Are You Headed for the Iceberg?

An iceberg is an inanimate object. Conversely, we humans plan, build, communicate, aspire, toil and yes, sometimes screw up-royally.

The story of the Titanic is one of a confluence of events which changed a lot of things, including ship construction, nautical regulations, navigation error and communication protocols and many other forms of human behavior and misbehavior.

According to Wikipedia, “The RMS Titanic, the largest ship afloat at the time it entered service was operated by the White Star Line, then considered the most powerful shipping line in the world. The ship was 882 feet long and was claimed to be unsinkable. The White Star Line turned to Thomas & Wolf, its longtime shipbuilder to build the world’s state of the art liner. Its chief naval architect, Thomas Andrews, who headed up the design of the Titanic, ironically perished when it sank.

The primary design concept to make the ship unsinkable was a series of sixteen compartments separated by watertight bulkheads in the lower portion of the ship. Those bulkheads were lower than normal to make room for sweeping elegant staircases.

The perfect storm of events and mistakes was triggered by the sideswiping of a one million ton iceberg, which was where it wasn’t supposed to be.

On its maiden voyage in 1912, the Titanic took 1523 of its 2200 passengers to the bottom. It wasn’t a single factor that sent the ship to the ocean floor. It was a chain of events. Paul Louden Brown, the Chairman of White Star Lines, later testified that, “The ship was almost doomed from the very day she was designed.”

The water-tight containers meant that the Titanic should have acted as her own lifeboat, floating until help arrived. The number of lifeboats was reduced from forty eight to sixteen. It was felt that people don’t pay to look at lifeboats. That decision conformed to the British Board of Trade regulations which became outdated as ships were made larger.

The order to man the lifeboats was misinterpreted as women and children only, not women and children first.

Another factor was cutting costs.

"Most designs are a tradeoff between performance and cost."

It is believed that the placement of the rivets contributed to the disaster. The rivets that held the ship’s hull together were not uniform in composition or quality and had not been tested in a uniform fashion. Many rivets were cast iron of a poor grade which caused premature failure.

Forty six rivets from the Titanic’s hull were hauled up from the depths in 1998 for scientific analysis and the wrought iron ones were found to be riddled with unusually high concentrations of slag (the glassy residue left over from the smelting of metallic ores making them brittle and prone to fracture). The steel rivets did not have that problem.

According to Science Illustrated Magazine, “The cost cutting exercise meant that the part of the hull that hit the iceberg was substantially weaker than the main body of the ship."

The cast iron rivets at the bow and the stern were not hydraulically inserted, so they would not have been as firmly inserted as those in the middle three fifths of the ship. Since the impact was at the starboard bow and the impact was near a seam of rivets, the rivets contributed to the sinking. When the ship got sideswiped, the iceberg opened the hull like a zipper. The collision was so gentle that many passengers slept through it.

Climactic conditions caused more icebergs than usual to condense in a small area. Distorted air also disrupted the Morse lamp signals to refract in unusual ways and interrupted the signals between the Titanic and the nearby SS Californian causing them to appear as a mirage and also prevented the Titanic lookout from seeing the iceberg until it was just 1000 feet away. The binoculars for the lookout in the crow’s nest were locked in a locker of an officer who was transferred to another ship and who took the keys with him.

The Californian believed that the Titanic was sailing away.

"When the liner struck the iceberg, six of its watertight compartments were damaged and water flooded compartments cascading water one into the other.” That would not have happened so quickly had they been at the standard height." 

Since that disaster, passenger ships must carry lifeboat space for everyone on board. Lifeboat drills must be conducted. Steamships carry searchlights. 24 hour radio watch on all ships carrying 50 or more people is now required. A separate frequency is reserved for distress messages. There was the creation of the international ice patrol to monitor icebergs. Shipping lanes were shifted further south.

When contacted by the radio operator of the Californian, the Marconi operator on the Titanic who was engaged sending messages for the passengers said, “Shut up! I am busy,” when interrupted by his counterpart telling him that the Titanic was in the vicinity of an ice field. He was busy transmitting and receiving telegrams for the passengers which is how Marconi Corp. made their money.

With the Marconi wireless, it was like a party line with everyone signaling at the same time. After being told to shut up, the Californian’s radio operator turned off his transmitter and went to sleep. The Californian was only ten miles away when the Titanic struck the iceberg. Theoretically, the Californian could have saved all hands.

The Cunard Carpathia was fifty eight miles away, and picked up the Titanic’s distress signal too late to be of help. It was four hours away. Prior warnings to the captain from other ships were not delivered to the captain either because he was at dinner with first class passengers or the other warning messages did not contain the mandatory prefix MSG CRITICAL.

The Titanic then was the first ocean liner to transmit an SOS, which means “Save Our Ship" or "Save Our Souls” but to no avail.

Design faults were combined with human error. The design faults were mainly the short bulkheads, the defective rivets and lack of sufficient lifeboats. The human errors in procedure and communication were almost too numerous to list.

Do you believe that the Titanic situation was unique?

Ships have recently been damaged or sunk when radar or GPS was virtually shouting at them to change course in the face of a storm. The giant container ship, the El Faro, left Jacksonville, FL, with 33 crew members on the way to Puerto Rico a few months ago and sank in the middle of a hurricane. She had advanced radar and satellite capabilities.

Do you think management ordered the captain to sail into the storm?

Carnival’s Costa Concordia sank off the Tuscan coast with the loss of 33 passengers because the captain was showing off for a girlfriend when the ship struck a massive rock near the shore. He weaseled his way onto one of the first lifeboats and was later sentenced to 16 years in prison. A New York newspaper headline called him “Chicken of the Sea.”

Cruising is very safe, but the message here is that stuff happens in all businesses when you are careless or don’t pay attention.

Hopefully, Titanic II to be launched in 2018 will fare better than its namesake.

How many companies have cut costs thus endangering their clientele?

Lumber Liquidators has been selling product with excessive levels of carcinogenic formaldehyde. There are the purveyors of carcinogenic Chinese wallboard. Others intentionally sold or sell dangerous products such as asbestos or cigarettes.

How many bad management decisions have led to commercial catastrophies?

When Kodak invented digital photography, it told the inventor to bury it because of the potential effect on their film business. Curtis Wright was too late to the jet engine business because it bragged that it made the world’s finest propeller aircraft engines while GE, Pratt and Whitney and Rolls Royce were eating their lunch. Sears and JC Penny are desperately trying to play catch up with Amazon and other on-line purveyors. Can they? Borders is gone, but Kindle isn’t.

If the railroads had realized that they were in the transportation business not just running trains, might they have owned the airlines, truckers and ship operators and would there have been a place for FedEx and UPS?

Have you ever seen pictures of the dirigible, the Hindenburg, with its flammable hydrogen burning at Lakehurst, NJ?

Fortunately, most of us learn from our mistakes.

The Navy Prayer eloquently asks for divine help:
Eternal Father, strong to save,
Whose arm hath bound the restless wave, 
Who bidd'st the mighty ocean deep
Its own appointed limits keep;
Oh, hear us when we cry to Thee,
For those in peril on the sea! 

I agree, but it is also said that “God helps those who help themselves.”

Do you know of companies that are headed for an iceberg?  What about your personal career?

I wouldn’t lose sleep over icebergs but there are plenty of more common hazards some self-imposed. Please tell me what you think.

Ira Friedman, Material Technologies
Special thanks to my friend, Dr. Bob Lucky, former Executive Vice President of Bell Laboratories and recipient of the Marconi Award for his help in writing this article.

References:

https://vignette1.wikia.nocookie.net/titanic/images/b/ba/Titanic's_grand_staircase_edit.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20120610062658
https://education.nationalgeographic.org/media/sinking-of-the-titanic/
https://www.tellyouall.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/wallchan-free-titanic_1432721.jpg
https://www.ibiblio.org/jimmy/folkden/php/images/Titanic.jpg