Last survivor of the Titanic dies

[Merlin of Flyote 8]

Elizabeth Gladys (aka Millvina) Dean aged 97 died today Sun 31/05/2009. She was the youngest passenger aboard at 9 weeks of age. Her father Bertram died, her mother Georgetta and brother Bert also survived. They returned to Southampton, Hampshire, England were they spent the rest of their lives. There were 706 survivors in total.

The Titanic 882x92ft 46328 tonnes, sailed from Southampton on 10/04/1912, with a lifeboat capacity of 1,178 people. It struck an iceberg on the 15/04/1912 at 0220 GMT. It sent both SOS and Mayday signals (the first use of Mayday) and ships including the Carpathier and California responded, but were too far away to get there before she sank.

Survival rates by class:-

1st  =  60%

2nd = 44%

3rd = 25%

crew = 24%

[Meg 368]

It was just a few weeks ago that the movie folks where helping her out with her bills.  [link]

She'd have to be the last one, if she was only weeks old when it happened and died at 97.

I remember when they found the ship.

and when the last living Confederate widow died.

Still a few WWI veterans around though.

It still seems odd to me that here, in the 21st century, I have clear memory of people who lived in the 19th century.  like my grandmother and grandfather.

but I digress . . .

[Easy Bakes 253]

Was she the one they used in the Movie?

[Meg 368]

Originally posted by: Easy Bakes

Was she the one they used in the Movie?

quote>

No, Gloria Stuart played Old Rose in the movie.

It was one of the places where the movie was considered to be unrealistic.   The ship sank in 1912.  Rose, the character in the movie, was what?  20 years old?  which meant she would have born in 1892.  The movie was filmed in 1997, which would have made the character 105.

Not that I recall anything in the movie that claimed it took place in 1997.     The earliest the movie could have been set was 1985, when they actually found the ship.  At which point, the character would have been 93.

 

I didn't see what all of the fuss was about concerning the character's age.  First off, it's a movie.  Secondly, my grandmother lived to be 101; why shouldn't other people?

[Merlin of Flyote 8]

Originally posted by: SkiGeek

It was just a few weeks ago that the movie folks where helping her out with her bills.  [link]

She sold all her Titanic memorabilia recently, to help pay her care costs.

She'd have to be the last one, if she was only weeks old when it happened and died at 97.

I remember when they found the ship.

and when the last living Confederate widow died.

Still a few WWI veterans around though.

2 in Britain, there were 3 at the last rememberance day, one from each service, but the one from the Royal Navy died.

I think Harry Patch from the army is the oldest one, he was in the trenches during WW1. The other veteran was a pilot at the formation of the Royal Air Force in 1917. Before that the few planes formed the Royal Flying Corps part of the Army.

It still seems odd to me that here, in the 21st century, I have clear memory of people who lived in the 19th century.  like my grandmother and grandfather.

but I digress . . .

quote>

The Titanic had been warned about icebergs, but failed to divert it's course because the ship was trying to break the record for the fastest crossing of the Atlantic and diverting would have ruined that. Also the lookouts did not have binoculars, so couldn't see far enough away to avoid a collision. When the iceberg was seen the captain ordered the ship to turn, thereby causing the iceberg to open up the side of the ship. In hindsight it would have been better to have hit the iceberg head on. The damage would have been less and the ship would have remained afloat, then everybody would have survived.

A tragic story of putting money before lives.

[Jezus53 18]

Originally posted by: SkiGeek

Originally posted by: Easy Bakes

Was she the one they used in the Movie?

quote>

No, Gloria Stuart played Old Rose in the movie.

It was one of the places where the movie was considered to be unrealistic.   The ship sank in 1912.  Rose, the character in the movie, was what?  20 years old?  which meant she would have born in 1892.  The movie was filmed in 1997, which would have made the character 105.

Not that I recall anything in the movie that claimed it took place in 1997.     The earliest the movie could have been set was 1985, when they actually found the ship.  At which point, the character would have been 93.

 

I didn't see what all of the fuss was about concerning the character's age.  First off, it's a movie.  Secondly, my grandmother lived to be 101; why shouldn't other people?

quote>

I just watched the movie the other day and if I remember correctly she stated that she was 17 when the ship set sail so that would have made her 102 when the movie was filmed. Still a ridiculously old age, but it's completely possible. Also, I do not believe they said it was present day in the movie so it could have been, say, 1990? So she could have been 95 in the movie. But as you said, what's the big deal. I could careless as long as you entertain me to a somewhat believable level.

[CommodoreTech 5]

Sad really. I'll grow up to see the last ever Tommy die. Difficult to say about WW2 veterans, as there are so many in so many places it'll be difficult to know when the last one actually dies, but i'll probably live to see that.

Heck, I might even see the last Vietnam veteran die... :S

[LarksTonguesInAspic 28]

Originally posted by: Merlin of Flyote

The Titanic had been warned about icebergs, but failed to divert it's course because the ship was trying to break the record for the fastest crossing of the Atlantic and diverting would have ruined that. Also the lookouts did not have binoculars, so couldn't see far enough away to avoid a collision. When the iceberg was seen the captain ordered the ship to turn, thereby causing the iceberg to open up the side of the ship. In hindsight it would have been better to have hit the iceberg head on. The damage would have been less and the ship would have remained afloat, then everybody would have survived.

A tragic story of putting money before lives.

quote>

If the icebergs hadn't strayed unusually far south that winter, if they hadn't decided to save 33¢ per ton on rivets by using an inferior grade, etc.

Clive Cussler's Raise The Titanic! (1976) accurately predicted where she would be found, as he proudly pointed out in the foreword to either its re-release or in another novel (I can't remember which). A very entertaining, if dated, book that had a great deal of detail about the sinking and the ship itself. The movie in 1980 was worthless.

[Merlin of Flyote 8]

Originally posted by: manticorefan

If the icebergs hadn't strayed unusually far south that winter, if they hadn't decided to save 33¢ per ton on rivets by using an inferior grade, etc.

Yes but that aside and the fact that there was a design error that caused the Titanic to break into two, if they had diverted south the ship would have survived but the record breaking run would have been lost.

Clive Cussler's Raise The Titanic! (1976) accurately predicted where she would be found, as he proudly pointed out in the foreword to either its re-release or in another novel (I can't remember which). A very entertaining, if dated, book that had a great deal of detail about the sinking and the ship itself. The movie in 1980 was worthless.

quote>

Heh it's a movie, it the producers/directors licence to embellish/alter a story for effect.

Apparently there was supposed to be a person named Eustace Robertson (?) who wrote a book about a ship called the Titan which sank on it's maiden voyage between New York and Liverpool. The ship was supposed to have been about the same size as the Titanic and about the same number of people died. He is apparently supposed to have said he didn't make up the story, but angels did using his hands to write it. The book was supposed to have been written somewhere about 1890. I saw something about this years ago on TV, on a program that was about the Titanic, I'm not sure exactly how true it is.I'll leave you to make up your own minds.

[Zelgadis 638]

Originally posted by: Merlin of Flyote

The Titanic had been warned about icebergs, but failed to divert it's course because the ship was trying to break the record for the fastest crossing of the Atlantic and diverting would have ruined that.quote>

Actually, this is not the case.  First of all, the Olympic class (Olympic, Titanic, Britannic) were not remotely capable of challenging the speed queens of the day, Lusitania and Mauretania, nor were they intended to be.  Priority was given over to comfort for these ships. 

It could have been argued that the Titanic was attempting to break a company record, but this is also unlikely.  White Star captains at the time, and Captain Smith in particular, were loathe to run the engines of a new ship at their absolute maximum.  Captain Smith was notorious for taking years before doing so.  He wanted the new engines properly broken in.

So what happened?  The likely problem is inexperience.  Captain Smith was White Star's Commodore and had many decades with the company under his belt, but enormous ships like Titanic were still relatively new at the time.  Builders didn't quite know how to build them (Titanic had a ridiculously tiny rudder for a ship that size.)  And there were very few captains who quite understood how they handled.  Captain Smith received the ice warnings and probably felt that the ship would be able to turn in time to miss anything they came across, even if the lookouts had no binoculars.  Obviously, that was not the case.  Besides the fact that the ship's bulk made it difficult to turn, it also doomed it in another way.  A smaller ship would have simply bounced off the ice.  The Titanic was far too big to bounce and plowed down its side instead. 

Final nail in the coffin?  It was a "blue" iceberg.  That is, the iceberg had recently shifted in the water and the white frost washed away, thereby rendering it practically transparent.  A white berg they would likely have seen in time.  No chance with a blue one.

Many Titanic movies make a big show of the ship's owner, Bruce Ismay, wanting to arrive in New York half a day early.  Captain Smith would have cared less.  It was to be his last voyage before retirement.  What were they gonna do?  Fire him?  

Apparently there was supposed to be a person named Eustace Robertson (?) who wrote a book about a ship called the Titan which sank on it's maiden voyage between New York and Liverpool.quote>

Correct.  The story is part of a collection of short stories in a book called "Futility" by Morgan Robertson written in 1898.  I've read it.  The only major difference between the Titanic story and the Titan story is that the Titan hit the iceberg in the fog.

if they hadn't decided to save 33¢ per ton on rivets by using an inferior grade, etc.quote>

One of the newer revelations.  And it is true.  But again, a consequence of outdated shipbuilding techniques.  Even the Lusitania and Mauretaina, had mostly iron rivets.  They only used steel rivets on the bow and stern and they were built to much more rigorous specifications laid out by the British navy.  There was nothing unusual about the way the Olympic class ships were built.  It's just that the techniques were not suitable for ships that big.

In the end, it was really 19th century sailing and shipbuilding practices and several unimaginable turns of bad luck that ultimately doomed the ship.  The Olympic class ships were actually quite robust.  The oldest sister, Olympic, had a stellar career and even managed to sink a German U-boat during WWI when the captain spotted it and decided to run over it. 

Ah, I think I've gone on quite enough.

ISF

[Wrightguy0 40]

Zel, I love it when you prattle on about ships, i makes me realize, I am not alone

[Mikeaut1 261]

Wow I was just thinking about the Titanic the other day and was curious as to whether or not Dean was still alive to this day. Strange how things happen like that. But RIP Millivina!

[Merlin of Flyote 8]

Originally posted by: Zelgadis

Originally posted by: Merlin of Flyote

The Titanic had been warned about icebergs, but failed to divert it's course because the ship was trying to break the record for the fastest crossing of the Atlantic and diverting would have ruined that.quote>

Actually, this is not the case.  First of all, the Olympic class (Olympic, Titanic, Britannic) were not remotely capable of challenging the speed queens of the day, Lusitania and Mauretania, nor were they intended to be.  Priority was given over to comfort for these ships. 

It could have been argued that the Titanic was attempting to break a company record, but this is also unlikely.  White Star captains at the time, and Captain Smith in particular, were loathe to run the engines of a new ship at their absolute maximum.  Captain Smith was notorious for taking years before doing so.  He wanted the new engines properly broken in.

It may have been a company record perhaps, but THEY WERE trying to break the record for the fastest crossing, Ismay was on board at the time, and the board of trade inquiry tried to pin blame on him for the tragedy. Also I have seen stories which say that the Titanic was the largest ship afloat at that time.

So what happened?  The likely problem is inexperience.  Captain Smith was White Star's Commodore and had many decades with the company under his belt, but enormous ships like Titanic were still relatively new at the time.  Builders didn't quite know how to build them (Titanic had a ridiculously tiny rudder for a ship that size.)  And there were very few captains who quite understood how they handled.  Captain Smith received the ice warnings and probably felt that the ship would be able to turn in time to miss anything they came across, even if the lookouts had no binoculars.

Board of trade didn't think so!

  Obviously, that was not the case.  Besides the fact that the ship's bulk made it difficult to turn, it also doomed it in another way.  A smaller ship would have simply bounced off the ice.  The Titanic was far too big to bounce and plowed down its side instead. 

Because the ship had turned at the last minute, the damage was in a number of sections. If the Titanic had hit head-on then damage would be confined to just the front and it would have been capable of remaining afloat until the passengers had been rescued.

Final nail in the coffin?  It was a "blue" iceberg.  That is, the iceberg had recently shifted in the water and the white frost washed away, thereby rendering it practically transparent.  A white berg they would likely have seen in time.  No chance with a blue one.

Accepted, however it was still decided that the lookouts not having binoculars was a contributory factor in not seeing the iceberg soon enough.

Many Titanic movies make a big show of the ship's owner, Bruce Ismay, wanting to arrive in New York half a day early.  Captain Smith would have cared less.  It was to be his last voyage before retirement.  What were they gonna do?  Fire him?  

Loss of pension and reputation as well as loss of job.

Apparently there was supposed to be a person named Eustace Robertson (?) who wrote a book about a ship called the Titan which sank on it's maiden voyage between New York and Liverpool.quote>

Correct.  The story is part of a collection of short stories in a book called "Futility" by Morgan Robertson written in 1898.  I've read it.  The only major difference between the Titanic story and the Titan story is that the Titan hit the iceberg in the fog.

if they hadn't decided to save 33¢ per ton on rivets by using an inferior grade, etc.quote>

One of the newer revelations.  And it is true.  But again, a consequence of outdated shipbuilding techniques.  Even the Lusitania and Mauretaina, had mostly iron rivets.  They only used steel rivets on the bow and stern and they were built to much more rigorous specifications laid out by the British navy.  There was nothing unusual about the way the Olympic class ships were built.  It's just that the techniques were not suitable for ships that big.

In the end, it was really 19th century sailing and shipbuilding practices and several unimaginable turns of bad luck that ultimately doomed the ship.  The Olympic class ships were actually quite robust.  The oldest sister, Olympic, had a stellar career and even managed to sink a German U-boat during WWI when the captain spotted it and decided to run over it. 

Britannic wasn't so lucky, it's lying at the bottom of the Aegean Sea off of Greece (a diver died trying to film it about a week or so ago), it had the same design fault as the Titanic, which was corrected for the Olympic. As I understand it the Olympic survived into the thirties.

Ah, I think I've gone on quite enough.

ISF

quote>

Anyway we digress it's sad to see Millvina has died.

[Zelgadis 638]

Originally posted by: Merlin of Flyote

Originally posted by: Zelgadis

Originally posted by: Merlin of Flyote

The Titanic had been warned about icebergs, but failed to divert it's course because the ship was trying to break the record for the fastest crossing of the Atlantic and diverting would have ruined that.quote>

Actually, this is not the case.  First of all, the Olympic class (Olympic, Titanic, Britannic) were not remotely capable of challenging the speed queens of the day, Lusitania and Mauretania, nor were they intended to be.  Priority was given over to comfort for these ships. 

It could have been argued that the Titanic was attempting to break a company record, but this is also unlikely.  White Star captains at the time, and Captain Smith in particular, were loathe to run the engines of a new ship at their absolute maximum.  Captain Smith was notorious for taking years before doing so.  He wanted the new engines properly broken in.

It may have been a company record perhaps, but THEY WERE trying to break the record for the fastest crossing, Ismay was on board at the time, and the board of trade inquiry tried to pin blame on him for the tragedy. Also I have seen stories which say that the Titanic was the largest ship afloat at that time.quote>

quote>

quote>

[Abes 0]

You all seem to have fogotten one detail, the White Star Line's engineers had designed the Olympic Class Liners to be "unsinkable"...... Lifeboats were thought to be a useless addition, but were tacked on at the last minute to satisfy the Board of Trade...... The Liners obviously WEREN'T unsinkable, but it was the beginning of the 20th Century, and the Western World was convinced that they were the smartest, most advanced beings in the universe, so it's sort of forgivable. The Titanic, Olympic and Brittanic were all designed with 12 segment hulls that could be sealed into watertight comparments, and even if 4 of them (or one third of the hull) were breached, the ships were supposed to be able to remain afloat. Unfortunately, in a cost-cutting measure from the Irish shipbuilder, the tops of the watertight chambers weren't sealed properly, so water was able to enter the supposedly "safe" portions of the hull.... Another reason so many passengers and crew went down with the ship. Remember, alot of the passengers lost in the disaster refused to leave the ship until the lifeboats were almost all away, because of their belief that the Titanic was unsinkable. This is another reason why crews of passenger ships today have absolute authority in such situations, so that they can get every lifeboat filled to capacity before sending them on their way.

[Odainsaker 2,136]

Wow, so much of the Titanic disaster has become part of our collective folklore, it sometimes gets hard to separate the history from the mythology.  I can see how thousands of years of retelling might have given us the story of Noah's Ark.  Walter Lord still remains the best!  Oh, and aside from the actually raising scene, the movie Raise the Titanic is indeed pretty dull--even the quirky TV sunken liner adventure Goliath Awaits with Christopher Lee channeling Count Dracula, Count Dooku, and Captain Nemo was more fun.

The White Star Line was well aware of the treacherous waters of legal liability, and was careful not to use the word "unsinkable" in its promotion of the Olympic Class ships.  "Largest" and ironically even "safest" were used, and technically they were arguably right on both counts, accounting for how poorly designed and operated other ships of the era were--a scary thing when you consider how Titanic ended up.  However, a trade magazine mentioned how watertight bulkheads made the ships practically unsinkable, and the media picked up on that phrase.  Indeed, that notion gained fire especially after the sinking, as newspapers frenzily combed every past scrap of literature on the ship in order to sell the most sensational disaster story in modern history.  If I remember correctly, the widely villianized White Star Line was successful in fending off lawsuits regarding unsinkability claims.

Speaking of watertight compartments, much analysis has been done on Titanic's in order to further explain the disaster.  An apparently obvious flaw was not capping the compartments above the waterline.  However, Harland & Wolff realized that such an expense was pointless...if enough compartments were flooded to the point that the ship weighed down such that water was spilling over the tops of the bulkheads, then the ship had already reached a critical loss of buoyancy where sinkage was inevitable.  The ship would have sunk even if the compartments had watertight caps, as it simply could not survive so many compartments compromised, and the weight of the part of the ship no longer being buoyed would have pulled down the rest.  Indeed, it is very likely no comparable ship of the time would have survived.  However, bulkhead caps likely would have delayed the sinking, perhaps giving enough time for rescue ships to arrive and evacuate everyone.  Then again, the ship did stay afloat for around two hours, not bad considering other ships of its day, and it was realized that Titanic travelled the busiest shipping lanes, with help indeed well close by.  If only all of that help had responded...left out of the James Cameron movie Titanic was the confusion of ships even closer than the Carpathia, as well as the infamously unreacting Californian, whose captain and bridge crew did not comprehend the meaning of the mysterious lights and rockets coming from the nearby ship they were watching within fast reach.  Come morning, when their lone wireless operator awoke, they learned of the Titanic's fate with harrowing realization, and were left the grave task of finding and retrieving floating corpses.

Perhaps more eerily, the Olympic was also close at hand, making the reverse crossing back to Great Britain.  It feared that the rescue ship Carparthia might be too distressingly overcrowded, and offered to transfer Titanic survivors to its more spacious and comfortable accomodations for warmer care.  Carpathia's Captain Rostron wisely thought that putting the already shocked Titanic survivors onto a ship that was a nearly identical copy to the one they just saw sink with all their lost loved ones would be too traumatizing.  He should have been made First Sea Lord as the only person on the North Atlantic who decisively knew what he was doing that night.

Ramming the iceberg in hindsight does indeed seem likely survable for the Titanic, though we would then all be asking why Third Office Murdoch didn't instead just dodge the iceberg rather than killing so many people in the bow, injuring thousands of others, and crippling the ship.  Murdoch's quickly spurred orders on the bridge have been picked over, with some finding that the instinctive order to reverse engines may have severly hampered the flow and effectiveness of the rudder, as the center turbine-driven propeller that washed the rudder most directly was non-reversable and could only be stopped.  Much in the way a bike or even modern cars respond better at speed than at a crawl, the dodging bow turn and then swing away of the stern might have been more successful if he had maintained speed.  But then these massive ships were new, and the understanding of how they moved in the water incomplete.

After the disaster White Star was obviously obsessed with safety, pulling the Olympic for upgrades and radically redesigning the under-construction Britannic into an almost cartoon of a safe vessel, with lifeboats pilled up the funnels and including watertight compartment caps.  It didn't matter--a wartime mine blast on the Britannic in a similar general bow area as Titanic's iceberg damage sank the Britannic just as fast.  It is fortunate the hospital-converted Britannic was on an empty pick up run rather than returning from the Turkish warzone packed with thousands of Allied wounded, or White Star would have found itself outdoing the most sensational maritime disaster in peacetime history with an even more gorily sensational worst maritime disaster in wartime history!

They did have company, though.  Cunard's Lusitania was designed not just with compartments along its length, but segments and coal bunkers dividing its width.  More watertight segments in numerous directions would seem to be ideal on the surface, but the torpedoing of the Lusitania lead to one side of compartments flooding while the opposite side remained watertight, creating an impossible list that made launching one half of the lifeboats impossible while making the loading the now-misaligned remaing half as deadly perilous for the passengers as the sinking itself.  A true design flaw no longer repeated without adequate counter-flooding options...err, and a few more lessons from the Andrea Doria.

Speaking of lifeboats, much has been said having more on the Titanic, but we might also consider how casual both the ship's crew and even their contemporaries on other ships viewed safety drills.  Only a small number of select crewman teams had drilled on the launching of the Titanic's lifeboats, and during the disaster the lifeboats were launched one-by-one on each side, up to when water began to wash onto the Boat Deck as the ship began its plunge.  Organized that way, the crew would never have had time to launch any additional lifeboats, and those boats would in all likelihood have gone down still tied to their davits on the ship.  However, one has to wonder whose brilliantly inane idea it was to place two collapsible boats upside down and unreachable atop the roof of the crew's quarters.  Gosh, at least they provided boards with which to somehow flip the boats over and slide them down from the roof to the Boat Deck, where the boats could then be somehow dragged over and attached to the lowering davits, which would then fling the boats over the side and lower them down to the Promenade Deck for passenger loading, after which the boats would then be lowered to the water.  Seriously, with this kind of designed sequence of emergency actions passing regulatory muster, do we really think more boats would have helped?  They probably would have had them piled up in a stack on the sides of the smokestacks...oh wait, see Britannic!

After already ordering passengers to the Promenade Deck to await their lifeboats, Captain Smith was reminded that the Titanic's forward Promenade Deck was enclosed, a last-minute design enhancement from the Olympic, on which he previously had more experience.  The crew was ordered to pull the first lifeboats back up to the Boat Deck and the passengers sent up there instead to board the boats, but the lifeboat teams found that hauling the boats back up by hand to be extremely difficult and slow going, and so abandoned the time-consuming effort until they could smash the glass of the Promenade Deck enclosure and push passengers who had yet again been sent back down to the Promenade Deck through its shattered windows into the dangling lifeboats.  Though we must commend the crew for heroically throwing passengers through windows and into the boats even as water finally swirled around them on the Promenade Deck, we must also marvel at the sheer organizational chaos created in an era before mandatory maritime safety drills.  I guess it could be worse...fullsteam chaos on the bridges of the Lusitania and the Britannic sent their lifeboats into the still-churning and chopping propellers, and don't even get me started on the sad bridge comedy and decision-paralysis aboard the carrier Akagi at Midway:

Deck Logistics Officer Fujisaki, put the explosive bombs on the left, torpedo warheads on the right, and flammable aviation fuel tanks in the middle.  Oh, and be sure the giant sun disk on our flight deck has a fresh coat of bright red paint and crisp red rays all pointing to the center, so as to display the impressive dignity of His Majesty the Emperor.

Hmmm, good thing there were no icebergs nearby...

[Jezus53 18]

Originally posted by: Odainsaker

quote>

uh, wow.

[Merlin of Flyote 8]

Originally posted by: Zelgadis

Originally posted by: Merlin of Flyote

Originally posted by: Zelgadis

Originally posted by: Merlin of Flyote

The Titanic had been warned about icebergs, but failed to divert it's course because the ship was trying to break the record for the fastest crossing of the Atlantic and diverting would have ruined that.quote>

Actually, this is not the case.  First of all, the Olympic class (Olympic, Titanic, Britannic) were not remotely capable of challenging the speed queens of the day, Lusitania and Mauretania, nor were they intended to be.  Priority was given over to comfort for these ships. 

It could have been argued that the Titanic was attempting to break a company record, but this is also unlikely.  White Star captains at the time, and Captain Smith in particular, were loathe to run the engines of a new ship at their absolute maximum.  Captain Smith was notorious for taking years before doing so.  He wanted the new engines properly broken in.

It may have been a company record perhaps, but THEY WERE trying to break the record for the fastest crossing, Ismay was on board at the time, and the board of trade inquiry tried to pin blame on him for the tragedy. Also I have seen stories which say that the Titanic was the largest ship afloat at that time.quote>

quote>

quote>

Again, as I mentioned above, this is simply and utterly impossible.  The owners and designers did want to make the Olympic class a fast series of ships, but absolutely no effort was made to make them the fastest.  Their purpose was to be comfortable and smooth.  Taking a look at the Olympic, the only one of the class to have survived to have a career, you'll see that no attempt was ever made in its 20+ years of life to try to win the Blue Riband (fastest Atlantic crossing) prize with it.  If they wanted to win prizes, they'd have built the main engines with faster turbine engines rather than the slower, but smoother reciprocating ones.  (Only the small, center prop had a low-pressure turbine.)

So what happened?  The likely problem is inexperience.  Captain Smith was White Star's Commodore and had many decades with the company under his belt, but enormous ships like Titanic were still relatively new at the time.  Builders didn't quite know how to build them (Titanic had a ridiculously tiny rudder for a ship that size.)  And there were very few captains who quite understood how they handled.  Captain Smith received the ice warnings and probably felt that the ship would be able to turn in time to miss anything they came across, even if the lookouts had no binoculars.quote>

Board of trade didn't think so!quote>

The board of trade had far less expertise in shipbuilding and navigational matters than they should have to make a decision on the inquiry.  This is the same board of trade that thought 20 lifeboats should be enough.  And of course the board of trade didn't think so.  Flaws in large steamship design and operation were worked out over a period of decades.  They couldn't have known.  The testimony at the inquiry gives some interesting insight, but I wouldn't trust their conclusions any farther than I could throw them.

  Obviously, that was not the case.  Besides the fact that the ship's bulk made it difficult to turn, it also doomed it in another way.  A smaller ship would have simply bounced off the ice.  The Titanic was far too big to bounce and plowed down its side instead.  quote>

Because the ship had turned at the last minute, the damage was in a number of sections. If the Titanic had hit head-on then damage would be confined to just the front and it would have been capable of remaining afloat until the passengers had been rescued.quote>

True, but I wasn't talking about that.  First officer Murdoch decided that he could turn the ship in time.  Any other ship on the planet (except Olympic, of course) could have made the turn.  Titanic was too big and the rudder was too small.  We also now know that triple screw ships have a slower turn time than quad screw ships.  And then the ship slid down the side of the berg and didn't bounce off of it. 

Many Titanic movies make a big show of the ship's owner, Bruce Ismay, wanting to arrive in New York half a day early.  Captain Smith would have cared less.  It was to be his last voyage before retirement.  What were they gonna do?  Fire him?  quote>

Loss of pension and reputation as well as loss of job.quote>

Nope, nope, and nope.  None of those things would have happened.

Ismay:  Sorry, Captain Smith.  I know you've had an illustrious career with us, but you didn't go fast enough on your last voyage, so you're fired and you get no pension.  Back to England in disgrace and poverty with you!  Mwa ha ha ha!

Never would've happened.

In the end, it was really 19th century sailing and shipbuilding practices and several unimaginable turns of bad luck that ultimately doomed the ship.  The Olympic class ships were actually quite robust.  The oldest sister, Olympic, had a stellar career and even managed to sink a German U-boat during WWI when the captain spotted it and decided to run over it.  quote>

Britannic wasn't so lucky, it's lying at the bottom of the Aegean Sea off of Greece (a diver died trying to film it about a week or so ago), it had the same design fault as the Titanic, which was corrected for the Olympic. As I understand it the Olympic survived into the thirties.quote>

Britannic hit a mine AND half the portholes were open.  Hardly any ship would have stood a chance in those circumstances.  The design fault was corrected in the Britannic too, but even that wasn't enough to save her.

ISF

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[Odainsaker 2,136]

Unfortunately, both the British Board of Trade and U.S. Senate committee inquiries were both shams, with the decried White Star Line trying to cover itself and salvage its company image in the U.S. investigation, and the publicly humiliated Board of Trade trying to cover for itself and its outdated lack of oversight with its own later political show hearing. They were together the O.J. Simpson trials and Warren Commission hearings of their day, with the social and political elite of Britain and America parading through under the most sensationalist tabloid coverage, complete with passenger sex scandals and Magic Bullet mystery ships.

I watched the same program too regarding the expansion joint, which in presented surviving drawings show elements of poor design which could lead to end cracking. Dives on the Britannic showed that an alteration was made from the drawings, though it is hard to say whether this change came about as a result of the Titanic disaster or experiences with cracking on the Olympic. Dives on the Titanic seemed unable to find the same location to properly determine if it had ever been similarly corrected during building. In the end, expansion joints were a practical, if now obsolete, design solution to the universal problems of large ship bending and cracking that they were confronting af the time. I would argue that it would be hard to pin it as a negligent design fault contributing to the sinking, for just as we do not today design our skyscrapers to withstand terrorist attacks using multiple passenger jet planes, they did not design their ocean liners around tilting stern up and sinking. The Bismarck's gun turrents fell out of their seats when it sank and rolled over because the heavy turrets were simply held in place by gravity, but I wouldn't call that a negligent fault of design. I think Robert Ballard was right in pointing out that the ship simply hit an iceberg and sank, and subjecting every individual plate and rivet to exhaustive stress analysis in order to discover some new Smoking Gun is rather pointless.

For breaking speed records, Titanic was very nonchalant about it, for all its boilers were not even lit during the voyage, and the ship was not even going at its optimal potential speed. A focus was made during the inquiries on how much influence Managing Director Bruce Ismay had and whether he was pushing an early arrival to scoop the headlines and show up the competition or just mentioning it as an grand suggestion. With Ismay reduced to a shell-shocked recluse, the evidence examined comes from the casual conversations overhead by nearby passengers, with disaster investigators and the frenzied media looking to indict a villain and hang the monied White Star Line through Ismay. It is hard to peg anything concrete, as overheard casual talk in the lounges over tea does not equal implied orders, and the remaining bridge officers never seemed to be operating with an eye to break records. Afterall, similarly overhead conversations suggest that Captain Smith, a Royal Navy Reservist, instead mentioned following a common practice of skirting fast through danger zones rather than lingering in them. Who knows...but it is unlikely the most experienced, respected, and celebrated liner captain of the era on his grand retirement send-off-cruise as commodore of the fleet commanding the most glamorous maiden voyage to date was under any type of insidious employment threat. Besides, its not like having the conservatively old-fashioned Titanic surpass the maiden voyage crossing time of its sister ship Olympic set a mere year earlier is anything world shattering, especially with Cunard's rattling racehorses darting past both of them up in celebrated races with the Germans.  Instead, if anything, the whole casualness by which Captain Smith commanded, in an era when even then technically inferior liners operating with less experience and advanced safegaurds simply weren't hitting icebergs everyday, is more damning than romanticized storytelling notions of arrogant backdoor companyman villany snivellingly bringing down God's Righteous Wrath. We can watch that story in the "Poseidon Adventure."

There we go, a much shorter and more coherent post after my last armchair babblefest, hehehe.