00:00Welcome to Turning Point's World History. I'm Clara.
00:04And I'm Hugo. Tonight we go to the North Atlantic, to a night so calm the sailors called it a
00:10sea of glass.
00:11The 14th of April, 1912.
00:14At 11.40 that night, high in the crow's nest of the largest ship in the world,
00:19a lookout named Frederick Fleet saw something rise out of the darkness ahead.
00:23He rang the warning bell three times, grabbed the telephone to the bridge,
00:27and said the words that would echo through history.
00:30Iceberg, right ahead.
00:32The ship was the Titanic, and she had less than three hours to live.
00:36This is the story of her last night.
00:39Not just how she sank, but how a chain of small human decisions made the disaster almost inevitable.
00:46To understand that night, you first have to understand what the Titanic meant in 1912.
00:51She was 882 feet long, the biggest moving object human beings had ever built.
00:57She had a swimming pool, a gymnasium, Turkish baths, and grand staircases lit by a glass dome.
01:04And she had sixteen watertight compartments in her hull.
01:09The ship could stay afloat with any four of them flooded.
01:12The newspapers took that engineering fact and turned it into a legend.
01:17This ship, they said, was practically unsinkable.
01:20Notice the word.
01:22The engineers said practically.
01:24The legend dropped it.
01:25Her captain, Edward Smith, was the most experienced commander of the White Star Line, a man passengers
01:32specifically requested.
01:34And her designer, Thomas Andrews, was aboard for the maiden voyage, notebook in hand, checking
01:40every detail.
01:41Two thousand, two hundred and twenty-four people were on board.
01:46Millionaires and first class, immigrants and third, all of them sailing toward New York and the future.
01:53Now, here is where the chain of decisions begins.
01:56All that Sunday, the Titanic's wireless room received ice warnings from other ships,
02:02message after message describing icebergs and great fields of ice directly along her route.
02:07This was normal in April, and the warnings were passed around the ship, but not all of them
02:13reached the bridge, and the ship did not slow down.
02:16Why not?
02:18Partly confidence.
02:19Ships of that era routinely steamed through ice regions at speed and relied on lookouts
02:24to spot bergs in time.
02:26Partly the myth.
02:27This ship had been built to survive a collision.
02:30And partly, something small and almost absurd.
02:34The lookouts in the crow's nest had no binoculars that night.
02:38The key to the locker that held them had left the ship in Southampton,
02:42carried off by an officer who had been reassigned at the last minute.
02:46So, at eleven-forty, Fleet saw the iceberg with his naked eyes, far too late.
02:52The officer on the bridge ordered the ship hard to port, and the engines reversed.
02:57The great liner swung agonizingly slowly, and nearly made it.
03:01The berg scraped along the starboard side like a can-opener, buckling the steel plates
03:06and popping rivets across five of her watertight compartments.
03:11Five.
03:11Remember the number?
03:13The ship could float with four flooded.
03:15She could not float with five.
03:17There was no dramatic gash.
03:19If you had stood in those boiler rooms, you would have seen thin jets of water spraying
03:23through seams.
03:24But the North Atlantic was pouring in at hundreds of tons a minute.
03:27Captain Smith went below with Thomas Andrews and saw the water rising.
03:33Andrews did the mathematics in his head, and it took him only minutes.
03:37He told the captain the ship would sink, and that she had perhaps one to two hours.
03:43Smith, to his credit, never pretended otherwise.
03:47He ordered the lifeboats prepared, and the wireless operators to send the distress call.
03:52And now the second tragedy begins, inside the first.
03:57The Titanic carried lifeboats for 1,178 people, barely half of everyone aboard.
04:05That was legal.
04:06The regulations dated from a time when ships were far smaller.
04:10And incredibly, the Titanic actually carried more boats than the law required.
04:15Worse.
04:16In the first hour, many boats were lowered half empty.
04:20Some officers believed the boats would buckle if filled to capacity.
04:24Many passengers refused to leave the warm, bright, solid ship for a tiny, wooden boat in
04:30a black ocean.
04:31The first boat to leave held 28 people.
04:34It could hold 65.
04:36The order was, women and children first.
04:39And on one side of the ship, it was interpreted as women and children only.
04:44So men stood back from empty seats and watched the boats descend without them.
04:50Husbands kissed wives goodbye across the rail.
04:53Some of the richest men in the world, men who could have bought the ship, simply stepped
04:59back, dressed for dinner, and waited.
05:02All the while, the wireless operators, Jack Phillips and Harold Bride, kept sending the distress
05:08call into the night.
05:09Ships answered from far away.
05:11The Carpathia, 58 miles off, turned and raced toward them through the ice at a speed her captain
05:18admitted exceeded her maximum, because her crew shoveled coal like men possessed.
05:24But there was another ship, much closer.
05:27On the horizon, the Titanic's officers could see a steamer's lights.
05:31The Californian, stopped for the night because of the ice, perhaps 10 to 20 miles away.
05:36Her crew saw the Titanic's white rockets rising over the water, one after another, eight in
05:43all.
05:43They woke their captain.
05:45The rockets were discussed.
05:47They were wondered about.
05:48And the ship stayed where it was.
05:50The Californian's wireless operator had gone to bed minutes before the Titanic struck.
05:56Earlier that evening, he had tried to warn the Titanic about the ice surrounding his ship,
06:01and an exhausted Jack Phillips, drowning in passenger messages, had told him to keep off the line.
06:07Historians still argue about that night, and fair accounts note the Californian's captain
06:12faced genuine confusion.
06:14But the official inquiries on both sides of the Atlantic concluded the Californian could have
06:19come, and did not.
06:21She remains the darkest what-if of the whole story.
06:25Back on the Titanic, the end came with terrible speed.
06:28The band played on deck almost to the last.
06:31Every one of its eight musicians died.
06:33At about 2.18 in the morning, the ship's lights went out.
06:37She broke in two between her funnels.
06:39Her stern rose high into the stars, and at 2.20 she was gone, taking around 1,500 people
06:46with her into water cold enough to kill in minutes.
06:48Just over 700 people sat in the lifeboats, in the dark, among the icebergs, listening.
06:55And around 4 in the morning, the Carpathia arrived, and one by one the boats came out of
07:01the darkness to her side.
07:03She carried the survivors to New York, where 80,000 people stood in the rain to watch her
07:08dock.
07:09The world refused to let those 1,500 deaths be meaningless.
07:13Within two years, the great maritime nation signed the first Safety of Life at Sea Convention.
07:20Lifeboats for everyone on board, no exceptions.
07:24A permanent ice patrol began watching the North Atlantic lanes.
07:28Wireless rooms on passenger ships had to be staffed around the clock, because the world
07:33remembered the Californian's silent radio.
08:00We are still living in it.
08:06I'm Clara.
08:07And I'm Hugo.
08:08This has been Turning Points, World History.
08:11Join us next time, when another single moment bends the whole story of the world.
08:16We are changing the whole world.
08:17.
