8 ms·

“Titanic” Disaster: Report of the Committee on Commerce, US Senate (1918) [pdf]

89 points by miobrien 4y ago

dwheeler 4y ago
What I especially appreciate are the recommendations at the end. The Titanic was a disaster, but the good news is that it was carefully analyzed and changes were made to greatly reduce the impacts of problems in the future. For example, laws were changed changed so that there had to be enough lifeboats for everybody on the ship. Currently software developers are often not learning from previous security disasters. I hope that will change in the future. There are already efforts to start writing up about important problems, and that will be a start.
- mgkimsal 4y ago
  > Currently software developers are often not learning from previous security disasters. Perhaps some developers aren't, but many are. It may also be that their recommendations or efforts are ignored or overruled ("that'll make things too slow/costly/etc").
  - Nextgrid 4y ago
    Most importantly, Titanic-like disasters involving numerous losses of life generally prompt regulation or lawsuits at the very least. There is a significant financial incentive not to let accidents happen. Data breaches or misuse of personal data is not punished (at least not in the US), neither by the government nor by the market. There is no financial incentive there.
    - InCityDreams 4y ago
      There is a significant financial incentive not to let [cost-ineffective] accidents happen.
- vegetablepotpie 4y ago
  The regulation to have life boats for all was the trigger for the capsizing of the Eastland in 1915. The addition of lifeboats cased the ship to be too top heavy and it flipped over while boarding. This killed 844 passengers, more than the passengers killed on the Titanic [1]. While it’s important to have backups in failure cases. It’s important to also consider the impact backups have in contributing to other failure cases. Another example, people often wonder why airlines do not equip passengers with parachutes in the case of a crash. The answer is that people do not know how to use them, and would likely injure or kill themselves. Furthermore, they wouldn’t help in the period of flight where accidents are most likely to happen, which is take off and landing [2]. Disasters are a systems problem. And when looking to mitigate, we need to consider the efficacy of the mitigation and the total influence of mitigation’s on contributing to the likelihood of other failure cases. [1] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/eastland-disaster-killed-more-passengers-titanic-and-lusitania-why-has-it-been-forgotten-180953146/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/eastland-disaster-kil... [2] https://simpleflying.com/commercial-planes-parachutes/ https://simpleflying.com/commercial-planes-parachutes/
  - WastingMyTime89 4y ago
    Blaming the new regulation for The Eastland capsizing is verging on dishonesty. The boat was poorly designed and had already nearly cap sized in 1904 and 1906. It was bought for a bargain in 1914 because it was known to be unsafe. The addition of the new six lifeboats was only one modification amongst many which were done without due care and merely the straw that broke the camel back.
  - tialaramex 4y ago
    Lifeboats in particular were probably the wrong fix, not because of Eastland, which was just an unsafe ship and would doubtless have found some other excuse to kill everybody, but because lifeboat maintenance and testing causes injuries and occasionally deaths, while in the modern era the need to evacuate passengers to lifeboats grows smaller. I think MAIB (the Marine [edited: this said Maritime but that's wrong] Accident Investigation Branch, a UK government agency) wrote a report about this at one point. In coastal waters particularly the ship's master is realistically never going to encounter a situation where abandoning to lifeboats is the right choice. Fire is the most likely reason to consider it, but modern vessels should be able to contain plausible fires well enough to reach safety, even if as a result the ship is damaged beyond economic repair. Just loading the passengers into lifeboats and putting the lifeboats into the sea is a pretty fraught endeavour, you will probably injure either a passenger or crew member doing it - and that's before any risk from being in a tiny boat out at sea.
- akira2501 4y ago
  > Currently software developers are often not learning from previous security disasters. I hope that will change in the future. Current security disasters are typically exclusively financial or social and don't involve the death of those impacted. So, in a certain sense, I hope this doesn't change in the future.
jasonhansel 4y ago
A classic case of correlated failures. If you have multiple redundant systems, but anything that damages one system is also likely going to damage others, then a failure is much more probable than you would expect based on the level of redundancy. In this case the redundant systems were the watertight compartments. The engineers thought the ship wouldn't sink because it was unlikely for five of them to fail at the same time. But they forgot just how likely it was that any incident (e.g. an iceberg collision) that damaged one compartment would likely also damage many others.
- togs 4y ago
  So in other words, redundancy requires subsystems' Pr(failure) to be independent of each other.
- Comevius 4y ago
  I mean the Titanic suffered a 100 meters long side-swipe damage, no redundancy could account for that. No one thought that the Titanic was unsinkable, it's just that no one thought that anyone would smash the ship against an iceberg at that speed, because why would they. Unfortunately the clear, moonless sky effectively camouflaged the iceberg due to the low contrast and false horizon. Even ships today would maintain a lower speed at night when needed despite having a radar and access to satellite images, but the Titanic had to cross the ocean faster than the Olympic did before.
  - jasonhansel 4y ago
    Yeah, no redundancy could account for it, which is why confident predictions that the Titanic was uniquely unlikely to sink due to the presence of redundant systems were so ridiculous. Keep that in mind next time you think your system is ultra-reliable because you have 50 instances of every service, but they're all running in us-east-1.
russfink 4y ago
The sister ship, Olympic, was refitted after the accident and had a long career to 1935. It had its own set of illustrious fatal incidents. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Olympic https://www.britannica.com/topic/Olympic
- akvadrako 4y ago
  There is a new podcast Did Titanic Sink that suggests it was actually the Olympic that sunk instead of the Titanic and the ships were switched for insurance fraud reasons. https://www.rnz.co.nz/programmes/did-titanic-sink https://www.rnz.co.nz/programmes/did-titanic-sink
  - hef19898 4y ago
    That cinsiracy theory is as old as the Titanic. Besides involving the intentional killing of hundreds if people, it never made sense for a ton of reasons. It was alos debunked hundrds if times by now...
    - akvadrako 4y ago
      I'm only a few episodes in but so far it seems reasonable. It doesn't involve intentially killing the people, since if the ship didn't hit an iceberg there would have been time to rescue them.
      - hef19898 4y ago
        Let's assume the complete BS theory for a second. It would mean to switch two huge ships without anyone noticing. Repainting, changing the interior and all that involves a shipyard. Once that is done successsfully wothout anyone wondering why they are painting Titanic over the letter Britannic or something else, nobody in the crew should realize it. It wouod also mean the naval architect of those ships is in on it as he was onboard. Then it means having some ships in port on stabd by for the rescue ops, again hard to ccordinated without anybody on those ships eondering why they are still in port. In port, well, that it self is stupid. Why not have them on route and near by the Titanic when you scuttle her? Because scuttling is what you have to do, on high seas, without the people opening the valves to turn on you later. And why? Because unless there is some other shipping towing an iceberg to the Titanic to convenently hit, how exactky do you sink a perfectly good ship? So it either all of that, or it is just an accident caused by bad technology, bad practices, incomoetence, corporate preasure ans greed and bad luck. Your pick on what you want to believe.
haunter 4y ago
I actually like the recommendations parts and already talks about encryption! >The committee finds that this catastrophe makes glaringly apparent the necessity for regulation of radiotelegraphy. There must be an operator on duty at all times, day and night, to insure the immediate receipt of all distress, warning, or other important calls. Direct communication either by clear-speaking telephone, voice tube, or messenger must be provided between the wireless room and the bridge, so that the operator does not have to leave his station. There must be definite legislation to prevent interference by amateurs, and to secure secrecy of radiograms or wireless messages. There must be some source of auxiliary power, either storage battery or oil engine, to insure the operation of the wireless installation until the wireless room is submerged. Also the HTML version is here https://www.titanicinquiry.org/USInq/USReport/AmInqRep01.php https://www.titanicinquiry.org/USInq/USReport/AmInqRep01.php
- londons_explore 4y ago
  Nearly all those recommendations have effectively been implemented in modern boats... Not sure if the law requires it, or boat designers just see it as a sensible design. Quite impressive for someone to read an incident report and actually implement the recommendations - so often they sit in a filing cabinet forever.
  - hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
    > Quite impressive for someone to read an incident report and actually implement the recommendations - so often they sit in a filing cabinet forever. That's not really true. There is a saying when it comes to transportation regulations, "Safety regulations are written in blood." That is, nearly all safety regulations are the result of analysis after a tragic accident.
    - londons_explore 4y ago
      Oh yes, but nearly all accident reports make perhaps 30 recommendations, any one of which would probably have averted the disaster that just happened, of which only perhaps 3 are implemented. The other 27 usually get skipped because they're too costly/politically unpopular/no longer seem important after some other changes have been made to prevent reoccurance.
arbuge 4y ago
Page 3 states that the cost of the Titanic, "fully equipped", was 1.5m pounds sterling. According to: https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/monetary-policy/inflation/inflation-calculator https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/monetary-policy/inflation/in... this equates to around 120m pounds sterling today. It seems to me that there's no way you could construct anything like her for that amount of money today. I wonder what gives.
- profile53 4y ago
  Labor laws, mostly.
  - ClumsyPilot 4y ago
    like how if someone looses a hand in your factory, they get compensation?
    - profile53 4y ago
      Yeah, or the fact that hard hats are required, people are required to be paid more than 50 cents an hour, you can’t force 1 employee to work 80 hours a week continuously, etc. All of that adds to costs. For good reason, don’t get me wrong, but the cost of labor in the western world has exploded over the last 100 years.
- dboreham 4y ago
  Inflation isn't a scalar.
  - mwint 4y ago
    Can you elaborate? I’m intrigued, always thought of it as a scalar
    - tzs 4y ago
      Different things have different price changes over time. For example, in 1973 a 2N2222 transistor was $0.79 at Radio Shack. Today, a single 2N2222 is $1.29 at Jameco. It's $0.95 at AmplifiedParts.com. It's $7 for 100 of them at Amazon. If we go by the price of 2N2222 transistors and use the price for single units at Jameco we get inflation of 1% per year over the last 50 years. In 1977 the price of volume I of Apostol's "Calculus" in hardback was around $20. Now it is $153 on Amazon, for the same book. By "same book" I don't just mean hardback. I also mean the same content. It was on the 2nd edition in 1977 and Apostol saw no need for any further revisions. Using Apostol volume I as our yardstick inflation has been 4.6% per year over the last 45 years. The most complete way to represent inflation would be as a vector whose components are the inflation for each individual good or service. To get a scalar for inflation they take another vector that represents how much of each good or service that some hypothetical typical consumer consumes and combine them to get what the overall inflation is for a typical consumer.
toinewx 4y ago
the report says - the titanic did not beak in two parts - there was no substantial suction So the movie is inaccurate
- adamj9431 4y ago
  The movie is right. Some survivors said it broke in half, many didn’t. It was thought it went down in one piece until the shipwreck was discovered in the 1980s.
- scoopertrooper 4y ago
  If so, then the video footage of the Titanic in two pieces on the ocean floor must also be inaccurate.
- Comevius 4y ago
  Some passengers got this wrong, but the Titanic did broke in two. It's hull girder couldn't tolerate much bending, as the water filled the front of the ship, it started to break after the stern was up 15 degrees. One passenger claims that he even heard when it first snapped. Many witnessed the ship breaking in two and sinking. Later we found the wreckage that also confirmed it.
- inglor_cz 4y ago
  Please do not commit the mistake of believing a 100 year old paper over your own eyes or credible evidence. The ship lies on the ocean floor until today, broken in two parts with almost half a mile separating them.
itcrowd 4y ago
My little trivia for the Titanic has always been that Violet Jessop was on board, surviving three accidents from sister ships: Titanic, Olympic and Brittanic! Go read the wiki, it's amazing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violet_Jessop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violet_Jessop
varenc 4y ago
You can find the full report, along with the appendices with the list of crew and passengers, here: https://books.google.com/books?id=twnY7_eFDuQC&pg=PA7287&lpg=PA7287&dq=%22INVESTIGATION+INTO+LOSS+OF+STEAMSHIP+Titanic%22&source=bl&ots=I9qvMjV9py&sig=ACfU3U0qtlQTObWdqyaCy6VxH_mDn-0azw&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwie6JGgzJz6AhWiLkQIHSILCrwQ6AF6BAgFEAM https://books.google.com/books?id=twnY7_eFDuQC&pg=PA7287&lpg... The tables are also more nicely formatted in this version. And Google has kindly performed OCR as well. You can download a PDF of the entire 1912 congressional record, of which report is a small part, here: https://books.google.com/books/download/Congressional_Record.pdf?id=twnY7_eFDuQC&output=pdf https://books.google.com/books/download/Congressional_Record...
billfor 4y ago
"Woman and children first", but especially first class :-)
thamer 4y ago
The report mentions the ship making a C.Q.D. call, which I wasn't familiar with. The name comes from the earlier telegraph "CQ" call for alerts, named after the French word "sécurité", abbreviated as "sécu" which is how the letters C and Q are pronounced in French. "D" is added to indicate distress. Sending a CQD call means sending the letters C,Q,D in Morse code; this practice was later supplanted by SOS. Wikipedia has a page with more information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CQD https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CQD. It mentions the Titanic disaster: "Harold Bride, the junior radio operator, suggested using SOS, saying half-jokingly that it might be his last chance to use the new code."
tamaharbor 4y ago
I have always wondered why the General Slocum incident (955 dead) in NYC in 1904 has never received more attention.
kazinator 4y ago
I tried to Ctrl-F search for "DiCaprio", but it's just scans. Why did he have to die, you know?

89 points by miobrien 4y ago

What I especially appreciate are the recommendations at the end. The Titanic was a disaster, but the good news is that it was carefully analyzed and changes were made to greatly reduce the impacts of problems in the future. For example, laws were changed changed so that there had to be enough lifeboats for everybody on the ship. Currently software developers are often not learning from previous security disasters. I hope that will change in the future. There are already efforts to start writing up about important problems, and that will be a start.

mgkimsal 4y ago
> Currently software developers are often not learning from previous security disasters. Perhaps some developers aren't, but many are. It may also be that their recommendations or efforts are ignored or overruled ("that'll make things too slow/costly/etc").
- Nextgrid 4y ago
  Most importantly, Titanic-like disasters involving numerous losses of life generally prompt regulation or lawsuits at the very least. There is a significant financial incentive not to let accidents happen. Data breaches or misuse of personal data is not punished (at least not in the US), neither by the government nor by the market. There is no financial incentive there.
  - InCityDreams 4y ago
    There is a significant financial incentive not to let [cost-ineffective] accidents happen.
vegetablepotpie 4y ago
The regulation to have life boats for all was the trigger for the capsizing of the Eastland in 1915. The addition of lifeboats cased the ship to be too top heavy and it flipped over while boarding. This killed 844 passengers, more than the passengers killed on the Titanic [1]. While it’s important to have backups in failure cases. It’s important to also consider the impact backups have in contributing to other failure cases. Another example, people often wonder why airlines do not equip passengers with parachutes in the case of a crash. The answer is that people do not know how to use them, and would likely injure or kill themselves. Furthermore, they wouldn’t help in the period of flight where accidents are most likely to happen, which is take off and landing [2]. Disasters are a systems problem. And when looking to mitigate, we need to consider the efficacy of the mitigation and the total influence of mitigation’s on contributing to the likelihood of other failure cases. [1] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/eastland-disaster-killed-more-passengers-titanic-and-lusitania-why-has-it-been-forgotten-180953146/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/eastland-disaster-kil... [2] https://simpleflying.com/commercial-planes-parachutes/ https://simpleflying.com/commercial-planes-parachutes/
- WastingMyTime89 4y ago
  Blaming the new regulation for The Eastland capsizing is verging on dishonesty. The boat was poorly designed and had already nearly cap sized in 1904 and 1906. It was bought for a bargain in 1914 because it was known to be unsafe. The addition of the new six lifeboats was only one modification amongst many which were done without due care and merely the straw that broke the camel back.
- tialaramex 4y ago
  Lifeboats in particular were probably the wrong fix, not because of Eastland, which was just an unsafe ship and would doubtless have found some other excuse to kill everybody, but because lifeboat maintenance and testing causes injuries and occasionally deaths, while in the modern era the need to evacuate passengers to lifeboats grows smaller. I think MAIB (the Marine [edited: this said Maritime but that's wrong] Accident Investigation Branch, a UK government agency) wrote a report about this at one point. In coastal waters particularly the ship's master is realistically never going to encounter a situation where abandoning to lifeboats is the right choice. Fire is the most likely reason to consider it, but modern vessels should be able to contain plausible fires well enough to reach safety, even if as a result the ship is damaged beyond economic repair. Just loading the passengers into lifeboats and putting the lifeboats into the sea is a pretty fraught endeavour, you will probably injure either a passenger or crew member doing it - and that's before any risk from being in a tiny boat out at sea.
akira2501 4y ago
> Currently software developers are often not learning from previous security disasters. I hope that will change in the future. Current security disasters are typically exclusively financial or social and don't involve the death of those impacted. So, in a certain sense, I hope this doesn't change in the future.

jasonhansel 4y ago

A classic case of correlated failures. If you have multiple redundant systems, but anything that damages one system is also likely going to damage others, then a failure is much more probable than you would expect based on the level of redundancy. In this case the redundant systems were the watertight compartments. The engineers thought the ship wouldn't sink because it was unlikely for five of them to fail at the same time. But they forgot just how likely it was that any incident (e.g. an iceberg collision) that damaged one compartment would likely also damage many others.

togs 4y ago
So in other words, redundancy requires subsystems' Pr(failure) to be independent of each other.
Comevius 4y ago
I mean the Titanic suffered a 100 meters long side-swipe damage, no redundancy could account for that. No one thought that the Titanic was unsinkable, it's just that no one thought that anyone would smash the ship against an iceberg at that speed, because why would they. Unfortunately the clear, moonless sky effectively camouflaged the iceberg due to the low contrast and false horizon. Even ships today would maintain a lower speed at night when needed despite having a radar and access to satellite images, but the Titanic had to cross the ocean faster than the Olympic did before.
- jasonhansel 4y ago
  Yeah, no redundancy could account for it, which is why confident predictions that the Titanic was uniquely unlikely to sink due to the presence of redundant systems were so ridiculous. Keep that in mind next time you think your system is ultra-reliable because you have 50 instances of every service, but they're all running in us-east-1.

russfink 4y ago

The sister ship, Olympic, was refitted after the accident and had a long career to 1935. It had its own set of illustrious fatal incidents. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Olympic https://www.britannica.com/topic/Olympic

akvadrako 4y ago
There is a new podcast Did Titanic Sink that suggests it was actually the Olympic that sunk instead of the Titanic and the ships were switched for insurance fraud reasons. https://www.rnz.co.nz/programmes/did-titanic-sink https://www.rnz.co.nz/programmes/did-titanic-sink
- hef19898 4y ago
  That cinsiracy theory is as old as the Titanic. Besides involving the intentional killing of hundreds if people, it never made sense for a ton of reasons. It was alos debunked hundrds if times by now...
  - akvadrako 4y ago
    I'm only a few episodes in but so far it seems reasonable. It doesn't involve intentially killing the people, since if the ship didn't hit an iceberg there would have been time to rescue them.
    - hef19898 4y ago
      Let's assume the complete BS theory for a second. It would mean to switch two huge ships without anyone noticing. Repainting, changing the interior and all that involves a shipyard. Once that is done successsfully wothout anyone wondering why they are painting Titanic over the letter Britannic or something else, nobody in the crew should realize it. It wouod also mean the naval architect of those ships is in on it as he was onboard. Then it means having some ships in port on stabd by for the rescue ops, again hard to ccordinated without anybody on those ships eondering why they are still in port. In port, well, that it self is stupid. Why not have them on route and near by the Titanic when you scuttle her? Because scuttling is what you have to do, on high seas, without the people opening the valves to turn on you later. And why? Because unless there is some other shipping towing an iceberg to the Titanic to convenently hit, how exactky do you sink a perfectly good ship? So it either all of that, or it is just an accident caused by bad technology, bad practices, incomoetence, corporate preasure ans greed and bad luck. Your pick on what you want to believe.

haunter 4y ago

I actually like the recommendations parts and already talks about encryption! >The committee finds that this catastrophe makes glaringly apparent the necessity for regulation of radiotelegraphy. There must be an operator on duty at all times, day and night, to insure the immediate receipt of all distress, warning, or other important calls. Direct communication either by clear-speaking telephone, voice tube, or messenger must be provided between the wireless room and the bridge, so that the operator does not have to leave his station. There must be definite legislation to prevent interference by amateurs, and to secure secrecy of radiograms or wireless messages. There must be some source of auxiliary power, either storage battery or oil engine, to insure the operation of the wireless installation until the wireless room is submerged. Also the HTML version is here https://www.titanicinquiry.org/USInq/USReport/AmInqRep01.php https://www.titanicinquiry.org/USInq/USReport/AmInqRep01.php

londons_explore 4y ago
Nearly all those recommendations have effectively been implemented in modern boats... Not sure if the law requires it, or boat designers just see it as a sensible design. Quite impressive for someone to read an incident report and actually implement the recommendations - so often they sit in a filing cabinet forever.
- hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
  > Quite impressive for someone to read an incident report and actually implement the recommendations - so often they sit in a filing cabinet forever. That's not really true. There is a saying when it comes to transportation regulations, "Safety regulations are written in blood." That is, nearly all safety regulations are the result of analysis after a tragic accident.
  - londons_explore 4y ago
    Oh yes, but nearly all accident reports make perhaps 30 recommendations, any one of which would probably have averted the disaster that just happened, of which only perhaps 3 are implemented. The other 27 usually get skipped because they're too costly/politically unpopular/no longer seem important after some other changes have been made to prevent reoccurance.

arbuge 4y ago

Page 3 states that the cost of the Titanic, "fully equipped", was 1.5m pounds sterling. According to: https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/monetary-policy/inflation/inflation-calculator https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/monetary-policy/inflation/in... this equates to around 120m pounds sterling today. It seems to me that there's no way you could construct anything like her for that amount of money today. I wonder what gives.

profile53 4y ago
Labor laws, mostly.
- ClumsyPilot 4y ago
  like how if someone looses a hand in your factory, they get compensation?
  - profile53 4y ago
    Yeah, or the fact that hard hats are required, people are required to be paid more than 50 cents an hour, you can’t force 1 employee to work 80 hours a week continuously, etc. All of that adds to costs. For good reason, don’t get me wrong, but the cost of labor in the western world has exploded over the last 100 years.
dboreham 4y ago
Inflation isn't a scalar.
- mwint 4y ago
  Can you elaborate? I’m intrigued, always thought of it as a scalar
  - tzs 4y ago
    Different things have different price changes over time. For example, in 1973 a 2N2222 transistor was $0.79 at Radio Shack. Today, a single 2N2222 is $1.29 at Jameco. It's $0.95 at AmplifiedParts.com. It's $7 for 100 of them at Amazon. If we go by the price of 2N2222 transistors and use the price for single units at Jameco we get inflation of 1% per year over the last 50 years. In 1977 the price of volume I of Apostol's "Calculus" in hardback was around $20. Now it is $153 on Amazon, for the same book. By "same book" I don't just mean hardback. I also mean the same content. It was on the 2nd edition in 1977 and Apostol saw no need for any further revisions. Using Apostol volume I as our yardstick inflation has been 4.6% per year over the last 45 years. The most complete way to represent inflation would be as a vector whose components are the inflation for each individual good or service. To get a scalar for inflation they take another vector that represents how much of each good or service that some hypothetical typical consumer consumes and combine them to get what the overall inflation is for a typical consumer.

toinewx 4y ago

the report says - the titanic did not beak in two parts - there was no substantial suction So the movie is inaccurate

adamj9431 4y ago
The movie is right. Some survivors said it broke in half, many didn’t. It was thought it went down in one piece until the shipwreck was discovered in the 1980s.
scoopertrooper 4y ago
If so, then the video footage of the Titanic in two pieces on the ocean floor must also be inaccurate.
Comevius 4y ago
Some passengers got this wrong, but the Titanic did broke in two. It's hull girder couldn't tolerate much bending, as the water filled the front of the ship, it started to break after the stern was up 15 degrees. One passenger claims that he even heard when it first snapped. Many witnessed the ship breaking in two and sinking. Later we found the wreckage that also confirmed it.
inglor_cz 4y ago
Please do not commit the mistake of believing a 100 year old paper over your own eyes or credible evidence. The ship lies on the ocean floor until today, broken in two parts with almost half a mile separating them.

itcrowd 4y ago

My little trivia for the Titanic has always been that Violet Jessop was on board, surviving three accidents from sister ships: Titanic, Olympic and Brittanic! Go read the wiki, it's amazing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violet_Jessop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violet_Jessop

varenc 4y ago

You can find the full report, along with the appendices with the list of crew and passengers, here: https://books.google.com/books?id=twnY7_eFDuQC&pg=PA7287&lpg=PA7287&dq=%22INVESTIGATION+INTO+LOSS+OF+STEAMSHIP+Titanic%22&source=bl&ots=I9qvMjV9py&sig=ACfU3U0qtlQTObWdqyaCy6VxH_mDn-0azw&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwie6JGgzJz6AhWiLkQIHSILCrwQ6AF6BAgFEAM https://books.google.com/books?id=twnY7_eFDuQC&pg=PA7287&lpg... The tables are also more nicely formatted in this version. And Google has kindly performed OCR as well. You can download a PDF of the entire 1912 congressional record, of which report is a small part, here: https://books.google.com/books/download/Congressional_Record.pdf?id=twnY7_eFDuQC&output=pdf https://books.google.com/books/download/Congressional_Record...

billfor 4y ago

"Woman and children first", but especially first class :-)

thamer 4y ago

The report mentions the ship making a C.Q.D. call, which I wasn't familiar with. The name comes from the earlier telegraph "CQ" call for alerts, named after the French word "sécurité", abbreviated as "sécu" which is how the letters C and Q are pronounced in French. "D" is added to indicate distress. Sending a CQD call means sending the letters C,Q,D in Morse code; this practice was later supplanted by SOS. Wikipedia has a page with more information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CQD https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CQD. It mentions the Titanic disaster: "Harold Bride, the junior radio operator, suggested using SOS, saying half-jokingly that it might be his last chance to use the new code."

tamaharbor 4y ago

I have always wondered why the General Slocum incident (955 dead) in NYC in 1904 has never received more attention.

kazinator 4y ago

I tried to Ctrl-F search for "DiCaprio", but it's just scans. Why did he have to die, you know?