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Ice, Hubris, and 1,500 Dead: The Night Titanic Sank
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
At 11:40 PM on April 14, 1912, the Titanic struck an iceberg — and within forty minutes, her architects knew she would sink. This episode covers the impact, the flooding, the half-empty lifeboats, and the two hours and forty minutes that killed 1,500 people.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
It's eleven-forty PM on April fourteenth, nineteen twelve. The North Atlantic is flat and black, unusually calm, the sky thick with stars.
To understand what happened that night, you need to understand what the Titanic represented before it hit that iceberg. This wasn't just a large ship.
The Titanic had left Belfast, where she was built at the Harland and Wolff shipyards, on her delivery voyage to Southampton. From Southampton she departed on April tenth, nineteen twelve, on her maiden voyage to New York.
The damage from the iceberg was not the collision the name implies. The iceberg didn't punch a clean hole through the hull.
Among the famous names aboard were John Jacob Astor the Fourth, one of the wealthiest men in the world, who helped his young wife into a lifeboat and stepped back on deck. Benjamin Guggenheim changed into his finest evening clothes, reportedly saying that he was prepared to go down like a gentleman.
At two twenty AM on April fifteenth, nineteen twelve, two hours and forty minutes after the iceberg, the Titanic's bow hit the seafloor of the North Atlantic. The stern rose almost vertical, then the ship broke in two and both sections plunged down, two miles to the bottom.
The wreck sat undisturbed for seventy-three years. On September first, nineteen eighty-five, a joint American-French team led by Robert Ballard located the Titanic on the seafloor, about three hundred and seventy miles southeast of Newfoundland.
The Titanic wasn't just a maritime disaster. It was a failure that unfolded in layers, each one visible, each one correctable, and each one ignored or mismanaged until correction was no longer possible.
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