My thoughts exactly. An hour of my life I'll never get back.
It would be interesting to know if the team that found and are exploring the ship have managed to get down to the boiler rooms, which might help disprove the theory one way or t'other.
Didn't bother to watch it - living near Southampton, I'm bored to death with the Titanic. It's a ship. It sank. As my mother used to say, worse disasters happen at sea.
And in Barnsley they still bang on about pit disasters:-) Twas the Oaks disasters 150th anniversary last month.
So it was coal that sunk the Titanic? Was it Barnsley coal?, best coal in the world:-)
You cannot burn incriminating evidence with a WB combi boiler or come up with excuses at school such as "Sir my Dad was pissed on Sunday and he used my homework to light the fire".
Marine steam turbines were first used in Turbinia in 1894 and demonstrated to the navy top brass at the Spithead review in 1897.
formatting link
I suspect she was oil-fired, simply because her dimensions wouldn't have allowed space for coal-fired boilers, bunkers and an army of stokers (she was only 9ft wide), but I can't immediately confirm that. The first big naval vessel to be equipped with turbines was HMS Dreadnought, commissioned in 1906. The boilers were fired with a combination of coal and oil.
formatting link
Most of the ships that took part in the battle of Jutland were coal-fired, although thanks to Churchill's insistence (he was First Lord of the Admiralty), all naval vessels constructed after 1914 were oil-fired.
formatting link
The Titanic had a combination of reciprocating piston engines and a low-pressure turbine on the end, but was coal fired.
formatting link
However, the Mauritania, launched a few years before the Titanic, was fully equipped with turbines.
formatting link
but as built was coal fired and only converted to oil in 1921.
The claim is that Titanic sailed with a coal bunker fire in progress, and that by the time the coal was shifted, the adjacent bulkhead had been fatally weakened so that it failed rather than holding the sea back after the iceberg strike (which would supposedly have allowed enough time for everyone to be saved).
Ta! I wondered if it was related to the conspiracy theory which says that the identities of the Titanic and Olympic were swapped, and that it was actually the Olympic which sank.
Didn't they do that a few years ago? And they showed the rivets were no different to any of that time.
If she had hit the iceberg head-on, and only stove in the bows, she would have survived, because fewer compartments would have flooded, but steering to try and avoid the iceberg was actually her undoing.
The Winky article says that IIRC the cast iron rivets were at the limit of their capabilities, but as you say that was probably SOP for the day. As was not having enough life boats, which was standard practice.
I noted the Winky articles make no mention of fire at all. They do mention the turbine, which, when the ship was put into reverse, unlike the other engines could not be reversed, so it was stopped, along with its centrally located prop. Which apparently reduced the effectiveness of the rudder. IOW, if he'd just steered and left the engines at full ahead, he'd have missed the iceberg.
HomeOwnersHub website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here.
All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.