Legends and myths regarding the Titanic
The Titanic was designed to comply with the Grade 1 subdivision proposed by the 1891 Bulkhead Committee, meaning that it could stay afloat with any two adjoining out of its 16 main compartments open to the sea.
To somewhat lower the chance of a sailor being caught in them, a geared system dropped the doors gradually, over 25 to 30 seconds, by sliding them vertically on hydraulic cataract cylinders.
"[8] This comment was seized upon by the press, and the idea that the White Star Line had previously declared Titanic unsinkable (without qualification) gained immediate and widespread currency.
[9] An often-quoted story that has been blurred between fact and fiction states that the first person to receive news of the sinking was David Sarnoff, who would later lead media giant RCA.
[15] There are reports that, in 1936, a ham radio operator named Gordon Cosgrave claimed to be receiving long delayed echo SOS messages from the Carpathia and Titanic 24 years after their transmission.
On 15 April, the eight-member band, led by Wallace Hartley, had assembled in the first-class lounge in an effort to keep passengers calm and upbeat.
[21] But Walter Lord's book A Night to Remember popularised wireless operator Harold Bride's 1912 account (The New York Times) that he heard the song "Autumn" before the ship sank.
The notion that the band played "Nearer, My God, to Thee" as a swan song is possibly a myth originating from the wrecking of SS Valencia, which had received wide press coverage in Canada in 1906 and so may have influenced Dick's recollection.
[21] On 24 May 1912, the seven chief London orchestras performed at a memorial for the musicians who perished, as they played Horbury, two Titanic survivors in the audience became emotional and stated that this was the tune they heard while they were in their lifeboat.
Among items left behind by Hartley's fiancée, Maria Robinson, was the sheet music of a third tune to the hymn written by Lewis Carey in 1902 and made popular by the Australian contralto Ada Crossley.
[25] Colonel Archibald Gracie IV, an amateur historian who was aboard the ship until the final moments, and was later rescued on a capsized collapsible lifeboat, wrote his account immediately after the sinking but died from his injuries eight months later.
[27] The second, "From the Old World to the New" (1892) features a White Star Line vessel, Majestic, that rescues survivors of another ship that had collided with an iceberg.
Advocates of Captain Lord's innocence have avidly adopted the latter theory, beginning with Leslie Harrison, the general secretary of the Mercantile Marine Association in the 1960s.
[29][30] The root of this claim comes from the testimony of one of the Samson's officers, Hendrik Bergethon Naess, who told a Norwegian newspaper in 1912 that his ship had been near a large liner with "many lights" shooting rockets into the sky the morning of 15 April.
[30] Because the Samson was seal hunting illegally in territorial waters, the ship's officers decided to move on quickly to avoid detection.
He cited the Samson as returning from seal-hunting south of Cape Hatteras (North Carolina), which is more than a thousand miles away from the cold waters of the Arctic Circle where seals live.
The Titanic historian Leslie Reade obtained microfilmed Lloyd's List records reporting that the Samson docked in Isafjordur twice that April: on the 6th and the 20th, then on 15 May.
[33][34] Another myth is that the Titanic was transporting the supposedly cursed "Unlucky Mummy" Egyptian artifact from the British Museum to New York when it sank.
This story features an enormous British passenger liner called the Titan, which, deemed to be unsinkable, carries insufficient lifeboats.
[41] One month before the fateful April maiden voyage of the RMS Titanic, the story was published by S. Fischer Verlag as the novel Atlantis.
Atlantis is a romantic tale set aboard the fictitious ocean liner Roland, which is coincidentally doomed to a fate similar to that of the RMS Titanic.
