Shipwreck ettiquette – Titanic vs. Lusitania: Which ship had the more polite men?
We just said bon voyage to the Titanic exhibit here at the Science Museum of Minnesota, but I came across this very interesting article about male behavior patterns when ships are sinking. Researchers have analyzed the behaviors of men on board Titanic (which sank in about three hours) and men on board Lusitania (which sank in 18 minutes). Which ship saw more "gentlemanly" behavior? Think about it and then read the results of the research findings right here.
Tags : A 12-mile long iceberg which broke off from Antarctica 10 years ago is now closer to Australia than any iceberg has gotten to the continent in over a century. The mega-iceberg is now just a third of its original size and continues to break up into pieces, posing a shipping hazard in the south Pacific. Here is more information, and photos, on the huge berg.
No iceberg needed: This drawing from Harpers Weekly in May 1865 showed the wreckage in the aftermath of the explosion aboard the Sultana while it was cruising the Mississippi River near Memphis. It's believed more people died in that accident than aboard the Titanic, which sank in the north Atlantic in 1912.
Courtesy Thatcher131Hanging around in the museum lobby yesterday, I came across a cute little exhibit put together by the Mississippi River Visitor Center. And the information is provided just blew me away.
Have you ever heard of the Mississippi riverboat the Sultana? I hadn't either, but it's story is a tale of even more tragedy than the sinking of the Titanic. Heading up river on April 27, 1865, with a overflow load of passengers, one of the Sultana's boilers suddenly exploded near Memphis, Tennessee. The ship was carrying mostly Union Army soldiers who had just be released from Confederate prisoner of war camps. It's estimated that up to 1,800 passengers died when the Sultana quickly sank. Slightly more than 1,500 passengers died with the sinking of the Titanic.
About 300 to 500 passengers were survivors. Due to the changing course of the river, remains of the Sultana were found in a bean field in Arkansas in 1982 about two miles away from the current path of the Mississippi River.
Intrigued? Want to learn more? Read a narrative account of the Sultana here.
There are incredible stories about the titanic. Many unherd of. But did you know that if the captin retired before the titanic, there may have not have been a crash. The captin decided to speed up the trip and change the speed of the boat. Becuse of that, the ship was unable to change direction of the route and hit the ice berg.
Thor posted a few days ago about the Discovery Channel show Time Lapse and its use of high-speed cameras to catch super fast stuff and slow it down so it is visible.
We recently experimented with the opposite here. The Titanic exhibit has a two-ton piece of the ship's hull on display, and we did a time-lapse video of the installation - seeding up a slow process, the opposite of Thor's post. Check it out.
And if you are interested in this kind of stuff, check out the web site for our exhibit Playing With Time which gives visitors the tools to speed up or slow down time to allow us to see stuff that is usually too fast or too slow to perceive.
The last survivor of the Titanic died today. Millvina Dean was 97 years old. Although she did not remember the disaster (she was only nine weeks old when her family boarded the ill-fated ship), her story intrigued many. She was the ship's youngest passenger. Her mother and brother also survived, but her father did not. This short video features Millvina telling a bit of her story. You can read the full story here.
The Danton: The 150 meter long Danton carried about 1,000 men, 296 of whom went down with the ship when it was torpedoed by a German submarine.
Courtesy Joao CarvalhoThe BBC has really outdone itself today, as far as maritime archaeology goes—it’s running a story on how cool Elizabeth I’s naval guns were, and one on the recent discovery of a French WWI battleship, found 3000 meters under the surface of the Mediterranean.
The first story is based on the finds from another shipwreck, a small fighting ship from the late 1500s. Archaeologists and historians were surprised to discover that the cannons on the ship were all the same size and used the same size ammunition. Older ships had plenty of cannon, but they were often mismatched and not necessarily designed for fighting at sea. It appears that Elizabeth began to standardize England’s naval artillery earlier than people had though. This sort of efficiency allowed for England’s eventual naval supremacy of Europe, and contributed to worldwide political changes that still affect us today blah blah blah. Whatever—we’re still interested in those cannons.
The archaeologists actually had a replica of the recovered cannon built, so they could test its effectiveness. It turned out that it was very effective at making a loud noise and throwing a ball of iron very far, very hard. These smallish cannons would have been able to lob a cannon ball about half a mile, and could penetrate the oak hulls of other battleships at 100 yards.
Is it just me, or does almost all experimental archaeology involve weapons? (I’m not complaining.)
The other article is interesting because it demonstrates how some of the coolest shipwrecks are found: accidentally. This one was found by a company doing underwater surveys on the proposed route for an underwater gas pipeline. A large section of the pipe’s path goes through an exceptionally deep part of the Mediterranean Sean, a plain of seabed about 2,850 meters below the surface, and the company was surveying it with their Autonomous Underwater Vehicle—sort of a little remote control submarine.
The AUV spotted the French battleship the Danton, resting right side-up among a field of its own debris. Apparently the path the ship had plowed through the sea floor as it hit the bottom is still visible.
The Danton was sunk by a German submarine in 1917, but was supposed to have gone down several nautical miles away from where it was actually found.
Pretty cool stuff.
If you’re interested in shipwrecks and maritime archaeology, be sure to check out the Titanic exhibit coming to the museum this summer. We’ll be displaying, among other things, Leonardo DiCaprio’s undying love.
If you’re interested in the watery part of this stuff, and not the shipwrecks so much, maybe the Water exhibit that’s running right now is the place to start.
Later, mateys.
The bow of the Titanic: A picture of the bow of the Titanic 2.5 miles below the ocean's surface.
Courtesy RMS Titanic
This summer the Science Museum of Minnesota is hosting Titanic: The Artifact Exhibition.
Here's a link to an interesting story on MSNBC about shipwrecks that capture the imagination. The article is pretty fluff, but has enough info to start a Google search on the shipwrecks that interest you. Check it out!
A new analysis of passenger survival rates aboard the Titanic reveals interesting cultural differences. Behavioral economists, David Savage and Bruno Frey found that British passengers had a 10 percent lower chance of survival than any other nationality aboard the Titanic. These findings contracted their original hypothesis:
"The Titanic was built in Great Britain, operated by British subjects, and manned by a British crew. It is to be expected that national ties were activated during the disaster and that the crew would give preference to British subjects, easily identified by their language."
The survival rate for American passengers was 12 percent higher than the British. Americans reportedly fought their way to the lifeboats, whereas the British politely waited in line.
Savage and Frey's analysis revealed other disparities in survival rate. More women survived than men and children (aged 15 or younger) were more likely to live than elderly.
"Be British, boys, be British!" the captain, Edward John Smith, shouted out, according to witnesses.
The Titanic captain referred to the social norm of putting women and children first. The passenger survival data suggests that this did occur.
You can learn a lot more about one of the worst maritime disasters in history. The Science Museum of Minnesota is hosting an exhibit on the Titanic opening this summer.
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