Tim Maltin

There was a fire on board Titanic in one of her bunkers. And in fact, they worked night and day to put the fire out between leaving Belfast and all the way through Southampton. It was raging all the way along her route across the North Atlantic. It was in fact not put out until the Saturday before the accident.

Coal fires are so hot that you can't just play a hose on them to put them out. So the only way to get rid of the coal fire is actually to rake out all the burning coal and throw it on the furnaces. So it would have been up to the trimmers to make sure that they got the coal out of the hot bunker as it were first, and then they cleaned it all out and sprayed it all off with coal water afterwards.

In the inquiry after the sinking, it was talked about the damage that the fire had caused to the bunker. And it was noticed that the plates had been bent by the heat of the fire and some of the paint had come off as well. And in fact, it was equivalent to about one bucket an hour. So if you take a typical bucket of water, it was filling one of those about every hour.

That was the size of the damage. So not significant. And equally, of course, as Titanic sank with every open porthole, it was doubling and tripling the damage to the vessel. And so this weeping of this wound, if you like, caused by the fire earlier was a drop in the ocean.

I think the White Star Line felt slightly hard done by that the Cunard Line had in fact secured government funding to build the Lusitania and the Mauritania. But in order to get around this problem of funding, Ismay actually went to one of the richest people in the world, J.P. Morgan, and he actually bankrolled the building of the Titanic and the Olympic.

So in fact, in a way, Titanic was really an American ship. It was certainly financed by American money.

Ismay is often characterized as the villain of the piece, the baddie in the Titanic story. In fact, everyone is a mixture of good and bad, and that's the same for everyone on Titanic.

Now it was only Captain Smith's quick thinking in washing a little bit of thrust on the port propeller that actually saved the day there. Now, had Captain Smith ironically not been rather brilliant and quick-thinking in Southampton, of course, they'd have had to transship at the Isle of Wight, and everyone would have been saved.

White Star backed Smith 100%. They knew how safe he was. They knew how good he was. He had an absolutely perfect safety record.

In the end, Smith lost the case and the White Star had to pay compensation to the Navy.

They tried to make Titanic as safe as was practicably possible. They gave her a double bottom, for example. They also made sure that she could survive a collision between two bulkheads. They even made sure that she could survive the first four bulkheads being taken out.

But what they didn't put within the design envelope of Titanic was a sideswipe disaster over 200 feet that would affect the first five compartments.

So it wasn't really that they made a mistake in building her as they did. It was just that they didn't envisage having to make her be watertight in this type of damage.

People often wonder if the Titanic had had more lifeboats, would more lives have been saved? Well, in fact, what most people don't know is that even though Titanic only had 20 lifeboats, in fact, she didn't have time to launch even the 20 that she did have.

They had these lanes in the Atlantic with ships on them. They had an eastbound lane and a westbound lane, like railway tracks 60 miles apart. And they knew there was always going to be a ship coming along or a ship nearby. Plus they knew about radio. So lifeboats were not for, you know, chilling out on the ocean for a few days.

Lifeboats were for a short period of transshipment between a rescue vessel and a stricken vessel.

The Board of Trade didn't want unsafe ships that were going to sink piled high with lifeboats just to make people think they were safe. What the Board of Trade wanted was to incentivize well-subdivided and well-built ships like Titanic to be able to carry enough lifeboats to be able to ferry passengers from a stricken vessel to a nearby rescue vessel.

Being a stoker on Titanic was extremely hot work, very dusty, very physical work. It was an extremely exhausting job, and in fact, they didn't have access to any of their own deck space. What they did have though was Titanic's fourth funnel. was in fact a dummy funnel. It wasn't real, but it was used for what we would now call air conditioning.

And the stokers were able to climb up inside the fourth funnel, and there was a gantry that you could walk around inside the fourth funnel. And in fact, there's quite a famous picture of Titanic in Ireland where...

A stoker is going up for what was probably a cigarette break, and they're looking down, and this black face of this stoker was regarded as a bad omen, of course, at events that happened later on.

Most of the lifeboats had somebody in charge. It was either a junior officer or a quartermaster or some crew member who was in charge and had to make the decision ultimately whether to go back or not. And often passengers were divided according to accounts, whether they should go back or not.

Tim Moulton.

I don't think it's panic or irrational. If you're in the water with a life belt on and a lifeboat comes within short swimming distance from you and 100 people, I'm going to swim to the lifeboat and try and get on before the other people do. You know, your life is now on the line. So I don't think it's panic that people were worried about.

They were worried about the fact that people would actually, in a sense, rationally decide, I'm getting on this lifeboat. I'll take a chance. It won't sink if there's more than 70 people on it, because otherwise I'm going to die.

Even in non-stressful situations, people's memory is not good. People make many mistakes. In emotional crisis, memory is even worse than it is normally.

There's a crew member who's sleeping and some of his buddies come in and tell him, hey, you know, we've hit an iceberg, there's ice all over the decks. And he just says, yeah, well, that won't do any harm and, you know, rolls back over and goes back to sleep.

It is very late at night. Many people would have eaten a heavy meal, probably drunk a fair bit. I mean, I think some people are just going to be in such disbelief. They're going to say, oh, you know, and the fact that you're in bed and you're warm and you're cozy and you don't want to get up. If nothing else, it's going to delay you reacting to it, right?

Because you're probably going to say, oh, five more minutes and then I'll get up. This can't really be that sort of urgent.

So there's the crewmen on each side holding the rope, right, through a pulley. And then there's the rope is attached to the bow of the lifeboat, the stern of the lifeboat. And the crewmen have to work together to lower it. And that's very hard to do. And again, remember, they hadn't had much practice, right? So what would often happen is one crewman would lower too fast.

And so suddenly the bow of the ship is dangling down and everybody's about to fall out of the lifeboat. And then the same thing would happen with the stern. So it's a very, very scary, perky-jerky process. Early on, they can't really convince people to get into the lifeboats. People are like, why would I want to get off this nice warm ship and go out there in the freezing cold ocean?

The ship seems a lot safer. But part of it also is because the lifeboats are not being loaded in a very kind of orderly fashion.

The orders are very confused, right? I mean, the most famous order, you know, that the captain gives is women and children first. Well, what does that mean? You know, it's not entirely clear. So Lightoller, who's loading passengers on one side of the ship, interprets that as women and children only. So he will not allow any men on the lifeboats.

Captain Smith knows there's not enough seats for everybody on the lightboats. He knows that every seat on those lightboats is precious. They can't afford to launch them half full. He knows that that's literally going to lead to people dying. And I think for me, the mystery of Captain Smith is why he's not there sort of behaving more in a kind of leadership and more forceful capacity.

Nobody really sees him. like after the collision. And I don't want to cast aspersions because I don't know what he's doing. We don't know what he's doing. He might have been doing something helpful that we just aren't aware of. And, you know, in addition to that, you know, all of us, none of us know how we would behave, right, in that particular circumstance.

And he must have been dealing with an enormous weight of, you know, just that he was in charge of the ship and what had happened. But, you know, the whole story does cry out for somebody, right, to have taken a sort of leadership role. And several hundred people, potentially more, could have survived if those lifeboats had actually been loaded properly.

If the lifeboats had been loaded more efficiently, hundreds more people could have been saved, right? Those lifeboats go off, some of them go off less than a third full.

Literally some of the officers are off in various parts of the ship and they start to see lifeboats floating around in the water. One of them calls and says, hey, are you aware there's a boat with some people on it floating around in the water? He doesn't even know that the ship is sinking and they've sort of forgotten about him wherever he was stationed.

And they're like, oh, you need to get in here and grab some distress rockets and come and help us. Another member of the crew kind of looks out and sees one of the lifeboats in the water. And he says, you know, if they're going to launch the boats, why don't they actually put some people in them?

That was the greatest mistake he made in his life, that he preferred to survive. I mean, his life was ruined afterwards, but he survived.

He is extremely human, Bruce Ismay, and that is his great mistake, that he's a human being and wants to live.

The stories about shooting and people killing other people, it's very, very difficult to prove anything whatsoever.

Mrs. Murdoch, the nephew of William, his wife wrote to me from Scotland and said that not even Hollywood can say somebody's a murderer without truth, which is so, so true. You can't, because William Murdoch is the person who saved most people from the Titanic. I met Cameron and tried to point this out, that how wrong it is. I think he's changed his mind now, but the damage is done.

They should cut that scene away from the film. That's my belief. I've seen the film many times, but I close my eyes when that part comes. I don't want to see it.

There was an enormous air pocket inside the stern. And if you compress air, it becomes explosive. So the whole stern more or less imploded. So if you look at the wreck today, the whole stern is just like junkyard. The deck is turned upside down and everything is more or less completely destroyed because of this enormous pressure.

If the bulk had gone higher, this disaster wouldn't have happened.

as soon as titanic made contact with the iceberg the forward right hand if you like as you're looking going ahead part of the boiler rooms just exploded or looked like they exploded and suddenly fountains of water started spurting out from between the seams in the plates

So this would have been extremely shocking and worrying to those men who were trimming and the firemen and the stokers down there. And in fact, some of them felt that they must have run aground on Newfoundland because they couldn't imagine anything else that would do that much damage. I think some of them would have been quite surprised to know that all of that damage was caused just by ice.

Everyone down below would have been aware of the collision immediately because as well as half the people were on duty and half of them were sleeping, but their sleeping quarters were low down in the ship, right in the bow. So they would all have been immediately woken up by the loud crash of the iceberg hitting Titanic

As the bunker filled with water, it did eventually collapse under the weight of the water and that caused a rush to come in.

Immediately that water was seen to be pouring into the engine rooms, the order was given in the boiler rooms to shut the dampers. And basically this was a way as quickly as possible of stopping the boilers from exploding.

So what they wanted to do was actually rake the coal out and really, if you like, put the fire out straight away so that you didn't have cold water meeting steam and create cracks and explosions.

There was a roar of steam coming up from each of the funnels. And it actually meant that the officers couldn't actually hear any orders being given. So they were working in sign language because so much steam was being blown off so fast and so noisily overhead. And this was in order to prevent the boilers from exploding.

at dinner before the collision both captain smith and in fact thomas andrews who was one of the designers of titanic were if you like showing off to passengers by saying that titanic could be cut into three pieces and each piece would float so they really believed that she wouldn't sink they also believed that an iceberg probably wouldn't cause a catastrophic failure of the hull

So I think they were as surprised as the rest of the passengers. And I think their main concern would have been, does this mean a delay in getting into New York? So they then sent Andrews down to assess the damage. It took Andrews quite a long time to go through the different areas and time how fast the water was coming in and then get the plans out and work out what that meant for the ship.

When you get very, very cold air, you get this thing that's called heliostasis, which is a posh way of saying still air. And that's because air is denser and heavier when it's colder. So what happens is that you get very cold air very near the surface and it gets warmer and warmer like a sort of layer cake. So what you had was very stratified air.

It had the effect of switching on and off the stars. So as you're looking at the stars, the light beams were just oscillating a little bit in these layers of air that you're looking obliquely through to see the stars.

And so some survivors actually said the stars were flashing so much, it was almost as if they were flashing Morse code signals of distress to everyone about the calamity that was happening below.

And of course, the absolutely fatal part of that is that the Morse Lamp signals between a nearby potential rescue ship, the Californian and the Titanic, that flashing caused by the stratified air actually scrambled the sense out of the Morse Lamp signal. So this is the kind of tragic situation that was caused by the very, very unusual seeing conditions that night.

And that's why I say that in a way, first of all, the Titanic disaster was ultimately caused by the weather and really that she was sunk by a perfect storm of calm.

The impact on Thomas Andrews of realizing that his creation that he had put blood, sweat, and tears into over the last several years was actually definitely going to sink, I think would have been absolutely devastating. It's quite interesting because everyone's trying to calm the passengers. And of course he is too. But a stewardess is seen walking around without her life jacket on.

And he says to her, why aren't you wearing your life jacket? And she says, oh, Mr. Andrews, I don't want the passengers to think I'm afraid. And then he says to her with a sort of look, he says to her, if you value your life, you will wear your life belt.

This news would have been an utter devastating shock to Captain Smith and Bruce Ismay, and I don't think they could quite believe it.

For years, CQD had been a distress signal. It had been the more standard. But recently, they were moving it to be SOS. And the reason for SOS was because it was very easy to hear. Even if you weren't very well trained, you could hear the dots and dashes of SOS quite clearly. Philip's distress call is just eight letters.

Murdoch's plan was to do a maneuver called porting about the berg.

Everyone knows the famous order harder starboard. And this was from sailing days when in fact the tiller of the helm would be put harder starboard, which would actually move the bow to the port or left. So that's what Murdoch did to get the front to clear the berg. And he did that. The bow missed it. But Titanic isn't out of the woods yet. He then gave a less famous order, which is harder port.

And that's because having swerved the bow away, it was then presenting her whole starboard side to the Berg.

Titanic nearly missed the berg. It missed the part of the berg above the sea. Unfortunately for Murdoch, there was a very large flat spur of ice that was a couple of meters below the surface. In fact, the harder port order, instead of or as well as clearing the stern, it actually had the effect of driving the bow of Titanic into the ongoing iceberg.

The explosive force of hitting the iceberg was a million foot tons a second. It was enough to lift the Washington Monument a foot in a second. So in other words, it was like a bomb going off. People have said that if Murdoch hadn't actually swerved, if you like, to nearly avoid the iceberg, that then there would have been a head-on collision.

And it's true that this actually would have saved Titanic because it would have had the effect a bit like a car crash, if you like, with crumple zones. It would have the effect of concertina-ing in the first hundred feet of the ship. But the rest of the ship would have been completely intact.

And in fact, the deceleration at 22 knots in, say, the first 100 feet of crumpling would actually not have even thrown people out of their beds. So it would have been like a motor car of the day gradually coming to a stop.

Now that would have very sadly killed all 80 of the firemen who were birthed down in the bow of the ship who were not on duty at the time.

He jolly nearly succeeded. Now, of course, if he'd taken the decision to carry straight on and Titanic had survived and the first hundred feet had been smashed in, then he'd definitely have been sacked and people would just have thought he was a complete idiot and not trying to avoid the berg.

So I think it's one of those situations where he did his best at the time and really he did what any sensible, experienced person would do.

It was only light damage, but the problem was that it was over 200 feet. that she was designed to float with any two watertight compartments flooded, and she was designed to float even with her first four watertight compartments flooded. What she wasn't designed to float with was breaches in her first five compartments.

The bird just slightly nicked into the fifth watertight compartment, which, if you like, was the Achilles heel. It was the thing which meant that Titanic would sink to the bottom.

a number of these engine room crew flooded up into what was normally passenger areas. And in fact, there is one account where a Stoker appears completely black from head to toe in coal dust, but with quite a lot of blood spattered over their face and clothes. And they were missing a number of fingers on one of their hands.

So I think it gives you a picture of how shocking that time was when people were getting ready to get in the lifeboats.

It's very controversial to say this, but a lot of third class who died chose not to get in the boats. And they did that for a very specific reason. It's because a lot of first and second class were traveling alone or as a couple, which makes it much easier to make executive decisions about who's going to survive and who isn't.

Whereas a lot of third class were bringing everything they own to the new world, and they were traveling many of them. So the Goodwins, for example, had the largest cabin in third class right at the stern of the ship. And all eight of them died on the Titanic. And I think that's because they wouldn't have been allowed to send up to the boats their sort of teenage children.

They would be counted as men and counted as adults in 1912. And so they elected to stay together. Now, of course, once the shit properly starts tipping up and they realize it's all terrible, these families then flood onto the deck. And really, people are really shocked to see that there are so many women and children still on the ship because they believe genuinely

that really all the women and children they could see had gone on the lifeboats. So suddenly when this massive humanity comes up from third class at the end, you know, cynically you could say they had chosen to stay there, they had been given the opportunity, but you can absolutely see why they decided to stay together.

And it's those women and children that come up, and that's a lot of the reason why 50 children died on the Titanic.

In 1912, you were a man. If you were over 13, you could work down a mine or something like that. A few years before that, in the late Victorian period, you had children climbing up chimneys when they were absolutely tiny, and you had people down mines when they were six or whatever.

What women and children only meant on the port side of Titanic was pretty much no teenagers. If you were 14, 15, 16, you would not be allowed to get in a boat with your mother. And as a result, a lot of people with families chose not to leave in lifeboats.

With Lightoller, I think it is quite possible that because of the stress of the situation, he was absolutely carrying out orders to the letter of the book at that time. Basically, I think this is an example of how when the chips are really down and things are really serious, you behave extremely properly.

And I think that's what was going through the minds of the officers and senior personnel on Titanic throughout the tragedy.

Tim Maltin, What we find is Murdoch, who's actually allowing men to go in lifeboats with women and children, that allows families to load boats very, very quickly. Whereas Lightoller on the other side of the ship was splitting up families, which is taking a long time and causing a lot of people to reject getting in a boat at all.

So more people were saved from Murdoch's side of Titanic than they were from Lightoller's side of Titanic.

The military men there sort of stood to attention, and the women got off in the cutter, and they were saved. So since then, that became the rule, although it wasn't actually a real rule, if that makes sense.

The Board of Trade said you could fit 60 people in a lifeboat, but they didn't take into account the sweep of the oars, which took up a lot of space. In other words, if you filled the boat, you couldn't then move the oars, which is not a very sensible situation if you think you've got a 500-mile row ahead of you.

Also, it was very cold that night, and the Board of Trade didn't take into account motoring clothes and coats. Some people got in the lifeboats with luggage and even a small dog, for example. So, in other words, the sort of general chaos of it was not taken into account by the Board of Trade.

And in fact, lifeboats that, when you count them up on land, look to have been quite empty would have actually looked much more full at the time.

One reason for getting the lifeboats away, in some cases quite empty, was because they felt that the falls might not take the weight of everyone. They felt it was safer to load them more fully when they were actually buoyant on the surface of the sea. So that's why a lot of the boats were lowered when they weren't full.

But I do believe, controversially, I think Lightoller did have in mind that he wanted to leave a few spaces in the lifeboats for crew, and there were 900 crew, to be able to swim into the lifeboats afterwards.

The lifeboats were located on the promenade deck, and that is where first and second class were. Now, the third class promenade deck was at the stern, where there were no lifeboats. So there is a structural thing that the third class are having to travel further to get to lifeboats.

When they left Belfast for Southampton, the second officer left and nobody got the binoculars from him. Nobody came up with another set of binoculars for the lookouts. The lookouts didn't have binoculars.

The lookouts testified at the Senate hearing and the Board of Trade that in their opinion, if they had had binoculars, they'd have seen the iceberg sooner and that they would have been able to avoid it.

I think Ismay's conduct on Carpathia is very, very bad. He probably knew more people on Titanic that drowned than anyone else. His guests were the Kakatas, a very wealthy family, very powerful railway building family in America, and they'd all died on Titanic at his invitation. And look, I can't blame him. I think if it had been me, I might have cowered and hidden in my cabin as well.

There are reports of people going in to try and talk to him, and he wasn't really there. So I don't doubt that he may have suffered a real nervous breakdown, mental breakdown, being in a real sense of shock.

He could not face the Widows on the Carpathia. He could not face it. He had a lot of shame for having survived.

All men who survived the Titanic disaster were vilified at the time, especially those, you know, rich and powerful men. Women and children died and people couldn't understand why there were bases left in the life base and some men got in. Ismay is often characterized as the villain of the piece, the baddie in the Titanic story.

The situation on Carpathia immediately after the rescue is extraordinary. So she's absolutely packed to the gunnels, if you like. You've got first-class passengers that are offering their beds to third-class families. You've got a lot of the Carpathia passengers who are sleeping on the floor in the dining rooms and hallways and corridors.

And of course, don't forget, Carpathia had 700 people on board already, so it doubles the amount of people

So there are rumors like Titanic's met with an accident, but she's being towed to Halifax and she's going to be all right. And of course, people thought that must be more realistic than the great Titanic actually sinking on her maiden voyage. That's just too bonkers to be true.

Ismay tries to hold the white Starliner, the Cedric, in order to be able to immediately get the crew back to England. I think he's doing that to protect his business and because they are his staff and he'll know that they won't have the money or means or want to stay around in New York.

But the other thing is, of course, he would then lose his workforce to other lines because they would be freelance and they'd be able to work on other ships.

I think he's looking from a business perspective, but also there could be an element that he may have known there was going to be an inquiry and there could be an element that he wants to make sure that people are in the UK and subject to UK law rather than in the US and subject to US law.

Wireless was such a fantastic new technology. And in fact, there had been previous use of wireless in disaster situations. And the wireless operators there had become extremely famous. So it was well known that the wireless story from Titanic was a major one. Now, Marconi was an inventor, but he was also a businessman. And he knew that Bride had survived.

And of course, lots of reporters would have been offering money for stories. And so they'd have wanted it to be placed with the right publication and for the right money. And that's how they not only controlled the news, but also really publicized the amazing savior that Marconi was.

Because actually, if Titanic had not had radio, or actually if Carpathia had not had radio, it's possible and likely that nobody... would have survived the sinking of the Titanic.

Titanic's distress position was ten miles wrong.

So actually Carpathia had steamed at full speed towards ten miles away from where the actual Titanic was sinking?

because of a one-minute error between taking a star sight on the deck and transferring that correct timing onto the ship's chronometer time. There was a one-minute error made in that, which equates to a 10-mile error. But by absolute luck that night, and there was luck as well as bad luck,

The true position of the sinking Titanic and indeed her floating lifeboats was on the wrong track between the rescue ship and the wrong position. So it just so happened that they picked up the lifeboats by accident because of where they happened to be when they had the wrong distress position.

the wind was getting up, the waves were getting up, some lifeboats were fairly swamped. Had Carpathia arrived, say, two or three hours later, it's likely that there could have been no survivors from the Titanic.

Lightoller's blowing his whistle frantically.

And so what happens is that one of the empty lifeboats that has emptied itself to go to the wreck actually picks the people off collapsible B. They end up transferring just as the Carpathia is coming up.

And that vessel, collapsible B itself, is left to float about the Atlantic.

All of the survivors from the Titanic were in a very bad way, especially those on collapsible B. They weren't really thinking straight. Many passengers, for example, Bride, whose feet were so badly damaged, they had to create a sling and actually haul him up onto the Carpathia.

They were given brandy when they arrived. They were also checked over by the doctor. Some of them were suffering from shock. We know that Ismay himself had to be sedated in his cabin because he was suffering so much from the effects of shock.

She wore the very false shirt and they were due to do a speed trial on the Monday morning. My hunch is she would have probably done 25 knots.

Titanic was due to arrive on Wednesday morning, and what they wanted to do was arrive on Tuesday night so that as the miss lifted in New York, she would be on her berth, and then all the press in New York would be like, wow, this Titanic's really fast.

I do believe Elizabeth Lyons, actually, because I think that both Ismay and Smith wanted to have the headlines. They both loved headlines. They weren't racing for the Blue Ribbon, but the Titanic was in a race and she was racing her sister's maiden voyage. So what they were doing is they were watching the charts and they were looking at where was Olympic on her maiden voyage and where are we?

And they were like, great, we're way ahead.

They'd known each other for years. Smith had known his father, Thomas Ismay.

Ismay had quite a confusing status aboard Titanic because he was traveling on a first-class ticket and therefore was technically a passenger. But of course, as the ultimate boss, he even employed the captain, as it were. He really was also a sort of super captain or, if you like, another member of the crew. And what we see is we see him flipping between these roles throughout the voyage.

So sometimes he's eating and meddling with the passengers. Sometimes he's carrying a message from the bridge. He's walking between these two worlds.

The boiler rooms were several decks deep and they occupied the area of the ship on top of what we call the tank top. And underneath that, you had the bilges and things like that. So in other words, it's the lowest deck that there is on the ship, but going up several heights of decks to accommodate the size of the boilers.

And then towards the stern of the ship, you had the engine room proper, if you like. And that's where these two giant reciprocating engines were.

They were cork trimmers because they literally trimmed the coal from the bunkers at the sides of the ship and then fed it into the boilers. And if they trimmed it unevenly, then the ship would actually develop a list because Titanic used 600 tons of coal a day.

So the trimmers worked wheelbarrows and actually went from the bunkers, collected the coal and then wheeled the coal to the stokers who would then shovel it into the hot furnace. extremely hot work, very dusty, very physical work.

He was the most experienced captain on the North Atlantic. He was quite a good-looking man with a big, rough sort of moustache, which was typical of captains of the time. And yet he spoke in very hushed, very calm tones. He had sparkly blue eyes. And passengers loved him. They would change their passages to actually sail with him. He was urbane. He was sophisticated.

He could talk about all the court cases of the day, you know, with the wealthiest people of the day.

Quartermaster Road said you could see whiskers around the light, which means little ice crystals floating in the still air, which made beautiful rainbows around all of Titanic's deck lights. Another point while we're talking about the incredible beauty and majesty of that night is that there was a lot of phosphorescence in the water.

So as Titanic plowed on to her destiny, if you like, on this black ocean that was absolutely calm, there was a green V shape, almost like geese flying, if you like, but a green V coming out from her bow.

They had just been able to make contact with America for the first time since leaving Europe, 400 miles away, and it was very faint. So then when this ship, the Californian, comes in, hey, I'm stopped in ice, it blasts Phillips' ears off.

He says, K-O-O-N. And what that means is keep out, old man. So it's been translated in modern parlance to be shut up. But it wasn't. It was banter between two young people. He didn't know the importance of the message. It brassed his ears off. And in the haste of the moment, he just said, keep out, old man. K-O-O-N.

There were about 200 icebergs in a giant circle, 360 degrees around Titanic, when she sank. And a lot of the birds were more than 200 feet high. So what you have to imagine is any warmer air is just blowing over the top of all these birds. And inside, you've got this little microcosm of a mill pond that's freezing with still air.

And of course, this barrier of ice all the way around really protected the environment. Titanic curator Klaas-Joran Wetterholm.

Even though there was no moon, the stars were extraordinarily bright. People said that you could read your watch by the starlight. You could see the whole Milky Way. Someone said there were more points of light than there was black between them.

And actually, not only could Titanic's funnels be seen when her lights went out, silhouetted against the stars, but even her masts, her thin masts all the way up, could actually be seen as blocking out stars. It was a night almost where you're looking at the universe.

There had been quite a warm winter in the Arctic in 1911, and a lot of ice had come out of Bathin Bay and was actually sort of marooned, if you like, along the shore around Newfoundland. And then what happened was there was quite a high tide. And what happened was that the high tide lifted all the icebergs, and then they suddenly floated in a giant rush down the Labrador Current.

So what happened was the cold water flowed a bit like a cold snake wriggling over the hot desert floor. That's how the Labrador current that was freezing flowed over or into the Gulf Stream, but without mixing. When you get very, very cold water of the type I've been describing, you get the opposite of a desert mirror.

So in the desert, the surface is very hot and light travels faster along the surface and slower in the colder air, slightly higher up. And that causes the light beam to bend upwards. And what that means is it brings a sliver of the sky, bends it down and sort of paints it on the ground in front of you. And then it's your brain that actually thinks it's water.

The exact same things happens, but in reverse when it's very, very cold on the surface. So what happened is that as you get into this very, very cold Labrador current area, the light, instead of bending upwards and showing you the sky, it bends downwards around the curvature of the Earth and shows you a bit more beyond the horizon. It has the effect of raising the horizon slightly.

What they started to see when they got into the Labrador Current was a very thin layer of what looked like haze, a band of haze all around the horizon. It had the effect of camouflaging the iceberg. And so this little band of haze all around the horizon just meant they probably picked up the berg, I don't know, 15 seconds, 20 seconds later than they would otherwise have done.

author tim malton there was a map of where all the ships would be that had radio at the time because radio didn't have a range right the way across the atlantic so if you wanted to get messages to shore you would have to jump from ship to ship by saying hey can you send this message to america and they'd say yeah okay i'll tell fred and you know and then it would get there

They were the equivalent of, if you like, tech geeks today. They were involved in the technology that was cutting edge. They'd all trained together in a place called the Tim Tavonackle. They all knew each other and were mates, and they were all quite intelligent, well-educated young men who cared about this new technology.

There was an element of a problem of dual responsibilities because they were being paid by Marconi and the passengers were actually paying them to send messages, whereas no one was actually paying them to take weather warnings to the bridge. Most of the weather warnings were sent to the bridge, but they didn't tend to get the priority that the paying messages got.

I think some of the fixes they made probably wouldn't have been advised by the company, but they were perfectly capable of making do and mending on the North Atlantic.

In fact, had they not fixed the radio just before the collision, of course, they would have been without it during the collision and it's likely that no one would have survived and no one would have been saved and Titanic would have been like the Mary Celeste and no one would have known what happened to her after she left Ireland on her maiden voyage.

In 1912, all captains on the North Atlantic believed that in clear weather, which they had, that they would be able to see ice in time to take avoiding action.

The speed was absolutely driven by the passengers. You know, they demanded to be there fast, absolutely demanded it. There were sweepstakes being run on how fast the ship was going to go. So I would say the main topic of conversation on Titanic was the speed of the vessel.