Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how Stuff Works dot com. Hello, 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, but it's true. I don't think many people who do not have up. 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 Jay Bruce is May and Lord Pierry 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, we're 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 like the Kuniard line, but but luxurious and attractive for for the you know, the aristocratic passengers have 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 then 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. A good point. 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 a Turkish baths. Yeah, that 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 the boat. 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 Juniord Line, which is 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 see that in a minute. Yeah, it was 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 China and 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 fatal mistake. Yes, so we have these wide open swaths of gleaming wood decks and Thomas Andrews, who was the ship's designer, he designed this 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 rode, sort of like when you're an evolving 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 drop 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 some water and the ship would still stay afloats. And that makes 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 life boasts, 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 lifeboats 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 as far back as the construction of it. I mean people say that, um, the constructors used substandard iron, even in in the materials to you to bank to make the ship and uh, and even the the technology, the Marconi wireless telegraphy, it was seen as maybe two cutting in because a lot of people out there on the boats they didn't know how to use it necessarily or to decipher it right. So when the Titanic was sinking and it sent out it's distress calls, 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 for 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 say, 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's 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 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 idi bety Honda Civic, where I haven't 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 what of my favorite points about how ill prepared the Titanic was for this voyage, and it's just smacks 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 live boats 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 have 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 and it 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 combinate that difference. 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 regulation exactly. And you hit on the point earlier day when you were talking about not wanting to clutter up the decks. I think that Titanic X builders and designers conveniently misinterpreted the guidelines. They could have filled in the number they needed, but they didn't because they wanted their their decks to look shiny and open and clean. But okay, so you asked, could everyone have been saved if there have been enough life But it didn't matter now, not really, because when I was talking about how inefficient the crew wise and how ill prepared they were and how little testing this ship had undergone. I think they only practice lowering what two to four lifeboats? Is that right? I think yeah, I think I remember hearing those stuff. 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 passengers saw that these lofe boats would have to take a fifty foot 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 the filled lifeboat, and they said women and children first, see you later, and they lowered the boat. And so that's it's a kind of testament too. They didn't really know what they were doing when they were flowering 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 happens so quickly and so quietly that no one really realized any 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 to the steerage decks because even if people saw water filling up their cabins, like we said, they weren't allowed is 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 a 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. As a terrible it sounds like they went through a lot of havoc and panics. 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 no what actually happened, you know, um people they have deferring historical accounts, whose to blame and and it's 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 were people who said that the ship broke in half before I sink. 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 of 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 is about the chairman and managing director of the Star the White Star is that it the White Star Line. There was always start line. His name was Bruce is May, 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 Historical 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 in 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 Andrews, the ship's designer, 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 reality a better ship ms Rose, that really is sort of how it happened that which where it 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 saw that UM there's a traveling Titanic exhibit called Titanic Aquatic, and you can see all these things that are ms. 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 was made of wood and it had these porcelain and gratten dishes in it. And over time the wood from the China cabinet disintegrated, but the gratten dishes were left perfectly stacked and neat Little Rose And that's how they are of right now in the display. They're stacked and neat Little Rose. And it's so creepy. That is fascinating because like the best 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 is 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 in the water off the ship's rail archaeologists have a word for them. They're called rusticles, because essentially all these little tiny microbs 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 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 SHMV on the other side, 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 those bodies, not all of them were 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. There's so much history about the Titanic, and there's so much that we haven't covered, and you can learn even more when you read How Titanic Worked on how stuff work dot com for moralness and thousands of other topics because it how stuff works dot com. Let us know what should be Send an email to podcast at how stuff works dot com.

Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how Stuff Works dot com. Hello, 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, but it's true. I don't think many people who do not have up. 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 Jay Bruce is May and Lord Pierry 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, we're 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 like the Kuniard line, but but luxurious and attractive for for the you know, the aristocratic passengers have 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 then 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. A good point. 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 a Turkish baths. Yeah, that 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 the boat. 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 Juniord Line, which is 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 see that in a minute. Yeah, it was 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 China and 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 fatal mistake. Yes, so we have these wide open swaths of gleaming wood decks and Thomas Andrews, who was the ship's designer, he designed this 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 rode, sort of like when you're an evolving 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 drop 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 some water and the ship would still stay afloats. And that makes 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 life boasts, 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 lifeboats 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 as far back as the construction of it. I mean people say that, um, the constructors used substandard iron, even in in the materials to you to bank to make the ship and uh, and even the the technology, the Marconi wireless telegraphy, it was seen as maybe two cutting in because a lot of people out there on the boats they didn't know how to use it necessarily or to decipher it right. So when the Titanic was sinking and it sent out it's distress calls, 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 for 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 say, 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's 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 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 idi bety Honda Civic, where I haven't 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 what of my favorite points about how ill prepared the Titanic was for this voyage, and it's just smacks 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 live boats 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 have 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 and it 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 combinate that difference. 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 regulation exactly. And you hit on the point earlier day when you were talking about not wanting to clutter up the decks. I think that Titanic X builders and designers conveniently misinterpreted the guidelines. They could have filled in the number they needed, but they didn't because they wanted their their decks to look shiny and open and clean. But okay, so you asked, could everyone have been saved if there have been enough life But it didn't matter now, not really, because when I was talking about how inefficient the crew wise and how ill prepared they were and how little testing this ship had undergone. I think they only practice lowering what two to four lifeboats? Is that right? I think yeah, I think I remember hearing those stuff. 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 passengers saw that these lofe boats would have to take a fifty foot 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 the filled lifeboat, and they said women and children first, see you later, and they lowered the boat. And so that's it's a kind of testament too. They didn't really know what they were doing when they were flowering 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 happens so quickly and so quietly that no one really realized any 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 to the steerage decks because even if people saw water filling up their cabins, like we said, they weren't allowed is 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 a 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. As a terrible it sounds like they went through a lot of havoc and panics. 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 no what actually happened, you know, um people they have deferring historical accounts, whose to blame and and it's 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 were people who said that the ship broke in half before I sink. 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 of 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 is about the chairman and managing director of the Star the White Star is that it the White Star Line. There was always start line. His name was Bruce is May, 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 Historical 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 in 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 Andrews, the ship's designer, 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 reality a better ship ms Rose, that really is sort of how it happened that which where it 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 saw that UM there's a traveling Titanic exhibit called Titanic Aquatic, and you can see all these things that are ms. 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 was made of wood and it had these porcelain and gratten dishes in it. And over time the wood from the China cabinet disintegrated, but the gratten dishes were left perfectly stacked and neat Little Rose And that's how they are of right now in the display. They're stacked and neat Little Rose. And it's so creepy. That is fascinating because like the best 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 is 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 in the water off the ship's rail archaeologists have a word for them. They're called rusticles, because essentially all these little tiny microbs 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 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 SHMV on the other side, 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 those bodies, not all of them were 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. There's so much history about the Titanic, and there's so much that we haven't covered, and you can learn even more when you read How Titanic Worked on how stuff work dot com for moralness and thousands of other topics because it how stuff works dot com. Let us know what should be Send an email to podcast at how stuff works dot com.