Though the wireless code was flashing SOS around the world

[austin_dern]

It's time for annual re-appearance on the sciencey or historyish channels for specials about the sinking of the Titanic. The opening reminds us the ship was called unsinkable to its face, and mentions the sister ship Olympic. They never mention a mother or father ship. Titanic was surely affected by growing up an orphan, and perhaps that collision with the tug as mentioned about four minutes in was just a plea for affection. Perhaps it needed a hug, and settled for a tug. Imagine if it needed a jug. But what would it need a jug for?

After the first commercial break the narrator notices some previously unidentified and unpredictable-in-1912 flaw in the construction: ``Is it possible the great ship's segmented compartments were simply stapled together?'' Some mechanical engineers, in front of black backdrops, explain how staples work and that sometimes you want to staple things better than they did back then. Next a Royal Navy officer, in front of props from the 1951 movie Captain Horatio Hornblower, agrees, but using different words. Grainy photographs appear while the narrator explains that poor metallurgy of the day means staples of 1912 would today be classified as tomato ketchup, and the only thing holding Titanic together was the embarrassment it would cause the company if it never amounted to anything besides a pile of raw parts.

About 22 minutes in we've had enough of this and bring on an entertaining fellow from an obscure university who points out that from the iceberg's perspective the Titanic rammed it, and nobody seems to have been worrying why the iceberg was so perfectly aimed and what the icebergs hoped to gain. But laboratory tests on modern icebergs show that they don't use staples to hold themselves together either. They use staples only recreationally.

Around the 35 minute mark we have footage showing the Triangle Shirtwaist Company Fire. This, the narrator admits, has no bearing on the Titanic, but they swiped this clip of the fire from a silent movie made to better exploit the tragedy back then, and it would be a shame to let those images go unused until whenever the heck the anniversary of that disaster is.

At 40 minutes they mention that novel that guy wrote where the ship with the name like Titanic sinks, and note that this means that guy and that novel have achieved immortal fame, never asking what role he had in the iceberg.

Closing on the 46 minute mark we find another fellow with some connection to a more obscure college, who claims to have written a book, and who finds the contemporary documentary evidence unclear in important points. Do we know there was an iceberg? What happened to it? Do we know it wasn't dry ice? If it wasn't dry ice, was that because of the water splashing onto it? And this Titanic thing: how can we say with certainty that the passengers were not merely on a boardwalk amusement ride in Asbury Park, New Jersey? Assuming there were an iceberg and a ship, and that at least one of those two sank, then what about the penguins? No penguins seem to have been admitted into evidence, however, and the fellow is plainly mad. After taping he will be despatched to the Nostradamus Bureau.

The conclusion is that while the Titanic was built with unimagined flaws we would never make that mistake now. If we were to build the Titanic today no mere iceberg would sink it. Nothing could, not even meteor strikes. We might try everything we could think of and it would stay afloat. It would prowl the seas, unstoppable, until we finally drained the North Atlantic. This would not sink it, but it would at least keep us safe from the ship. We'd have to store the North Atlantic in a humongous jug, possibly placed in Nova Scotia, but surely that would be worth it.

Thus we end talking about the staples again, and the observation that if we knew then what we knew now, things would have been different, considering how few of us were around then and now. It makes the disaster so very cozy.

Trivia: The first hearings into the sinking of the Titanic began 19 April 1912, at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City. Source: Why Things Break, Mark E Eberhart. (That would be the old Waldorf-Astoria, presently the site of the Empire State Building.)

Currently Reading: Edison: A Biography, Matthew Josephson. And every so often these things hit a sentence with startling yet coincidental meaning. bunny_hugger, you may want to note: At that period Charles Edison also showed some passing interest in owning and managing the Little Thimble Theatre, one of the ``little theaters'' of the Washington Square quarter.

Comments

[moonfires.livejournal.com]

The Titanic was actually held together with the metallurgical equivalent of flimsy staples.

Right now the belief is that the use of iron rivets at the stern and bow, instead of steel rivets, which were only used at the central hull, were the main cause. The fact that the Titanic, Olympic, and Britannic were all being constructed at the same time caused major shortages in men and materials. Images of a later crash of the Olympic show this, with a joint with the rivets completely missing - the force just sheared the heads off.


http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/15/science/15titanic.html?_r=1&sq=titanic&st=nyt&oref=slogin&scp=3&pagewanted=all
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Titanic-Rivets.html?scp=2&sq=titanic&st=nyt

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Oh, you didn't think I was joking, did you? Every couple of years there's a new discovery of severe materials science blunders in the making of Titanic, with the result that its hull had the strength of balsa wood, its rivets were sarcasm, the engines operated at exactly the lengthwise resonance mode of the vessel, its flooding tanks were able to handle eyedroppers full of water before the ship would sink, and while they didn't weld anything important back then, if they did, they would have welded it all wrong too. I'm impressed when one of these shows find the ship construction did anything right.

[bunny-hugger.livejournal.com]

The Little Thimble Theatre... now that's just adorable, even if it had nothing to do with Ham Gravy.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

It's quite cute. And now I'm starting to get curious since if Wikipedia's to be believed, Segar moved to New York City in either 1918 or 1919. If you have a small theater, certainly, `Thimble' is a natural word to put in front of it, and the same alliterative charm would have attracted Segar's interest, but ...

Ah! The New York Times archive reports the Little Thimble Theatre had opened at 10 Fifth Avenue in August 1915. That'd certainly be something Segar could have seen; it's right near Washington Square Park. I don't know where the New York Journal building was, though. Obviously the closer it was the better the odds he might have seen it.

[chefmongoose.livejournal.com]

Fascinating, to think he might have borrowed the name. But neat that it has some potential resonance.

Which reminds me, one of these days I need to see the They Might Be Giants movie.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I also learn in searching this out that apparently the Hearst newspapers decided, when the Journal-American shut down, that its whole archive -- including all its photographs -- should be destroyed. Since, after all, the newspapers were on microfilm and who could possibly want the stuff which went into one of the most influential newspapers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries?