Titanic

I was always interested in the story of the Titanic, but there was something about it that never rang true. My gut feeling that something was wrong with the story became stronger while working as an aerospace engineer at Aerojet designing solid rocket motors. I would often be assigned to conduct rocket motor failure analyses, which became a specialty of mine. When I started my own company, Wickman Spacecraft & Propulsion Company, one of our first jobs was investigating what happened to the solid rocket boosters in the Space Shuttle Challenger accident. During my career, I have conducted countless failure analyses and looked at hundreds of parts that were blown apart during rocket motor tests.  Over the years, I continued to look at videos and pictures of the Titanic wreckage and read testimony trying to figure out what happened. I did not spend much time on it, as my primary focus was on my business during those years.

There finally came a day in my investigation when I came to a surprising realization. First, the Titanic could have easily steered around the iceberg. Jump to page 17 and look at the Titanic making tight turns at full speed. Contrast that picture with the Hollywood movies showing the Titanic making an agonizingly slow turn to avoid the iceberg coming towards it while someone shouts, “Turn, damn it.” In reality, the Titanic was highly maneuverable and the accident should never have happened. The second realization was that the ship should not have sunk. The wreckage shows the Titanic was not ripped open as reported in testimony. The pumps on the Titanic could have easily kept boiler rooms five and six dry, which would have been sufficient to keep the
Titanic afloat. The wreckage shows damage to the hull in this area was not sufficient to overwhelm the Titanic’s pumps.

I then knew the accepted explanation of what happened on the Titanic was wrong. It became clear to me that testimony was given to cover up the truth about the accident. I now needed to find out what was being hidden by going through all of the available evidence. I decided to conduct a complete and professional failure analysis of the Titanic accident using my experience in analyzing failures in the aerospace industry.

The primary rule of failure analysis is to go where the evidence takes you. Forget preconceived ideas of what might have caused the problem. You can tell when you have the answer because all of the pieces fit. It is important to rank the evidence as well. Physical evidence is the most important and that was definitely available with the Titanic wreckage. Visual evidence comes next, which is usually film or video. There was no visual evidence of the Titanic sinking so the next best thing was eyewitness accounts, but they are time critical evidence. As time goes by, memories change and they can become more inaccurate. For this reason, I gave more weight to testimony given in the U.S. Senate hearings than those given in England, because the Senate hearings happened much sooner after the sinking. Eyewitnesses will also see the same event and describe it differently. That was certainly the case with the Titanic. To filter the conflicting accounts, I gave more weight to the witnesses who described events that matched the physical evidence. Finally, I conducted an engineering analysis using the data to determine the cause of the failure.

I built up a library of all of the video and still pictures of the Titanic wreckage I could get my hands on. I read the testimony of every witness in the U.S. Senate hearings, British hearings, and lawsuit against White Star in New York. For the hearings, I deliberately did not read the witness testimony in chronological order. In hearings and trials, witnesses are often presented in a sequence to support a narrative. I wanted to break up that narrative by going out of sequence and read them in alphabetical order instead. After I finished with the hearings, I then read all of the articles from major newspapers in the United States, Canada, and England from April 1912 until April 1922 that had the word Titanic in it. I also read declassified British communications between
London and the British embassy in Washington, D.C. In addition, I went through the British Board of Trade documents on the Titanic as well as what personal correspondence from Titanic survivors and others involved in the Titanic sinking, rescue and body recovery that I could obtain.

To understand the Titanic from an engineering standpoint, I examined all the drawings I could get including some original blueprints from Harland and Wolff, the company that built the Titanic, as well as books that detailed the construction of the Titanic. I read all the Harland and Wolff acceptance test reports for the material used to build the Titanic’s hull. As my investigation grew beyond engineering, I began researching the major figures in the story as well as reading all the telegrams regarding ice and the Titanic before, during, and after the Titanic sinking. It took years to go through all this evidence.

This book is the result of my investigation. It presents, in chronological sequence based on historical documents, physical evidence and engineering analysis, what happened before, during and after the Titanic accident. The dialog during the hearings is from the witness transcripts. In two or three cases, typographical errors in the transcripts were corrected so that a sentence made grammatical sense. Other dialog is based on historical record where it was available. The story presented is as historically accurate as I can make it with the available documents and evidence.

Now you can learn the truth about the Titanic and what happened in April 1912 on that cold, dark night. In this section, I will be presenting the supporting research and experiments that support my book, “Titanic – The Hidden Evidence”.