The Titanic, at the beginning of the 20th century, the largest passenger ship that belonged to the English postal and passenger shipping company White Star Line, was built in 1911. Displacement 46328 tons, length - 269 m, speed - 25 knots. Making its maiden voyage from Southampton to New York on the night of April 14-15, 1912, the Titanic collided with an iceberg and sank 800 km southeast of the island of Newfoundland. The number of dead, according to various sources, ranged from 1,400 to 1,517 people (in total there were about 2,200 people on board). Insurance companies paid out more than £14 million to relatives of the disaster victims, an astronomical sum at the time. The sinking of the Titanic is one of the greatest maritime disasters of the 20th century.
1985, September 1 - three members of an underwater expedition led by Professor Robert Ballard descended in the Albin bathyscaphe to a depth of more than 4 km and for the first time, 73 years after the disaster, saw the Titanic's hull broken into two parts on the seabed. But his examination not only did not clarify some of the mysterious circumstances of the death of the Titanic, but also raised many new questions.
So, throughout all these years it was believed that the Titanic sank because, during a collision, an iceberg tore open its starboard side plating below the waterline to a length of about 60 meters. However, Ballard's expedition discovered only 6 relatively small tears in the hull skin, the edges of which were turned outward. Such damage could, for example, result from an explosion (or explosions) inside the aircraft's hull. But why could these explosions occur and how are they related to the impact with the iceberg?
Maybe events developed like this. The iceberg broke through the side plating below the waterline at the engine room level, and cold sea water, which had a temperature of 2 degrees Celsius, poured in. When she began to fill the steam boilers, colossal stresses arose in their hot walls due to the sharp temperature difference. The metal could not stand it, the walls burst, and the boilers, the steam pressure in which reached 150 atmospheres, began to explode. The explosions increased the size of the holes obtained during the collision and created new ones, turning their torn edges outward...
The fact that the Titanic collided with an iceberg is beyond doubt. This was evidenced by numerous passengers and crew members who were lucky enough to survive. But why, again according to eyewitness accounts, did neither the passengers nor the crew members feel anything other than a slight shudder of the hull and, as it were, an echo of a distant explosion? But a body weighing 66,000 tons, moving at a speed of 40 km/h, hit a giant block of ice, which had the hardness of a rock!
Perhaps the Titanic did not collide with the iceberg at all, but only lightly touched it? But did he encounter something completely different? Or did this “something” deliberately collide with the liner, using the iceberg as a “screen” and becoming the true culprit in the death of the ship?
Well, if the culprit is an iceberg, then why did such a collision occur? How could it happen that in clear, calm weather and a complete absence of rough seas - a surprising phenomenon for these latitudes and this time of year - the officers and sailors on duty failed to notice the danger in a timely manner and take measures to avoid a disaster? Moreover, as it turned out later, on the Titanic’s route, the fatal iceberg was the only one within a radius of several tens of miles.
The strange carelessness of Captain Smith and his two watch assistants, Murdoch and Lightoller, also cannot be explained. At one time, clear weather and complete calm at sea were recognized as its cause. This carelessness was manifested, in particular, in the fact that the sailor observers in the “crow’s nest” on the mast were not even equipped with binoculars. They monitored their surroundings with the naked eye! There was no watchman at the bow of the ship. When the inevitability of a collision with an iceberg became obvious, senior mate William Murdoch made a fatal and unforgivable mistake for a professional. If at that moment he had given the command “Full back! The steering wheel is straight!”, then the Titanic would have remained afloat. Calculations showed that in this case, in a collision, two bow waterproof compartments would have been broken, the ship would have received a trim on the bow, which could be easily eliminated by filling the two aft compartments with sea water. The remaining twelve compartments remaining intact would have provided the Titanic with buoyancy, and if at the same time it still could not reach New York under its own power, then at least all the passengers and crew members would have been saved.
Unfortunately, Murdoch commanded differently: “Full back! Left rudder!”, exposing the entire starboard side of the liner to the iceberg’s impact. The result of this fatal mistake of the most experienced naval officer is known...
The commission that investigated the circumstances of the sinking of the Titanic came to the conclusion that the steamer Californian was the closest to the site of the disaster - the only ship that, in the opinion of the commission, could come to the aid of the dying giant liner, especially since both of them were one from another within line of sight. The commission of inquiry recognized Stanley Lord, captain of the Californian, as one of the culprits in the deaths of more than 1,500 people on board the Titanic. The charge of deliberate failure to provide assistance to people in distress at sea is so serious for any sailor, and moreover for the captain of the ship, that it puts an end to his professional reputation and future maritime career.
For many years, the commission's conclusion was not questioned, and only in 1968, the American Merchant Marine Association, after re-examining the circumstances of the sinking of the Titanic, came to the conclusion that the accusation brought against Captain Stanley Lord more than 50 years ago was erroneous. . The Californian was too far away to see the sinking Titanic. It was proven that the distance between the two vessels was so great that it was impossible for them to even see each other's running lights. But at the same time it turned out that between the sinking Titanic and the Californian lying adrift there was another ship, while from the Titanic it was mistaken for the Californian, and from the Californian - for the Titanic. The name and identity of this ghost ship remains a mystery to this day. The nature of the maneuvers of the mysterious ship (let's call it "X") was very accurately established from entries in the Californian's logbook and from the testimony of members of its crew, as well as people who escaped from the Titanic. These maneuvers seem rather strange.
"X", heading from northeast to southwest, comes into view of the watchmen on both mentioned vessels at approximately the same time - at 22.25. Exactly at 23.40, that is, at the moment when the Titanic collides with the iceberg, X stops the cars and goes into a drift, and then... turns 180 degrees, as if intending to go in the opposite direction! But he does not do this and until 02.05 he continues to drift, as if from a distance - from a distance of about 6 nautical miles - watching the development of the Titanic tragedy. After this, “X” starts the machines, turns 180 degrees again and goes southwest. At 02.40, its running lights disappear from the field of view of those on watch on the Californian.
What was this “X” and why was he acting so strange? And if for more than two hours they watched indifferently as the Titanic sank, then was it not involved in the death of the liner? Or maybe “X” was not a ship at all?
(Material by V. Ilyin)
The ship, which lived only 4 days, has not been able to reveal the secret of its death for more than a hundred years. What seemingly crazy ideas do not come to the minds of modern researchers, starting with an attack on a UFO ship and ending with the opening of time-spatial portals.
Let's start with the fact that many hypotheses boil down to the same thing: the Titanic was simply doomed to its destruction. And this was indicated by several prerequisites at once:
1. First of all, the name of the ship is associated with the mighty titans who dared to go against the gods of Olympus. Moreover, one of the captain’s assistants claimed that he was completely safe on the ship, since at that time it was the most unsinkable ship.
Sailors themselves are very superstitious, so many of them believed that it was a water spirit or the god of the seas and oceans himself who sank the giant ship to the bottom. There is an opinion that both the ship and the sea cannot be treated with disdain, otherwise one or the other will definitely destroy you.
2. There were rumors that during the accelerated construction of the Titanic, one of the builders was walled up alive in the hull of the Titanic, but evidence of this case was not found.
3. Just before sailing, a fire started in one of the compartments of the ship. The decision was made to continue sailing. There were statements that the fire that broke out was extinguished shortly before the collision with the iceberg (the official and more popular version of the death of the ship).
4. The version that a secret anti-Christian code was embedded in the serial number of the ship is considered completely incredible. This number consisted of the following digits. If you read it on paper in a mirror image, you can clearly see the inscription “No Pope,” which translated from English means “No to the Pope.” Thus, the Titanic became a victim of divine retribution.
5. Some of the surviving passengers and crew members claimed that a few days before departure or during the voyage they dreamed that the ship sank and they followed it. For this reason, many people refused a trip that was quite expensive at that time. However, among the lucky ones were many very wealthy people who knew each other. This fact is alarming, and the thought of a monstrous conspiracy among influential people naturally appears.
6. There is also an assumption that the ship fell into a time-spatial hole. The legendary physicist Albert Einstein also spoke about “wormholes”. There were also some hypotheses that it was in the place where the Titanic sank that something like the Bermuda Triangle could arise.
So far, researchers who support such a theory believe in this possibility only for two reasons: due to the appearance of a phantom SOS signal from the Titanic and due to unconfirmed cases of surviving passengers several decades later. One of these lucky ones was Winnie Coates, who was removed from the glacier in 1990.
The woman claimed that she had escaped from the Titanic that night and needed to help the rest of the people in distress. However, all the sources that tell this story are for some reason silent that Winnie Coates actually died in 1960. The woman's biography can be read here.
7. The most interesting version of the death of the Titanic is based on the fact that the giant liner took on board dangerous cargo. According to some reports, these were weapons and explosives, which could cause explosions that accelerated the sinking of the ship.
Some researchers believe that the Titanic was actually carrying jewelry and gold. George Morgan, being the head of an American banking house, canceled the trip at the last moment. In his memoirs, the latter described that Captain Edward Smith knew about the dangerous cargo, despite the fact that German pirates walked in the ocean waters.
But journalist Abraham Golts agreed to go on the flight. The suspicious goods were disguised as weapons and ammunition. All local newspapers immediately after the tragedy wrote about this type of cargo. However, Goltz, unlike his colleagues, noticed in Captain Smith’s letter a small mention that the cargo had a shine that “evokes mortal melancholy.”
Regarding the last point, some researchers do not agree with either weapons or precious metals. Some believe that the ship was carrying a uranium bomb created by the legendary physicist Nikola Tesla. Others are of the opinion that near the captain’s bridge there was the tomb of an Egyptian priestess-soothsayer. It was because of her charms that the captain decided not to slow down at a time when all the nearby ships were talking about the approach of glaciers.
Nikola Tesla
Whether this was the curse of Egypt or just a fiction - we are unlikely to know about it. Only one thing is strange: why the captain, who had just retired, agreed to go on a voyage on a ship with such a strange name. And he also decided to die with him. Maybe this is just a tribute to tradition?
If we talk about “wormholes,” then this hypothesis is not entirely meaningless; for example, a captain’s gun, which was created in 1928, was found at the bottom. A suitcase full of 1996 banknotes was also picked up. In 1991, a man with a gray beard calling himself Edward Smith was raised in the waters of the Atlantic. Also, a small child was saved in a life preserver named “Titanic”. However, how plausible these cases are is unknown.
Sometimes versions are put forward that the ship was ripped open by an alien laser. It was the lights from the searchlights of the alien ship that were visible to the surviving passengers. However, apart from assumptions, we do not have any indirect facts about the reality of this case.
If the most popular version of the sinking of the Titanic is that the ship met a huge iceberg, then the second most common option is that the ship was attacked by an enemy torpedo. Those who support this outcome of events say that if the ship was carrying something valuable, then German ships could have attacked the Titanic for precisely this reason. By the way, as for the above lights, they could have come from an enemy ship hidden in the darkness. Then it would be possible to explain the situation in which nearby ships did not come to the aid of dying people.
In 2002, after underwater research by Americans, it was reported that there were several holes in the Titanic’s hull, very similar to torpedo marks. However, if you recall the words of the famous traveler Jacques Cousteau, there was not a word about such damage. The French researcher, on the contrary, questioned the version of the torpedo attack, pointing to the nature of the hull violations. Their edges were outside, not inside. Here we should lean more towards an explosion that occurred from inside the ship.
There is one more point that is worth highlighting in this article. There is an opinion that just before their death, people saw not only prophetic dreams, but also the legendary Flying Dutchman, peacefully drifting near the Titanic. As the legend says, anyone who sees this ghost ship will very soon also die in the water element. Let us note once again that sailors, as a rule, are very superstitious, so many of them confirm that the Flying Dutchman is considered a kind of messenger of death for doomed ships, and that he can appear in any area of the sea routes.
The official version about the glacier also conceals many secrets and mysteries. During the entire voyage, experienced naval officers made so many fatal mistakes that such a coincidence of circumstances can safely be called fate. At first, the flight was not delayed due to a fire that started just before departure. This decision was made either because of the value of the cargo being transported, or because of the order of George Morgan, the head of the shipping company.
D. Morgan
Then the ship rushed at full speed, violating all safety rules, even in an area of increased concentration of glaciers. Perhaps the haste was due to the fire, which at any moment could cause a deafening explosion on the ship. The collision may have been deliberate to cover up the crew's countless infractions.
Only recently, Charles Lightoller's granddaughter, Louise Patten, released her novel entitled Pure Gold. In it, she reveals for the first time the details of the sinking of the Titanic. It is historically known that the first mate of the ill-fated ship was William Murdoch, who had already avoided collisions with icebergs on other large passenger ships more than once. It was he who took command that decisive night. Lightoller, being the second mate, was in his cabin after duty at the moment when the collision with a block of ice occurred.
Charles Lightoller
The second mate learned the truth about what had happened from the captain and William Murdoch when they went to get weapons to begin to control the boarding of people in the boats. Unfortunately, it was the last officers who were blamed for the death of the unsinkable liner and its 1,517 passengers all these years. In fact, it turned out to be quite the opposite: Murdoch, being a very experienced navigator, gave the order to turn left from the iceberg in order to avoid a head-on collision with it. However, helmsman Robert Hitchins, who received the command, was completely at a loss, and turned the steering wheel to the right rather than to the left.
Robert Hitchins – helmsman
In principle, Murdoch also made a mistake: he gave the "to the tiller" order, which was used throughout the North Atlantic. In this case, the steering wheel turns in the opposite direction of the named direction. The helmsman did not work on sailing ships, but was trained on steam ships, so out of habit he followed the order “to the helm,” in which the helm is turned in the direction announced by the captain.
W. Murdoch - first mate of the Titanic
It was no longer possible to correct the mistake, although Murdoch tried to do so. There were only 4 minutes left to complete the desired action. But this mistake was not the worst.
The managing director of the White Star Line, Bruce Ismay, did not want to spoil the reputation of his company’s brainchild (or indeed, there was some valuable cargo on board), so he ordered the captain not to stop the ship and continue moving without slowing down. If the crew had refused to carry out such a disastrous order, the ship could have held out until the rescuers arrived.
As a result, Murdoch died while cutting off the ropes of the last lifeboat: he was washed into the ocean after being hit by a huge wave. The first assistant was involved in rescuing people together with Lightoller. By the way, it was Murdoch who saved 75% of all surviving passengers, as he put not only women and children, but also men, into boats. The captain's second mate was able to escape and tell his relatives about the mystery of the plane's crash.
However, the main reason for the death of so many people cannot be attributed only to the lack of lifeboats. For example, the lookouts did not have binoculars, which prevented the latter from noticing in time the iceberg approaching directly along the chosen course. The binoculars were on the ship, but they could not be taken out of the locked box. The White Star Line company, in preparation for the voyage, made a colossal change in the entire crew. As a result, the officer who had the keys to the box remained ashore.
Those looking ahead could only rely on their own eyes. However, it was useless to rely on them. According to researcher Tim Maltin, the Titanic could have died due to a mirage that arose in northern waters due to a very large difference in temperatures.
Australian explorer T. Maltin
All eyewitnesses of the incident noted that half an hour before the collision the air temperature dropped sharply by 10-15 degrees. Even William Murdoch noted this when he went on duty shortly before the tragedy began. At this time, the Labrador Current met the warm Gulf Stream.
As a result of anomalous refraction, a thick haze formed on the horizon directly ahead of the ship, which hid the iceberg from the eyes of the sailors in the crow’s nest. There is an opinion that the iceberg turned out to be “black”, that is, upside down, as a result of which its dark lower part appeared on the surface of the water.
If this version is true, then nearby ships might also not have noticed how the largest liner in the world was sinking. In such difficult weather conditions, SOS signals were noticeable. The ship's only hope was the radio, but the Titanic's radio operator, Jack Phillips, ignored an important message about the approach of glaciers sent by the radio operator of the Californian. Jack cited being busy, and as a result, the only chance to escape was missed.
D. Phillips – radio operator
Whatever it was, but under any set of circumstances, it seems that the Titanic was actually doomed to certain death. Take, for example, the fact that passenger ships perish with an enviable frequency of a hundred years. After the Titanic, the passenger liner Costa Concordia ran aground on its centenary, and this incident cannot be called a mere coincidence. One gets the impression that the water element requires more and more sacrifices from humanity. Maybe the Flying Dutchman is really to blame for this, wanting to play with other people's destinies.
Despite this, Austrian millionaire Clive Palmer is going to build an almost complete copy of the lost liner and call his creation “Titanic 2”. The new ship will be launched by 2016, and will depart at the same time and along the same route as its predecessor.
Researchers are convinced that this idea will not end well. The billionaire invested all his savings in the upcoming project. It is expected that a new film will be made about the sinking of the Titanic. But some scientists doubt the sincerity of Clive Palmer's intentions. You can learn about all the guesses and assumptions of the latter by watching 3 episodes of the documentary film “Titanic: The Secrets of Eternal Life.”
Almost a century has passed since that terrible night of April 14-15, 1912, when the legendary Titanic sank in the icy waves of the North Atlantic, taking with it more than one and a half thousand human lives. Hundreds of testimonies, thousands of facts and, finally, the long-awaited opportunity to descend to a depth of almost 13 thousand pounds to study in detail the wreckage of what was once one of the greatest ships of mankind. Hundreds of scientific studies conducted by scientists from major countries in the world using the most powerful computer technology. The timing of the tragedy has been restored, seemingly minute by minute, and there can be no more mysteries. And it seems like it’s time to put an end to this sad story, if only not for one circumstance: ships are still picking up SOS signals sent from the radio room of the Titanic in distress, and Norwegian fishermen continue and continue to catch the surviving passengers. What is this - mass insanity or the still unexplored mysteries of time and space?
Mysterious distress signals
Recently, the press again (once again!) reported that radio operators of several ships assigned to the ports of Norway, Sweden and the Netherlands received an international SOS distress signal on April 15, which was sent for almost two hours from a point with coordinates 41 .46 north, 50.14 weight in the Atlantic Ocean. All vessels reported the received signals via radio to the shore, where navigation services joined in the search for the vessel in trouble. However, to the surprise of the sailors, satellite images showed that there were no ships at all in the area at that time. The radio operators were reprimanded, the navigation services began an internal check, trying to find the unknown “joker”, but this (alas!) did not bring any results. Nevertheless, this was far from the first such “hoax.”
The first time SOS signals were recorded from the sinking Titanic was back in 1972. On April 15, the radio operator of the American battleship Theodore Roosevelt, Lloyd Detmer, received a distress signal. Morse code broke through the monstrous interference in the headphones with a call to come to the aid of the sinking Titanic. Naturally, like any sane person, he did not believe his ears. My first thought was that he was either crazy or someone was playing a prank on him. However, the instructions strictly ordered that all such facts be reported ashore. Really, you never know? What if someone actually drowns? What if, in fact, the name of the ship was simply similar to the Titanic, and due to interference he simply misunderstood it? The response from the shore came in record time and, to Lloyd Detmer’s surprise, was surprisingly calm and strange: do not respond to SOS signals, follow the same course. And later, already in the port, the crew of the battleship, including the captain, was explained that the long-sunk Titanic, naturally, could not send any calls for help. Accordingly, following the logic, either there was no SOS signal at all, or someone was just making a rude joke. The team dispersed, laughing. Indeed, this is probably how it all happened. However, something haunted the unfortunate radio operator. But what? The explanations, at first glance, are logical; the signal was indeed too weak and an error could well have crept into it. There was only one thing suspicious: why were explanations about his, as everyone believed, nonsense or unspecified hooliganism on air given not by their immediate military superiors, but by representatives of the special services? And then, at first simply out of curiosity, Detmer began his own investigation, which yielded a lot of very unexpected and completely inexplicable facts. It is not surprising that when the investigation went too far, and Detmer already began to have some very interesting information, he was suddenly declared mentally incompetent and was put in a mental hospital in record time. But what did Lloyd Detmer dig up that was so interesting that he incurred the wrath of powerful intelligence agencies?
Firstly, as it became known, Detmer found in the military archives reports from his fellow radio operators that, it turns out, he was not the only one who received strange radiograms allegedly sent from the Titanic. As it turned out, radio ghosts appeared with enviable regularity - approximately once every six years (1924, 1930, 1936, 1942, etc.). But then it turned out that the next signal had to be expected in 1978! Continuing to work as a radio operator on the ship, Detmer himself asked to go on watch on the night of April 15. As it became known from the ship's log, the signal was received. However, like the last time, no one believed it on the shore, the special services held a second explanatory conversation, and Detmer, who tried to prove his case using facts obtained from military archives, was declared mentally disabled and sent for compulsory treatment to the neurosis clinic in Baltimore (USA). For almost two decades, the mysterious signals from the sunken Titanic were forgotten. Until, in April 1996, a note appeared in the Canadian newspaper The Sun about another SOS signal from the past received by the Canadian ship Quebec. The circle is closed.
Time loop
So, Detmer's assumption about the periodicity of the distress signal appears to have been correct. By the way, some scientists who have studied this phenomenon agree with him. Several assumptions have been put forward to explain the appearance of a signal from the past. So, according to some researchers, the explanation may be that “a phantom of a radio signal was formed in the space-time field.” This is what they say is caught from time to time by ships in the Atlantic Ocean. And if the frequency of “radiomaterialization” of the phantom is calculated correctly, then its next appearance should be expected in 2008.
Other scientists claim that the SOS signal from the Titanic struck time in both directions. That is, it should have been caught in 1906, 1900, 1894 (and so on) years. However, due to the fact that at the beginning of the century radio was too expensive and exotic, and it was invented relatively recently (in 1895), the signal was not documented. However, the latter does not mean that it did not exist at all.
Marvelous? But this is not all the miracles associated with the death of the Titanic. Comparing all the facts related to the disaster, it can be argued that Edward Smith, the captain of the real Titanic, shortly before the disaster could have received... his own SOS signal. This, in their opinion, can explain his stupor, and an unexpected attempt to change course, and (most importantly) that the Carpathia and Olympic, the ships that were the first to arrive to the aid of the Titanic in distress, received an SOS signal almost twenty minutes earlier than the disaster itself occurred.
Let's figure it out. The ships "Olympic" and "Carpathia" received an SOS from the Titanic at 23:17. The Titanic sank at 2:20 am. "Carpathia" arrived at the scene of the disaster at 4 hours 38 minutes, that is, it took about six hours. Everything seemed to fit: the Carpathia was located about 200 kilometers from the Titanic. The only thing that doesn’t add up is this: the Titanic collided with the iceberg at 23:40 and, thus, could not have transmitted the SOS signal 23 minutes earlier. He generally began to cry for help only around midnight, and it was this call that was heard on the ship "Cincinatti", which was 900 kilometers away. It turns out that both the Olympic and the Carpathia received not a real distress signal, but a phantom of it.
NatureSOS
So, the facts confirm that distress signals were distributed even before the disaster. Scientists have wondered about their origin. Were these really radio signals, or something completely different?
Back in the 70s of the last century, Doctor of Technical Sciences G.A. Sergeev reported on his discovery of so-called stress radiation, which occurs at a moment of mortal danger for a person, including when he drowns. He proved that the physical component of this radiation propagates both in water and in air. In addition, this radiation can be detected at short distances from a drowning person using special liquid crystal sensors. It is quite possible that the Titanic tragedy generated stress radiation of such strength that it spread over thousands of kilometers!
As confirmation of this theory, the scientist cites the fact that at the time of the sinking of the Titanic, “visions” or dreams of relatives of people who died on the Titanic were documented in different countries.
On an April evening in 1912, the minister of the Rosedale Methodical Church in Canada had a vision: the furious sound of waves, voices crying out for help, and the words of an old song that he had not heard for many years. At the end of the evening service, the priest told the parishioners about his vision and asked them to sing with him the old chant that he heard during the vision: “We pray to Thee, O our Lord, for those who are perishing in the abyss of the sea.” The next morning, the priest and parishioners learned about a terrible tragedy in the Atlantic, which occurred at the very moment when a strange vision arose. As it turned out later, this chant was performed during prayer on board the liner. One more example. A young American woman had a terrible dream: her mother was in a boat filled with rushing and screaming people who had been shipwrecked. Several other boats float nearby and hundreds of people flounder in the water. And in the distance, the stern of a ship rises above the ocean, plunging into the abyss. Later, the woman’s surviving mother confirmed that during the sinking of the Titanic, she turned her thoughts to her daughter, whom she did not want to see again.
In New York itself, where the Titanic was supposed to arrive, a young girl, Stella Smith, saw herself in a dream on board a sinking ship, the stern of which rose steeply upward. Water was already splashing under her feet, and she, frantically clinging to the shrouds, tried to climb up, but fell and flew into the black abyss... A little later she found out that her fiancé was among the dead passengers.
Similar visions, as facts show, from time to time (all with the same frequency of 6 years) visit people on both sides of the Atlantic. And if we take into account the theory of the time loop, then it is likely that the visions, spreading both into the past and into the future, were perceived by Morgan Robertson, the author of the warning novel Futility.
Morgan Robertson's mystical prediction
In 1896, a book by an absolutely unknown author, Morgan Robertson, was published in England. A reporter specializing in maritime topics published a novel with the strange title “Futility,” in which he told a simple story about how a 260-meter-long transatlantic liner with four pipes and three propellers was built in England. With a displacement of 60 thousand tons and a machine power of 50 thousand horsepower, it developed a speed of over 25 knots. The ship was considered unsinkable, the most luxurious and the fastest in the world. Naturally, the right to make the first trip across the ocean on it fell to the powers that be - the millionaires of the Old and New Worlds. However, the voyage ended tragically: on a cold April night, the liner crashed into an iceberg at full speed and sank. The tragedy was aggravated by the fact that there were not enough lifeboats for everyone, and therefore the bulk of the two thousand passengers died. The name of the fictional ship was Titan. Does the plot remind you of anything?
Anyone will unmistakably recognize in the story of the novel “Futility” the story of the real wreck of the Titanic, built in England and lost on the cold night of April 14-15 on its way to America as a result of a collision with an iceberg. The only surprising thing is that the real disaster occurred 16 years later. By the way, this novel saved the lives of some people who never became passengers on the ill-fated Titanic. So, ironically, a copy of the novel ended up in the hands of one of the ship’s stokers, who began reading it during breaks between shifts during the voyage. As he read, he was literally horrified when he recognized in the description of the Titan the ship on which he himself had sailed. He tried to tell his comrades about this, but they laughed at him. However, the frightened fireman hastened to desert the liner while calling at the English port of Southampton. Well, as time has shown, he was right.
The coincidences between “Titan” and “Titanic” were noticed, but, unfortunately, too late. 16 years after the novel’s release, all copies of the book, which was previously practically out of demand, sold out literally instantly. What is the reason? Why did a book by a retired British Navy sailor suddenly become the most popular not only in the USA, but also in many other countries? Did the readers really discern in it some previously carefully hidden literary merits? There weren't any. But something else is striking - the story predicted with incredible accuracy the smallest details of the disaster that took place in April 1912. Everything agreed: the fact that the shipwreck occurred on the very first voyage, and the fact that the ship died in the Atlantic in April, and the fact that both ships - real and fictional - stumbled upon an iceberg at night, and the fact that they survived on the surface of the ocean approximately the same time, and the fact that the technical data of the Titan and Titanic almost completely coincided. See for yourself:
The list of matches can be continued. Even the number of deaths in Robertson's book is not much different from the number of those unfortunate people who actually died in the sinking of the Titanic.
Mysterious warnings
The novel Futility was not the only warning of a possible disaster. The wife of industrialist G. Wood, who at the last moment refused a ticket on the Titanic after the disaster, gave the press an anonymous warning she received by mail on the eve of sailing, which said: “If you do not want to lose your husband, then make every effort to dissuade him from this trip. If this warning has a favorable effect, I ask, as a token of gratitude, to transfer the sum of 1000 pounds to the indicated address, since the transmission of this warning to you required great effort and expense on my part.”
Wood's wife managed to persuade her husband to abandon the trip, taking this message as a warning about a possible attempt on his life. Of course, after the press reported the death of the ship, the specified amount was immediately transferred to an unknown benefactor. How the unknown well-wisher learned about the impending disaster is unknown. However, the Woods weren't the only ones likely to have received a "final warning."
At the very last moment, citing ill health, American multimillionaire Pierson Morgan, the actual owner of the ship, refused to travel on the liner. However, a few days later, after the shipwreck, Morgan was discovered at a resort in France in the company of his mistress. He was in absolute health and did not even mention any illness.
More than fifty other people refused to sail with Morgan, also at the last moment, including his close friends and business partners, including the German steel magnate Henry Frick and the American multimillionaire George Vanderbilt.
Ghosts of disaster
Who were all these people who warned (albeit often not for free) the powers that be about the coming catastrophe? Who was, by the way, the retired sailor Morgan Roberts, whose biography, as it turned out, is completely unclear and replete with all sorts of blank spots? Recently, a group of American anomalists proposed a completely fantastic version: they were all... surviving passengers of the Titanic. It seems that the time loop worked not only for radio waves, but also for people. Marvelous? Still would! But the whole point is that this, no doubt, very fantastic version has a number of very serious confirmations received today.
On September 24, 1990, fishermen of the Norwegian fishing trawler "Vosshagen" under the command of Captain Karl-Jorgen Has in the North Atlantic, 340 km southeast of Iceland, 29-year-old Winnie Couts was discovered and removed from the iceberg. The woman was thoroughly wet, weather-beaten and chilled. She claimed that she miraculously escaped from the sinking Titanic, which literally just plunged into the abyss before her eyes. In addition, Winnie Couts was very worried about the fate of the other passengers and literally begged the ship's crew to immediately go to their rescue. For this woman, time seemed to stand still on the tragic date of April 15, 1912, which she, 79 years later, experienced as if it had just happened. Moreover, for her these same 79 years did not exist at all!
Of course, a living and unharmed witness to the sinking of the Titanic who showed up from nowhere came as a complete surprise to the crew of the ship Vosshagen. This did not fit not only into the poor fishermen’s heads, but also into the usual scheme of perception of earthly time. The Norwegian naval authorities were completely confused, because Mrs. Couts gave the impression of a completely normal woman, without mental deviations. In addition, what was surprising was the fact that her clothes were fully consistent with the latest fashion trends of the early twentieth century, and the surprise that seemingly ordinary things aroused in her - a cell phone, a TV, an airplane, etc.
There were signs of a time jump of as much as 79 years. But how? In search of an answer, experts contacted the English Maritime Department. However, the answer that came soon not only did not clarify, but further confused the current situation. London confirmed that Mrs Winnie Couts from Southampton was indeed on the Titanic's passenger list and could therefore have been on board the superliner at the time of the disaster. However, how to explain the fact that a 108-year-old woman looked like a 29-year-old at the time of discovery? “This is supernatural,” said 27 doctors and scientists who examined the rescued woman, “it seems that this woman was in a time distortion for 79 years. She hasn't aged a bit."
Such cases, by the way, are not isolated. A year after the events described, on August 9, 1991, the crew of the naval research vessel Larson Napier, 365 kilometers southwest of Iceland (that is, almost in the same place), picked up another “revived” drowned man from an old rescue boat designs. This time it turned out to be, neither more nor less, the captain of the Titanic, John Smith, shocked by what happened, but completely unharmed. To everyone's surprise, he was wearing a clean and ironed White Star Shipping Company uniform. On top of that, the captain smoked tobacco from his old pipe. Rescuers, as in the case of Winnie Couts, immediately brought the rescued person to shore, where they handed him over to amazed psychiatrists. The special services got involved in the case, and immediately after the fingerprints of the newly minted captain and those found in 80-year-old documents completely matched, all documents on this case were classified. Representatives of the special services answered any questions from the press briefly: “He was just a mentally ill person.” Indeed, it is difficult to remain mentally healthy when you first drowned and then unexpectedly resurrected 80 years after the tragedy! Until now, even though both rescued people feel great, they are kept isolated from society, supposedly in order to consistently adapt to modern reality.
But the third Titanic passenger who was saved was lucky. No one is keeping him in a mental hospital; he (or rather, she) has successfully adapted and currently lives in Norway. Three years after the events described, in 1994, in the waters of the North Atlantic, again in almost the same place, a 10-month-old girl, frozen but healthy, was rescued by the crew of another Norwegian ship. No one could answer the question of where the baby came from, far from sea routes, in cold water. The fact that the baby was tied to a lifebuoy with the inscription “Titanic” did not add clarity, and her clothes were completely consistent with those that babies were dressed in at the beginning of the century. Later, scientists studying this phenomenon discovered a mention of a 10-month-old female child in the Titanic passenger lists. However, it was not possible to continue the research further: the infant, alas, could not tell anything about himself.
Modern researchers have unearthed other facts. It turns out that sailors have repeatedly reported that at approximately these latitudes they saw a huge steamer going head down. The vision lasted only a few seconds and then disappeared. “It seems,” said oceanographer Malvin Idland, “that time has lost its meaning in this area of the world. People who disappeared back in 1912 suddenly appear as if nothing had happened to them. They haven't even aged! It is possible that both the Titanic and its passengers fell into some kind of time trap, the mystery of which we have yet to solve.”
By the way, if we accept all these facts and compare them with the theory of time “punched” in both directions, then we can assume that Morgan Robinson, the author of the surprisingly prophetic novel “Futility,” could well have turned out to be one of the passengers of the Titanic, only “ abandoned" not to the future, but to the past. Then all the amazing coincidences between the fictional “Titan” and the very real “Titanic” become clear: Morgan Robinson wrote just an autobiographical story with which he wanted to warn. Unfortunately, not everyone heeded his warnings.
April 15, 2012 marks the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the famous British steamship Titanic. Few people know that this terrible tragedy, which claimed the lives of about 1.5 thousand people, could have been prevented. It so happened that on board the liner there was no key to the box in which the lookout's binoculars were located. At the time of the ship's death, this key was in the pocket of the officer, who at the last moment was removed from the Titanic and transferred to another ship, and another lookout was put in his place. So, in September 2007, when the crisis was already raging in the West, this key was sold to an anonymous buyer for 180 thousand dollars - an amount that any owner of a one-room apartment in Moscow could afford at that time.
The mystery and mysticism of the death of the Titanic
The sinking of the legendary Titanic, which claimed the lives of one and a half thousand people, shocked the whole world and became one of the most notorious disasters of the 20th century. People still remember about the fatal voyage, although exactly 100 years will soon pass since the crash. The centenary of the Titanic's sinking will take place on the night of April 14-15 - the tragic date of the ship's collision with an iceberg in 2012.
It is quite difficult to write about the sinking of the Titanic - on the one hand, there is no person who did not know about this tragedy, on the other hand, there are a lot of interesting facts unknown even to specialists.
Of course, after the miracle of the 20th century, the film “Titanic”, if anyone in the world did not know about the Titanic, or only knew that something like that happened and apparently sank, now everyone knows and believes that there is more to know nothing.
This huge ship sailed from England to America, with Kate Winslet, Leonardo DiCaprio and a bunch of other actors on board. Leonardo seduced Kate and they would have gotten married, but then an iceberg happened on the way, and for most of the film the characters scurried around the back streets of the sinking Titanic, like rats in a maze. Then, finally, the Titanic sank miserably, DiCaprio could not fit on the same board as Kate and very beautifully plunged into the waters of the Atlantic, Kate was picked up, and she remained faithful. The main villain and other unimportant ones still survived. Kate has lived to this day and, being an old fool, threw a precious stone into the ocean. For most, the story of the Titanic has become a story of a terribly beautiful love of terribly beautiful heroes against the backdrop of the computer wonders of modern filmmaking.
Let me start with some well-known facts:
Liner Titanic:
gross tonnage 46,328 register tons, displacement 66 thousand tons.
Dimensions:
length 268.98 m, width 28.2 m, distance from the waterline to the boat deck 18.4 m or 53.3 m from the keel to the tops of its four huge pipes.
In short, the Titanic was as tall as an 11-story building and four city blocks long.
The three-screw Titanic was powered by two four-cylinder steam engines driving the outer propellers and a steam turbine driving the middle propeller. The rated power of this power plant was 50,000 hp, but a power of 55,000 hp could easily be developed. At full speed, the Titanic could travel at a speed of 24 - 25 knots.
The most interesting design feature of the liner was its watertight bulkheads. The Titanic had a double bottom and was divided into 16 watertight compartments by fifteen watertight bulkheads. It is strange, however, that these bulkheads did not extend very high. The first two and last five bulkheads were extended to deck D, and the middle eight - only to deck E. Nevertheless, the unsinkability of the liner was ensured if any two compartments were flooded, and since the designers could not imagine a misfortune worse than a hole in the area where the two compartments, the Titanic was declared "unsinkable".
The unsinkable Titanic launched from the slipway of the Belfast shipyard of the shipbuilding company Harland and Wolf on May 31, 1911. For the next ten months it was at the outfitting wall. Titanic's sea trials were completed on April 1, 1912, and the liner arrived in Southampton on April 3. A week later he went to New York.
And on the night of April 14-15, 1912, the Titanic sank while on its maiden voyage. Collided with an iceberg. Of the 2,224 people on board, 711 were saved, 1,513 died. The main reason for such large losses is considered to be a huge discrepancy between the places in the boats and the number of people. The boats could only pick up 1,178 people. So it is, but not quite. More on this below.
The reasons for the collision were, first of all, a complete disregard for the ice danger, despite numerous warnings that there was ice and icebergs ahead. The speed was not reduced, the watch was not strengthened. Then, the vigilance of those looking ahead. Despite the fact that these were people with experience, experienced sailors, in this case they made a mistake. They noticed it late, which sharply reduced the opportunity for maneuver. Further, if on the bridge they didn’t avoid the iceberg, but simply gave the cars “Full Back” and crashed nose-first into the iceberg, the liner would have suffered greatly, but not 
sank. The forecastle and the third-class cabins located there would have been crushed, but the ship would have remained afloat.
A fatal role was also played by the fact that in those days there were no uniform generally accepted rules about sending distress signals with flares and flares. That is, the red color of the rockets was not accepted as a distress signal. They fired whatever they had to. White rockets were fired from the Titanic. Well, they shoot, but why, who knows. Maybe they are celebrating something. This is exactly what they decided on the bridge of California, which was only 10 miles away, and therefore they calmly passed by.
The steamship Carpathia approached the site of the sinking of the Titanic, not immediately, but some time later. The Titanic plunged into the water at 02.20, the first survivors climbed onto the deck of the Carpathia at 04.10, and the last people from the last boat were accepted at 08.30 in the morning. The time difference seems to be small, less than two hours, but the fact is that it is small for those who got into the boats, although there was no time to hesitate there either. But for the majority, those who found themselves in the water, minutes counted. It is minutes that determine the life of a person caught in icy water, and even in extreme conditions of the sudden death of a ship. 5 - 15 minutes, and the person can no longer be pulled out, except for a funeral. 
But if the cargo-passenger steamer California had recognized the signals from the Titanic as distress signals, then it could have been at the scene of the disaster even before the Titanic sank into the water, and then the number of those saved would have been disproportionately large. Almost everyone could have been saved.
That's the whole story in a nutshell. And now - some little-known facts to film buffs and others.
Boats, boarding the boats, who and how many were saved, who died and how.
In those years, the construction of ships and the equipment of their life-saving equipment were regulated by wild rules from our point of view. Thus, for ships with a displacement of more than 10,000 tons, a maximum of 20 lifeboats were required, that is, the number of seats in the boats was regulated not by passenger capacity, but by tonnage. 
Titanic boats: 20 in total, of which 14 are lifeboats with a capacity of 65 people each, 2 workboats with a capacity of 40 people each, and 4 Engelhardt types, with a capacity of 47 each. Total - 1178 places.
If you strictly follow the rules of that time, then the Titanic should have had no more than 962 life-saving seats, but there were more. The White Star Line company also complained that no one appreciates its care and extra expenses. She complained before, and not after, the tragedy, when she praised the giant under construction.
All 14 lifeboats were launched, both working and two Engelhardt types, with a total capacity of 1084 people. Most of the boats turned out to be NOT COMPLETELY loaded. There were many reasons for this. For example, most women and children, especially at the beginning, were afraid to move from the side of the liner that still seemed unsinkable to them onto fragile boats swinging over the water at an altitude of 20 meters; it got to the point that men were the first to go down into the boats in order to convince women that the landing was safe. Interestingly, the number of seats made it possible to save ALL the women and children on board, plus another 550 men. Yes, not all women and only half of the children were saved - 74% of women, 52% of children. But compared to the percentage of men who died, even women in third class were more likely to survive than men in first class - and among them were people whom the whole world knew! Summarizing the statistics of the sexes, we can say that the men of the Titanic were much less likely to survive than the women and children. On the Titanic, the ancient maritime law “Women and Children First” ruled!
Moving on to the statistics of surviving men, we also begin to be surprised. Let us apply the class approach so beloved by publicists and writers, especially ours, and we will freeze in bewilderment. What did family and school teach us, remember? A brutal capitalist in a tuxedo, covered with a sable fur coat and clutching jewelry in his sweaty fat fingers, hid in the corner of the boat, he is covered by faithful servants of capital, armed with pistols, and they shoot indiscriminately at the distraught women and children. 
With the exception of tuxedos, it was just the opposite. How did these same capitalists die? Here's an example - Guggenheim, one of the richest people of his time.
“..He was truly inimitable. The sweater that steward Etches had forced him to wear was gone, and so was the survival bib. Now the millionaire and his valet stood in magnificent evening suits. “We put on our best clothes,” Guggenheim explained, “and prepared to die like gentlemen.”
On the Titanic, among the first class passengers were the “cream” of high society, and this is how they behaved:
“..The Ellisons stood smiling on the promenade deck; Mrs. Ellison hugged little Lorraine on one side, her husband on the other. The Ostrich couple leaned against the railing of the boat deck, their arms around each other's waists. Nearby, a young married couple from the Western United States was waiting for something; Lightoller asked the young woman if he should put her on the boat, to which she cheerfully replied:
- No way! We set out together and, if necessary, we will complete our journey together.
Archibald Gracie, Clinch Smith and a dozen other first-class passengers worked with the crew to prepare the last boats for departure. When these men helped Mrs. Willard from Duluth, Minnesota, into the boat, they smiled at her and advised her not to lose heart. She noticed large drops of sweat on their faces.
Members of high New York and Philadelphia society continued to stick together - in a small group stood John B. Thayer, George and Harry Widener, Duane Williams; lesser luminaries such as Clinch Smith and Colonel Gracie wandered nearby. Astor remained alone almost all the time, and the Ostriches sat in deck chairs...”
Most, to put it mildly, not entirely conscientious publicists, researchers and writers could not avoid the temptation to fall into a class approach, and rearranged the statistics cubes in such a way as to most clearly demonstrate the human inadequacy of first class passengers. However, a strict approach to statistical data irrefutably demonstrates that gender and age were decisive in salvation. For example, third class women were 41% more likely to survive than first class men.
James Cameron also did not avoid the Marxist approach in his cumbersome creation. DiCaprio came from the people with proletarian fists, and the main scoundrel was a scumbag from high society. Statistics and eyewitness accounts give us a completely different picture.
And in general, the main question in such tragedies was, is and I hope will be - who was saved first, women and children, or did the strongest rule? In the Titanic tragedy, the answer is clear: women and children were the first to be saved.
Lovers of the class approach will have to be satisfied with the following excerpts from Lord Mersey's report - the document that most fully and impartially covers the disaster:
“..there were quite a lot of insinuations and speculations about the injustices committed during the rescue in relation to third class passengers. There is not an iota of truth in them. Yes, the percentage of third class passengers saved is significantly less than that for second and first class passengers. This is explained, first of all, by the significantly larger number of third class passengers, but also by such factors as the reluctance of many passengers to leave their property (and let me remind you, there were many emigrants sailing to America for permanent residence with all their property, which we managed to take), the distance of the third class premises from the boat deck and a number of others. The counsel for some of the third class passengers in the damages claims, Mr. Garrison, stated unequivocally that he had no evidence or even allegation that the third class passengers were forcibly kept in their premises in order to to avoid panic, or not to interfere with the evacuation of second and first class passengers. There was no discrimination, and the commission states this with full responsibility. During the evacuation, everyone was equal.”
Causes of the tragedy, conclusions, and thoughts about
According to Lord Mersey's report, the ship was lost as a result of a collision with an iceberg, and this happened because the ship was traveling at an unacceptably high speed under the circumstances. That's all. And then - numerous conclusions. First I will give conclusions, and then some thoughts. So:
“..Never again will people send their ships into ice fields without heeding warnings, relying only on the strength of several thousand tons of riveted steel sheets. Since that memorable night, transatlantic liners will take ice warnings seriously, try to avoid dangerous places or travel at a moderate speed. No one will believe in “unsinkable” ships anymore.
And icebergs will no longer float unattended across the seas. After the sinking of the Titanic, the American and British governments organized an international ice patrol, and today coast guard ships monitor wandering icebergs that drift towards the sea routes. As an additional precaution, shipping lanes are being shifted south for the winter.
And there are no longer any liners on which radio watches are kept for less than a day. Every passenger ship is required to have a 24-hour radio watch. No more people would die because some Cyril Evans, ten miles away, finished his watch and went to bed.
The Titanic was the last liner to go to sea without a sufficient number of lifeboats. Having a gross registered tonnage of 46,328 tons, it was equipped in accordance with hopelessly outdated safety regulations. According to these rules, the ship's need for lifeboats was determined by an absurd formula: all British ships with a gross register tonnage of over 10,000 tons were required to have on board 16 lifeboats with a total volume of over 155.7 m^3, plus such a number of rafts and floating devices as corresponds to 75% of the volume of lifeboats..”
In addition, Mercay's report drew attention to the need for proper training of the crew, both in the field of watchkeeping and in the field of organizing and conducting lifeboat alarms. It's funny to say, but the report noted the need to monitor the vision of sailors keeping a running watch on the bridge. Even more ridiculous from the heights of modern times is the requirement for the number of binoculars on ships. On the Titanic there were two or three of them for the entire ship. The lookouts, that is, not only did not have eagle-like visual acuity, but also did not have binoculars.
Captain of the Titanic Edward Smith
The sinking of the Titanic was a turning point in ensuring the safety of navigation. Generally speaking, before the sinking of the Titanic, sailors had not yet realized and felt that they were already in the 20th century, that sailing ships were a thing of the past, that shipping was becoming busier every day, speeds were higher, and the size of ships was larger. And that the standards of the 19th century are outdated and simply dangerous. The Titanic could be said to be a victim of 19th century mentality coupled with 20th century technology.
To a modern navigator, many of the attitudes of those times that reigned on the bridge of the Titanic will seem simply something wild. How is it possible, knowing about icebergs and ice on the course, to fly into the black unknown of the night without slowing down? But there were no traces of radars at that time, but speeds and sizes were already determined by the progress of the 20th century. How could it be possible not to provide the lookouts with binoculars? How is it possible to fly huge aircraft without generally accepted international distress signals, from radios to flares to missiles? How can you consider the ship on whose bridge you are unsinkable - and yet the crew and the public thought so!
Everything sinks, no matter how you do it. The element is the element. The sinking of the Titanic instilled in the genes of the next generations of sailors a healthy distrust of unsinkability and a constant readiness for the worst, whether on the bridge or in the cabin during rest. The shock and subsequent organizational conclusions did a lot, very much to make people realize that this is the 20th century, and in order to avoid tragedies at sea, it is necessary to reconsider the existing rules. And they reconsidered. Even as they revised it, many of the rules adopted after the Titanic still remain in force, they don’t even need to be corrected.
For this alone, a monument to the Titanic should be erected. His death was not in vain.
Some interesting facts
The iceberg that sent the Titanic to the bottom was found 90 years later
Almost 90 years after his death, tireless researchers and mystery lovers found... the same iceberg that sent the Titanic to the bottom and made it possible for Cameron to win a bunch of Oscars. Photographs of this scoundrel were in a private collection and were never published anywhere. A thorough examination of the photographs has established that the iceberg depicted on them bears traces of damage caused by a collision with some considerable floating object of appropriate strength - steel, that is.
So, a certain Stefan Regorek from Bohemia was traveling on board the liner Bremen, en route from Bremerhafn to New York. On April 20, Bremen passed the place where the disaster occurred. Everyone present on board the Bremen poured out onto the deck, observing numerous remains of a shipwreck in the water, and something more terrible - dozens of corpses. Bremen did not pick up the bodies only because in a few hours the ship McKay-Bennett, chartered specifically for this purpose, was supposed to arrive. Well, the hero of this story took several photographs and sent them home from New York.
photo of the fatal iceberg from the liner Bremen
The iceberg photographed matched the description given by Titanic survivors.
In the days immediately after the tragedy, photographs of several icebergs were taken, however, after studying Regorek's photographs, comparing them with the description of the iceberg by eyewitnesses, studying wind and currents, it can be assumed with a fairly high degree of probability that the desired iceberg was photographed by only one person, Stefan Regorek, with board the liner Bremen. And these photos were discovered only in April 2000. The original photographs are currently kept in a bank safe in Munich.
Did the Titanic orchestra really play to the end, and if so, then what exactly?
Most likely, this legend is true. Yes, we played until the end. What exactly? It’s more difficult here, since the eyewitness accounts are very different. According to legend, the orchestra drowned, playing, of course, the religious hymn “Closer to Thee, O Lord.” Many of the survivors claim that this was exactly the case, and there is no reason to doubt the sincerity of their words. Others claim that the only thing the orchestra played was ragtime. One person reports that he remembers the last minutes of the orchestra very well, but the musicians seemed to play nothing at all. In this confusion of contradictory testimony, the story of junior radio operator Harold Bride stands out somewhat. The profession itself required observation and scrupulous accuracy from him. In addition, Bride was on the Titanic until the very end, as they say. He clearly remembered that the orchestra played the melody of "Autumn" - one of the hymns of the Anglican Church.
The most exciting question is: was there a DiCaprio?
The real Jack Dawson was a fireman on the Titanic, and not even a fireman, but a coal miner, that is, one who mixed coal in coal bunkers so that it would be easier for the stokers to pick it up. He did not survive the Titanic disaster, but did not drown along with the liner. His body was recovered from the water along with dozens of others, and he was identified by a union card he had hidden on 
breasts The remains of the real Dawson were not plunged into the icy waters of the Atlantic amid the sounds of sobbing cinema halls around the world, but were buried in Fairview Lawn Cemetery, in Halifax, grave number 227.
His love was not a high society star played by Kate Winslet, but the sister of his friend, fireman John Priest, who, by the way, persuaded him to become a sailor. Dawson was 23 years old.
After the release of the film Titanic, fans of DiCaprio and Winslet besieged all possible historical authorities with the question - were there really prototypes of the stars, yes or no? Then it turned out that if Winslet was in doubt, then Dawson was fine, he was, and moreover, his ashes can be worshiped. Which the fans immediately did. From then to this day, the piles of flowers on the grave of the fireman, who was stunned by such worldwide fame, do not have time to wither; they are replaced by new ones.
Cameron claims that he took the name “Dawson” out of thin air and was sincerely surprised to learn that there really was such a person on the Titanic. Is the cunning Cameron stirring things up to create another legend, or telling the truth - who knows?
Conclusion - mysticism
Lovers of mysticism and mysteries of all stripes, from those involved in spiritualism to those concerned about the invasion of aliens, pounced on the Titanic like vultures on a dead donkey. They laid it out according to all parameters, from the magic of numbers to the location of the stars and comments on the Apocalypse, the revelations of John the Theologian and instructions to adherents of black magic. All this is quite funny, but something truly mystical really does take place. This is the story of the book “Vanity,” written in 1898, 14 years before the tragedy.
So:
“..A certain Morgan Robertson wrote a novel in 1898 about a transatlantic liner, which, with its fantastic dimensions, surpassed all ships built until then. Robertson's fairy-tale ship is populated with rich, complacent passengers. During the course of the novel, on a cold April night, the liner collides with an iceberg and the ship dies. This shipwreck, according to the author, was supposed to symbolize the futility of everything earthly. Robertson's book, published in the same year by the publishing company M. F. Mansfield, was called “Vanity.”
Fourteen years later, the English shipping company White Star Line built a liner that was remarkably similar to the ship described by Robertson. The displacement of the new liner was 66 thousand tons, the steamship from Robertson's book was 70 thousand. The length of the real liner was 269 m, the literary one - 243. Both liners had three propellers and could reach a speed of about 24-25 knots. Each of them was designed for approximately 3,000 people, and the lifeboats of both could accommodate only part of the passengers and crew, but no one attached any importance to this, since both ships were considered “unsinkable.”
Robertson named his ship "Titan", the owners of the White Star Line company dubbed their new liner "Titanic".
On April 10, 1912, the real airliner set off on its maiden voyage from Southampton to New York. Among other cargo, on board was the priceless manuscript of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, and the travelers included in the list of passengers on the liner were “worth” a total of 250 million dollars. On a cold April night, this liner, like its literary “prototype,” collided with an iceberg and also sank...”
Violet Jessop
She almost went down with the sinking ship...three times.
Traditionally, it is believed that the presence of a woman on a ship will lead to misfortune and that women make the sea angry. On the other hand, it is believed that the sight of a naked woman calms the sea. If Violet Jessop had known about this, perhaps the Titanic would not have collided with the iceberg.
But Jessop's story begins not on the Titanic, but on board her sister ship Olympic. In 1911, Jessop was a stewardess on this luxury liner.
the same Olympic
On September 20, 1911, Olympic collided with a British warship. Fortunately, no one was hurt, but Violetta decided to go to serve on a huge unsinkable ship, her choice fell on the Titanic.
and this is the Titanic
She brought with her not only bad luck, but also “brought” Olympic captain Edward Smith. Subsequently, as you know, the ship collided with an iceberg. We can guess what you're thinking. It can hardly be considered a coincidence that she was on board during two crashes, despite the fact that the captain was the same. It's all about him, right?
That's not all.
Jessop sat in a lifeboat and watched as the world's largest ship disappeared under the water. She escaped, unlike the captain.
In 1916, after a short break, Jessop took a job as a nurse aboard the Britannic. Soon the ship hit a mine and sank. The ship, going down, almost hit the boat in which Violetta was sitting, but she managed to jump into the water... Fortunately, the woman survived and returned to land for the third time.
She died of heart failure in 1971 and was buried at sea.
The sinking of the Titanic still conceals many mysteries, most of which are unlikely to be solved now, except perhaps in the distant future, when they will be able to read those elusive particles that, as some scientists claim, preserve pictures of the past.
Voitenko Mikhail
http://www.odin.tc/disaster/titanic.asp
The Last Night of the Titanic: http://www.titanic.infoall.info/
Confession that shook the world: http://bibliotekar.ru/chip/1005-6.htm
13 INTERESTING FACTS ABOUT THE TITANIC
1. Theoretically, the Titanic was unsinkable, so the owners decided to save on boats and expand the usable space. The ship was equipped with only 20 lifeboats with a total capacity of 1,178 people, that is, half the number of passengers.
2. The ship was divided into 16 watertight compartments, which, in the event of depressurization, were blocked within 25 seconds, protecting the ship from flooding. The Titanic was built so that it could remain afloat if any two of its 16 watertight compartments, any three of its first five compartments, or all of its first four compartments were flooded. Researchers suggest that the iceberg pierced at least six compartments at once, which led to the death of the ship.
3. The cost of a first class ticket was $4,350, fabulous money at that time.
4. At the time of the tragedy, there were 1,316 passengers and 908 crew members on board, a total of 2,224 people. Of these, 711 people were saved, 1,513 died. Most of the passengers died from hypothermia in ocean water.
5. Interestingly, due to panic, many boats set sail half full.
6. Construction of the Titanic cost $7,500,000 and took three years. 3 million rivets were used in the construction of the Titanic.
7. At the time of construction, the Titanic was the largest passenger ship in the world, its length was 268 meters. The weight of the Titanic when fully loaded was 46,328 tons.
8. The ship was equipped with 29 steam boilers, which consumed 825 tons of coal per day. Of the four chimneys, only three worked as intended, the fourth was for beauty and served as ventilation.
9. The Titanic was not baptized according to maritime custom (breaking a bottle of champagne on the side for good luck), because its owners did not believe in omens.
10. The Titanic struck an iceberg at 11:40 pm on April 14, 1912, 2 hours and 40 minutes after leaving on its first and last voyage.
11. The Titanic sank at a depth of 12,600 feet (about 4 kilometers) at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Ireland.
12. The orchestra continued to play during the sinking of the Titanic and sank along with the ship.
13. The film Titanic, based on the tragedy, was nominated for 14 Oscars and won 11 of them. The box office grossed over a billion dollars.
Exactly a century ago, on the night of April 15, 1912, the largest, most comfortable, safest ocean ship of the early 20th century crashed in the cold waters of the Atlantic. An incredible number of victims - one and a half thousand people!
100 years have passed. During this time, all the myths, mysteries, and legends surrounding the disaster were debunked, the event was planned literally minute by minute. People even risked diving into the abyss, to a depth of almost 4000 meters, to see with their own eyes the skeleton of a giant liner and find the true cause of the death of the ship.
It would seem that there are no more secrets. But this film will for the first time reveal another secret that sank to the bottom along with the legendary ship: there were our compatriots on board the Titanic - passengers with Russian passports! Who are they? Why did you go overseas? What was their fate?
No one in Russia has ever searched for a Russian trace in the history of the Titanic.
The filmmakers did an incredibly difficult job of finding Russian names. After all, exact lists of passengers still do not exist. They went down with the ship.
The investigative film will trace the real destinies of our compatriots who, due to various circumstances, found themselves on that legendary flight.
The “Russian trail” will lead to the Rostov region, from where at the beginning of the last century peasants went to distant Uruguay in search of a better life. Some of them decided to travel by sea and boarded the Titanic. Did any of them make it to Uruguay?
The story of an impoverished nobleman, retired military man Mikhail Zhadovsky will lead to the Nizhny Novgorod province. He was a cashier on the Titanic, and according to his status, he was entitled to a place on the boat. But Mikhail Mikhailovich lost it to an unknown woman.
For the first time, the living descendants of one of the surviving passengers of the Titanic, Ossetian Murzakan Kuchiev, a subject of the Russian Empire, will tell how everything really happened. He miraculously escaped death in the icy waters of the Atlantic. But his fate after rescue was no less dramatic.
What happened to the other passengers of the Titanic - migrants from Grodno, Vilna, Mogilev? In search of the Russian trace, the filmmakers visited Canada, the Halifax Maritime Museum, and Fairview Cemetery, where the dead were buried.
There is another Russian trace in this story. Few people know that the very idea of the famous film “Titanic” owes its name to the Russians. He conceived this picture when he learned about the existence of Mir devices in Russia. The pilots of these deep-sea vehicles, Anatoly Sagalevich and Evgeny Chernyaev, will talk about the dive to the Titanic and help debunk the myths and legends surrounding its death.
According to unverified data, there were about a hundred passengers on the Titanic with Russian passports. So far, the filmmakers have managed to discover the names of 52 people, but touched the fates of only five. Maybe those who see the film will find familiar names there and will be able to shed light on the fate of the remaining passengers with Russian passports. We must hurry with the search. After all, the Titanic has no more than 30 years left to live. Why? Henrietta Mann, a Canadian professor at Dalhousie University, will talk about this.