There was a lot of contributing factors, towards the title of unsinkable. The water tight compartments was a good idea, IF they had gone all the way up. I think the main reason was, the fact they where so big, they could not think of something big enough to sink them.

>they said it was unsinkable because they thought that nothing could >penetrate the steel that they made

Well, not really, since White Star was well aware that the Hawke had punched right through the Olympic's hull steel during that vessel's 1911 collision casualty.

The "unsinkability" tradition actually stemmed from the mistaken belief that no more than two of the ship's WT compartments could possibly be opened to the sea at any one time via collision or other cause.

The public ran away with a quote made in the "Shipbuilder" magazine at the time. It advertised the Olympic class liners as "practically unsinkable". White Star just went along with this and did not contradict the comment. The public picked up on this and ran with the claim. It became a sort of general belief that these ships were unsinkable. Now we know that even with the watertight compartments extended higher that the ship would still sink. It may have taken longer to sink but the weight of water would still have caused an overflow. It has even been proven that by closing the compartments horizontally at the top would not have prevented the sinking. Five compartments worth of water would have pushed through these bulkheads and the ship would have sunk anyway.

>The public ran away with a quote made in the "Shipbuilder" >magazine at the time. It advertised the Olympic class liners as >"practically unsinkable". White Star just went along with this and did >not contradict the comment.

Bill Sauder has demonstrated that the "Shipbuilder" staff actually used White Star's own publicity material to write up their descriptions of various White Star ships. (My website contains an illustration of such a White Star publicity pamphlet for Olympic/Titanic.) In effect, it was White Star who originally made the "practically unsinkable" claim, and this info was merely transcribed verbatim in the "Shipbuilder," "New York Times" etc.

Either way, it captured the public's imagination and lured everyone in a false sense of security...

Indeed it did clinton

The watertight bulkhead design wasn't exactly watertight. The boundaries extended vertically from the keel of the ship to D Deck, four decks below the main deck. This design was sufficient to keep the Titanic afloat if as many as four of her watertight compartments were breached. With the fifth breached, the water level would rise until it reached D Deck, at which point it would begin to spill over into the other watertight compartments.

The Marconi wireless telegraph was still a fairly new technology, and ships did not rely on it as they would come to later as an integral part of operations. The radio operators were under the command of the captain, but they were employed by the Marconi Wireless Company, and their purpose was to handle messages for passengers. Weather reports and other ship-to-ship transmissions were handled as a courtesy, but were a lower priority than traffic for the paying customers. The equipment failure Saturday evening and extended downtime created a backlog of outgoing messages that the operators felt they had an obligation to catch up. This overload caused numerous warning messages to be misplaced or misdirected, or, in the case of the last one from Californian, ignored.

Captain Smith ordered the ship to travel at high speed through the night, in spite of the one ice warning he had been confirmed to receive, and the other posted by Lightoller in the chart room. In fact, ice warnings were being received during the whole trip, for a total of 21 in all, only 7 of which were received after the radio went down.

The unusual calmness of the North Atlantic made bergs much more difficult to spot for the lookouts. When the swells are active, they will reflect off the berg, causing counter-ripples at the surface that would indicate a large object well before it came into view. The clear, moonless sky gave them nothing to show up against in contrast.

The Californian was close at hand at the time of the sinking, so close that Fourth Officer Boxhall spotted its masthead lights, and Captain Smith ordered a boat to row the distance between them. The wireless operator had quit his post, and the captain and crew completely ignored the distress flares, and never even thought to rouse their radioman. Had the Californian responded to any of the distress calls or signals, Titanic's passengers and crew could have been evacuated before they froze to death in the 28oF water.

If anything white star may have became arrogant, that even after a bad accident Olympic still stayed afloat.

One passenger on the Olympic maiden voyage, joked saying, ‘she is far to big to sink’

So popular thought was the size played a key part in the terminology of the phrase, Unsinkable.

As explained in another thread, neither White star nor Harland and world said they where unsinkable, though they did not really deny it. The popular magazine dubbed them practically Unsinkable.

Good day to all,

Quote:

true true but they were sinkable, they just put that slogan so ppl would think it was safe

Yeah maybe,

I egree with bell on this one. People did see size as a form of invincability. Now we know that bigger ain't necessarily better.

Won't that just make some men feel happy about themselves... But that is a totally different topic. lol