The Titanic's Best Lifeboat

Summary

Summary of "The Titanic's Best Lifeboat" - 99% Invisible

Released June 24, 2025

Introduction: Rethinking the Titanic Narrative

In this compelling episode of 99% Invisible, host Roman Mars, along with producer Joe Rosenberg, delves deep into the oft-repeated story of the RMS Titanic and its insufficient lifeboats. While popular culture, notably James Cameron's iconic film, has cemented the narrative that the Titanic lacked enough lifeboats, Mars and his guests challenge this oversimplified view, revealing a more nuanced history of maritime safety and lifeboat technology.

Challenging the Standard Narrative

Roman Mars begins by acknowledging the pervasive belief that the Titanic's tragedy was primarily due to its inadequate number of lifeboats:

Roman Mars (23:15): "We like to tell a certain story about the Titanic. About human beings, hubris, about overconfident designers and reckless ship owners all drunk on a kind of unbridled pre-world war techno optimism."

However, as historian Mike Brady counters:

Mike Brady (23:39): "These are not easy things to talk about what went wrong. Because all the things that people think went wrong, they did not go wrong. And they are not the things that went wrong."

Tim Moulton adds further depth:

Tim Moulton (23:46): "In 1912 there's absolutely no question that the Titanic was the best built and safest passenger ship to be on."

Evolution of Lifeboat Technology

The episode traces the history of lifeboats, highlighting significant advancements:

Helen Doe (05:16): "If anything trained, I think, is probably too strong a word, right?"

Roman Mars explains the rudimentary nature of early ship lifeboats, which were primarily meant for transporting cargo and crew rather than saving passengers. The transformation began in the late 18th century when Lionel Lucan patented the first true lifeboat designed explicitly for saving lives:

Helen Doe (06:22): "A lot of them deliberately would not learn to swim because they considered that should they be in the sea, it would just prolong their agony."

Subsequent improvements by William Woodhave and Henry Greathead introduced self-righting boats, a crucial innovation that enhanced survivability in rough seas:

Helen Doe (07:49): "This was not just unemergable, it would right itself as well. There's a difference between not sinking and also something that, when it turns over, automatically rights itself."

The Titanic’s Design: A Paradox of Safety

The Titanic was a marvel of its time, boasting features designed to prevent sinking and ensure passenger safety:

Roman Mars (24:07): "Everything mentioned earlier, the double bottomed hull, the extensive compartmentalization and the sheer size of Titanic, all of it worked to the ocean liners advantage."

Despite these advancements, the Titanic adhered to outdated lifeboat regulations set by the British Board of Trade, which did not require ships to carry lifeboats for every person on board. To compensate, the ship carried fewer lifeboats but included four additional collapsible ones as a precaution:

Joe Rosenberg (24:33): "To compensate, White Star lines both reduced the total number of passengers on Titanic and added four additional collapsible lifeboats just in case."

The Night of the Sinking: Lifeboats Under Fire

On April 14, 1912, the Titanic struck an iceberg, leading to a catastrophic sequence of events:

Roman Mars (25:00): "At 11:39pm, Titanic's forward lookouts spotted an iceberg straight ahead."

The crew's response was hampered by several factors:

1. Delayed Maneuver: The Titanic attempted to avoid a head-on collision but ended up scraping the iceberg along its side, causing hull breaches in five compartments—exceeding its design limits.

2. Ineffective Lifeboat Launching: The lifeboat drills had never been conducted, and the davit systems were difficult to operate under panic:

   Joe Rosenberg (28:42): "The Titanic's crew had never performed a lifeboat drill at sea. And when the women and children were ordered to abandon ship, the ship's davit system for launching the lifeboats turned out to be incredibly difficult to operate."

3. Passenger Reluctance: Many passengers, reassured by the Titanic's grandeur and initial appearances of safety, were hesitant to board the small, open-topped lifeboats:

   Mike Brady (29:00): "So the ship is sinking very, very slightly, so passengers can't tell that it's sinking."

Despite launching lifeboats, their limited number and the chaotic conditions meant that over 1,500 lives were lost. Only those in lifeboats were rescued, but this was facilitated by unusually calm seas that night:

Roman Mars (32:42): "The ocean on the night of the sinking was universally described as a sea of glass. They didn't know it, but this was life saving for the survivors crowded into small, open topped, severely overloaded boats."

Aftermath and Legislative Changes

The tragedy of the Titanic prompted significant changes in maritime safety regulations. Two weeks after the sinking, a groundbreaking event occurred:

Tim Moulton (34:32): "The crew of another White Star ocean liner actually went on strike, refusing to work until the ship carried enough lifeboats for everyone."

This advocacy led to the 1914 International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea (SOLAS), mandating that ships carry enough lifeboats for all aboard— a requirement still in effect today:

Roman Mars (35:12): "In 1914, just two years later, an international treaty made the practice of lifeboats for all mandatory."

Modern Implications: Lifeboats Today

While the Titanic's lifeboats were tragically insufficient, contemporary lifeboat technology has evolved considerably. Modern lifeboats are faster to deploy, more robust in harsh conditions, and designed to be life-saving in a wider array of scenarios:

Joe Rosenberg (35:28): "Modern lifeboats can be launched faster and are far safer on the water than their 20th century predecessors. And on very rare occasions, having enough lifeboats for everyone has actually proven crucial."

Conclusion: Lessons from the Titanic

Roman Mars concludes by reflecting on the enduring legacy of the Titanic's lifeboat story. While the initial lesson drawn—that more lifeboats equate to more lives saved—has been foundational in maritime safety, the episode emphasizes that the true advancements lie in the design and deployment of lifeboats, complemented by the invention of the ship as its own best lifeboat.

Roman Mars (36:24): "If anything, lifeboats were kind of like the old fashioned version of the life vest under your seat. Do you know if those things work? I don't either. You just hope it doesn't come to that."

Notable Quotes with Timestamps

• Roman Mars (23:15): "We like to tell a certain story about the Titanic. About human beings, hubris, about overconfident designers and reckless ship owners all drunk on a kind of unbridled pre-world war techno optimism."

• Mike Brady (23:39): "These are not easy things to talk about what went wrong. Because all the things that people think went wrong, they did not go wrong. And they are not the things that went wrong."

• Tim Moulton (34:32): "The crew of another White Star ocean liner actually went on strike, refusing to work until the ship carried enough lifeboats for everyone."

Additional Resources

For those interested in exploring further, Helen Doe's book One Crew offers an in-depth history of Britain's Royal National Lifeboat Institution, shedding light on the development of lifeboat services and maritime safety.

Credits

Produced by Joe Rosenberg, edited by Lash Madon, with contributions from Mike Brady, Tim Moulton, and Helen Doe. Music by Swan Rial and George Langford.

Transcript

[Roman Mars]

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[Joe Rosenberg]

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[Joe Rosenberg]

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[Roman Mars]

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[Joe Rosenberg]

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[Roman Mars]

Jack.

[Tim Moulton]

Rose.

[Roman Mars]

Jack, Jack, Rose.

[Joe Rosenberg]

Jack, Jack.

[Mike Brady]

Listen, Rose.

[Joe Rosenberg]

But in real life, the actual Titanic, the one that sank on April 15, 1912, is mainly remembered for something else. So much so that James Cameron's script couldn't not mention it.

[Roman Mars]

I did the sum in my head and with the number of lifeboats times the capacity you mentioned. Forgive me, but it seems that there are not enough for everyone aboard. Not half, actually.

[Helen Doe]

Rose, you miss nothing, do you?

[Joe Rosenberg]

There are countless films about the Titanic, most of them called Titanic. And in almost all of them. The lack of lifeboats is kind of the whole point.

[Mike Brady]

We have lifeboats.

[Joe Rosenberg]

We must launch them at once, get everyone off the ship.

[Mike Brady]

That won't be entirely possible.

[Tim Moulton]

They say it's nothing, but they're lying.

[Joe Rosenberg]

There's water below.

[Roman Mars]

And now somebody says there aren't enough lifeboats for the men.

[Joe Rosenberg]

Even the Nazis took time away from the war in 1943 to discuss the matter of lifeboats in their own Titanic film. Titanic.

[Roman Mars]

The Titanic lifeboat narrative is so ingrained in our collective consciousness at this point, that when I informed my dad that I was working on an episode about the Titanic, before I had a chance to say anything more, he just blurted out, ah, yes, if only they had carried more lifeboats.

[Joe Rosenberg]

That's 99pi producer Joe Rosenberg.

[Roman Mars]

Because film or no film, it's just something we've all grown up learning. That when the RMS Titanic set out on its maiden voyage, the owners and authorities, confident that the ship was unsinkable, did not require it to carry a full complement of lifeboats.

[Joe Rosenberg]

So when the Titanic collided with an iceberg and sank in the frigid waters of the North Atlantic, roughly 1,500 passengers, more than half of the people on board, died for lack of lifeboat space.

[Roman Mars]

And look, it's true there weren't enough lifeboats for everyone on the Titanic. It's also true that ever since, international regulations have required large passenger ships to carry enough lifeboats for all on board. But the more you learn about the history of lifeboats and how they worked, the more you realize that the standard story about Titanic's lifeboats isn't entirely correct.

[Joe Rosenberg]

For most of human history, the onboard lifeboat you are likely picturing in your head right now did not exist. A ship might have a boat, but it wasn't there to save lives.

[Roman Mars]

Even as late as the 18th century, on a typical wooden sailing ship, what few boats were on board were mostly for taking cargo and a few crew members to and from shore. But there were no boats for the whole crew to get on, just in case the ship sank. For starters, there wouldn't have been any room. Decks in the Age of Sail were busy, crowded places with lots of gear and rigging.

[Joe Rosenberg]

If Jack had tried to pull that king of the world crap on a British manowar, he would have been shoved overboard.

[Roman Mars]

So if your ship did sink, there wasn't much you could do. You might try to signal for help by firing a cannon or lighting a fire and hope that someone came to your rescue. But for the most part, things were very improvisational. Did crews in the early modern period train or organize for sinking scenarios? What would have been the standard procedure.

[Helen Doe]

If anything trained, I think, is probably too strong a word, right?

[Roman Mars]

And so was it every man for himself, or was it would depend on.

[Helen Doe]

How well you got on with your shipmates, I guess.

[Roman Mars]

Helen Doe is a maritime historian who has written about the early history of lifeboats in the U.K. helen says that most shipwrecks actually occurred near shore. But even if someone on shore saw your distress signal, you Couldn't always count on the lousy landlubbers to save you. Yes, there were many daring and heroic rescues, but sometimes the locals either didn't have any boats or took one look at the rough seas and thought, you know what? I'm good here.

[Joe Rosenberg]

Given the odds involved, the only real strategy when it came to maritime safety was not to sink. No one gave much, if any, thought to how to save lives once you started sinking.

[Helen Doe]

And let's also remember that there was a different view of attitudes to life and death. Life was short, it could be very brutal. So the early mariners were very phlegmatic about drowning. A lot of them deliberately would not learn to swim because they considered that should they be in the sea, it would just prolong their agony.

[Roman Mars]

Wow. I was actually going to ask if that was another kind of urban legend, but that is, that is. That's very true.

[Helen Doe]

That's very true.

[Joe Rosenberg]

And it's the way things were, at least until 1785. That's when a British carriage builder named Lionel Lucan filed a patent for the world's first known boat, designed with the specific purpose of saving lives at sea. Lucan's key innovation was to line the boat's hull with sealed air pockets and cork to help keep it buoyant even in the most difficult conditions.

[Helen Doe]

It was just called unemergable. Wonderful word. Unemergable boat was his pamphlet for his patent.

[Roman Mars]

Yeah, it really rolls off the tongue in a late 18th century kind of way. Less than a decade later, the Englishmen William Woodhave and Henry Greathead improved on Lucan's design. Their boat's hull rose steeply upward at both ends, so that only the middle of the boat would ever take on water while the bow and stern remained above the waterline, making it even more difficult to sink. It could also accommodate a crew of.

[Helen Doe]

12, because when you get out to a wreck, you've got the wind and the weather, you've got flotsam and jetsam all over the place. So you're trying to manage the boat, keep the boat steady and have people there who can get somebody over the side of the boat. If you've ever tried to take a body, a live person out of the water over the side of a boat, you'll know what I mean.

[Roman Mars]

Not easy, but perhaps the most important improvement was that the boat wouldn't capsize.

[Helen Doe]

This was not just unemergable, it would right itself as well. There's a difference between not sinking and also something that, when it turns over, automatically rights itself. This is one of the earliest Ideas for a self righting boat.

[Joe Rosenberg]

And somewhere along the way, these unemergable self righting, life saving vessels were finally dubbed lifeboats.

[Roman Mars]

Now, you might think of a lifeboat as being by definition a boat that goes on a ship. But there still wasn't enough room for lifeboats on a ship's deck at this point. So instead, the earliest lifeboats were meant to be launched by people on shore, not unlike Coast Guard rescue boats today. That meant people on board a sinking ship still didn't have any reliable way to save themselves.

[Joe Rosenberg]

But that changed in the mid19th century when the age of sail gave way to the age of steam. A steamship's engine was tucked away inside its hull with no sails or rigging to bother with. The deck could finally be put to other uses, including lifeboats.

[Roman Mars]

Transatlantic steamers also carried a lot more passengers. At first hundreds and eventually thousands, many of them immigrants bound for the Americas. Did they bill it as safer than the sailing ships?

[Helen Doe]

Well, they know they didn't bill it necessarily as safer because you've got to remember early steamships did have a nasty propensity, occasional to blow up, which slightly alarmed some people.

[Roman Mars]

And so, with an eye towards customer safety, shipping companies slowly began putting more and more lifeboats on board.

[Joe Rosenberg]

But what they found was that although lifeboats launched from shore performed well, lifeboats on ships were rarely able to save anyone.

[Tim Moulton]

The simple fact was, you know, that the presence of lifeboats on a ship was no guarantee of survival.

[Roman Mars]

Mike Brady is a maritime history researcher and the creator of the YouTube channel Ocean Liner Designs. Mike says lifeboats on ships were only useful in ideal situations when the water was calm and you were sinking slowly and close to land. But the rest of the time, lifeboats were a gamble.

[Joe Rosenberg]

Shipboard lifeboats were more ungainly and cheaply built than their shore based counterparts. They were designed to carry as many passengers as possible, not a rescue crew. And mariners quickly realized that it's one thing to send a boat into a raging sea from shore and pick up survivors. It's quite another to get people onto a boat from a moving deck and then lower that boat into the raging storm.

[Tim Moulton]

It's just not happening. Because if a 400 foot long ship struggled, then you would not want to point to a relatively tiny 30 foot wooden boat and say, don't worry, this is what will save you.

[Joe Rosenberg]

If your ship was severely listing, that is tilting too much to one side, then already you could only get half your boats off. The other half would get stuck against the ship's exposed hull and Even the boats you could lower would encounter some serious problems.

[Tim Moulton]

Imagine the, the ship's listing over about 15, 20 degrees to one side. The boat is then swinging too far out. You've got boats that are being lowered down, maybe successfully, but then being smashed back against the hull of the ship and spilling their occupants out into the sea.

[Roman Mars]

And that's if the crew didn't drop you, which sometimes they did.

[Joe Rosenberg]

An onboard lifeboat is generally attached with ropes to a crane called a davit. In those early days, the crew was supposed to lower the boat from the davit into the water by slowly, slowly letting the ropes out by hand. But a lifeboat could weigh multiple tons, and exhausted, panicked mariners could sometimes lose their grip.

[Tim Moulton]

But the other part of it is that in order for lifeboats to actually work, in order for the theory to play out that passengers board these lifeboats and they've escaped the sinking of ship, then the question is, now what?

[Roman Mars]

Even piloted by a trained crew member, a lifeboat was open, topped, at the mercy of the elements, and often had few or no provisions. Okay if you're close to land, but not if you're far out at sea.

[Helen Doe]

And some of the concern was, well, is it going to be a good idea to have lots of people in small boats in the middle of the Atlantic when they're just going to be greater risk of exposure and less likelihood of being rescued? What do you what to what purpose?

[Tim Moulton]

And plenty of lifeboats that did successfully get away from, from sinking ships simply disappeared or were found decades later, washed up with their complement dead inside all over the world.

[Roman Mars]

But perhaps the worst case scenario was what happened to the SS Clallam, a small passenger steamer that ran into trouble in heavy seas off the coast of British Columbia.

[Joe Rosenberg]

Certain the ship was sinking, the men nobly lowered the women and children into the ship's only three lifeboats. Two tipped during lowering, the third capsized in the waves. All of the women and children died. Most of the men who stayed on board the ship were rescued the next morning.

[Tim Moulton]

It's a shocking thing that to go for the lifeboat, to actually go for this thing that's designed to save your life, seals your fate. And cement's probably in the public mind a little bit when they see disasters like this that, yeah, the lifeboat is possibly useful in some scenarios, but probably stands as more of a symbol of absolute last resort. Absolute. This is all we've got. Rather than a tried and trusty safety feature that is your first option.

[Roman Mars]

If anything, lifeboats were kind of like the old fashioned version of the life Vest under your seat. Do you know if those things work? I don't either. You just hope it doesn't come to that.

[Joe Rosenberg]

But at the turn of the 20th century, the shipping industry hit upon a new strategy, one that would have long term consequences for safety at sea.

[Tim Moulton]

Because eventually, as the technology is beginning to improve, shipping companies turned their focus to the ships themselves. And the ship becomes the lifeboat.

[Joe Rosenberg]

The ship becomes the lifeboat may sound like a contradiction in terms, but it marked a new paradigm in shipbuilding.

[Roman Mars]

The idea behind this new mantra, the ship is its own best lifeboat, was to make ships so sturdy, so reliable, with so many safety features and redundancies, that there would rarely be any need to get in an actual lifeboat. Instead, in most emergencies, the safest boat would be the ship itself.

[Joe Rosenberg]

In this new way of thinking, collisions were still best avoided, but they were ultimately okay because these new ships could take a hit.

[Roman Mars]

Ships began to be constructed with stronger plated steel and with crucial redundancies, such as double bottomed hulls. A hull would also have multiple compartments sealed with watertight bulkheads so that any flooding from a breach could be contained to a small area and the ship could stay afloat. Ships were also getting bigger, which made them stabler in rough seas.

[Mike Brady]

Size is definitely equated with safety.

[Roman Mars]

Tim Moulton is a historian, author and television presenter. And he says that ocean liner passengers, when given the choice, always went for the biggest, newest ships.

[Mike Brady]

Some of the immigrants traveling would only travel in a four funnel vessel because they would regard it as safer than a three funnel vessel and safer than a two funnel vessel and safer than a one funnel vessel. So it was kind of like the more funnels you had, the safer she was.

[Roman Mars]

And even if your big four funnel vessel did sink, it was now more likely to sink slowly over the course of several hours instead of a few minutes.

[Tim Moulton]

And that was no mistake. A lot of thought had gone into not just how the ship would behave in the event that she almost sinks, but actually how she would behave in the event that she did sink.

[Joe Rosenberg]

Almost every new ocean liner in the early 20th century was described in casual conversation as unsinkable. But the ship's designers never totally believed it. Instead, they believed that in the last resort, a ship should be designed to sink well.

[Roman Mars]

But it wasn't just the ship that was safer. As more and more passenger vessels made their way across the Atlantic, the ocean itself was no longer a vast empty place with no other soul in sight. Tim says it was more like a busy freeway.

[Mike Brady]

And in fact, you couldn't go about anywhere you wanted. On the North Atlantic, there were very strict lanes, both for east gang traffic and west gang traffic. And Those lanes were 60 miles apart. And the idea was that there would always be a ship coming along.

[Joe Rosenberg]

But the linchpin that really made everything come together wasn't just bigger ships or stronger ships or subdivided ships, or even more ships. It was that if your ship got into any trouble, you could finally call for help.

[Tim Moulton]

The introduction of the Marconi wireless telegraph. This cannot be overstated as being the biggest development, probably in safety of life at sea at the time. Because suddenly ships didn't have to be within visual distance. They could communicate with each other around the clock, out to 400, 500 miles at nighttime. And it meant that suddenly the ships out at sea that were forming a vast highway formed basically a communications network.

[Roman Mars]

Now, if your ship was sinking, a radio message could be sent out and picked up by nearby vessels in the ship's sea lane, who could then come to the rescue.

[Tim Moulton]

And the idea becomes that if a ship does somehow start to sink, then it will sink slowly enough and evenly enough that help will be able to come and all the passengers will be able to be transferred off the vessel.

[Roman Mars]

But at the same time as all these innovations, perhaps even because of them, the design of shipboard lifeboats changed very little. Instead, they took on a far humbler and frankly, more achievable role.

[Mike Brady]

Lifeboats were not an end destination. Lifeboats were purely to ferry people to a nearby waiting liner.

[Roman Mars]

So even as ocean liners grew larger and larger, their builders never saw any need for a full complement of lifeboats. Between any two ships, there'd be enough with plenty of time for them to make multiple trips between vessels.

[Joe Rosenberg]

Now that the ship was its own lifeboat. The idea of providing simultaneous lifeboat space for everyone was never taken seriously.

[Tim Moulton]

It's just considered ridiculous because you're relying on conditions actually even being good enough to get everybody into the boats and to get those boats away safely and for those people to survive an extended period of time in open top boats. It seems so inconceivable there would ever be a scenario where all of those things happen.

[Joe Rosenberg]

Until on April 14, 1912, they did.

[Tim Moulton]

Is there anyone there? Yes.

[Joe Rosenberg]

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[Roman Mars]

We like to tell a certain story about the Titanic. About human beings, hubris, about overconfident designers and reckless ship owners all drunk on a kind of unbridled pre world war techno optimism. And of course about how all that misplaced pride is the reason there weren't enough lifeboats on the night the Titanic sank. And that's true, but it's also not the truth.

[Mike Brady]

These are not easy things to talk about what went wrong.

[Joe Rosenberg]

Right.

[Mike Brady]

Because all the things that people think went wrong, they did not go wrong. And they are not the things that went wrong.

[Roman Mars]

Both Tim Moulton and Mike Brady say there is a lot the standard narrative has backward starting with the fact that as forms of travel go, the RMS Titanic, operated by White Star Lines and launched in April 1912 actually was exceptionally safe.

[Mike Brady]

Yeah, I mean Joe, I don't want to shock the listeners, but I think the White Star Line and Titanic did pretty much everything right.

[Tim Moulton]

Yeah. In 1912 there's absolutely no question that the Titanic was the best built and safest passenger ship to be on. All the lessons they'd put into place, all the lessons they'd learned the hard way from horrible loss of life, but then also the lessons they'd learnt from when things went extremely well. And Titanic was the culmination of all of this learning.

[Roman Mars]

Everything mentioned earlier, the double bottomed hull, the extensive compartmentalization and the sheer size of Titanic, all of it worked to the ocean liners advantage.

[Joe Rosenberg]

As for lifeboats, it was well known that the requirements set by the British Board of Trade hadn't kept up with the size of the newest ships. To compensate, White Star lines both reduced the total number of passengers on Titanic and added four additional collapsible lifeboats just in case.

[Roman Mars]

Taken altogether, the Titanic really was its own best lifeboat. That didn't mean it couldn't sink.

[Joe Rosenberg]

On the night of April 14, 1912, the passage, passengers and crew of the Titanic all marveled at a North Atlantic ocean that was unusually calm, clear and cold. Ice warnings had been issued from ships ahead of Titanic in the sea lane, so the crew were keeping a keen eye out for icebergs.

[Roman Mars]

At 11:39pm, Titanic's forward lookouts spotted an iceberg straight ahead. With the captain off duty, the course of action fell to the bridge's ranking officer. What followed was a Rube Goldberg like sequence of events that would see each of the Titanic's safety features defeated one.

[Joe Rosenberg]

By one, starting with its compartmentalized steel hull. Because under normal circumstances the hull could have handled hitting the iceberg.

[Mike Brady]

So in the inquiry afterwards it was asked what would have happened if Titanic had gone straight on into the iceberg without even trying to move left or right. And they calculated that Titanic would have stayed afloat. It would have squashed in her first few compartments, but it would be like a motor car putting on its brakes.

[Roman Mars]

Except doing that probably would have killed several dozen crew members. So the Titanic's ranking officer on deck did something that likely made sense at the time. He ordered the crew to stop the engines and turn the ship in an effort to avoid a collision.

[Joe Rosenberg]

But the maneuver was executed too late. And instead of missing the ship or colliding with it head on, the iceberg scraped along Titanic's right starboard side.

[Mike Brady]

So Titanic was designed to have a collision with any vessel however you like. Okay. She was also designed to like ram into a rock or something like that. Or a lighthouse or land.

[Roman Mars]

Or a cliff or an iceberg. Exactly.

[Mike Brady]

But what she wasn't designed to do is have the kind of sideswipe down the first 200ft of the ship.

[Roman Mars]

Those few hundred feet were one of the most vulnerable parts of Titanic. A section below the waterline. But above the ship's double layered bottom.

[Joe Rosenberg]

The iceberg ground against the single layered hull. Buckling the rivets between its steel plates. Water began leaking into several of Titanic's forward compartments.

[Roman Mars]

The Titanic could have up to four of her front compartments flooded and still not sink. An exceptional degree of redundancy.

[Mike Brady]

And in fact, the damage wasn't that much. The problem with the damage was that it was into that crucial fifth compartment. So that unfortunately, that was her Achilles heel in the sense of it was outside her design envelope.

[Joe Rosenberg]

One by one, the five compartments began to flood.

[Mike Brady]

And that meant that the weight of water in the first five compartments, they dragged the Titanic down by the bow. And then if you imagine like an ice cube tray that you're filling with water, what happened was that as they pulled down the top of the bulkhead in the next compartment, the water would overflow into the next and the next and the next.

[Joe Rosenberg]

Eventually, all of the compartments would be compromised. The Titanic was going to sink.

[Roman Mars]

But the Titanic wasn't totally defeated yet, because as expected, there was another ship in Titanic's sea lane close enough to come to the rescue. The Californian.

[Joe Rosenberg]

The Titanic's captain had already ordered the radio operator to send out a distress signal strong enough for the Californian to hear. From there, the rescue effort was supposed to play out calmly and rationally, just as it had with other recent sinkings.

[Mike Brady]

What's interesting is in 1912 there was no 24 hour radio watch and unfortunately, the radio operator of the Californian had actually turned in for the night just before Titanic sent a distress signal.

[Roman Mars]

Shipboard radios were still a new technology at the time. Their focus was on transmitting private correspondence. It just hadn't occurred to anyone yet that no one would be listening. When a ship was in trouble, against.

[Joe Rosenberg]

All planning and odds, everything now hinged on Titanic's last and least reliable line of defense. Its lifeboats.

[Roman Mars]

And let's be clear, this is not the part of the story where the lifeboats come in and save the day. And all of their weaknesses turn out to be strengths. The lifeboats did what lifeboats normally did. They sucked.

[Joe Rosenberg]

The Titanic's crew had never performed a lifeboat drill at sea. And when the women and children were ordered to abandon ship, the ship's davit system for launching the lifeboats turned out to be incredibly difficult to operate. Passengers hustled onto the deck on a freezing, moonless night, watched as the tiny open topped boats jerked and creaked and banged against the hull on their long way down to the invisible water eight stories below. Understandably, at first, most people refused to get on them.

[Roman Mars]

And while the lifeboats were glitching their way down to the water, the Titanic was doing its job. It was sinking well, maybe if anything, too well.

[Tim Moulton]

Her design had been that she would sink evenly and slowly. And that's exactly what Titanic does. So the ship is sinking very, very slightly, so passengers can't tell that it's sinking.

[Mike Brady]

So actually, Titanic looks at this time absolutely fine. She's warm, the lights are on, the band, people are having drinks at the bar. Why would I take that risk of going in a tiny rowing boat when I can clearly take my chances with the biggest ship in the world?

[Roman Mars]

Making matters worse, word had spread among the passengers that a distress signal had gone out. They didn't yet understand that the only ship close enough had never received it. Everything around the passengers flashed the same reassuring and now familiar message over and over again. The ship was what was safe. The ship was the lifeboat, the passengers.

[Joe Rosenberg]

Faith in the ship made an already terrible situation even worse. With most people refusing to board the lifeboats, the first took off, only half loaded. One boat with a capacity of 40 was launched with seven crew members and just five passengers.

[Roman Mars]

Only when the deck's sharpening angle became obvious did the thousands of passengers still on board, many who had just arrived on deck from second and third class, scrambled to save themselves. The surge caused the later round of lifeboats to go off severely overloaded.

[Joe Rosenberg]

In the rush, the ropes for lowering one of the boats got stuck and had to be sawed through by hand with a pen knife. A different boat barely avoided being crushed when another was almost lowered on top of it. Another flipped over before entering the water, and some passengers attempted to jump onto boats from the deck above and missed. But all of that only served to mask a more fundamental problem.

[Tim Moulton]

So the question is, would more boats have made a difference? I think there were enough crew to get the boats away, but the time was so narrow and so limited, in fact, the crew worked so hard, even though it was literally freezing outside. Second Officer Charles Lighthaller, he was soaked with sweat to get all the boats away. So the crew worked like absolute lions, but they still just ran out of time.

[Joe Rosenberg]

The lifeboat simply took too long to lower into the water. Ultimately, the crew was only just able to set off the last of the regular boats and two of the spare collapsible boats that Titanic's designers added earlier. The last two collapsibles were never launched.

[Roman Mars]

Even with better training, the crew could only have launched a handful more boats, nowhere near enough for the 1,500 people still on board.

[Tim Moulton]

So I don't see there being enough time. You're not going to be getting 40 or 50 boats off Titanic in the space of an hour.

[Roman Mars]

The truth is no number or arrangement of lifeboats was going to work.

[Joe Rosenberg]

But when the survivors were picked up later that morning and the world learned what had happened, none of this mattered. Because the same implausible sequence of events that made Titanic look bad made lifeboats look great.

[Mike Brady]

And the reason for that is that the only people that were rescued from the Titanic were all in lifeboats.

[Joe Rosenberg]

What most people didn't realize, including many survivors, was that this was only because of the very particular conditions of that.

[Roman Mars]

One night, instead of the normally rough North Atlantic waters in which lifeboats often floundered. The ocean on the night of the sinking was universally described as a sea of glass. They didn't know it, but this was life saving for the survivors crowded into small, open topped, severely overloaded boats.

[Joe Rosenberg]

Meanwhile, the ocean water, which freezes at a lower temperature than fresh water, was 28 degrees Fahrenheit. Of the people with life jackets who did not make it onto a lifeboat before the ship sank, only a tiny handful survived.

[Mike Brady]

One gentleman had strapped himself to a door, another one was on a staircase that was floating. In other words, people who'd managed to keep themselves out of the water, they were still alive.

[Roman Mars]

Oh, so. So someone really did survive on a door. That's. That's not just movie magic.

[Mike Brady]

No, that's, that is one of the true things in the film.

[Joe Rosenberg]

In the immediate wake of the disaster, the stark math of who survived and who didn't provided the Titanic story with a simple moral. Lifeboats meant life.

[Tim Moulton]

Never mind the fact, of course, that were conditions to be any different, Titanic's boats probably wouldn't have performed as well. The big lesson gets distilled down to if there had been more lifeboats on Titanic, more people would have survived.

[Roman Mars]

It's impossible to overstate just how quickly this belief took hold in the public imagination after the Titanic disaster, that if a ship got into trouble, your best way to survive was to get on a lifeboat. And therefore it was critical that a ship have enough lifeboats for every person on board.

[Joe Rosenberg]

Ship designers and veteran seamen of the time knew that in most scenarios, onboard lifeboats remained of only limited use. But it didn't matter.

[Roman Mars]

Two weeks after the Titanic sank, the crew of another White Star ocean liner actually went on strike, refusing to work until the ship carried enough lifeboats for everyone.

[Tim Moulton]

Yeah, so it's a full blooded mutiny. But it was, it was a statement, if there aren't enough boats for all of us, we're not going to work. And that had not happened before. You know, the crews of ships hadn't really thought that way ever. So it is a huge departure and a huge shift towards awareness for safety for all at sea, not just for passengers.

[Roman Mars]

In 1914, just two years later, an international treaty made the practice of lifeboats for all mandatory. That treaty, called Solis for Safety of Life at Sea, has been signed by 168 countries and is still in effect today.

[Joe Rosenberg]

Ironically, that requirement is more useful now than it was in 1914. The world may have learned the wrong lesson from Titanic, but since then, lifeboat technology has caught up with our expectations. They're still only to be used as a last resort. Even now, the ship remains its own best lifeboat. But modern lifeboats can be launched faster and are far safer on the water than their 20th century predecessors. And on very rare occasions, having enough lifeboats for everyone has actually proven crucial.

[Roman Mars]

So I guess even if it's not the lesson we should have learned from the Titanic, in the final analysis, it turns out everyone really does deserve a spot on a lifeboat. Even Jack. I really think there's only one question to ask when it comes to Titanic, which is, was there space for Jack on that door? Would he have taken them both down with him?

[Tim Moulton]

I like that James Cameron took that so seriously. He tested it recently with two actors in a tank.

[Roman Mars]

He did. Oh, I didn't know this. He did.

[Tim Moulton]

He did. He got a replica of the panel and two people about the same size as Jack and Rose and found conclusively that two people on the panel could have survived.

[Roman Mars]

I knew it. I knew it. I knew it the whole time.

[Joe Rosenberg]

99% invisible was produced this week by Joe Rosenberg and edited by Lash Madon. Additional editing by Kelly prime mix by Martin Gonzalez, music by Swan Rial and George Langford. Fact Checking by Graham Hacha. Special thanks this week to our guest, Helen Doe. Helen's book One Crew is a history of the first ever nationwide lifeboat service, Britain's Royal National Lifeboat Institution. We ended up cutting a whole section of the story about the RNLI's incredible history. So we strongly recommend you check out Helen's book. We'll have links to that as well as more work for from Tim Moulton and Mike Brady's YouTube channel, Ocean Liner Designs on our website. Kathy Tu is our executive producer. Kurt Kolstedt is the digital director. Delaney hall is our senior editor. The rest of the team includes Chris Berube, Jason De Leon, Emmett Fitzgerald, Christopher Johnson, Vivian Le Jacob, Medina Gleason and me, roman Mars. The 99% invisible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence. We are part of the SiriusXM podcast family now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building in beautiful uptown Oakland, California. You can find us on all the usual social media sites, mostly Bluesky these days, as well as our own Discord server. There's a link to that as well as Every past episode of [e-mail] Foreign.

[Roman Mars]

Welcome back to Listen to your Heart.

[Joe Rosenberg]

I'm Jerry and I'm Jerry's Heart. Today's topic, Repatha Evolocumab Heart. Why'd you pick this one? Well, Jerry, for people who have had.

[Tim Moulton]

A heart attack like us, diet and.

[Joe Rosenberg]

Exercise might not be enough to lower.

[Roman Mars]

The risk of another one.

[Tim Moulton]

Okay, to help know if we're at.

[Joe Rosenberg]

Risk, we should be getting our ldlc, our bad cholesterol checked, and talking to our doctor.

[Roman Mars]

I'm listening.

[Tim Moulton]

And if it's still too high, Repatha.

[Joe Rosenberg]

Can be added to a statin to lower our LDL C and our heart attack risk.

[Roman Mars]

Hmm. Guess it's time to ask about Repatha. Do not take Repatha if you are allergic to it. Serious allergic reactions can occur.

[Joe Rosenberg]

Get medical help right away if you.

[Roman Mars]

Have trouble breathing or swallowing swelling of.

[Joe Rosenberg]

The face, lips, tongue, throat or arms. Common side effects include runny nose, sore throat, common cold symptoms flu or flu like symptoms back pain, high blood sugar and redness pain or bruising at the injection site. Listen to your heart.

[Tim Moulton]

Ask your doctor about Repatha. Learn [e-mail] or call 1-844-repatha discovering a better way to money that's everyone's jam.

[Roman Mars]

No matter what goals you've got queued up, a Northwestern Mutual advisor can help.

[Joe Rosenberg]

Uncover opportunities that others might overlook.

[Tim Moulton]

Let's get [e-mail] the Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance Company Milwaukee, Wisconsin.