The Loss of the S.S. Titanic by Lawrence Beesley (free ebook reader for pc .txt) 📕

same right as the expert to consider and discuss these things:

they are not so technical as to prevent anyone of ordinary

intelligence from understanding their construction. Using the term in

its widest sense, we come first to:—

 

Bulkheads and watertight compartments

 

It is impossible to attempt a discussion here of the exact

constructional details of these parts of a ship; but in order to

illustrate briefly what is the purpose of having bulkheads, we may

take the Titanic as an example. She was divided into sixteen

compartments by fifteen transverse steel walls called bulkheads.

[Footnote: See Figures 1 and 2 page 116.] If a hole is made in the

side of the ship in any one compartment, steel watertight doors seal

off the only openings in that compartment and separate it as a damaged

unit from the rest of the ship and the vessel is brought to land in

safety. Ships have even put into the nearest port for inspection after

collision, and finding only one compartment full of water and no other

damage, have left again, for their home port without troubling to

disembark passengers and effect repairs.

 

The design of the Titanic’s bulkheads calls for some attention. The

“Scientific American,” in an excellent article on the comparative

safety of the Titanic’s and other types of watertight compartments,

draws attention to the following weaknesses in the former—from the

point of view of possible collision with an iceberg. She had no

longitudinal bulkheads, which would subdivide her into smaller

compartments and prevent the water filling the whole of a large

compartment. Probably, too, the length of a large compartment was in

any case too great—fifty-three feet.

 

The Mauretania, on the other hand, in addition to transverse

bulkheads, is fitted with longitudinal torpedo bulkheads, and the

space between them and the side of the ship is utilised as a coal

bunker. Then, too, in the Mauretania all bulkheads are carried up to

the top deck, whereas in the case of the Titanic they reached in some

parts only to the saloon deck and in others to a lower deck

still,—the weakness of this being that, when the water reached to the

top of a bulkhead as the ship sank by the head, it flowed over and

filled the next compartment. The British Admiralty, which subsidizes

the Mauretania and Lusitania as fast cruisers in time of war, insisted

on this type of construction, and it is considered vastly better than

that used in the Titanic. The writer of the article thinks it possible

that these ships might not have sunk as the result of a similar

collision. But the ideal ship from the point of bulkhead construction,

he considers to have been the Great Eastern, constructed many years

ago by the famous engineer Brunel. So thorough was her system of

compartments divided and subdivided by many transverse and

longitudinal bulkheads that when she tore a hole eighty feet long in

her side by striking a rock, she reached port in safety. Unfortunately

the weight and cost of this method was so great that his plan was

subsequently abandoned.

 

But it would not be just to say that the construction of the Titanic

was a serious mistake on the part of the White Star Line or her

builders, on the ground that her bulkheads were not so well

constructed as those of the Lusitania and Mauretania, which were built

to fulfil British Admiralty regulations for time of war—an

extraordinary risk which no builder of a passenger steamer—as

such—would be expected to take into consideration when designing the

vessel. It should be constantly borne in mind that the Titanic met

extraordinary conditions on the night of the collision: she was

probably the safest ship afloat in all ordinary conditions. Collision

with an iceberg is not an ordinary risk; but this disaster will

probably result in altering the whole construction of bulkheads and

compartments to the Great Eastern type, in order to include the

one-in-a-million risk of iceberg collision and loss.

 

Here comes in the question of increased cost of construction, and in

addition the great loss of cargo-carrying space with decreased earning

capacity, both of which will mean an increase in the passenger rates.

This the travelling public will have to face and undoubtedly will be

willing to face for the satisfaction of knowing that what was so

confidently affirmed by passengers on the Titanic’s deck that night of

the collision will then be really true,—that “we are on an unsinkable

boat,”—so far as human forethought can devise. After all, this

must be the solution to the problem how best to ensure safety

at sea. Other safety appliances are useful and necessary, but not

useable in certain conditions of weather. The ship itself must always

be the “safety appliance” that is really trustworthy, and nothing must

be left undone to ensure this.

 

Wireless apparatus and operators

 

The range of the apparatus might well be extended, but the principal

defect is the lack of an operator for night duty on some ships. The

awful fact that the Californian lay a few miles away, able to save

every soul on board, and could not catch the message because the

operator was asleep, seems too cruel to dwell upon. Even on the

Carpathia, the operator was on the point of retiring when the message

arrived, and we should have been much longer afloat—and some boats

possibly swamped—had he not caught the message when he did. It has

been suggested that officers should have a working knowledge of

wireless telegraphy, and this is no doubt a wise provision. It would

enable them to supervise the work of the operators more closely and

from all the evidence, this seems a necessity. The exchange of vitally

important messages between a sinking ship and those rushing to her

rescue should be under the control of an experienced officer. To take

but one example—Bride testified that after giving the Birma the

“C.Q.D.” message and the position (incidentally Signer Marconi has

stated that this has been abandoned in favour of “S.O.S.”) and getting

a reply, they got into touch with the Carpathia, and while talking

with her were interrupted by the Birma asking what was the matter. No

doubt it was the duty of the Birma to come at once without asking any

questions, but the reply from the Titanic, telling the Birma’s

operator not to be a “fool” by interrupting, seems to have been a

needless waste of precious moments: to reply, “We are sinking” would

have taken no longer, especially when in their own estimation of the

strength of the signals they thought the Birma was the nearer ship. It

is well to notice that some large liners have already a staff of three

operators.

 

Submarine signalling apparatus

 

There are occasions when wireless apparatus is useless as a means of

saving life at sea promptly.

 

One of its weaknesses is that when the ships’ engines are stopped,

messages can no longer be sent out, that is, with the system at

present adopted. It will be remembered that the Titanic’s messages got

gradually fainter and then ceased altogether as she came to rest with

her engines shut down.

 

Again, in fogs,—and most accidents occur in fogs,—while wireless

informs of the accident, it does not enable one ship to locate another

closely enough to take off her passengers at once. There is as yet no

method known by which wireless telegraphy will fix the direction of a

message; and after a ship has been in fog for any considerable length

of time it is more difficult to give the exact position to another

vessel bringing help.

 

Nothing could illustrate these two points better than the story of how

the Baltic found the Republic in the year 1909, in a dense fog off

Nantucket Lightship, when the latter was drifting helplessly after

collision with the Florida. The Baltic received a wireless message

stating the Republic’s condition and the information that she was in

touch with Nantucket through a submarine bell which she could hear

ringing. The Baltic turned and went towards the position in the fog,

picked up the submarine bell-signal from Nantucket, and then began

searching near this position for the Republic. It took her twelve

hours to find the damaged ship, zigzagging across a circle within

which she thought the Republic might lie. In a rough sea it is

doubtful whether the Republic would have remained afloat long enough

for the Baltic to find her and take off all her passengers.

 

Now on these two occasions when wireless telegraphy was found to be

unreliable, the usefulness of the submarine bell at once becomes

apparent. The Baltic could have gone unerringly to the Republic in the

dense fog had the latter been fitted with a submarine emergency bell.

It will perhaps be well to spend a little time describing the

submarine signalling apparatus to see how this result could have been

obtained: twelve anxious hours in a dense fog on a ship which was

injured so badly that she subsequently foundered, is an experience

which every appliance known to human invention should be enlisted to

prevent.

 

Submarine signalling has never received that public notice which

wireless telegraphy has, for the reason that it does not appeal so

readily to the popular mind. That it is an absolute necessity to every

ship carrying passengers—or carrying anything, for that matter—is

beyond question. It is an additional safeguard that no ship can afford

to be without.

 

There are many occasions when the atmosphere fails lamentably as a

medium for carrying messages. When fog falls down, as it does

sometimes in a moment, on the hundreds of ships coasting down the

traffic ways round our shores—ways which are defined so easily in

clear weather and with such difficulty in fogs—the hundreds of

lighthouses and lightships which serve as warning beacons, and on

which many millions of money have been spent, are for all practical

purposes as useless to the navigator as if they had never been built:

he is just as helpless as if he were back in the years before 1514,

when Trinity House was granted a charter by Henry VIII “for the

relief…of the shipping of this realm of England,” and began a system

of lights on the shores, of which the present chain of lighthouses and

lightships is the outcome.

 

Nor is the foghorn much better: the presence of different layers of

fog and air, and their varying densities, which cause both reflection

and refraction of sound, prevent the air from being a reliable medium

for carrying it. Now, submarine signalling has none of these defects,

for the medium is water, subject to no such variable conditions as the

air. Its density is practically non variable, and sound travels

through it at the rate of 4400 feet per second, without deviation or

reflection.

 

The apparatus consists of a bell designed to ring either pneumatically

from a lightship, electrically from the shore (the bell itself being a

tripod at the bottom of the sea), automatically from a floating

bell-buoy, or by hand from a ship or boat. The sound travels from the

bell in every direction, like waves in a pond, and falls, it may be,

on the side of a ship. The receiving apparatus is fixed inside the

skin of the ship and consists of a small iron tank, 16 inches square

and 18 inches deep. The front of the tank facing the ship’s iron skin

is missing and the tank, being filled with water, is bolted to the

framework and sealed firmly to the ship’s side by rubber facing. In

this way a portion of the ship’s iron hull is washed by the sea on one

side and water in the tank on the other. Vibrations from a bell

ringing at a distance fall on the iron side, travel through,