
00:40:23first to the left and then to the right
00:40:26to try and skirt round the iceberg
00:40:29and then that the engine should be stopped.
00:40:31He shouted the order and then it was confirmed
00:40:34that the wheel was swung hard over.
00:40:36At the same time, he rang full astern
00:40:38on Titanic's engine telegraph.
00:40:42On Murdoch's command, the great ship starts to swing round
00:40:46but she cannot escape the iceberg's underwater shelf.
00:40:50Whilst they've almost cleared the iceberg above the water,
00:40:53what they haven't done is clear the massive portion of it
00:40:56under the waterline and what happens is
00:40:58the iceberg breaks the side of the Titanic
00:41:00under the waterline.
00:41:11Naval architect Stephen Payne designed the Queen Mary II.
00:41:16He believes that the way Titanic's steering worked
00:41:19acted against her in those crucial few seconds.
00:41:29In simple terms, a rudder deflects water.
00:41:33Simple flat plate and you twist it at the stern
00:41:37and it directs the water flow from one side to the other.
00:41:41But the efficiency of the Titanic's rudder
00:41:44was augmented by a central propeller
00:41:47thrusting water past this flat plate.
00:41:52Titanic's central propeller gives its rudder
00:41:55more power to change direction
00:41:57but only when it's rotating.
00:42:02Crucially, when the order was given to stop the engines
00:42:08and then laterally reverse them,
00:42:11the central propeller would have been stopped.
00:42:15Cutting power to the central propeller
00:42:18would have stopped it pushing water across the rudder
00:42:20for a few crucial seconds.
00:42:23We're talking about a marginal situation here
00:42:27and perhaps the rudder,
00:42:29working a few percentage points more efficiently,
00:42:32may...
00:42:35may have swung round just a little bit more
00:42:41to actually miss the iceberg.
00:42:46Instead, Titanic struck the giant bird.
00:42:56But the collision was so glancing
00:42:59that hardly anyone realised what had happened.
00:43:03Many people on Titanic were up late reading
00:43:06and they noticed, you know, water glasses rattling.
00:43:09They noticed that the tempo of the engines had changed.
00:43:12But the vast majority of people didn't realise
00:43:16that the ship had actually struck the iceberg.
00:43:21Titanic was so huge
00:43:23that she seemed to shrug off the collision.
00:43:28The passengers were completely unaware
00:43:30that deep below decks, her fate was already sealed.
00:43:38People were not prepared for what was going to happen.
00:43:42They certainly didn't realise that the ship was about to sink.
00:43:54Contrary to popular belief,
00:43:56when the iceberg scraped along Titanic's starboard side,
00:44:00it probably didn't tear a hole through its steel hull.
00:44:05Instead, it exposed the seventh crucial error
00:44:09that helped doom the stricken ship.
00:44:15Titanic's hull was made up of hundreds of metal plates
00:44:19fixed together with an astonishing three million rivets,
00:44:23most of them made of steel.
00:44:25A rivet is a way of fastening two sheets of metal together
00:44:30You would take this rivet and heat it up
00:44:33and then put it in through a hole
00:44:36that was punched through the two pieces of metal
00:44:39that are lined up on top of each other.
00:44:41And the rivet is put in through that hole
00:44:44and then hammered at the flat end
00:44:46and that deforms the flat end into another head
00:44:50and fastens these two pieces of metal together.
00:44:53These rivets hold up well under normal circumstances,
00:44:57but the North Atlantic was unusually cold that night.
00:45:00Because Titanic was cutting through smooth, icy waters,
00:45:05her hull would have actually been below freezing
00:45:08at the time of the collision.
00:45:13A simple experiment called a Sharpie test
00:45:16demonstrates how different temperatures affect the strength of steel.
00:45:20This steel bar is similar to that used in the Titanic's rivets.
00:45:25At room temperature, the steel bar bends, but does not break.
00:45:30But when it's chilled in sub-zero water,
00:45:33the steel undergoes a fundamental change.
00:45:37The super-chilled steel has lost its ability to absorb the blow's energy.
00:45:46In the icy waters of the Atlantic,
00:45:49Titanic's rivets below the waterline would have become
00:45:51similarly brittle.
00:45:54But that's not all.
00:45:57High-quality steel rivets could only be inserted
00:46:00using a bulky hydraulic machine,
00:46:03which in the bow section was a challenge.
00:46:06The hydraulic riveter was a very, very large, unwieldy piece of equipment.
00:46:10Where the hydraulic riveter was not so efficient
00:46:13was in the parts which were not straight, the turn of the bilge,
00:46:16or in the bow of the ship, where the hull is more angled.
00:46:18As a result, you had to use manual riveting crews there.
00:46:21But steel rivets required too much force to be hammered in by hand.
00:46:26So the plates of the ship's bow section
00:46:29had to be fixed together by rivets made not of steel, but iron.
00:46:33And iron had significant drawbacks.
00:46:37Wrought iron is not quite as versatile as steel.
00:46:41And when it's made in the smelting process,
00:46:44it produces a by-product called slag.
00:46:46Which is just all the stuff in the ore
00:46:49that you don't really want in your iron.
00:46:55The slag in the rivets can make them even more prone to fracture
00:46:59when struck by a heavy force in low temperatures.
00:47:03And that's exactly what happens when a ship is struck by an iceberg.
00:47:08You really have to appreciate the forces that were involved here.
00:47:12When you consider the Titanic, 50,000 tonnes of weight
00:47:16moving at 20 miles per hour,
00:47:19there's a lot of energy in that system.
00:47:22And to strike an iceberg,
00:47:25which to all intents and purposes is an immovable object,
00:47:29you've suddenly got all that energy striking a solid object.
00:47:42As the iceberg hits the Titanic,
00:47:45that force and that impact has to be absorbed.
00:47:48It has to go somewhere.
00:47:50And it's going to impact the weakest sections of the ship that it's hitting.
00:47:54And those are along the seams, along the rivets.
00:47:58So the ship basically gets unzipped and water floods in.
00:48:03And we know what happens after that.
00:48:13The brittle rivets snap,
00:48:16allowing the steel plates of the hull
00:48:19to open up in several places below the waterline.
00:48:23Using iron rivets had been a big mistake,
00:48:27but Titanic was supposed to survive damage on a massive scale.
00:48:31Titanic had 15 bulkheads, dividing her into 16 compartments.
00:48:35If part of the hull was breached in any way,
00:48:38the flooding would be contained.
00:48:39In fact, Titanic was designed to take on water
00:48:43in up to four of her main compartments.
00:48:46And her forward bow section also had an extra watertight compartment
00:48:51that slowed the rise of water in her nose.
00:48:54This made her effectively one of the safest ships afloat.
00:48:58Ten minutes after the collision, all seemed calm and tranquil.
00:49:04To most on board, it felt like Titanic would stay afloat
00:49:06long enough for everyone to be evacuated.
00:49:10Immediately following the collision, water floods into Titanic very fast.
00:49:15But as the pressure of water inside the hull
00:49:18begins to match the pressure outside, the flooding actually slows down.
00:49:22As word of the collision spread,
00:49:25some passengers gathered on deck to see what was happening.
00:49:28But there was no air of panic.
00:49:31What they didn't know was that down below in the ship's boiler rooms
00:49:36the vents were starting to spiral out of control.
00:49:41Ultimately, they would expose a fatal weakness
00:49:45in Titanic's supposedly unsinkable design.
00:49:5311.40pm.
00:49:55Although she has just collided with a giant iceberg,
00:49:58on the Titanic's passenger decks all seems calm.
00:50:02But down below in the boiler rooms, all hell is breaking loose.
00:50:07Our man on the spot that night in terms of the boiler room
00:50:11is Fred Barrett, a fireman on the Titanic.
00:50:14The iceberg has opened up a hole in Titanic's hull.
00:50:18The room he's in starts filling with water.
00:50:21Fred retreats into the next compartment.
00:50:24As the watertight door closes behind him,
00:50:26Fred is safe in boiler room number five.
00:50:29Here, Fred is surprised to see water spurting into the empty coal bunker.
00:50:33He slams the bunker door shut.
00:50:36It's not watertight, but it'll have to do.
00:50:41For the next hour, he works to keep the ship afloat.
00:50:45He's trying to oversee some kind of rescue attempt to pump water out
00:50:49and see if they can at least prolong the life of the ship.
00:50:55Suddenly, a mass of green bony water came crashing through into the boiler room
00:50:59and Fred suddenly realised there was absolutely no more he could do.
00:51:02He ran to the nearest emergency ladder and got out.
00:51:05Titanic had 16 watertight compartments
00:51:08formed by internal bulkheads designed to limit flooding.
00:51:13But water is now flooding more compartments than she was designed to handle.
00:51:20At 12.40, water starts pouring into the ship
00:51:24and the ship begins to sink more rapidly than before.
00:51:29The compartment Fred escaped from housed the coal bunker
00:51:32where he and his men had spent days fighting a fierce fire.
00:51:37The extreme heat had warped the plates of the bunker's rear wall
00:51:41which formed part of a crucial watertight bulkhead.
00:51:45Some water was entering the compartment through the hole in the hull.
00:51:49But was it also getting in from the next door compartment
00:51:52through the damaged bulkhead?
00:51:55I think you have to concede that there may have been some damage
00:51:58done to the bulkhead by the bulkhead fire.
00:52:01We know that one of the bulkheads was exposed to the fire that was in the coal bunker
00:52:07and it is possible that that heat compromised steel
00:52:11and it could have cracked and allowed that water to flow through.
00:52:16We know from the inquiry into the Titanic disaster
00:52:19that the fire-damaged plates in the bulkhead may have been weeping
00:52:23about one or two buckets of water per hour even before the collision.
00:52:27How much the fire-warped bulkhead contributed to the flooding is controversial.
00:52:32But it is clear that once the bunker filled with water
00:52:36all that held it back was a flimsy door.
00:52:39The compartment filled up with ten feet of water
00:52:42and the weight of the water in that compartment was about 440 tonnes
00:52:47and there was three tonnes of weight on the door.
00:52:51When the pressure on the door got to more than three tonnes
00:52:54the door burst open sending a huge wave knocking him to the ground.
00:52:59A whole load of water which had been held back for a while
00:53:02suddenly began to overwhelm the compartment.
00:53:05The front six compartments of Titanic are now filling with water
00:53:10pushing her lower and lower under the surface.
00:53:13Until now Titanic had been flooding slowly
00:53:17giving enough time to evacuate all the 2,200 plus people on board.
00:53:22But as she sank deeper into the water
00:53:26a terrible mistake by some of the passengers in cabins towards the bows
00:53:31would hasten Titanic's demise.
00:53:38Despite the force of the collision
00:53:41the total area left open to the sea by the six breaches in the hull
00:53:45was surprisingly small.
00:53:47Now in fact when you put all these together
00:53:50it makes an area just the size of, I don't know, a fireplace or something like that
00:53:54so not a very big area at all.
00:53:57But what happened was after the collision the Titanic came to a stop
00:54:02and people wondered what had happened
00:54:05so their natural reaction was to open the portholes and have a look.
00:54:08As the ship's fate became clear
00:54:11the crew ordered passengers up on deck ready for evacuation.
00:54:14And then when they went up to the lifeboats
00:54:17they left the portholes open.
00:54:20As Titanic's passenger accommodation began to dip under the Atlantic
00:54:24the open portholes meant that water flooded in at a much greater rate.
00:54:29In fact, 12 open portholes would have doubled the iceberg damage to Titanic
00:54:35and of course there were hundreds of portholes in Titanic's bow.
00:54:39More than 300 of the ship's passengers were killed
00:54:42more than 300 of the ship's portholes opened onto passenger cabins.
00:54:48The all too human curiosity of passengers
00:54:52helped to accelerate the rate at which the ship would sink.
00:54:58And as she filled with water
00:55:01it became clear that a fatal mistake had been made
00:55:04in the design of her watertight bulkheads.
00:55:06Standing an average of 12 metres high
00:55:10the bulkheads weren't tall enough to reach the passenger deck level.
00:55:14A deliberate choice by Titanic's designers.
00:55:22The designers of the ship wanted more space for the deck
00:55:26and more rooms for the passengers
00:55:29so the bulkheads didn't go all the way up to the top of the deck.
00:55:33They didn't go all the way up to the top of the ship.
00:55:37The problem is that you have a hotel.
00:55:40The whole reason the ship is there
00:55:43is for the easy movement of passengers in their cabins through the public spaces.
00:55:49Now the consequence of that decision would come back to haunt them.
00:55:54Once the water reaches the top of the bulkheads
00:55:58they become useless.
00:55:59Water spills over them, flooding all the compartments
00:56:03and rampages unchecked through the public spaces above.
00:56:10It's the final straw.
00:56:13Titanic's bows dip below the surface
00:56:16hoisting her stern high in the air.
00:56:19In the final moment there were thunderous crashes
00:56:23as the steel was heard down below to be breaking apart at the keel level
00:56:27and then higher up there was almost a stampede of passengers towards the stern of the ship.
00:56:35She rises so high in the water and then she seems to right herself again
00:56:39and people think they're safe.
00:56:42Everything might be alright briefly
00:56:45but all that is is the stern snapping off and falling back down.
00:56:51You have all out chaos in the final death race.
00:56:58The lights went out and then the ship bobbed for a bit
00:57:03and then disappeared forever.
00:57:08At 2.20am on Monday the 15th of April
00:57:12Titanic finally sank into the frozen depths of the Atlantic Ocean
00:57:17dragging around 1500 of her passengers and crew down with her.
00:57:22After hitting the iceberg she had managed to stay afloat for 2 hours and 40 minutes.
00:57:30I think it was remarkable just how well the ship did
00:57:34considering one third of the ship had been fatally compromised.
00:57:40But all that loss of life need not have happened
00:57:43were it not for one crucial error.
00:57:46The most human mistake of all.
00:57:4912.27am
00:57:52Two hours before the Titanic finally sank
00:57:55her Chief Wireless Operator Jack Phillips started tapping out CQD in Morse code
00:58:02the 1912 version of SOS.
00:58:0547 minutes after the collision
00:58:08the Titanic finally sank into the ocean
00:58:11and the crew of the Titanic were all on board.
00:58:13The 1912 version of SOS.
00:58:1647 minutes after the collision
00:58:19Titanic knew she was doomed
00:58:21and she tried every method possible to call for help.
00:58:24So she sent out a wireless distress signal using the radio.
00:58:29CQD, CQD, this is the Titanic.
00:58:33We've hit an iceberg.
00:58:35We are sinking by the head.
00:58:3725 year old Jack had been up all the previous night
00:58:40fixing a problem with the radio
00:58:43which meant Titanic was able to alert nearby ships of her plight.
00:58:47The heroism of Jack Phillips is remarkable.
00:58:51He's been awake for almost two days
00:58:53and yet he stays there tapping away
00:58:56almost as the water is washing around his feet.
00:59:03Notoriously, Titanic had fewer than 1,200 lifeboat spaces
00:59:09for her 2,200 passengers and crew.
00:59:14The thinking was that ships in trouble
00:59:17would be rescued by nearby vessels.
00:59:20In 1912 there were very strict lines like tram lines
00:59:25that were going east and west across the Atlantic
00:59:28so a ship was never more than about 60 miles away
00:59:31from a potential rescue vessel.
00:59:33And this is why the vast majority of ships
00:59:36on the North Atlantic at that time
00:59:38didn't have lifeboats for everybody.
00:59:41It was thought that only enough boats were needed
00:59:44to ferry passengers to another ship that would come to the rescue.
00:59:49And there was another ship on the horizon
00:59:52within sight of the Titanic.
00:59:54It was a small cargo vessel.
00:59:58The night the Titanic sank
01:00:00there was another ship, the Californian,
01:00:02only ten miles away
01:00:04but tragically she did not respond.
01:00:06Unfortunately, the Californian's radio operator
01:00:09had already gone to bed
01:00:11having been told to get off the airwaves
01:00:13by Jack Phillips earlier that evening.
01:00:18In desperation, Titanic's crew started sending up rocket flares
01:00:23to signal their plight.
01:00:26The Californian is the million dollar question
01:00:29in the sinking of the Titanic.
01:00:31They did actually report seeing rockets
01:00:34But when Californian's captain was told about the rockets
01:00:37he didn't recognise them as distress signals.
01:00:40You have to bear in mind that
01:00:42in the early 20th century
01:00:44a lot of signals carried out at night were used by rockets.
01:00:47There was no international standard
01:00:50for using flares and distress signals.
01:00:54So firing off flares or rockets
01:00:57the Californian no doubt considered
01:01:00that it was a firework display.
01:01:06A second ship, the Carpathia
01:01:08did pick up Jack's desperate pleas
01:01:10and immediately started steaming towards Titanic.
01:01:14But she was 58 miles away.
01:01:18During the agonising wait
01:01:20Jack kept tapping out messages.
01:01:24We are putting passengers off in small boats.
01:01:27We are putting passengers off in small boats.
01:01:30Women and children cannot last much longer.
01:01:33Losing power.
01:01:47The Carpathia finally arrived
01:01:50more than one hour and 30 minutes after Titanic sank.
01:01:54By which time some 1,500 people had perished.
01:02:01Amongst those lost was Jack Phillips
01:02:04who remained at his post until the end.
01:02:13In a night of so many tragedies
01:02:16one stands out as perhaps the cruelest of them all.
01:02:19Titanic's final mistake.
01:02:35If First Officer Murdoch had not tried to miss the iceberg
01:02:39she might have survived the collision.
01:02:42If the Titanic had struck the iceberg head on
01:02:45about 100 feet, one eighth of the length of the ship
01:02:49would have been crushed
01:02:52but the watertight bulkheads would have held.
01:02:55The likelihood is that that damage would not have been fatal
01:02:59and the ship would have remained afloat.
01:03:03The Titanic's foremost bow section was a collision bulkhead.
01:03:11Like the crumple zone
01:03:12in a modern car
01:03:14it was designed to absorb the worst of a head-on impact
01:03:18protecting the integrity of the compartments behind
01:03:21and reducing the inflow of water.
01:03:27But by swinging the ship around in a bid to avoid the iceberg
01:03:31Murdoch sideswiped it instead.
01:03:36Titanic heeled over and left the coffin-shaped flat bottom
01:03:39which presented it to the shelf of the berg
01:03:42so a lot more underwater damage
01:03:44was because she was what's called on the swing.
01:03:52Scraping the underside of the ship along the iceberg
01:03:56arguably caused more structural damage than a head-on crash
01:04:00but Murdoch could never have made that call.
01:04:10If you are First Officer Murdoch
01:04:13the last, last thing that's going to occur to you to do
01:04:16is to smash face first into an iceberg.
01:04:19It just doesn't happen.
01:04:21It's against every human instinct.
01:04:23Also as well, it's a brand new, shiny ship
01:04:25and it's a career ender
01:04:27if you make the wrong call.
01:04:29In my opinion, you couldn't fault Murdoch in what he did.
01:04:33It was the classic response
01:04:36and what was expected of him.
01:04:40As RMS Titanic sank beneath the icy Atlantic waters
01:04:45the iceberg that had destroyed the biggest ship on Earth
01:04:49continued to drift southwards.
01:04:52The iceberg doesn't really outlive the Titanic by that long.
01:04:56The next day, it was apparently caught on camera
01:04:59in this remarkable photo.
01:05:02It's obvious that she's the berg that struck Titanic
01:05:05and that's why she's in the picture.
01:05:07It's obvious that she's the berg that struck Titanic
01:05:10because she has this big smear of red paint
01:05:12going along her side
01:05:14where she scraped the underside of the ship.
01:05:18The iceberg then gets caught up in the Gulf Stream
01:05:23towards America.
01:05:26So what began as this giant iceberg
01:05:29then after the collision
01:05:31melted away in the warm waters of the Gulf Stream
01:05:34and was probably gone within two weeks.
01:05:36and was probably gone within two weeks.
01:05:44More than 100 years later
01:05:47the legacy of the Titanic dead lives on.
01:05:51We owe them a tremendous debt and gratitude
01:05:55because sailing today on a modern ship
01:05:58is so much safer
01:06:00because of the lessons learned from the Titanic.
01:06:07As a result of the Titanic
01:06:09we have lifeboats for everybody
01:06:11we have greater watertight integrity in ships
01:06:13we have greater safety regulations
01:06:16although health and safety can drive you nuts.
01:06:22As the designer of the Queen Mary II
01:06:25the last transatlantic liner operating on the Atlantic
01:06:29I had to be acutely aware
01:06:32of all the lessons learned from the Titanic.
01:06:35And in fact the majority of those lessons
01:06:38are now enshrined in maritime law.
01:06:44They have a saying
01:06:46that safety rules are written in blood
01:06:48well in the Titanic's case that couldn't be more true.