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The Titanic Was on Fire for Days Before the Iceberg Hit
- LeonB 8y agoI checked Snopes and it seems this is not entirely bogus. A bit speculative perhaps. https://www.snopes.com/news/2017/01/06/coal-fire-sink-the-titanic/ https://www.snopes.com/news/2017/01/06/coal-fire-sink-the-ti...
- Gibbon1 8y agoMy grandfather mentioned having to deal with a coal fire in the bunker at the high school he managed, over the winter break. If it'd been during the school year he could have got 25 teenage boys to do it. But it was just him and the maintenance guy shoveling out 20 tons of coal. Smoldering coal bunkers had to be a common occurrence on steam ships.
- coldtea 8y agoNot like snopes (a random internet website) is some expert authority on such matters.
- Domark 8y agoExcept the site specifically tries to debunk incorrect narratives.
- coldtea 8y agoSo like any e.g. conspiracy theorist site out there? They too try to "debunk incorrect narratives" (as they see it). Why trust some random non-expert volunteers running a site and their citations (which could be biased).
- Fjolsvith 8y agoAt least they make an effort to support their arguments with some research. Calling them non-expert volunteers is prejudging them before even considering their position and determining whether it is valid or not by providing supporting or opposing citations.
- onlydeadheroes 8y agoOr maybe we are not prejudging enough. "If an organization like Snopes feels it is ok to hire partisan employees who have run for public office on behalf of a particular political party and employ them as fact checkers where they have a high likelihood of being asked to weigh in on material aligned with or contrary to their views, how can they reasonably be expected to act as neutral arbitrators of the truth?" https://www.forbes.com/sites/kalevleetaru/2016/12/22/the-daily-mail-snopes-story-and-fact-checking-the-fact-checkers/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/kalevleetaru/2016/12/22/the-dai...
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- Fjolsvith 8y agoOr maybe we are just focusing on who is weighing in on matters instead of measuring it ourselves.
- onlydeadheroes 8y agoWe went from "Except the site specifically tries to debunk incorrect narratives" to "employees who have run for public office on behalf of a particular political party and employ them as fact checkers" I think we achieved something important here, in spite of it all.
- MrTonyD 8y agoI've stopped reading all those "fact check" web sites. They seem to be literalists who can't hear the actual meaning of things being said. Everything is just about measurements while ignoring reality. (Now that I think about it, that is also a common problem to technical people too. Failing to recognize the shortcomings of data and measurements.)
- krapp 8y ago>They seem to be literalists who can't hear the actual meaning of things being said. Everything is just about measurements while ignoring reality. "Facts" are about literal, objective, measurable reality. If it depends on a subjective interpretation and reading between the lines, then it isn't a fact.
- coldtea 8y ago>"Facts" are about literal, objective, measurable reality. If it depends on a subjective interpretation and reading between the lines, then it isn't a fact. In physics, chemistry, math, etc. facts are the order of the day, yes. But raw facts are few and far between in human affairs and even less so in politics. When people say something in non-hard-science domains, it more often than not depends on a "subjective interpretation", and depending on their phrasing, hidden motives, and eloquence might also need some "reading between the lines" or some charitable interpretation. Nerds applying Vulcan-style logic to such claims just confuse matters more.
- ataturk 8y agoWell, it's a fact that guns were moving from the US to Mexico in fairly large numbers. The media, during the late Bush and the early Obama Administration, although they knew what was really going on, were placing blame on guns being too available in the US. Turns out, however, that it was our own government making the whole thing operate in what they called an attempt to trace where the guns would end up. But of course that was just a cover story when they got caught because (and here's where "facts" end up diverging and what gets us into trouble) really the whole maneuver was about creating a casus belli for softening up the public to accept a policy change (better known as gun prohibition). Meanwhile, all the non-government people, like the gun dealers, were desperately trying to do the right thing but were being threatened with prosecution if they blew the whistle. This is sickening behavior on the part of our government. Barely anyone was punished for it, either. Here is how all this stuff gets started: 1) A behavior is observed 2) Some murky facts exist 3) Media and other poorly informed, lacking expertise people run with the story and apply their agenda to it however they please, either at the behest of their political masters or just because it sells eyeballs 4) Many stupid things happen 5) The public ends up even less well informed, more confused, and generally angrier and agitated, often less free 6) The usual suspects triumph no matter what because dividing people and confusing them is good for them overall Thus, nothing ever gets cleared up unless the facts are so clear and so obvious that even an IQ 60 person gets smacked in the face with them, which isn't often the case. You know who broke the Fast & Furious case wide open? A regular guy, not investigative journalists!
- Angostura 8y agoBut it is as if Snopes carefully sets out the reasoning, evidence and sources used to reach its comnclusions. Which means that you can look at the evidence and decide whether you wish to come to a different conclusion. Do you?
- kerrsclyde 8y agoThere was an excellent Channel 4 UK documentary about this, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORUKjNZzPbQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORUKjNZzPbQ
- Tokkemon 8y agoIt's been debunked.
- blablabla123 8y agoPeople must have felt that Engineering products gave humans god-like powers. It must have been fun to completely ignore Physics.
- black-tea 8y agoYou can see that even when people drive cars. People will do really stupid things like drive through deep puddles or over uneven ground because they essentially trust the car to do what it does under normal conditions.
- jbay808 8y agoOr the guy who, when his engineers say the building design isn't safe, fires them and gets someone else to do it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sampoong_Department_Store_collapse https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sampoong_Department_Store_co...
- mook89 8y ago> People will do really stupid things like drive ... over uneven ground Cars tend to be able to drive over uneven ground. I'd say that people only used to driving on smooth asphalt underestimate this.
- black-tea 8y agoI've seen people rip off entire pieces of bodywork because they've overestimated this.
- dsfyu404ed 8y ago>People will do really stupid things like drive through deep puddles or over uneven ground because they essentially trust the car to do what it does under normal conditions. Or because it makes an otherwise mundane task entertaining.
- Symmetry 8y agoPeople at the time were aware of the issue: http://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poems_strain.htm http://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poems_strain.htm
- aisofteng 8y agoThe short, stilting sentences make this article read like a fifth grade book report.
- cyberferret 8y agoIt is possible the author ran his post through an SEO tool like Yoast. I know we have that on our company blog (I didn't install it), and it is constantly telling me to shorten my sentences for maximum SEO ranking. I usually ignore it because by following its suggestions, it makes my writing read like a fifth grade book report.
- londons_explore 8y agoShort sentences help search engines 'understand' the text, because they can easily parse each sentence to get direct meaning out of it. If your article says 'Fire caused titanics sinking.", and someone searches Google for "Why did titanic sink?", then Google can return that snippet of your article directly. They can also look for similarities in meaning between your sentences and all other sentences on the web to find contradictory information. If you use long sentences with twists and turns and double negatives, it's rare that such a direct match can be made to a search query, and your article won't be returned.
- qubex 8y agoFinally I understand why a lot of online content (particularly that of a more obviously derivative nature) has become so relentlessly uniformly elementary over the course of the past three/five years.
- Waterluvian 8y agoI dunno if that's a bad thing. I would endeavour to write all your documents as simply as reasonably possible.
- nashashmi 8y agoI read for fun and mental enhancement. If articles become simple just for SEO optimization, I'm quitting the internet. Even Wikipedia is starting to reflect this.
- petee 8y agoThis article keeps referring to the bulkheads as watertight, which they were far from...
- steve19 8y agoThe article says that delaying sinking would have saved lives. Ships are frequently pumping out water. They don't need to be 100% watertight.
- EADGBE 8y agoEven recreational boats do this. Modern ones. Today.
- jsmith45 8y agoI mean any surprise really? Even if the hull of a recreational ship was completely water tight, large waves or rain would cause water to enter the boat, so having a way to get rid of that water is a good idea. While boats usually add drainage to the deck, and try to minimize the water that gets "inside" (say in the cabin, or the hollow hull of many small motorboats) not all ingress can be avoided. Combined with the possibility of anything below the waterline being even slightly less than watertight, and it is not a surprise that a bilge pump of some kind is pretty common equipment on most boats with an electrical system.
- B1FF_PSUVM 8y agoIn simpler times, bailing out was only done with buckets in boats (or even ships) ...
- petee 8y agoThats aside the point i was making -- the bulkheads were not watertight. If they were actually watertight, as incorrectly stated, then we wouldn't be discussing the Titanic at all.
- qubex 8y agoIt's actually well-known that there were fires in the Titanic's coal bunkers. I remember first reading about this way back in the mid 1990s (1995-1997) when I was somewhat obsessed with the subject. It's also been speculated for just as long that the heat might've affected the hull's properties, though this runs counter to the argument that the cold water might've contributed to making the metal more brittle. This is by no means extraordinary: coal bunker fires were rather common back in the age of steamships. It was even discussed at the various admiralty inquests into the loss of the vessel.
- cjrp 8y ago> ...though this runs counter to the argument that the cold water might've contributed to making the metal more brittle Why not both? Very high temperatures earlier in the crossing and then very low temperatures in the Atlantic.
- foldr 8y agoThis theory comes from a TV documentary broadcast in 2017 that's been pretty thoroughly debunked: http://wormstedt.com/Titanic/TITANIC-FIRE-AND-ICE-Article.pdf http://wormstedt.com/Titanic/TITANIC-FIRE-AND-ICE-Article.pd...
- tantalor 8y agoFrom the article's conclusion: Hypothesis: The fire played one final, deadly role in the disaster: the fire-damaged bulkhead gave way, causing the ship to sink, and the enormous loss of life. Actually: Since the ship was doomed from the moment of the collision, whether or not the bulkhead collapsed was more or less immaterial to the timing of the disaster. Lives were not lost because it allegedly collapsed early.
- mannykannot 8y agoHow long it stayed afloat was a critical matter. The RMS Carpathia arrived two hours after the Titanic sank.
- foldr 8y ago"Andrews knew about three-quarters of an hour before that rush of water in Boiler Room No. 5 that the ship was doomed. Once the forward compartments had filled, the ship’s bow would have been so low in the water that the flooding of the next compartment aft, Boiler Room No. 5, would have been a certainty. Whether or not the bulkhead held was of no major consequence in the eventual sinking, or how quickly the ship sank." The article goes on to show that it's far from clear that the bulkhead did in fact fail, and that it's unlikely that the fire would have been intense enough to damage it significantly.
- mannykannot 8y agoThis article is a criticism of a particular documentary (which admittedly seems to have a number of false and dubious claims), and in some places seems more determined to debunk the claims made in that documentary than to consider whether a bunker fire could nevertheless have played any role. If the documentary claims the ship was only doomed by the failure of the bulkhead in question, then it is in error, but timing of the essence here: if the ship stayed afloat for one more hour, it probably would have made little difference, but an extra two hours probably would have. The metallurgical discussion of the effect of fire on the bulkhead looks well-grounded to me (though I know little about the matter), but it might be somewhat moot if, as this article seems to acknowledge, the bulkhead may have been deformed beforehand, as a consequence of a bunker fire at some point. I am curious as to whether the strain on the hull, from having the stern lifted out of the water, could have led to (further) damage to the bulkhead, creating the reported rush of water.
- yuchi 8y agoNot as much interesting, but was astonished to know that we know the name of the Titanic paper boy. There’s a incredibly sad story on his death too: https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/6364763/edward-john-parfett https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/6364763/edward-john-parf...
- ollyhayes 8y agoCan someone explain the comment in the article about the ship going at full speed because they were fighting the fire by throwing the burning coal in the furnace? I would have thought there would be some valve somewhere that can be opened to vent excess power (steam?) into the atmosphere rather than being forced to drive the propellers faster, is that an incorrect assumption?
- dboreham 8y agoI don't know, but I do know (based on reading old Engineering text books from my Dad) that steam power is way more complicated than you might imagine. So I suspect it is possible there is no easy way to vent it while still maintaining acceptable forward motion. It is also possible they just liked the idea of going fast.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y agoMost things people don't have experience with are much more complicated than they imagine. It is a valuable concept to keep in mind.
- userbinator 8y agoThat part didn't really make sense to me either. I believe there's a throttle valve leading to the engines, and there are relief valves to vent excess steam. It might be that those valves aren't meant to operate continuously, however. I suppose a visit to archive.org's collection of old steamship books could yield a definitive answer.
- jacobush 8y agoMaybe they didn't want to let good fuel go to waste.
- pjc50 8y agoGiven that they need a certain amount of fuel to cross the Atlantic, this makes sense - I suppose that disposing of it otherwise would run the risk of running out of fuel.
- paul_milovanov 8y agoAny sufficiently complex system has a hidden barely contained coal fire burning somewhere. Working as intended.
- Izkata 8y agoNo, according to this the fire broke out in the coal storage. It's not referring to the furnace.
- paul_milovanov 8y agoExactly; the furnace is where you'd expect it to break out, so it won't. Somebody didn't write their integration tests for the coal storage though.
- ablation 8y agoMilovanov's Law.
- charmides 8y agoThis piece talks about the subject, but can anyone explain in more detail why they couldn't put out a coal fire on a ship?
- Deestan 8y agoNot trying to be snide, but why do you type this into a comment field and wait up to an hour for someone to summarize it for you rather than googling "coal fire"?
- charmides 8y agoI did and I still did not understand it well. I thought someone could explain it better and it'd maybe start a dialogue. Thanks for a worthless comment.
- nkg 8y agoTitanic 2: Backdraft.
- boomlinde 8y ago> It’s unthinkable today that a tragedy of this magnitude could occur. In terms of death toll, there have been worse shipwrecks in this century.
- freddie_mercury 8y agoTo expand on this: 1987 there was a shipwreck that was 4x as bad as the Titanic (over 4,000 deaths). In 2002 over 2,000 people died in one (nearly 2x the Titanic) A 2006 wreck had 1,000 deaths. The same magnitude as the Titanic. It seems that it is only unthinkable for people who can't use Wikipedia.
- usrusr 8y ago"Unthinkable" is a subset of "don't bother to check this" though, so it has quite some natural resistance to truth.
- magduf 8y agoHowever, if you account for the difference in global population, the Titanic disaster looks worse. There's many times more humans on the planet now than there were in 1911.
- sbmassey 8y agoI wonder if the punishment for murder ought to decrease as world population increases.
- Aloha 8y agoWe have proof that too many watertight compartments were open to the sea, that alone doomed the ship, the coal fire is an also ran.
- Tokkemon 8y agoYup. Occam's razor here.
- patrickg_zill 8y agoOne of my favorite short stories is Youth by Joseph Conrad, which has as a central event a ship sinking because of a coal fire... https://www.gutenberg.org/files/525/525-h/525-h.htm https://www.gutenberg.org/files/525/525-h/525-h.htm
- amysox 8y agoBoy, what James Cameron could have done with this news...
- justin66 8y agoThe author mentions a 56 year old coal fire in Pennsylvania for some reason. It's not the most extreme example he could have reached for. The New Straitsville mine fire in Ohio has been burning for 134 years, and is still slowly spreading. http://www.ohiohistorycentral.org/w/New_Straitsville_Mine_Fire http://www.ohiohistorycentral.org/w/New_Straitsville_Mine_Fi...
- empath75 8y agoThe Centralia fire is the most famous one by far.
- justin66 8y agoI've never noticed this to be the case, but I'm from the area (a few hours from each site). Looking online it appears you're right: one fire is 40x bigger and much older, but the new one gets 20x the google hits. I think the newer fire, by virtue of its location and having started more recently, is probably a lot more photogenic because of the infrastructure damage it causes.
- toyg 8y agoIt depends on your parameters - Yanartas / “Mount Chimera” was in the Iliad, it’s hard to beat that level of fame. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yanartaş https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yanartaş
- fromthestart 8y ago> It is estimated that more than two hundred square miles of coal has burned Why would they measure the amount burned in square miles??? How thick? This measurement is meaningless!
- mannykannot 8y agoGranted, it's not a measure of how much coal has been burned, but it is a measure of how far the fire has spread.
- 8y ago
- trhway 8y ago>There were rumors that the ship was trying to break some kind of speed record, but the Titanic was not built for speed. not exactly. Longest hull means highest hull speed.
- jamieson-becker 8y agoThe title is factually incorrect: the iceberg didn't hit the Titanic. The historical record clearly indicates that it was just chillin' out.
- farss 8y agoThey may have meant the word 'hit' as a noun.
- antongribok 8y agoIf the title was "The Titanic Was On Fire For Days Before The Iceberg Hit it" I would agree with the parent comment, however as it is now, I read it as you would read "We hit an issue". Clearly we didn't "hit" any issue, but we started experiencing an issue.
- Dylan16807 8y ago"We hit an issue" is still using "hit" as a verb. And making it metaphorical doesn't help the problem of the iceberg being the subject of that interpretation. Using it as a noun is like saying "before the hit" or "before the issue". "Iceberg" is an adjective describing the type of hit.
- tgarv 8y ago"the Iceberg Hit" is a gerund phrase -- a phrase derived from a verb but acting in as a noun. It's like saying "We went to the charity run". "Charity run" is acting as a noun.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- dragonwriter 8y ago> The title is factually incorrect: the iceberg didn't hit the Titanic. That's just a matter of your chosen frame of reference.
- gscott 8y ago
- mitchtbaum 8y agoThe myths of invincible heroes and the factors and flaws of their downfalls are instructive for any emerging leader, also of the fates of those who journey through the seas of reflection and those in the fog without their binoculars. Sometimes ya gotta flip the script. https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/InvincibleHero https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/InvincibleHero https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NoGearLevel https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NoGearLevel https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ImprovisedWeapon https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ImprovisedWeapon
- jliptzin 8y agoThis is neither new nor surprising; I remember reading about this years ago. Apparently this was common for steam powered vessels back then, which is the reason why they proceeded with the voyage.
- tbirrell 8y agoAh yes, another "TITANIC MYSTERY FINALLY SOLVED" article. And right on schedule too! If you Google "Titanic coal fire", the results page will be full of articles positing this exact theory. This is neither new, nor correct. Anyone who has studied this event at any length will know it was a death by a thousand paper cuts. Trying to assign ultimate responsibility to a coal fire using a 106-year-old photo showing a black smudge is laughable and shows a fundamental lack of understanding. The fire in question wasn’t some blazing inferno that many undoubtedly imagine, but rather it was more of a smoldering affair. This fire was in one of many rooms that was built for the express purpose of containing this coal. A fuel source that is known to self-ignite. To say that the fire effected the ship is like saying burning a casserole in your oven will burn down your house. Possible? Technically. Likely? Absolutely not. Something this article failed to mention was that the fire was put out the day before the Titanic sank. Coal fires were common on large steel ships like the Titanic. The engineers and stokers were prepared for, and ultimately handled the fire. It was part of their job, not some apocalyptic emergency. As I said above, the Titanic was a death by a thousand paper cuts. Unfortunately, it was a necessary death to give us the marine safety regulations we have today. If any number of things had been just slightly different on the Titanic, it would be a footnote in history and we would be talking about a different ship that would have inexplicably had everything go wrong, including but not limited to an irrelevant coal fire.
- debt 8y agoThey hit an iceberg going pretty fast and no one knows why they were going so fast. I think you’re glossing over the idea that the burning coals were thrown into the furnace which in turn revved up the engine which caused the Titanic to speed through the Atlantic and right into an iceberg.
- tbirrell 8y agoThe Titanic was going fast because they were trying to get to New York ahead of schedule for the favorable publicity. To say that the Titanic was careening out of control through the Atlantic Ocean that by all rights should have been devoid of icebergs because some lowly stokers were shoveling coal into a furnace faster than they should have is both simplistic and flat out wrong.
- TACIXAT 8y agoCoal fuel can't melt steel ships.
- mark-r 8y agoNo need to melt it, just decrease the structural integrity so that when stress was applied it would fail.
- trhway 8y agoIt was a feature and not a bug - such slow burning starved of oxygen would produce the coal burning with higher temperature and thus increase the power produced per volume unit of the burner.
- mcguire 8y ago"Another issue that has always caused confusion was the Titanic’s speed. It was running at full speed when crossing the Atlantic Ocean, even when there were warnings of icebergs in the area. There were rumors that the ship was trying to break some kind of speed record, but the Titanic was not built for speed. This mammoth ship was a luxury liner. Molony indicates that this could have been caused by the fire-fighting activities." I think Molony and the author need to do more research on transportation in the late 19th and early 20th century. Liners were the only way to cross the ocean. If you're in America and need to do business in Europe, you take a ship. The faster that ship gets there, the better.
- emmanueloga_ 8y agoSomething I learn quite recently and most Titanic articles tend not to mention: "The Olympic-class ocean liners were a trio of British ocean liners built by the Harland & Wolff shipyard for the White Star Line during the early 20th century. They were Olympic (1911), Titanic (1912), and Britannic (1915). Unlike the other ships in the class, Olympic had a long career spanning 24 years from 1911 to 1935. " [1] The Britannic was sunk by an explosion caused by a naval mine, apparently planted by a WWI German submarine. And the Titanic... well, we all know what happen to the Titanic, don't we... :-P 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olympic-class_ocean_liner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olympic-class_ocean_liner EDIT: More wiki-trivia [2] * The titanic was 269.1 m long. * The largest ship these days (the Seawise Giant) is an oil tanker 458.46 m long. * The largest passenger ship: the Oasis (362 m long). 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_longest_ships https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_longest_ships