Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm to Blinded Chuck Reporting and I'm fair. And there was a very important historical anniversary earlier this year that we just couldn't let go by without commemorating, especially since it's one our listeners are still really intrigued by. And that's the one hundredth anniversary of the sinking of the now legendary passenger liner, the RMS Titanic, on April fourteenth, nineteen twelve, after it collided with an iceberg during its maiden voyage from the UK to New York City. And it was one of the biggest non wartime maritime disasters ever. More than fift undred people died, and so it really continues to haunt people and fascinate researchers who are still examining artifacts and unraveling the stories of the people who traveled on this ill fated ship. And so of course there was a lot of coverage because of all that fascination, even some news which we're going to be discussing in a bit and events to commemorate this anniversary, to including a memorial cruise aboard the MS Memoral Cruise ship which retraced the Titanic's exact route and gathered on the deck at eleven forty pm on April fourteenth, which was the time the Titanic hit the iceberg a hundred years ago, and held a memorial service, and according to the Daily Mail, about fifty of the people who were aboard this memorial cruise had a direct family connection to the Titanic, including relatives of the ship's doctor and relatives of some of the passengers. There was also the presentation of five bronze plaques which includes all the names of the dead from all the classes aboard the ship, first, second, and third class. And it's said to be the first time that all of these people are included together and one memorial. That point was really striking to me that it took a hundred years for that to happen. It's kind of amazing. That is surprising, especially since there have been several memorials and remembrances, and this is our own sort of memorial that we have here today to the Titanic sinking. It's another look at a classic episode of Stuffy Miston History Class from two thousand eight on the Titanic by Candice and Jane. So we're gonna check that out first and then talk a little bit more about it afterwards. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm editor Candice Gibson, joined by staff writer Jane McGrath. Jane, I don't think that there's anything as big and posh and attention catching in the annals of naval history as the Titanic. That was true, I don't think many people would not have. I guess I should say a marine history rather than naval history. So it was a seagoing vessel and it was almost like a hotel on the water. And the idea behind it was precisely that j Bruce is May and Lord Pierie of Harlem and Wolf shipbuilders. They were at dinner one night and they were talking about the Cunard lines newest liners, the Mauritania and Lusitania, and they said to themselves, we can make one or three. Even with their plan, they were gonna have a triumvirate of ships that were even bigger and better, the Olympic, the Gigantic and the Titanic. That's right. And they wanted to make these not only fast, so like the Kuniard line, but but luxurious and attractive for for the you know, the aristocratic passengers to spend you know, a pretty penny to go on exactly the idea of being that the more comfortable and luxurious the ship, the longer distance people would be willing to travel. And so they weren't just selling you know, a couple of dollars worth of tickets to people. We're talking about a first class ticket than in today's dollars is equivalent to about forty three thousand dollars to about eighty thousand dollars, which is a ton of money. I mean, I don't even know people who spend that on airfare, you know, flying halfway across the world. Maybe you do, if you do, write me because I want to travel with you. So then what made the Titanic so special? Well, it's interesting because it was so incredibly lush, and you know, the first class passengers, you know, they were they were used to being treated nicely, but not as nicely as on this as on this ship, I mean they had such Uh they had a squash court, I think, and that you mentioned in the article, and uh there's gem there were Turkish bad Yeah, and these things are amenities that people had to pay a little bit extra for. But you bring up an important point about the first class and what they had access to. And I'm sure that all of you know this, but there were three distinct classes on board the Titanic, first, second, and steerage, and so it's really important to sort of go ahead in your mind as you're picturing the Titanic and that I think the nine different deck levels of it, that it was very stratified. There were places that first class were permitted to go. I mean, they could go anywhere they wanted, really because they paid that much, but they weren't going to wander down to steerage cabins. But then the third class was pretty much restricted to the bottom of about second class sort of in the middle. And this was such a gigantic ship that it required some really special engineering to make it go. And I'm not gonna lie to you. I'm no engineer. I'm not going to profess to know everything about horsepower, etcetera, etcetera. But I do know that it had two giant engines that were about four stories tall, and these two three blade propellers that were like twenty three ft across, and so that's big, and it enabled the ship to go about twenty four knots and that may sound slow to us today, but back then it was really fast, that's true. And they put it in the running against the Junior Line, which was the ships that they wanted to compete against, and it was faster than them. But it's sort of broke down in the process. But we'll get to that in a minute. Yeah, it's interesting you mentioned with the class distinctions, you know that might strike our modern sensibilities, is classism, which I yeah, it is. But it's interesting to notice that UM the third Class were even treated, maybe even better than other ships UM of the time because they had their own enclosed rooms and that was kind of a luxury in itself. It was a lot of them didn't even have that where they were coming from. And the White Star Line, which was the manufacturer of these three ships, knew that many of the Steerage members were European immigrants who were going to New York to start a new life, and they really sort of approached this with a delicate sensibility and they wanted to make this a very special and memorable passage for them. And to that end, the quarters they had aboard the Titanic were so much nicer than anything they would have seen in any other ship. For instance, there were real mattresses, whereas on other ships Steerage would have had straw filled sacks to sleep on. Now that's not to say that it compared with the private and semi private baths of the upper class ducks, but I think that there was sort of a continuous design and feeling that pervaded the entirity of the ship. But it wasn't just the third class it had top of the line, it was everyone. That's true. If you look at the on on and everything like they had this the whole ship had the sort of airy designed to it, with palm trees. Everything was lush, and you know, they wanted to promote this this luxurious atmosphere so much that if you look at like the decks, they didn't want to clutter them up too much with even safety equipment for instance. They yes, so we have these wide open swaths of gleaming with decks. And Thomas Andrews, who was the ship's designer, he designed the ship to be unsinkable. And it's interesting too. I mean you look at both the engineers and the passengers aboard were pretty confident. Um just the sheer size of the Titanic. It was so gigantic that they felt really comfortable there that you know, it was a safe ride, sort of like when you're an evolved station wagon. Yeah, nothing, nothing can harm you. It's just so large. And it wasn't just the size of the ship that made people think it was unsinkable. The ship's designer, Thomas Andrews, designed watertight doors to draw down between each of the sixteen compartments and the bottom of the ship, the idea being that if something happened to the ship, up to three of those compartments could flood and the ship wouldn't sink, and even in a stretch, four could take on from water and the ship would still stay afloats. And they'll make me feel pretty secure, I mean, And we go back to the idea that they didn't have a lot of safety equipment on the decks, and that leads me to my question actually that I have for you, is that is it true? A lot of people say that if they did have enough lifeboats, they would have been able to save a lot more people from the sinking. That sadly is fiction. Really Yeah, And it's funny because that's a point that people really harp on and attached to it, that there were not enough life boats to save everyone on the Titanic. I think people really latch onto this idea because we would like to think that history could be changed if there were more precautions. But the fact of the matter is, there were so many things that went wrong with the Titanic even before I picked up passengers that I think it was doomed to sink from the start. That's right, even if you look at for a bay is the construction of it. I mean people say that, um, the constructors used substandard iron even in in the materials to you to make to make the ship and uh, and even the the technology, the Marconi wireless telegraphy, it was seen as maybe two cutting inge because a lot of people out there on the boats they didn't know how to use it necessarily or to to decipher it right. So when the Titanic was thinking and it sent out it's distress called people couldn't interpret it. It was like speaking a totally different language. And there's some information out there about there not being enough rivets and the ship or the rivets weren't tightened properly, and we know for a fact that it only underwent about six or seven hours worth of testing, and I think it turned once or twice, but it was never even sailed at its top speed. And what's more, a lot of the crew didn't get on board until an hour or stay before the passengers did, and they weren't even told what their jobs were until after they got on the ship. So how can you be a proper lookout for a ship when you haven't been trained in that post? That sure, it doesn't leave a lot of time for training. And also if you look at the design of the ship, even um I read that the rudder was actually kind of an old fashioned design and it was smaller than the even the competition's rudders, and so this made it so the ship itself a little less maneuverable, and they couldn't shift out of an emergency situation as fast as they should have. So when you have something that large, it's like if you're you're driving an RV and all of a sudden you're you're nearing a stop sign. You need to know ahead of time that you need to go ahead and start breaking slowly. You can't just slam on the brakes and expect things do okay. It's not like you know, my idioty Honda Civic, where I have time to do that. The Titanic was the same way. If they saw something in the water that they needed to avoid um and Iceberg, they had to think about it a couple of miles ahead. And the same goes for turning. You still need you know, a bigger radius to turn something that large. And one of my favorite points about how ill prepared the Titanic was for this voyage, and it's just max of conspiracy, is that JP Morgan was one of the big financial backers, and there's some recent evidence lightly that he kept encouraging the shipbuilders to use cheaper and cheaper materials because he wanted as much bang for his buck as he could get. Scandalous scandalous. Well, here's where it gets even juiced here. He was supposed to be on the maiden voyage and then just a couple of hours beforehand, Summa business came up and he didn't ride. It's a little suspicious, I know, I know, But all that aside back to the lifeboats in question. So I'm gonna give you guys some numbers just so you can help visualize it. And I wanted to clarify too that there are so many numbers out there when it comes to the Titanic, because Parliament conducted an inquiry since it sets sail from England, but the US Senate also conducted an inquiry. And that may sound kind of funny, and it kind of is. One of the senators, Senator William Smith, knew the captain of the Titanic, John Smith, and he'd sailed with him before and thought, he said, to get captain, how could this happened? And so the Senate got involved to again kind of marking conspiratorial. So did the different investigations come up with different different results? No, just about the same thing, but the numbers are a little bit different. So we know that there were enough lifeboats to hold one thousand, one seventy six passengers, and that's only if they were filled to capacity. So on board again numbers from the U. S Senate, we know there were two thousand people and eight crew members. So even if you're doing the math that fast, you know that's not enough if you can't get all those people into boats, and the reason why they had so few lifeboats on board sixteen is that the Board of Trade was the governing body that set the rules for ocean liners at this time, and the number of requisite lifeboats for ships up to ten thousand tons was sixteen. Well, the Titanic was forty five thousand tons, but no one had bothered to sit down and do the math and say, we need this many more lifeboats to combate that of friends. So the Board of Trades regulations sort of went up to it was sort of an old fashioned maximum. They weren't sort of expecting something as big as a Titanic needing the regulation exactly. And you hit on the point earlier, Jane, when you were talking about not wanting to clutter up the decks. I think that Titanics builders and designers conveniently misinterpreted the guidelines. They could have filled in the number they needed, but they didn't because they wanted their decks to look shiny and open and clean. But okay, so you asked, would everyone have been saved, that there have been enough life But it didn't matter now, not really, because when I was talking about how inefficient the crew was and how ill prepared they were, and how little testing this ship had undergone. I think vainly practice lowering what two to four lifeboats? Is that right? I think? I think I remember hearing those that. So they didn't have an accurate time estimation for how long it would take to get that many people ever board. And if you you look at the survivors talk about it, you'll notice that not even all of the lifeboats, they weren't filled to capacity, some of them, and that's pretty scandalous. Um. There was one survivor who wrote um that the passengers saw that these loath boats would have to take a fifty ft drop, and I kind of scared them, and they thought, well, I'm gonna stick on the unsinkable Titanic. You guys can go ahead. And this one survivor claims that he asked to be on this this on on filled lifeboat, and they said women and children first, see you later, and they lowered the boat. And so it's a kind of testament to they didn't really know what they were doing when they were lowering these boats. No one did. And there were two evacuations on either side of the ship, and one of the people conducting the investigation on one side said women and children. First, the guy on the other side was letting anyone who could get in get in. But when we say anyone, we mean first class and then second class. Third class wasn't even told that the ship was sinking until well after the fact. And it was such a quiet disaster when the ship scraped the iceberg. It happened so quickly and so quietly that no one really realized and damage had been done until Thomas Andrews inspected and said, yeah, it's certain it's going to sink. And it's sort of scary to think about the panic that must have ensued down in the steerage decks because even if people saw water filling up their cabins, like we said, they weren't allowed just free room over the ship like the other class passengers were. Can you imagine them just getting lost in the bottom as you know, imagine they'd be riots and and you know, fights all over the place. It was crazy. It was, I mean, it was essentially struggle to survive. And later on when White Star Line sent out rescue craft to search for the bodies or any survivors, they got really confused because they saw so many corpses wearing garments of first class passengers, but essentially crew and steerage had raided the cabins and put on whatever they could to stay warm. It's terrible. It sounds like they went through a lot of havoc and panic the few moments. Yeah, I can't even imagine how scary it was. And the recovery efforts for disasters too. I mean, when the news broke that the Titanic had sunk, the world was stunned. I mean, this was the unsinkable ship, and I think it took nearly a week to even compile a list of all the survivors and all that deceased. So and it sort of captures the imagination even to today. I mean, people are obsessed with knowing what actually happened, you know, um people they have deferring historical accounts, Who's to blame, and it's a pretty intense debate all around the board. And people are obsessed with the story of the titan The Titanic. Yeah, and that's because there were so many passengers on board and everyone had a different story, and everyone had a different eye witness account. There are people who said that the ship broke in half before you saying. There are people who didn't report that. And later on I think people called it a litigation nightmare because, like we said, Parliament and the Senate conducted investigations, but any lawsuits that were brought on the White Star line were brought on by families the individual passengers for either people lost or property lost. And how I mean, how could you even prove anything with all the different testimonies. That's right? And one, uh, one scandal that people disagree on, uh is about the chairman and managing director of the Star the White Star is that it the Star the White Star lying. His name is bruce' is Mays, as you said, and he actually jumped on one of these not quite filled lifeboats, and um, people say, oh, what a coward, like he took someone else's space when really like it would not have been taken by by another person. At least some organizations like the Titanic Crostoricals Society tried to defend him and say, like he had a wife and kids and no one else was around, and he just took his opportunity to save his life and otherwise he just would have been, you know, sunk with the ship. And it was sad because after he he survived, and after he got to America he was sort of ridiculed by uh like William Randolph Hurst and his newspapers and and England sort of they accepted him, but America he got maligned. I'm sure he did. And if you look at the other two arguably other important figures on board from like Thomas the Andrews, the ships just miner and then the captain of the ship, Captain Smith, they both sort of quietly waited on board and went down with the ship. And Thomas Andrews in particular. I mean, even if you think about James Cameron's Titanic, that really poignant scene where he says, I wish I could have builty a better ship ms Rose, that really is sort of how it happened. That was where is necessarily, but he didn't put on a life vest and he sat in one of the first class lounges and just quietly waited. And it's just so eerie even today if you go and you look at pictures of artifacts that have been um like photographed underneath the surface of the water, or artifacts that have been brought up like one of the most haunting things. I thought that, um, there's a traveling Titanic exhibit called Titanic Aquatic, and you can see all these things that r M. S. Titanic has recovered, that particular society and they have sole ownership over the shipwreck. And one of them, it's just um. It was a China hutch that went down and it was made of wood and it had these porcelain of gratten dishes in it. And over time the wood from the China cabinet disintegrated, but the o Grattan dishes were left perfectly stacked and neat Little Rose. And that's how they are right now and the display they're stacked and neat Little Rose. And it's so creepy. That is fascinating because like the rest of the Titanic and you just see like even the exterior of the ship underwater. It's it's really creepy to see because of what what the pressure and the water has done to it. Um. But to see something that has survived that, that's really weird. It is and I know what you're talking about. Like if you see pictures, haven't you see this sort of like weird seaweed things sort of waving the water off the ship's rail. Archaeologists have a word for them. They're called rusticles because essentially all these little tiny microbes underwater are just feasting on the ship, and they suspect that in another I think, like fifty to ninety years time, the ship is just going to collapse and implode in on itself and it's going to be over. So there's a lot of argument right now about whether or not we should actually raise what's left of the hall. That's really interesting because I mean, as someone who's fascinated with the story, I of course like I want to be in supportive like bring it up, because I don't want to see such an interesting artifact of history destroyed just by you know, nature, And I think I'm going to take a sham be on the other side, really, and not even just to play Devil's advocate. I really feel that that's where it belongs. Because even in the recovery efforts of of those bodies, not all of them are brought up, and a lot of the steerage and crew members that were recovered, their bodies were actually tied to iron rods and thrown beneath the water, so they were in essence buried at sea. And so I think that you know that's where the ship belongs to them. Yeah, that's true. So it's always interesting to revisit a past topic, especially when it's one that we still get requests for all your time I have. I mean, I think since the beginning of this year, we've been hearing what are you going to do for the hundred of the anniversary? You guys should do a Titanic episode, and we've all we said, well, we've got one in our archives. But there is some new information to this story. It's worth an update. Yeah, there is some recent news to this, and I feel like we're always bringing that up when we do these update podcasts. But we did mention the news and the intro to this podcast, and so we should deliver on it now. It was very conveniently time to the anniversary, and it involves newly released photos that were taken in two thousand four during an expedition by Titanic reck discoverer Robert Ballard. They were originally featured in Ballard's book about the expedition, but they were cropped at the time when they were shown there. So this was the first time that the uncropped versions of the photos were released, and they show a coat and boots line next to each other on the ocean floor at the shipwreck sites actually kind of poignant. Yeah, And James Decaldo, who is the director of Maritime Heritage at the National Oceanic and Atmosphere Administration Noah, told the Daily Mail, quote, these are not shoes that fell out neatly from somebody's back, right next to each other. And he went on to say that the way these items are laid out into the coach and the shoes right next to each other makes a quote compelling case that it is where quote someone has come to rest. Uh So, Yeah, you probably saw a lot of headlines about that recently. And Delgado was the chief scientists on a expedition that mapped the entire wreck site, and he believes that these items do point to the probable presence of human remains buried under the sediment in that spot, and um so there could continue to be new research and this could continue to add insight to the stories of the people who were lost aboard the wreck. He also said that this find or this you know, this photo, they really points to the need to preserve the wreck site, which has been hard to do since it's an international waters although the site did come under UNESCO protection this year, so that's good news. We also have some other random Titanic news of a more romantic nature than human remains, if if that strikes your fancy a little better. It's also interesting, especially for those who are fans of James Cameron's Titanic movie. In April, Discovery News published an article about the real Titanic love Story, which discusses the life of an Italian immigrant named Emilio Portolupi, who might have provided part of the inspiration for the character of Jack Dawson and Cameron's movie. And incidentally, there is a grave for an actual Jay douphin which people have speculated about. I mean, you can imagine. But Porta Loupe's story is apparently quite similar to the story of Dawson's character in the movie, and particularly in the love department. So Porta Loupi, who was said to be a well respected Stonemason who had immigrated to America in nineteen oh three, was on his way back from a visit back home to Italy when he ended up totally by chance, on the Titanic. He was originally supposed to have been on an other ship the Oceanic too. How he got on the Titanic is sort of the crux of the matter. He was invited aboard the ship by the Asters, a famous wealthy American couple. John Astor the fourth was a millionaire from one of America's wealthiest families, and the couple apparently wanted wanted Porta Loupe to work for them, wanted him to use his stonemasonry skills at their villa in Newport, Rhode Island. Yeah, they were on their way back from vacation in Egypt, I guess, and they were kind of like, hey, hop on their honeymoon, wasn't it. And he traveled first class as the couple's guest and was invited to dinner with other first class passengers the night the iceberg hit the ship, and he went to bed that night and woke up when the ship hit the iceberg thinking that they had reached New York. So some other details that might kind of fall in line with what you know from the movie. But port Loupi had Or developed a crush on Astor's young beautiful wife, Madeline Talmadge Aster, but no one really knows the full extent of their relationship. We know about the crush, though, because, unlike the movie character he said to have inspired, poor Lupie survived the Titanic sinking and lived to the ripe old age of seventy three. He died in nineteen seventy four, and no one really knows for sure how he survived, though, because he gave different versions of his story sure did. In In one, he put on a life belt and jumped fifty feet into the water, where he swam to a cake of ice and managed to stay afloat there until he was eventually rescued by a lifeboat. And another he fell in the water trying to board a lifeboat and swam for two hours before he was rescued by lifeboat fourteen, which was the boat that Lady Astor was on, and I think one of the last lifeboats to get away. This is probably unlikely, though a lot of people think it's unlikely, just because it seems impossible that he would have survived for lotter for two hours. Yeah, I see, I see cold water. Uh. Some believe, however, that he may have escaped by disguising himself as a woman because of the Women and Children Edict, The Women and Children First Edict that Candison Jane discussed a little bit. He was first listed as Mrs Porta Loupi when the names of the rescued were transmitted initially, So this is I mean, maybe maybe see why people think this whatever happened with Porta Loupie. Though lady ASTs husband did not survive, but she and Porta Lupie never got together after the rack, I mean that's understandable. I think a pretty dramatic experience. She did remarry, and he may have married as well, even though he was already married at the time. Yeah, he was already married before the Titanic. True. Lots of stories like this on fates of survivors um including the Iceberg, And I saw an interesting news story this year also about what people thought happened to the Iceberg and kind of the background behind and whether there are little pieces of it left and right, or that it probably didn't survive past nineteen because the water is around it in the Atlantic were too warm. So always plenty of things to investigate here about the Titanic sinking, and always new things that are coming out about it. As we said, I think there's even a Titanic to a new Titanic ship that's being built, or at least a project that's been conceived of. Yeah, so there might be a better, newer, safer version of the Titanic that comes out by two thousands sixteen. I think would it be marketed for cruising? I think it is going to be a passenger ship. Wow. Yeah, well don't quote me on that, but will certainly be looking for more stories about that. Yeah. If you have any favorite Titanic developments or discoveries that weren't discussed in the classic podcast and weren't discussed today, feel free to write to us. We're a history podcast at Discovery dot com and you can look us up on Facebook and we're on Twitter at miss in History. And we also have a Titanic article, Don't we Do? Written by Canada Keena herself, and you can find that by visiting our homepage at www. Dot how stuff works dot com mm HM for more on thiss and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com m

Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm to Blinded Chuck Reporting and I'm fair. And there was a very important historical anniversary earlier this year that we just couldn't let go by without commemorating, especially since it's one our listeners are still really intrigued by. And that's the one hundredth anniversary of the sinking of the now legendary passenger liner, the RMS Titanic, on April fourteenth, nineteen twelve, after it collided with an iceberg during its maiden voyage from the UK to New York City. And it was one of the biggest non wartime maritime disasters ever. More than fift undred people died, and so it really continues to haunt people and fascinate researchers who are still examining artifacts and unraveling the stories of the people who traveled on this ill fated ship. And so of course there was a lot of coverage because of all that fascination, even some news which we're going to be discussing in a bit and events to commemorate this anniversary, to including a memorial cruise aboard the MS Memoral Cruise ship which retraced the Titanic's exact route and gathered on the deck at eleven forty pm on April fourteenth, which was the time the Titanic hit the iceberg a hundred years ago, and held a memorial service, and according to the Daily Mail, about fifty of the people who were aboard this memorial cruise had a direct family connection to the Titanic, including relatives of the ship's doctor and relatives of some of the passengers. There was also the presentation of five bronze plaques which includes all the names of the dead from all the classes aboard the ship, first, second, and third class. And it's said to be the first time that all of these people are included together and one memorial. That point was really striking to me that it took a hundred years for that to happen. It's kind of amazing. That is surprising, especially since there have been several memorials and remembrances, and this is our own sort of memorial that we have here today to the Titanic sinking. It's another look at a classic episode of Stuffy Miston History Class from two thousand eight on the Titanic by Candice and Jane. So we're gonna check that out first and then talk a little bit more about it afterwards. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm editor Candice Gibson, joined by staff writer Jane McGrath. Jane, I don't think that there's anything as big and posh and attention catching in the annals of naval history as the Titanic. That was true, I don't think many people would not have. I guess I should say a marine history rather than naval history. So it was a seagoing vessel and it was almost like a hotel on the water. And the idea behind it was precisely that j Bruce is May and Lord Pierie of Harlem and Wolf shipbuilders. They were at dinner one night and they were talking about the Cunard lines newest liners, the Mauritania and Lusitania, and they said to themselves, we can make one or three. Even with their plan, they were gonna have a triumvirate of ships that were even bigger and better, the Olympic, the Gigantic and the Titanic. That's right. And they wanted to make these not only fast, so like the Kuniard line, but but luxurious and attractive for for the you know, the aristocratic passengers to spend you know, a pretty penny to go on exactly the idea of being that the more comfortable and luxurious the ship, the longer distance people would be willing to travel. And so they weren't just selling you know, a couple of dollars worth of tickets to people. We're talking about a first class ticket than in today's dollars is equivalent to about forty three thousand dollars to about eighty thousand dollars, which is a ton of money. I mean, I don't even know people who spend that on airfare, you know, flying halfway across the world. Maybe you do, if you do, write me because I want to travel with you. So then what made the Titanic so special? Well, it's interesting because it was so incredibly lush, and you know, the first class passengers, you know, they were they were used to being treated nicely, but not as nicely as on this as on this ship, I mean they had such Uh they had a squash court, I think, and that you mentioned in the article, and uh there's gem there were Turkish bad Yeah, and these things are amenities that people had to pay a little bit extra for. But you bring up an important point about the first class and what they had access to. And I'm sure that all of you know this, but there were three distinct classes on board the Titanic, first, second, and steerage, and so it's really important to sort of go ahead in your mind as you're picturing the Titanic and that I think the nine different deck levels of it, that it was very stratified. There were places that first class were permitted to go. I mean, they could go anywhere they wanted, really because they paid that much, but they weren't going to wander down to steerage cabins. But then the third class was pretty much restricted to the bottom of about second class sort of in the middle. And this was such a gigantic ship that it required some really special engineering to make it go. And I'm not gonna lie to you. I'm no engineer. I'm not going to profess to know everything about horsepower, etcetera, etcetera. But I do know that it had two giant engines that were about four stories tall, and these two three blade propellers that were like twenty three ft across, and so that's big, and it enabled the ship to go about twenty four knots and that may sound slow to us today, but back then it was really fast, that's true. And they put it in the running against the Junior Line, which was the ships that they wanted to compete against, and it was faster than them. But it's sort of broke down in the process. But we'll get to that in a minute. Yeah, it's interesting you mentioned with the class distinctions, you know that might strike our modern sensibilities, is classism, which I yeah, it is. But it's interesting to notice that UM the third Class were even treated, maybe even better than other ships UM of the time because they had their own enclosed rooms and that was kind of a luxury in itself. It was a lot of them didn't even have that where they were coming from. And the White Star Line, which was the manufacturer of these three ships, knew that many of the Steerage members were European immigrants who were going to New York to start a new life, and they really sort of approached this with a delicate sensibility and they wanted to make this a very special and memorable passage for them. And to that end, the quarters they had aboard the Titanic were so much nicer than anything they would have seen in any other ship. For instance, there were real mattresses, whereas on other ships Steerage would have had straw filled sacks to sleep on. Now that's not to say that it compared with the private and semi private baths of the upper class ducks, but I think that there was sort of a continuous design and feeling that pervaded the entirity of the ship. But it wasn't just the third class it had top of the line, it was everyone. That's true. If you look at the on on and everything like they had this the whole ship had the sort of airy designed to it, with palm trees. Everything was lush, and you know, they wanted to promote this this luxurious atmosphere so much that if you look at like the decks, they didn't want to clutter them up too much with even safety equipment for instance. They yes, so we have these wide open swaths of gleaming with decks. And Thomas Andrews, who was the ship's designer, he designed the ship to be unsinkable. And it's interesting too. I mean you look at both the engineers and the passengers aboard were pretty confident. Um just the sheer size of the Titanic. It was so gigantic that they felt really comfortable there that you know, it was a safe ride, sort of like when you're an evolved station wagon. Yeah, nothing, nothing can harm you. It's just so large. And it wasn't just the size of the ship that made people think it was unsinkable. The ship's designer, Thomas Andrews, designed watertight doors to draw down between each of the sixteen compartments and the bottom of the ship, the idea being that if something happened to the ship, up to three of those compartments could flood and the ship wouldn't sink, and even in a stretch, four could take on from water and the ship would still stay afloats. And they'll make me feel pretty secure, I mean, And we go back to the idea that they didn't have a lot of safety equipment on the decks, and that leads me to my question actually that I have for you, is that is it true? A lot of people say that if they did have enough lifeboats, they would have been able to save a lot more people from the sinking. That sadly is fiction. Really Yeah, And it's funny because that's a point that people really harp on and attached to it, that there were not enough life boats to save everyone on the Titanic. I think people really latch onto this idea because we would like to think that history could be changed if there were more precautions. But the fact of the matter is, there were so many things that went wrong with the Titanic even before I picked up passengers that I think it was doomed to sink from the start. That's right, even if you look at for a bay is the construction of it. I mean people say that, um, the constructors used substandard iron even in in the materials to you to make to make the ship and uh, and even the the technology, the Marconi wireless telegraphy, it was seen as maybe two cutting inge because a lot of people out there on the boats they didn't know how to use it necessarily or to to decipher it right. So when the Titanic was thinking and it sent out it's distress called people couldn't interpret it. It was like speaking a totally different language. And there's some information out there about there not being enough rivets and the ship or the rivets weren't tightened properly, and we know for a fact that it only underwent about six or seven hours worth of testing, and I think it turned once or twice, but it was never even sailed at its top speed. And what's more, a lot of the crew didn't get on board until an hour or stay before the passengers did, and they weren't even told what their jobs were until after they got on the ship. So how can you be a proper lookout for a ship when you haven't been trained in that post? That sure, it doesn't leave a lot of time for training. And also if you look at the design of the ship, even um I read that the rudder was actually kind of an old fashioned design and it was smaller than the even the competition's rudders, and so this made it so the ship itself a little less maneuverable, and they couldn't shift out of an emergency situation as fast as they should have. So when you have something that large, it's like if you're you're driving an RV and all of a sudden you're you're nearing a stop sign. You need to know ahead of time that you need to go ahead and start breaking slowly. You can't just slam on the brakes and expect things do okay. It's not like you know, my idioty Honda Civic, where I have time to do that. The Titanic was the same way. If they saw something in the water that they needed to avoid um and Iceberg, they had to think about it a couple of miles ahead. And the same goes for turning. You still need you know, a bigger radius to turn something that large. And one of my favorite points about how ill prepared the Titanic was for this voyage, and it's just max of conspiracy, is that JP Morgan was one of the big financial backers, and there's some recent evidence lightly that he kept encouraging the shipbuilders to use cheaper and cheaper materials because he wanted as much bang for his buck as he could get. Scandalous scandalous. Well, here's where it gets even juiced here. He was supposed to be on the maiden voyage and then just a couple of hours beforehand, Summa business came up and he didn't ride. It's a little suspicious, I know, I know, But all that aside back to the lifeboats in question. So I'm gonna give you guys some numbers just so you can help visualize it. And I wanted to clarify too that there are so many numbers out there when it comes to the Titanic, because Parliament conducted an inquiry since it sets sail from England, but the US Senate also conducted an inquiry. And that may sound kind of funny, and it kind of is. One of the senators, Senator William Smith, knew the captain of the Titanic, John Smith, and he'd sailed with him before and thought, he said, to get captain, how could this happened? And so the Senate got involved to again kind of marking conspiratorial. So did the different investigations come up with different different results? No, just about the same thing, but the numbers are a little bit different. So we know that there were enough lifeboats to hold one thousand, one seventy six passengers, and that's only if they were filled to capacity. So on board again numbers from the U. S Senate, we know there were two thousand people and eight crew members. So even if you're doing the math that fast, you know that's not enough if you can't get all those people into boats, and the reason why they had so few lifeboats on board sixteen is that the Board of Trade was the governing body that set the rules for ocean liners at this time, and the number of requisite lifeboats for ships up to ten thousand tons was sixteen. Well, the Titanic was forty five thousand tons, but no one had bothered to sit down and do the math and say, we need this many more lifeboats to combate that of friends. So the Board of Trades regulations sort of went up to it was sort of an old fashioned maximum. They weren't sort of expecting something as big as a Titanic needing the regulation exactly. And you hit on the point earlier, Jane, when you were talking about not wanting to clutter up the decks. I think that Titanics builders and designers conveniently misinterpreted the guidelines. They could have filled in the number they needed, but they didn't because they wanted their decks to look shiny and open and clean. But okay, so you asked, would everyone have been saved, that there have been enough life But it didn't matter now, not really, because when I was talking about how inefficient the crew was and how ill prepared they were, and how little testing this ship had undergone. I think vainly practice lowering what two to four lifeboats? Is that right? I think? I think I remember hearing those that. So they didn't have an accurate time estimation for how long it would take to get that many people ever board. And if you you look at the survivors talk about it, you'll notice that not even all of the lifeboats, they weren't filled to capacity, some of them, and that's pretty scandalous. Um. There was one survivor who wrote um that the passengers saw that these loath boats would have to take a fifty ft drop, and I kind of scared them, and they thought, well, I'm gonna stick on the unsinkable Titanic. You guys can go ahead. And this one survivor claims that he asked to be on this this on on filled lifeboat, and they said women and children first, see you later, and they lowered the boat. And so it's a kind of testament to they didn't really know what they were doing when they were lowering these boats. No one did. And there were two evacuations on either side of the ship, and one of the people conducting the investigation on one side said women and children. First, the guy on the other side was letting anyone who could get in get in. But when we say anyone, we mean first class and then second class. Third class wasn't even told that the ship was sinking until well after the fact. And it was such a quiet disaster when the ship scraped the iceberg. It happened so quickly and so quietly that no one really realized and damage had been done until Thomas Andrews inspected and said, yeah, it's certain it's going to sink. And it's sort of scary to think about the panic that must have ensued down in the steerage decks because even if people saw water filling up their cabins, like we said, they weren't allowed just free room over the ship like the other class passengers were. Can you imagine them just getting lost in the bottom as you know, imagine they'd be riots and and you know, fights all over the place. It was crazy. It was, I mean, it was essentially struggle to survive. And later on when White Star Line sent out rescue craft to search for the bodies or any survivors, they got really confused because they saw so many corpses wearing garments of first class passengers, but essentially crew and steerage had raided the cabins and put on whatever they could to stay warm. It's terrible. It sounds like they went through a lot of havoc and panic the few moments. Yeah, I can't even imagine how scary it was. And the recovery efforts for disasters too. I mean, when the news broke that the Titanic had sunk, the world was stunned. I mean, this was the unsinkable ship, and I think it took nearly a week to even compile a list of all the survivors and all that deceased. So and it sort of captures the imagination even to today. I mean, people are obsessed with knowing what actually happened, you know, um people they have deferring historical accounts, Who's to blame, and it's a pretty intense debate all around the board. And people are obsessed with the story of the titan The Titanic. Yeah, and that's because there were so many passengers on board and everyone had a different story, and everyone had a different eye witness account. There are people who said that the ship broke in half before you saying. There are people who didn't report that. And later on I think people called it a litigation nightmare because, like we said, Parliament and the Senate conducted investigations, but any lawsuits that were brought on the White Star line were brought on by families the individual passengers for either people lost or property lost. And how I mean, how could you even prove anything with all the different testimonies. That's right? And one, uh, one scandal that people disagree on, uh is about the chairman and managing director of the Star the White Star is that it the Star the White Star lying. His name is bruce' is Mays, as you said, and he actually jumped on one of these not quite filled lifeboats, and um, people say, oh, what a coward, like he took someone else's space when really like it would not have been taken by by another person. At least some organizations like the Titanic Crostoricals Society tried to defend him and say, like he had a wife and kids and no one else was around, and he just took his opportunity to save his life and otherwise he just would have been, you know, sunk with the ship. And it was sad because after he he survived, and after he got to America he was sort of ridiculed by uh like William Randolph Hurst and his newspapers and and England sort of they accepted him, but America he got maligned. I'm sure he did. And if you look at the other two arguably other important figures on board from like Thomas the Andrews, the ships just miner and then the captain of the ship, Captain Smith, they both sort of quietly waited on board and went down with the ship. And Thomas Andrews in particular. I mean, even if you think about James Cameron's Titanic, that really poignant scene where he says, I wish I could have builty a better ship ms Rose, that really is sort of how it happened. That was where is necessarily, but he didn't put on a life vest and he sat in one of the first class lounges and just quietly waited. And it's just so eerie even today if you go and you look at pictures of artifacts that have been um like photographed underneath the surface of the water, or artifacts that have been brought up like one of the most haunting things. I thought that, um, there's a traveling Titanic exhibit called Titanic Aquatic, and you can see all these things that r M. S. Titanic has recovered, that particular society and they have sole ownership over the shipwreck. And one of them, it's just um. It was a China hutch that went down and it was made of wood and it had these porcelain of gratten dishes in it. And over time the wood from the China cabinet disintegrated, but the o Grattan dishes were left perfectly stacked and neat Little Rose. And that's how they are right now and the display they're stacked and neat Little Rose. And it's so creepy. That is fascinating because like the rest of the Titanic and you just see like even the exterior of the ship underwater. It's it's really creepy to see because of what what the pressure and the water has done to it. Um. But to see something that has survived that, that's really weird. It is and I know what you're talking about. Like if you see pictures, haven't you see this sort of like weird seaweed things sort of waving the water off the ship's rail. Archaeologists have a word for them. They're called rusticles because essentially all these little tiny microbes underwater are just feasting on the ship, and they suspect that in another I think, like fifty to ninety years time, the ship is just going to collapse and implode in on itself and it's going to be over. So there's a lot of argument right now about whether or not we should actually raise what's left of the hall. That's really interesting because I mean, as someone who's fascinated with the story, I of course like I want to be in supportive like bring it up, because I don't want to see such an interesting artifact of history destroyed just by you know, nature, And I think I'm going to take a sham be on the other side, really, and not even just to play Devil's advocate. I really feel that that's where it belongs. Because even in the recovery efforts of of those bodies, not all of them are brought up, and a lot of the steerage and crew members that were recovered, their bodies were actually tied to iron rods and thrown beneath the water, so they were in essence buried at sea. And so I think that you know that's where the ship belongs to them. Yeah, that's true. So it's always interesting to revisit a past topic, especially when it's one that we still get requests for all your time I have. I mean, I think since the beginning of this year, we've been hearing what are you going to do for the hundred of the anniversary? You guys should do a Titanic episode, and we've all we said, well, we've got one in our archives. But there is some new information to this story. It's worth an update. Yeah, there is some recent news to this, and I feel like we're always bringing that up when we do these update podcasts. But we did mention the news and the intro to this podcast, and so we should deliver on it now. It was very conveniently time to the anniversary, and it involves newly released photos that were taken in two thousand four during an expedition by Titanic reck discoverer Robert Ballard. They were originally featured in Ballard's book about the expedition, but they were cropped at the time when they were shown there. So this was the first time that the uncropped versions of the photos were released, and they show a coat and boots line next to each other on the ocean floor at the shipwreck sites actually kind of poignant. Yeah, And James Decaldo, who is the director of Maritime Heritage at the National Oceanic and Atmosphere Administration Noah, told the Daily Mail, quote, these are not shoes that fell out neatly from somebody's back, right next to each other. And he went on to say that the way these items are laid out into the coach and the shoes right next to each other makes a quote compelling case that it is where quote someone has come to rest. Uh So, Yeah, you probably saw a lot of headlines about that recently. And Delgado was the chief scientists on a expedition that mapped the entire wreck site, and he believes that these items do point to the probable presence of human remains buried under the sediment in that spot, and um so there could continue to be new research and this could continue to add insight to the stories of the people who were lost aboard the wreck. He also said that this find or this you know, this photo, they really points to the need to preserve the wreck site, which has been hard to do since it's an international waters although the site did come under UNESCO protection this year, so that's good news. We also have some other random Titanic news of a more romantic nature than human remains, if if that strikes your fancy a little better. It's also interesting, especially for those who are fans of James Cameron's Titanic movie. In April, Discovery News published an article about the real Titanic love Story, which discusses the life of an Italian immigrant named Emilio Portolupi, who might have provided part of the inspiration for the character of Jack Dawson and Cameron's movie. And incidentally, there is a grave for an actual Jay douphin which people have speculated about. I mean, you can imagine. But Porta Loupe's story is apparently quite similar to the story of Dawson's character in the movie, and particularly in the love department. So Porta Loupi, who was said to be a well respected Stonemason who had immigrated to America in nineteen oh three, was on his way back from a visit back home to Italy when he ended up totally by chance, on the Titanic. He was originally supposed to have been on an other ship the Oceanic too. How he got on the Titanic is sort of the crux of the matter. He was invited aboard the ship by the Asters, a famous wealthy American couple. John Astor the fourth was a millionaire from one of America's wealthiest families, and the couple apparently wanted wanted Porta Loupe to work for them, wanted him to use his stonemasonry skills at their villa in Newport, Rhode Island. Yeah, they were on their way back from vacation in Egypt, I guess, and they were kind of like, hey, hop on their honeymoon, wasn't it. And he traveled first class as the couple's guest and was invited to dinner with other first class passengers the night the iceberg hit the ship, and he went to bed that night and woke up when the ship hit the iceberg thinking that they had reached New York. So some other details that might kind of fall in line with what you know from the movie. But port Loupi had Or developed a crush on Astor's young beautiful wife, Madeline Talmadge Aster, but no one really knows the full extent of their relationship. We know about the crush, though, because, unlike the movie character he said to have inspired, poor Lupie survived the Titanic sinking and lived to the ripe old age of seventy three. He died in nineteen seventy four, and no one really knows for sure how he survived, though, because he gave different versions of his story sure did. In In one, he put on a life belt and jumped fifty feet into the water, where he swam to a cake of ice and managed to stay afloat there until he was eventually rescued by a lifeboat. And another he fell in the water trying to board a lifeboat and swam for two hours before he was rescued by lifeboat fourteen, which was the boat that Lady Astor was on, and I think one of the last lifeboats to get away. This is probably unlikely, though a lot of people think it's unlikely, just because it seems impossible that he would have survived for lotter for two hours. Yeah, I see, I see cold water. Uh. Some believe, however, that he may have escaped by disguising himself as a woman because of the Women and Children Edict, The Women and Children First Edict that Candison Jane discussed a little bit. He was first listed as Mrs Porta Loupi when the names of the rescued were transmitted initially, So this is I mean, maybe maybe see why people think this whatever happened with Porta Loupie. Though lady ASTs husband did not survive, but she and Porta Lupie never got together after the rack, I mean that's understandable. I think a pretty dramatic experience. She did remarry, and he may have married as well, even though he was already married at the time. Yeah, he was already married before the Titanic. True. Lots of stories like this on fates of survivors um including the Iceberg, And I saw an interesting news story this year also about what people thought happened to the Iceberg and kind of the background behind and whether there are little pieces of it left and right, or that it probably didn't survive past nineteen because the water is around it in the Atlantic were too warm. So always plenty of things to investigate here about the Titanic sinking, and always new things that are coming out about it. As we said, I think there's even a Titanic to a new Titanic ship that's being built, or at least a project that's been conceived of. Yeah, so there might be a better, newer, safer version of the Titanic that comes out by two thousands sixteen. I think would it be marketed for cruising? I think it is going to be a passenger ship. Wow. Yeah, well don't quote me on that, but will certainly be looking for more stories about that. Yeah. If you have any favorite Titanic developments or discoveries that weren't discussed in the classic podcast and weren't discussed today, feel free to write to us. We're a history podcast at Discovery dot com and you can look us up on Facebook and we're on Twitter at miss in History. And we also have a Titanic article, Don't we Do? Written by Canada Keena herself, and you can find that by visiting our homepage at www. Dot how stuff works dot com mm HM for more on thiss and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com m