Overview
Delving deep into Titanic's legacy, Allen Gibson presents a comprehensive history with a refreshing argument, that Titanic represented a considerable achievement in maritime architecture. He determines the true causes of the disaster, telling the story of the 'unsinkable' ship against a backdrop of a tumultuous and rapidly emerging technological world. The book exposes the true interests of the people involved in the operation, regulation and investigation into Titanic, and lays bare the technology so dramatically destroyed. Juxtaposing the duelling worlds of economics and safety, this study rationalises the mindset that wilfully dispatched the world's largest ship out to sea with a deficient supply of lifeboats.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780752467856 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | The History Press |
| Publication date: | 02/28/2012 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 304 |
| File size: | 7 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The Unsinkable Titanic
The Triumph Behind a Disaster
By Allen Gibson
The History Press
Copyright © 2011 Allen GibsonAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7524-6785-6
CHAPTER 1
ACCESSION
'All of Europe is crossing the ocean.'
New York diarist, Philip Hone, c.1840
RMS Titanic was conceived at the close of a period that produced the most crucial development in transportation: the steamship. It is with the growth of this technology that our story begins – a story that witnessed a chain of events that led to the construction of ever larger, faster and increasingly luxurious liners whose vulnerability at sea was not fully appreciated until the occurrence of the sea's most legendary disaster.
Following its conception in the middle of the eighteenth century, the steam engine revolutionised thousands of years of agriculture and industry. On land, steam was rapidly forging a newer, more developed world, and utilising this power at sea would enable ships to power themselves over great journeys, unaided by wind, and change the face of global transportation forever.
That was the dream, though in reality it was quickly realised that to sustain its engines over any lengthy journey a ship would have to accommodate an unfeasibly large supply of coal; such a journey would be an otherwise impossible task should no refuelling points reside along its way. This was until James Watt produced his groundbreaking sensation, the piston engine, in 1765, cutting the fuel consumption of a steam engine by 75 per cent.
The development of the steamship truly began with the first wooden steam-powered paddle craft: the 182-ton Pyroscaphe, which debuted on the Saône River in France on 15 July 1783. The innovation soon crossed the Channel to Britain where in 1801 the first commercial steamship, Charlotte Dundas, was built. Fitted with a 10hp engine it saw life as a tugboat on Scotland's Forth-Clyde Canal.
The first craft to use steam to cross the Atlantic – although predominantly assisted by sail – became the 320-ton 90hp paddler Savannah. Departing New York on 24 May 1819, she arrived at Liverpool twenty-seven days later, an epoch followed in 1827 by the 438-ton Curaçao, also jointly powered by sail. Setting off from Rotterdam, Holland, bound for the West Indies, Curaçao undertook the first Atlantic crossing of a hybrid powered predominantly by steam. The journey lasted twenty-two days, in contrast to the forty the same trip would have taken by sail.
The next milestone came in 1838 upon the advent of the first transatlantic journeys driven solely and continuously by steam, with two rival shipping companies pitting head-to-head to stake the claim. St George Steam Packet Company's 714-ton Sirius departed Cork, Ireland, on 4 April 1838. Travelling at an average of 6.7 knots, her engines paddled the 2,961 nautical miles to New York where she arrived nineteen days later. Meanwhile, from Bristol, England's Isambard Kingdom Brunel on 8 April had dispatched his ship, Great Western. Averaging 8.7 knots she reached New York in just fourteen days, as well as making port one day ahead of Sirius. The race, turning out to be no mere publicity jaunt, signed off an era that had prevailed for millennia: the age of the sail.
With steam came speed, and with speed came the possibility for more frequent crossings, in particular on the busiest routes: the North Atlantic. During the days of sail most passengers traversing the Atlantic endured forty terribly laggard days at sea, but with steam this same journey was diminished to eighteen. More so, as through Great Western Brunel had delivered a ship able to burn fuel economically, and large enough to store a sufficient amount of coal (400 tons) to sustain the entire voyage. The practical long-distance steamship had been born.
By 1852 the advent of high-pressure engines allowed shipbuilders to power even larger craft over greater journeys and at ever-increasing speed. With passengers emigrating westward and additional cargo occupying their vacated accommodation on the return east, transatlantic travel was becoming a highly lucrative enterprise. With 40 per cent of the world's trade passing through its port, Liverpool became the commercial hub of the British Empire, giving rise to numerous shipping lines that emerged to exploit this great new trade, eventually turning Liverpool into Britain's second-largest metropolis. Very soon, one shipping line in particular began striding out ahead of all the others.
Starting life in 1839 as the British & North American Royal Mail Steam Packet Company, Canadian-born Samuel Cunard founded what was to become the most significant shipping line of all time. Samuel's aspirations in shipping began when he took over his father's lumber business in 1814, expanding its operations to include shipping, he established the first timetabled transatlantic services. Travelling from Liverpool to Halifax and onward to Boston, their voyages in 1841 took a mere fourteen days and eight hours to complete. The expansion of his fleet between 1843 and 1845 allowed the inclusion of New York in their schedules from 1847. But, although their ships were fast, standards of accommodation, even in first class, caused considerable disappointment among their passengers: a void in the market had been exposed. With their fleet numbering twenty-eight by 1880, Cunard commanded 15 per cent of the North Atlantic's entire passenger traffic, and in consequence many additional companies formed in the hope of emulating this success.
Yet in the early years of steam it was an American company that would first challenge Cunard's dominance. Edward Knight Collins, who founded the Collins Line in 1845, focussed the design of his fleet on size and luxury as well as speed and consequently won funding from the US government in 1847 to carry their mail. His ship, Pacific, snatched the prized Blue Riband in 1851 as the first to cross the Atlantic in less than ten days. Collins would also introduce welcome improvements in passenger accommodation with the first so-called 'floating palace', the hugely expensive Atlantic, which, when completed in April 1850, found the bill for her construction amount a bewildering $1.2 million.
Carrying 4,306 passengers across the Atlantic in 1852, the Collins Line outstripped the 2,969 travelling by Cunard, their no-frills counterpart. Collins, however, soon discovered that his ships were burning 40 tons more coal a day than his Cunard rivals, which was particularly unfortunate since his own was turning only half the profit that Cunard was achieving, despite selling far more tickets. Moreover, when Collins lost two of his ships – Arctic in 1854 and Pacific in 1856 – the US withdrew its $385,000-ayear mail contract. With losses amounting to $1.7 million, high running costs compounded the collapse of the line in 1858. Cunard, however, remained strong, but 1850 saw fresh competition emerge under the leadership of William Inman, although unlike Collins, Inman centred his focus on emigrant transportation. In 1859 Inman had become the first line to add the port of Queenstown, Ireland, as a stop on his schedules to New York in order to cater for the exodus of emigrants fleeing the Great Famine; Cunard followed suit some ten years later. The Inman Line flourished both financially and technologically – their ships attaining the speed record in 1869, 1875, 1889 and 1892 – although economic difficulties forced the company to cede ownership to America, becoming American Line in 1893, which was itself ultimately absorbed into the vast American-owned shipping conglomerate, International Mercantile Marine, in 1902.
Another heavyweight in shipping was Stephen Guion. Establishing his line in 1866, Guion too gained the financial backing of the US government. Basing operations in Liverpool, he harboured an ambition to build liners able to compete for Blue Riband glory, which they won in 1879, 1882 and 1884. However, unlike the Inman Line, Guion put more consideration into the speed of his ships and disastrously less on passenger accommodation. It proved a fatal decision. His ships regularly sailed two thirds below capacity. Falling foul of the maxim – the faster the engine, the higher its coal consumption – spiraling costs steamed the line into bankruptcy in 1892.
Competition on the Atlantic was relentless. To help revive its struggling shipping industry the British government in 1854 awarded Cunard funding to build two fast iron-hulled paddle steamers, Persia and Scotia, both of which set the speed record in a little over eight days. At this point Cunard began concentrating their focus on operating routes exclusively across the North Atlantic. Abandoning the cumbersome paddlewheel in 1862 in favour of the new innovation, the screw propeller, it was an up-and-coming rival – White Star Line – that in 1872 became the first line to attain the speed record under this new form of propulsion: the 14-knot, 3,868-ton Adriatic crossed the Atlantic in a time of seven days and twenty-three hours.
Dedicating the 1890s to modernising their fleet, Cunard's first steel-hulled vessel, the 12,950-ton Campania, completed in 1893, set a new Atlantic record of six days and ten hours in 1894, averaging 21.09 knots. In 1905 Cunard became the first line to fit a turbine engine into an ocean-going liner: their 19,524-ton Carmania, capable of 20 knots.
It was amid this development that 15 million Europeans had travelled by sea to resettle on the other side of the Atlantic. America's industrial base expanded rapidly, a result of relying heavily on an ever-increasing influx of workers to fill its jobs. A flow of immigration encouraged by a reduction in government red tape prompted unprecedented demands on shipping companies to provide ever larger and faster fleets. Between 1800 and 1900 America's population soared from 5.25 million to 76 million, and from 1900 to 1914 the nation received 1 million people who resettled there each year. Of the total emigrating European population between 1815 and 1930, 20 per cent was British. The Statue of Liberty, brandishing her beacon of light, marketed to the impoverished continent the idyll of hope and escape from the squalor and crowded cities of decaying imperial Europe.
Emigration, however, was not the only driving force behind sea travel. Improving connections found the rich dedicating ever-increasing profligacy and energies on recreation at a time when society's poorest struggled merely to survive. Never before had society become so polarised, and shipping operators competed hard for both spectra of the market. The Edwardian age produced first-class passenger areas on ships themed with rooms reproducing the interiors of the grandest European palaces. Ostentation was the new vogue. To harvest the growing breed of super-rich traveller, shipping operators had their designers build them bigger, better and far more luxurious craft in a race to outdo the creations of their competitors. The newest liners would be brutally opulent in their interiors, yet their outside profiles always maintained graceful elegance and delicate charm. External grandeur masked cramped and spartan accommodation endured by their emigrating third-class companions, cheek by jowl and ensconced well out of sight in the decks below.
One such builder ahead of all others producing luxury and quality for all its would-be elite was Harland & Wolff, the great Belfast shipbuilder who one day would proudly launch White Star's fabled Olympic Class of liners.
The 'Old Firm'
Living his formative years near the shipyards of Scarborough, Edward James Harland developed an early passion for engineering. Beginning his apprenticeship at the age of fifteen in Newcastle at George Stephenson's engineering works, upon its completion in 1851 Edward found employment in Govan, Glasgow, as a draughtsman for a small maritime engine manufacturer, James & George Thompson. In 1854 he then moved to Belfast to manage the yard of Robert Hickson & Co., a shipbuilder on the river Lagan founded the previous year by Mr Robert Hickson. Hickson had been leasing an area of reclaimed land known as Queens Island from the Harbour Commission. However, the company's performance was poor and Harland was hired as general manager to help turn fortunes around. Harland indeed improved business but work at Hickson's remained plagued with setbacks impairing finances, personnel and supplies. All eventually had taken their toll on Hickson, and Harland was offered complete ownership of the yard and its 200-strong workforce. Harland accepted and the deal was finalised on 21 September 1858, with Harland buying the yard outright for £5,000.
Edward had raised the funds from long-term friend and mentor, Gustav Christian Schwabe, a financier from Hamburg who had resettled in Liverpool in 1838. Working during the 1840s as partner of the shipping line John Bibby & Sons (the Bibby Line), Schwabe had known young Harland as a young apprentice. Upon taking over Hickson's the yard became known as Edward James Harland & Co. and soon acquired their first order, a lucrative one at that – three vessels for the Bibby Line: Venetian (1,508 tons, launched 30 July 1859), Sicilian and Syrian (equally 1,492 tons). The size of the contract necessitated the yard to expand and acquire more land, and to give the business a further boost Schwabe injected it with yet more capital. But Harland soon found the yard hard to run on his own, so formed a partnership with his trusted assistant Gustav Wilhelm Wolff – Schwabe's nephew. This was no mere case of nepotism: Wolff had earned Harland's respect securing the yard their building contracts for Bibby.
Born in Hamburg, Germany, in 1834, Wolff had immigrated to Liverpool in 1849 to attend college, after which he undertook an apprenticeship in Manchester at the engineering firm of Joseph Whitworth & Co. Upon completion he remained in the city to work as a draughtsman, but in 1857 he transferred to Hickson's in Belfast, upon Schwabe's request that Harland hire his nephew to head the company's design team. Before long Wolff became Harland's right-hand man, and rising to business partner in 1861: Harland committed £1,916 to the enterprise, Wolff contributed his share of £500. The partnership was formalised on 11 April 1861 and the new business, supporting 2,400 employees, was officially renamed Harland & Wolff on 1 January 1862. By 1864 the yard was outputting 30,000 tons of shipping a year, receiving a further boost in 1867 securing a deal to build several battleships for the Royal Navy following their success producing vessels for the US government during the Civil War. Harland's meticulous attention to detail – regularly patrolling the yard and appraising his ships for the slightest imperfections – garnered the company an enviable reputation as a centre of excellence.
With significant financial interests in both Harland & Wolff and an up-and-coming shipping operator, White Star Line, during the early half of 1869 Schwabe introduced the two chairmen: Edward Harland and Thomas Ismay, managing director of the Oceanic Steam Navigation Company, parent company of White Star. The meeting was to broker a preferred supplier/customer relationship nurtured and based on a unique and simple understanding. As long as it did not build vessels for a competitor White Star would guarantee Harland & Wolff regular and loyal business. In return Harland & Wolff would build White Star ships of unrivalled quality, at virtually cost price. From this moment on, Harland & Wolff would build every vessel commissioned by White Star Line, not once making an exception. Indeed, so enduring was the alliance to be, from 1869 to 1919, that not a single working day passed without Harland & Wolff constructing a vessel for White Star within their yards. By 1885, Harland & Wolff – outputting in excess of 104,000 tons of shipping a year – was valued at £600,000 and filed for Limited status, offering 600 £1,000 shares.
Edward Harland, a fervent Irish unionist, reaped immense influence in Belfast, allowing him to set deep political roots. Mayor of Belfast during 1885–6, for which he was knighted, he then became member of parliament for the division of North Belfast in 1887, a seat he retained until his death on Christmas Eve, 1895.
To replace Harland, the yard's chief draughtsman, William James Pirrie, joined Gustav Wolff as partner of the business. The Pirrie name was already greatly familiar throughout the town. James' grandfather, William Morrison Pirrie, had from 1820 worked extensively to improve the yard's accessibility and increased the depth of the river Lagan to allow it accommodate larger vessels. In 1852 he was appointed by the Harbour Commission to head the acquisition of land from the Belfast Iron Works Company, which he achieved the following year – the very plot subsequently purchased by Robert Hickson.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Unsinkable Titanic by Allen Gibson. Copyright © 2011 Allen Gibson. Excerpted by permission of The History Press.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Title,List of Tables,
Preface,
Introduction,
1 Accession,
2 Introducing Titanic,
3 Olympic Class,
4 Last Man Standing,
5 Leap of Faith,
6 Making Waves,
7 Paradise Lost,
8 Safety in Numbers,
9 The Silent Witness,
10 'Further Particulars Later',
11 Devil in the Detail,
12 A Reputation for Safety,
13 A Class Divided,
14 Larger Than Life,
15 Lost Property,
16 Echoes of Tragedy,
17 Forever Young,
Appendices,
1 Without Prejudice: Who Owned Who,
2 Theatre of War: The Great Atlantic Routes,
3 Protection for Perpetuity: Estonia Accord,
4 An Undue Encumbrance: The Letter of Law,
5 Impenetrable Decadence: Bulkhead Configuration of Titanic,
6 The Bridge: 37 Seconds to Disaster,
7 Economy of Prudence: Lifeboat Configuration of Titanic,
8 Watertight Subdivision: Longitudinal vs Transversal,
9 Margin of Safety: A Tale of Two Keels,
10 Cause and Effect: The Hawke Incident of 1911,
Glossary,
Bibliography,
Copyright,