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00:00Extraordinary, iconic, lethal, these incredible ships have told our story for the past 400 years
00:13and defined what it means to be part of our island nation.
00:22I'm Rob Bell and in this series I'll be exploring Britain's greatest ships.
00:30This time I uncover the story behind perhaps the most famous ship in the world, the Titanic.
00:41The biggest ship ever built, she was a sensation before she even set sail.
00:47This place is just epic.
00:50The Titanic boasted the very latest technology, but her maiden voyage ended in a catastrophic loss of life.
00:59At a disaster, the whole thing was chaos and it shouldn't have been.
01:03She was said to be unsinkable.
01:06So how did Titanic become the most famous maritime disaster in history?
01:12At the beginning of the 20th century, shipbuilding was booming.
01:25Huge British ports like Belfast in Northern Ireland were hammering out ever bigger, better and faster ships to move people and goods around the world on a scale never seen before.
01:39The Harland and Wolf shipyard lies in the heart of Belfast.
01:44In 1908 they were commissioned by the White Star shipping line to build a game-changing passenger ship that would strike awe into anyone who saw it.
01:55This new liner wasn't just going to be the most luxurious, it would also be the biggest ship the world had ever seen and they gave it a fitting name, the Titanic.
02:14But its maiden voyage was to end in disaster.
02:23The Titanic has been lying on the seabed for over a hundred years.
02:27It seemed we'd lost all connections to this legendary ship.
02:31But in 2013, a piece of living history returned to Belfast docks.
02:42This is the SS Nomadic.
02:45Now, you might be thinking that she looks vaguely familiar.
02:49Well, she was the Titanic's original tender, so she has the same lines and the same livery as her bigger sister.
02:59The Nomadic is the only remaining White Star ship anywhere in the world.
03:06And her original job was burying passengers out to the Titanic for that first and last voyage across the Atlantic.
03:18Today, the Nomadic is the closest you can get to boarding the Titanic.
03:25Walking along this very same deck that those passengers did over a hundred years ago,
03:31you can just imagine the levels of excitement and the buzz that there would have been on board.
03:38Those passengers perhaps clinging onto this railing as they steam towards the great mass of the Titanic.
03:48It would have been an imposing sight.
03:51At 14 storeys high, it was the largest ship ever built.
03:57And it would have towered above them.
04:03To give an idea of Titanic's size, its museum here on the docks where the ship was built is the same height as its hull.
04:12But building the world's biggest ship created a problem for the White Star Line.
04:17If nobody built the world's biggest ports, it would have nowhere to go.
04:22The White Star Line took a monumental gamble.
04:26Imagine that the jumbo jet doesn't exist.
04:30But somebody comes along and they have an idea to build the jumbo jet.
04:34Well, no airport has a runway long enough.
04:37And that is exactly what the White Star Line did.
04:40They went ahead and ordered Harland and Wolf to build the world's largest liners,
04:45when there was no docks capable of handling the vessel.
04:49White Star Line managed to persuade key ports to extend piers and dredge deeper channels.
04:57But why did the Titanic need to be so big?
05:01It was all part of a daring new business plan, to carry as many of a profitable new type of customer as possible.
05:10The Titanic was essentially an immigrant ship.
05:13The official designation with the British government was the immigrant ship Titanic.
05:18And so the prime reason really for building the Titanic was because of mass migration.
05:24That's third class passengers.
05:26The second and the first class was really, if you like, the jam on top of the bread and butter.
05:31But the bread and butter is the bit that actually paid for the Titanic to be built and paid for her to be operated.
05:40The Titanic's size meant there was room for each class to occupy their own zones, even with separate promenade decks.
05:48It's most famous for its first class passengers, who travelled in incredible luxury.
05:55At the Titanic Museum, you can see for yourself how the ship was designed to give them a whole separate world,
06:02on top of the emigrant masses below.
06:05Passengers and crew alike had never seen a ship built on this scale before.
06:12You can see here there were ten deck levels in total.
06:16And in the top half of the ship you had these open airy spaces for first class passengers,
06:22where the designers freed up whole sweeping areas to accommodate jaw-dropping features,
06:29like glass roof staircases, long promenade decks.
06:36The Titanic was the biggest moveable man-made object the world had ever seen.
06:42So how did Harland and Wolff meet the challenge of building such a gigantic ship?
06:49Ironically, the biggest problem wasn't in making it float.
06:55It was building it on dry land.
06:58Normally a ship's hull took shape on a slipway, supported by a gantry.
07:04If the blocks under the keel were just half an inch out, the whole ship could break in two.
07:10Engineers managed to balance its entire 882 feet to perfection.
07:18The slipway where the Titanic was built is still here today.
07:23And it gives an idea of the sheer scale of the problem.
07:27Even long-established shipbuilding techniques would become fraught with new dangers.
07:33Once the hull was watertight, the Titanic faced what should have been its most perilous journey.
07:40From land here out into the estuary.
07:46Titanic's slightly smaller sister ship, Olympic, was the first to launch.
07:51A dangerous feat never attempted on this scale before.
07:55As soon as ships were released from the support of the gantry,
07:59they needed to slide into the water as quickly as possible to avoid keeling over.
08:06Despite the high-tech solutions like steam release mechanisms to help Titanic slide down the slipway,
08:13engineers hedged their bets with a method they've probably been using since before the Ark.
08:18To ease its path and reduce friction, shipbuilders used an age-old trick.
08:2822 tonnes of rendered beef fat and soap were smeared all over the slipway,
08:34right down to the water's edge.
08:37No doubt, there are probably a few crossed fingers involved too.
08:44They had no guarantee it would work.
08:46A crowd of a hundred thousand gathered to hold its breath,
08:51while the massive hull gently slid over beef dripping an inch thick into the estuary.
09:00Once the hull had been successfully launched, the next step was to tow it into a dry dock.
09:07With the gate closed, the surrounding water could be pumped out,
09:10and construction of the vessel completed.
09:15And of course, Titanic was going to need the world's biggest dry dock to be built.
09:21This is the dry dock that Harland and Wolf had to build to fit out the hull.
09:28It's almost impossible to take in the sheer scale of this place.
09:34Titanic is definitely the word.
09:37That's taken me almost three minutes to walk from one end to the other.
09:45With the dry dock drained of water, the empty hull of the Titanic could become a masterpiece in steel.
09:52But these were the days before welding.
09:56Thousands of steel plates up to an inch thick had to be hammered together by hand with three million rivets.
10:03It took 15,000 men to build the Titanic.
10:08And you can just imagine the noise and the industrial clamour that would have been echoing off of these walls.
10:15This place is just epic!
10:19After a construction cost equivalent to hundreds of millions of pounds today,
10:28the Titanic set sail on its first Atlantic crossing to New York.
10:33For passengers in France, the tender ship Nomadic would herald this whole new way of travelling.
10:49Passengers boarded the Nomadic here to be ferried across to the Titanic.
10:53And it was on board this vessel that they got their very first taste of the incredible ship they were about to experience.
11:04But the story of the Titanic's maiden voyage was to become unforgettable for very different reasons.
11:11How could a state-of-the-art ship, with so much money invested in it, come to such a catastrophic end?
11:25Belfast docks still bear the marks of building the biggest ship the world had ever seen.
11:32And the Titanic is not just famous for its size.
11:35Thousands of visitors flock here to the Titanic Museum to see the displays of opulent luxury.
11:42Like the kind of first-class cabin which would have cost you thousands of pounds in today's money.
11:48Previous transatlantic liners had offered sumptuous sweets and fancy dining.
11:55But on board the Titanic, everything was bigger and better.
12:00The very finest cabins were decorated in historical styles.
12:04They had their own private promenade deck, fireplaces, en-suite bathrooms, electric lighting and heaters.
12:13And buttons to call valet service.
12:17The Titanic also had the first heated on-board pool, a Turkish steam room, squash court, gymnasium and library.
12:28This lost world now lies two miles beneath the waves, with one very special exception.
12:38At a secret location in rural Derbyshire, retired engineer John Siggins has spent the last 25 years painstakingly rebuilding his own little corner of the Titanic.
12:50John Siggins, what have you got here?
13:00I've just stepped into a completely different world coming into here.
13:02Time capsule.
13:03Absolute time capsule.
13:04Yeah, it is, isn't it?
13:05If you listen, hear the engines.
13:09Have you re-created that as well?
13:10That's the engines, yeah, in the background.
13:13And all this here?
13:14That's all the original silverware, as would have been used on Titanic.
13:18Can I have a sit down and just see what it feels like to experience?
13:21Yeah, sit in the, that's a first class dining room chair, that.
13:24Okay.
13:25The original.
13:26This is how the first class would have ate their meals.
13:30This has all been sourced from Olympic?
13:33Yeah.
13:34So it would have been, what, the exact same stuff on Titanic?
13:36Yeah, yeah.
13:37This would have been used on board the ship, the same.
13:42The service and the experience you were getting on board Titanic in first class, it was up there with the highest hotels in the world.
13:49Yeah, oh yeah, yeah.
13:50The highest.
13:51Well, it was like, it was a five star hotel on, on the sea.
13:54Mm.
13:55So those first class passengers weren't necessarily bothered about going on board a ship.
13:58They, they, they just wanted luxury around them.
14:00Yeah, yeah.
14:02The whole point was for the upper classes to feel like they were either back in their stately homes or dining out in style.
14:10So what have you got here, John?
14:12This looks like.
14:13This menu is what the first class would have, would have eaten.
14:16Okay.
14:17That's the 14th, that one.
14:20Oh, so that's.
14:21So that's the day before the ship sank.
14:23Yeah.
14:24I mean, this gives you a bit of an example of what the first class passengers were.
14:26Yeah, yeah.
14:27What, six, seven, eight, nine.
14:30Nine courses.
14:31There's nine courses on there.
14:32Yeah, yeah.
14:33Dessert and coffee.
14:34I mean.
14:35Yeah.
14:36That's typical, is it, of a first class meal on board?
14:37Yeah, yeah, it would have been, yeah.
14:39Can I have, pick it up and have a look?
14:41Yeah, yeah, yeah.
14:42You all right.
14:43So this is a what, teacup?
14:44That's just a normal teacup, that is.
14:46A normal teacup.
14:47A date stamped on the bottom.
14:48Yeah.
14:49April, 1909.
14:501909, yeah.
14:51Yeah.
14:52That's a teacup, that's a coffee cup.
14:54That's a, what they call a beef tea mug.
14:56There's even different mugs for different types of tea.
14:58Yeah, yeah.
14:59Different teas.
15:00Time of day, different.
15:01Yeah, yeah.
15:02Different types of, of, of stuff they use.
15:03They use different patterns throughout the day.
15:05They're grape scissors.
15:08Grape scissors.
15:09Yeah.
15:10Are you kidding?
15:11No, you've cut grapes with them.
15:14They've commissioned specifically.
15:16For cutting grapes in half.
15:18What?
15:19Can't you just?
15:20Yeah.
15:21Not in, no.
15:22Posh people never did that.
15:24That was a bit rough.
15:25Not in the first class lounge.
15:26You had to have a pair of scissors to cut them.
15:29Okay.
15:30Be civil.
15:31Yeah, that was very uncouth.
15:32Yeah.
15:33Where are my manners?
15:34I'm so sorry.
15:35Yeah.
15:36Do you ever feel that sometimes you might just take your meals in here?
15:41Do.
15:42Do you?
15:43Yeah, we have our meals at Christmas.
15:44We sit in here and have our Christmas dinner in here.
15:47Do you go to this, to these extents?
15:49Yeah, yeah, yeah.
15:50Don't use those plates.
15:51Get all the cutlery out.
15:52I don't use those plates.
15:53You wouldn't, you wouldn't want to put those in there.
15:54No, no, no.
15:55I don't use the plates.
15:56I've got other plates.
15:57I've got some P&O ones.
15:58While the privileged few enjoyed the top decks of the Titanic, the less wealthy majority
16:12occupied the spaces below.
16:17Poor as some people were, it's a bit of a myth that third-class travel on the Titanic
16:23was something to be endured rather than enjoyed.
16:26Admittedly, it was further down in the bowels of the ship, but there was separate accommodation
16:31for families and single men and women.
16:34Freshly prepared hot meals were served four times a day, all part of the price of your ticket.
16:40The food was even served by stewards in White Star Line livery.
16:45The luxury of first-class on board Titanic is legendary.
16:50But even third-class was said to be better than second-class on rival ships.
16:54It was all part of White Star Line's plan to attract repeat business from emigrants.
17:00Most of those passengers would be travelling as what we call chain migration.
17:06They would be going over to America to create a bridgehead.
17:09Then they would send money back to the old country and they would bring back other members of the family.
17:15And gradually, the White Star Line would get even more profit from bringing further members of the family over.
17:22And this meant that the White Star Line constantly had a tap of more migrants.
17:28The White Star Line wanted emigrant passengers to recommend the Titanic to everyone they knew.
17:37So they were handled with a respect that many had never even seen at home.
17:42It wasn't treating people as just a one-way, quick fix, get them on the ship and get them off the other way.
17:49Because a bad experience for that migrant meant the potential of losing 5, 6, 7, 10, 20 more migrants in the future.
18:05Steerage on the Titanic was like a whole neighbourhood.
18:09With families living, eating and socialising together.
18:13Whilst right beneath their feet was the incessant throb of the mighty engines powering the liner across the Atlantic.
18:24Titanic's engines needed to produce enough raw power to push over 52,000 tonnes across the Atlantic at up to 21 knots, about 25 miles an hour.
18:36At the Titanic Museum, immersive computer graphics give you an awe-inspiring sense of what it took to fire up the biggest mobile power plant in the world.
18:54This just gives you a bit of an idea of the scale of what was on board Titanic.
19:00We're down here in the engine rooms with all the mechanics moving.
19:06You can imagine the noise this would have been making all around.
19:11Everything's just enormous.
19:16Titanic's engines produced 46,000 horsepower and enough electricity to light up a town.
19:22Back in the real world, locomotives are the last surviving machines where you can see the raw power of steam for yourself.
19:41The boilers on board the Titanic were roughly four times the size as the one on this locomotive.
19:46And there were 29 of them lined up along the bottom of the ship.
19:52They generated the steam to power the enormous propellers.
19:57The Titanic had three propellers.
20:00The two on either side for manoeuvring weighed 38 tonnes each.
20:05The central propeller in front of the rudder was brought in for top speed cruising.
20:10This colossal pile of coal here weighs in at about 120 tonnes.
20:18But to feed the insatiable appetite of the fires raging in its furnace,
20:23the Titanic needed 600 tonnes of coal every day.
20:29That's five piles like this every day for six days.
20:33The Titanic had over 150 stokers shoveling coal round the clock in the bowels of the ship.
20:46At full steam, she had 162 furnaces lit.
20:50The furious energy from all that steam powered four reciprocating engines.
20:59A bit like pistons moving in and out of cylinders on a car engine,
21:03but these were the biggest ever built.
21:07Each one the size of a three-storey house.
21:09For efficiency at high speed, the Titanic also deployed the very latest military technology.
21:19A turbine engine powered by the low pressure steam leaving the pistons.
21:26Everything about the Titanic was the last word in high tech.
21:31Electric lights, remote controlled safety systems and a new fangled invention
21:36that could keep ships in touch with each other across large distances.
21:42Radio.
21:45But how effective were the first radios?
21:48John Siggin's 100-year-old wireless set is still ready for action.
21:54Goodness me. What have we got here, John?
21:57Right, that's your Marconi spark gap transmitter.
22:00That spark then is transformed into a radio signal which is then broadcast outwardly.
22:06Yeah, which is broadcast outwardly.
22:08How old is this machine here, do we know?
22:10That's going to be about 120-year-old.
22:12Really? Somewhere around there, yeah.
22:13And so something like this was on Titanic, was it?
22:15Yeah, very similar.
22:17This was state-of-the-art technology at the time?
22:19It was at the time.
22:20In 1912, communication between ships at night still relied on coded sequences of rockets fired from the deck.
22:30But at night time, powerful radio signals bounced off the upper atmosphere
22:35to reach other radios beyond the curvature of the earth.
22:39Can I have a go and try and tap out the old SOS?
22:42Yeah, have a go. Off you go.
22:43So it's a dot dot dot dash dash dash dot dot dot.
22:46Yeah. SOS.
22:47SOS. Let's try it then. SOS.
22:53That's it. That's simple.
22:55During the day, they weren't so good.
22:57But at night time, they could travel up to 500 miles.
22:59That's how powerful a signal on this is.
23:01Yeah. If I connect that to an area, it might affect the police headquarters up here.
23:07As powerful as this new technology was,
23:10the Titanic's radio operators were mainly kept busy making money from it as a plaything of the wealthy.
23:18Radio was also an exciting innovation, enabling passengers to send messages back to people on shore.
23:26If they could afford the cost of it, that was.
23:28In today's money, a 10 word message would have cost around 40 pounds.
23:34So they tended to be kept quite short and succinct.
23:38Messages like this one.
23:40Fine voyage. Fine ship.
23:43But around 9.30 p.m.
23:46On the 14th of April, as the Titanic neared the sub-Arctic waters off Newfoundland,
23:51the messages she started receiving from other ships nearby took an ominous turn.
23:58Warnings of an ice field ahead.
24:01After four days at sea, the Titanic was 400 miles from land when it entered an ice field several miles wide.
24:14Nearby, ships like the Californian had stopped for the night,
24:18waiting for daylight to pick their way through the ice flows.
24:22But on the Titanic, Captain Smith didn't even order a reduction in speed.
24:28It was a very cold night.
24:34In fact, the day had been so cold, they'd cancel lifeboat practice.
24:38Not perhaps a sensible thing to do in the circumstances with benefit of hindsight.
24:42She was going fast, even in these icy conditions.
24:46This wasn't unusual at the time.
24:48It was thought that the lookouts would be able to spot bergs in time.
24:51And so it wasn't anything special.
24:53But in the event, it turned out to be extremely dangerous.
24:56To spot an iceberg on a dark night, lookouts would usually search for large silhouettes against the horizon,
25:04or white waves breaking around the base of a berg.
25:09But a low, dark shape was suddenly spotted, only a ship's length ahead.
25:14It would appear that atmospheric conditions prevented the lookouts in the foremast seeing the iceberg in time.
25:22But eventually they did see it, and they called upon the ship to turn, to try and avoid it.
25:27And the tragedy of it is, she almost did, but not quite.
25:31And so she scrapes along the side of the iceberg.
25:34And the iceberg, under the water, punches hulls, takes off rivets,
25:39and punches a whole series of small openings in the right-hand starboard side of the ship.
25:44And this causes water to cascade inside.
25:46The iceberg gouged thin slits in the hull, no wider than a hand's width.
25:54But crucially, they were dotted along the whole front third of the ship.
25:59But how could ice have ruptured solid steel in the first place?
26:07It seems crazy that ice could cut through mild steel an inch thick.
26:13But the colossal forces involved in this phenomenal collision are all about sheer scale.
26:21So of course, the ice here is softer than metal.
26:29You can see, in this battle, it's the metal wins as the ice is breaking up.
26:33That means the metal is harder than the ice.
26:38But the berg that sank the Titanic is estimated to have been at least 20,000 tonnes of solid ice.
26:46They weren't going to just bounce off each other.
26:50If sheer mass holds the ice in one place, it pushes back against the metal.
26:55But with the ice firmly in my vice here, if I now take my metal plate, which represents the hull of the Titanic,
27:07and if I run that along the top of the ice, there's maybe a bit of smoothing off of the surface of that ice there.
27:16But this metal plate is getting dented and bent right up.
27:23Now, when metal is continuously bent or stretched, it reaches something called its tensile strength.
27:30That's the point where it breaks or tears or cracks open.
27:34And on the Titanic, there's also a possibility that those forces started to pop the rivets out of the joints.
27:46Up on deck, even people who'd noticed the impact didn't seem alarmed.
27:51Why did they find it so hard to believe they were in danger?
27:57The Titanic's reputation was built on safety features that were designed to cope with all known threats to shipping.
28:06Like other ships, it was divided vertically into sections by bulkheads,
28:12walls running from the bottom to the top of a ship.
28:14Each of the resulting compartments had watertight doors to stop a leak from spreading the length of the ship.
28:23To make space for the large rooms on top, the Titanic's bulkheads stopped here, beneath the first-class facilities.
28:33But this wasn't a compromise on safety from the designers. Quite the opposite.
28:37Regulations of the time demanded that ships had to be able to stay afloat with any one of these compartments flooded.
28:47Titanic had 16 watertight compartments and could survive up to four of them flooding.
28:54She also had a barrage of steam-powered pumps to slow down any rising water in the engine rooms.
29:00The Titanic had more of the latest safety features than any other civilian ship of its time.
29:08That's why the buzz surrounding its construction earned it the reputation of being the unsinkable ship.
29:20When the Titanic steamed into the iceberg, Captain Smith ordered an immediate stop to assess the damage.
29:26The radio operator, Jack Phillips, started transmitting alerts to any nearby ships to come with assistance.
29:37Whilst they waited, Captain Smith tried to find the answers to two main questions.
29:43Were they sinking? And if so, how long would it take?
29:48The Titanic was built to remain afloat with up to four of its watertight compartments flooded.
29:58Water was now rushing into at least five of them.
30:02But with the rest of the compartments remaining intact, they were estimated to keep the ship afloat long enough for help to arrive.
30:0925 minutes after hitting the iceberg, Captain Smith ordered the lifeboats to be prepared.
30:17And the band to start playing to raise spirits.
30:21But passengers were slow to muster on the freezing cold deck.
30:26Why did the crew and passengers alike seem to feel like they were in so little danger?
30:31The belief at all levels that Titanic was unsinkable meant that on this very cold night, and if you were a rich American lady or a rich British Duchess or something, were you really going to get into a lifeboat?
30:46On a cold evening, when all this beautifully lit ship, with the orchestra still playing, was giving you a great sense of security? Of course you would.
30:55The majority of people on board were on the lower decks. Those scrambling to escape the rising water were met by a maze of corridors, locked gates and stairs.
31:08They had never rehearsed boat drill. That's a disaster. Therefore people had no idea where to go.
31:16The first class passengers were closest to the boats and they could virtually all speak English. So could the second class passengers.
31:21The third class passengers, steerage, were immigrants. Many of them couldn't speak English at all.
31:27There are no photographs of the Titanic's final hours.
31:32But this model in the Ulster Transport Museum is based on survivors' accounts, when confusion was turning to panic.
31:41Even an hour after the impact, Captain Smith hadn't instructed the officers to evacuate the passengers.
31:47Up on deck, everything now depended on the lifeboats. With the ship leaning dangerously forward, the crew started launching women and children first.
32:00But why were there only 20 boats to accommodate less than half the passengers on board?
32:10In their minds, the Titanic, if it did get into any form of distress, there were so many vessels travelling from the west to the east, that at any one time you could guarantee there would be a vessel within hailing distance of your particular ship.
32:26And it took some time between the strike of the iceberg and it actually sinking.
32:33So if a vessel had come to the assistance of the Titanic, then you and I wouldn't be here talking today.
32:38Why did no one come to the aid of the Titanic before she sank?
32:45There were five other ships navigating the ice field.
32:49When Titanic fired off rocket flares to attract attention, they were seen by the Californian.
32:55But why didn't it take action?
32:57Back then, there was some ambiguity about what these rockets represented.
33:03Was it distress or was it a vessel signalling to another vessel at sea?
33:08That was a way that we could communicate to sea if that vessel didn't carry wireless.
33:13Nowadays, if you see any pyrotechnics at sea, immediately we know that's distress.
33:18With the rockets being ignored, it was down to the wireless operator to get a distress call through to any ship that had a radio.
33:28The Carpathia responded, but it was almost 60 miles away across the ice field.
33:34Again, the closest ship, the Californian, didn't respond.
33:39The problem with other radio operators though, infamously in the Californian, is that they closed down.
33:48You weren't supposed to keep radio watch on a 24-hour basis.
33:53And this meant that not all ships in the vicinity picked up the signals.
34:02With the ship now dipping precariously forwards, the lifeboat's state-of-the-art winches
34:07were becoming trapped and tangled.
34:10Two of the lifeboats were yet to be launched when, at 1.45am, the Titanic's final message was received.
34:21Come quick, engine room nearly full.
34:25The nearest ship was still more than two hours away.
34:29By 1.40am, water had been gushing into the front six compartments of the Titanic for two and a half hours.
34:44The situation was now critical.
34:47The bow was so heavy, it tilted the stern clean out of the water.
34:52And without the water around it to support the weight of the massive engines near the back,
34:58the keel started to bend and the steel plates of the hull were torn apart.
35:07The Titanic had managed to stay afloat thanks to its remaining watertight compartments.
35:12But when the bow of the Titanic finally went under, it only took minutes for the whole ship to disappear.
35:22Why did the safest ship on the sea come to such a swift and catastrophic end?
35:29This plastic box represents the Titanic.
35:34And you can see I've got it divided into these watertight compartments.
35:39Now you also see at the front here, I've drilled some holes.
35:43Now they represent the compromise to the Titanic's hole when it struck the iceberg.
35:49But I've got those taped up for the minute.
35:51So if I pop this into the water, unsurprisingly, it floats.
35:58To make this model more representative, we need to add a little bit of weight.
36:02A bit of ship's ballast so that it sits down in the water like the hull of a ship would.
36:12There we go. That's more like it.
36:15You can see that these divisions between the watertight compartments on the Titanic
36:19didn't go all the way to the top of the ship.
36:23Instead, they only came up about halfway to allow for those large open spaces in the first class accommodation.
36:32So if I now take this tape off and open up the holes to the water in the front compartment here.
36:42So that goes in. It floats still, but we need to get our ballast weight.
36:47Back in the middle. Let's carefully pop those back in.
36:56So it doesn't take long for water to start pouring in because those holes were all beneath the water line.
37:04So water floods into that first compartment of the ship.
37:07Water keeps coming in slowly now. The water starts to tip over the top of that bulkhead and enters into the second part of the ship.
37:18And once that starts to happen, the ship goes down very, very quickly.
37:22And that's what happened on the Titanic.
37:31Because it only took a shallow angle for water to spill over the top of the bulkheads, the Titanic was engulfed in a lethal chain reaction.
37:42But why wasn't she built to withstand such a long gouge in the hull?
37:48There's a common misconception about the Titanic that she was badly built, that she wasn't built to withstand that collision with the iceberg.
37:58And that is just not fair. It's not true, in fact, and it's not fair on the builders and on the White Star Line.
38:07Because the Titanic was built in excess of the legal requirements of shipbuilding in 1912.
38:14It was the finest quality craftsmanship that went into that vessel.
38:20And they always said at the time, if it's Belfast built, it's well built.
38:25But nobody contemplated that amount of underwater damage.
38:30Any other vessel wouldn't have remained afloat for a fraction of the time.
38:38The Titanic was built to be one of the safest ships of its day.
38:42Its sister ship, the Olympic, survived another 21 years.
38:48Olympic had a very successful career. She became known as Old Reliable.
38:54She actually rounds and sinks a German submarine.
38:57And so it demonstrates that the basic design of the Titanic was fine, as long as you didn't drive it at high speed into icebergs.
39:04The Titanic sank because no steel ship had ever experienced this kind of damage.
39:16But many lifeboats left with empty spaces. So could more have been done to save lives?
39:22Really, most of the criticisms should fall with Captain Smith.
39:28Because Captain Smith's responsibility is to every man, woman and child on board the ship.
39:32Not in living memory for those men in 1912 had a disaster befall in a ship on such a scale.
39:43They could not contemplate such catastrophe.
39:46And I firmly believe that Captain Smith has a full mental breakdown.
39:51And that freezing command, you can see, going all the way through, right down to junior officers and ratings lowering the boats.
40:01They didn't realise the importance and magnitude of the coming disaster.
40:06Until it was too late.
40:07Until it was too late.
40:10There are undoubtedly 700 unnecessary deaths.
40:17Human error is ultimately responsible for the loss of life on board the Titanic.
40:23But there were many people who, by their own acts of heroism, saved lives too.
40:27After the impact, the engineers returned to the flooding compartments to keep the power going and prevent the ship from plunging into darkness.
40:42Most had likely drowned before a single lifeboat had been launched.
40:48And when Captain Smith finally ordered the crew to abandon ship, not everyone obeyed.
40:54Captain Smith eventually says to the crew, it's every man for himself.
41:00And he tries to get Phillips, the radio operator, to leave his post.
41:05But a great professional that he was, he wouldn't.
41:08He kept on signalling until finally the water came in and that was the end of him.
41:13Following naval tradition, Captain Smith also went down with the ship.
41:19Five years earlier, he'd claimed that modern shipbuilding had eliminated any possible threats that could cause a liner to sink.
41:29There are three lessons which were quite rapidly accepted after the Titanic disaster.
41:37The first was you had to have a 24 hour radio watch.
41:42Secondly, you've got to have enough lifeboats.
41:47They were not just there to transfer part of the passengers to another ship.
41:52You had to have enough lifeboats for everybody to be able to get in and wait for rescue.
41:56Thirdly, it was the International Iceberg Organization, which gave ships due warning of ice.
42:02So those three were the great lessons and they made the high seas and the North Atlantic in particular a great deal safer.
42:12The tragedy of a so-called unsinkable ship suffering such a catastrophic loss of life still grips our imaginations over a hundred years on.
42:23But perhaps thanks to the lessons learned that we should never be so complacent to blindly put all our faith in structures and machines.
42:34There's never been another Titanic.
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43:05Transcription by CastingWords