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Titanic Real Time Sinking

Annotated real time sinking video

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Watch a comprehensively annotated real-time Titanic sinking video, based on the authoritative Titanic history book "On a Sea of Glass: The Life & Loss of the RMS Titanic" by J. Kent Layton Bill Wormstedt, and George Behe.

Comment and discuss

  1. Arun Vajpey Arun Vajpey
    The traditional estimate of 2:20 as the time of the ship's sinking is not so much a precise calculation but rather an approximation, one that has been widely cited in the century since the disaster.I agree completely and for the record believe that the stern disappeared beneath the surface somewere between 02:20 and 02:21am.[QUOTE="Luca Gelmetti, post: 481845, member: 208890"]If the ship began to experience catastrophic structural failure around 2:16, as suggested by its critical tilt and other survivor testimonies, it would likely take several additional minutes for the stern to fully fracture, rise, and descend, until sinking at about 2:21True, but while most survivors would have heard the throes of the Titanic breaking-up almost from the start, those who saw it would only have witnessed the final catastrophic separation.The point is that two major interlinked but nevertheless distictly separate events - the "break-up" and the "final plunge" were taking place in the final 4 to 5 minutes of the Titanic's sinking but as we depend on survivor accounts, it is difficult to be chronologically accurate with the timeframes, unless by coincidence. Like many others, I have tried to work this out to my own satisfaction, based on the excellent analysis by [USER=137378]@Samuel Halpern[/USER] in his Centennial Reappraisal book, which mentions relevant survivor accounts. I confess that I have found it very difficult to accept the final
  2. Samuel Halpern Samuel Halpern
    Mr. BOXHALL. No; I can not say that I saw her sink. I saw the lights go out, and I looked two or three minutes afterward and it was 25 minutes past 2. So I took it that when she sank would be about 20 minutes after 2. Boxhall's 2 or 3 minutes after the lights going out could easily be 4 or 5 minutes. That was a subjective estimate at best. Senator SMITH. Did you have a watch on when you entered the lifeboat?Mr. PITMAN. I did, sir.Senator SMITH. Can you fix the exact moment of time when the Titanic disappeared?Mr. PITMAN. 2.20 exactly, ship's time. I took my watch out at the time she disappeared, and I said, "It is 2.20," and the passengers around me heard it.How accurate was Pitman's watch and how soon after he saw the ship sink did he actually look at his watch by the light from a lamp in his boat? We're talking about 1 or 2 minutes here. It matters not in the grand scheme of things. For some reason, possibly because we live in the digit age where time is shown to the nearest second, people want to know precise timings. So what if stern went under 90 seconds, 120 seconds or even 180 seconds after the split took place. None of us can prove anything about that, and nobody was timing things with a stop watch. We can only take what we were told by multiple eyewitnesses and then weight the credibility of their numbers against what we we were told by others.If it makes someone happier to believe the ship struck ice at 11:43pm, and then broke in two at 2:19am and
  3. Arun Vajpey Arun Vajpey
    It matters not in the grand scheme of things. For some reason, possibly because we live in the digit age where time is shown to the nearest second, people want to know precise timings. So what if stern went under 90 seconds, 120 seconds or even 180 seconds after the split took place. None of us can prove anything about that, and nobody was timing things with a stop watch. What I think we can safely say is that the ship collided about 11:40-ish and sank around 2:20-ish, and had broke in two 2 to 5 minutes before disappearing from sight altogether.Strictly speaking, yes the timeframes involved with various events during the sinking do not matter in the grand scheme of things of the Titanic disaster. A mundane way of looking at it is that the then largest ocean liner in the world set out on its maiden voyage from Southampton to New York, collided with an iceberg about 2/3 of the way on its voyage and sank over the next 2 hours and 40 minutes with nearly 1500 people losing their lives in the process. But that kind of a view can be applied to almost any event that made news at a certain time - Bolshevik Revolution, the Wall Street Crash, the Cuban Missile Crisis, JFK assassination, End of the 'Cold War', 9/11 attacks, Boxing Day Tsunami etc and the reaction would depend upon either the wordwide 'audience' or - if it existed - a small group of individuals who develop an obsessive interest in one of those events. The Titanic
  4. Samuel Halpern Samuel Halpern
    My post #197 was intended as a critique of trying to pin down times to the nearest absolute minute, not to stifle any discussions about how events may, or may not, have played out. I myself have worked on various chronological timelines but have always recognized how easy it is to fall into the trap of viewing those times (all written to the nearest minute by necessity) as some precise record of events. What I do find worthy of arguing about are timelines that have been developed by overlooking credible evidence that was pointed out by others, accepting unsupported and questionable evidence as fact, or accepting evidence from newspaper accounts that are demonstrably false in trying to prove something. lively discussions of the kind that have been going on in these forums for years continue to happen.I fully agree. There is a huge difference between discussion that takes place here on this forum when compared to what you see on various FB sites, which I tend to describe, for the most part, as a cyber sewer.
  5. Arun Vajpey Arun Vajpey
    I myself have worked on various chronological timelines but have always recognized how easy it is to fall into the trap of viewing those times (all written to the nearest minute by necessity) as some precise record of events.Understood and in fact, I was trying to express my impression following collation of various survivor accounts about the break-up and the final plunge. There are too many of them to quote here but the overall impression that I got from that collation of related statements was that there appeared to be almost 2 minutes between the time the 'wave' hit and the final catastrophic break that resulted in separation of the flooded bow from the stern. Many eventual survivors appear to have been washed overboard by that wave and when they surfaced, the ship appeared to be still in one-piece but with the stern now steadily rising. That was also the timeframe during which many survivors reported hearing loud "explosions" but I felt the sounds were from tortured metal structures getting ripped apart, eventually leading to the major break-up. That is the reason that I opined that the Titanic lost its longitudinal stability somewhere between 02:16 and 02:17am (based on your own statement that this happened about a minute or two after 02:15am) and as the wave washed sternwards, many people tried to run ahead of it. Carl Jansson was one among them and the wave caught-up with him and tossed him overboard along with
  6. Samuel Halpern Samuel Halpern
    As seen from the boats, not from the eyes of those struggling to remain alive, the time span for how long the stern remained afloat following the split may have seemed to be a more than 90 seconds. In fact, some believed that the stern was going to stay afloat without the bow before it began to rise up high and then slowly sink down below the surface.
  7. Arun Vajpey Arun Vajpey
    As seen from the boats, not from the eyes of those struggling to remain alive, the time span for how long the stern remained afloat following the split may have seemed to be a more than 90 seconds.That would be a very expected impression, I would have thought. Considering the fraught circumstances, the attention of most of the people in launched lifeboats would have been fixed on the maneuvers of the sinking stern section of the Titanic and struggles of the people in the water. There would have been a lot of auditory input as well from the screams of the people, especially obvious after the break-up resulted in sudden cessation of almost all the "mechanical" noise. The very common "timestretch" phenomenon under stress would have applied to almost all survivors and to them those 90 seconds would have seemed a lot longer.
  8. Arun Vajpey Arun Vajpey
    I was trying to express my impression following collation of various survivor accounts about the break-up and the final plunge. There are too many of them to quote here but the overall impression that I got from that collation of related statements was that there appeared to be almost 2 minutes between the time the 'wave' hit and the final catastrophic break that resulted in separation of the flooded bow from the stern. I opined that the Titanic lost its longitudinal stability somewhere between 02:16 and 02:17am and as the wave washed sternwards, many people tried to run ahead of it. Althought it is difficult to correlate statements from witnesses describing their own struggles with those who reported that the ship broke in two, the impression is that the final break happened somewhere between 02:18 and 02:19am and the separated stern lasted no more than 90 seconds after that.Sorry to be quoting myself, but I felt that a proper explanation was needed to [USER=137378]@Samuel Halpern[/USER] , [USER=208890]@Luca Gelmetti[/USER] , [USER=217060]@Richard C Elliott[/USER] and others as to why I got the impression that approximately 2 minutes elapsed between the "wave" and the final catastrophic break and separation of the bow and stern sections.I read and collated experiences of several people who were still on board when the wave struck but managed to survive, based on their testimonies, reports, third party statements etc. While
  9. Samuel Halpern Samuel Halpern
    Most real-time animations including OASOG show the lights still on at this time and it was only after the Titanic dipped further at the bow and second funnel fell that the lights failed.I was OK with what you were saying until you cited an animation, or animations, as a source for why you feel the way you do. All the people you referred to before you mentioned animations were eyewitness to the events that happened. A real time animation however is not an eyewitness account. It's the animator's impression of what happened, which can be based one or more eyewitness accounts, along with some added imagination.
  10. Arun Vajpey Arun Vajpey
    A real time animation however is not an eyewitness account. It's the animator's impression of what happened, which can be based one or more eyewitness accounts, along with some added imagination.Absolutely right and I think I did not word my thoughts properly. What I meant was that even the people who did those animations but show a timeframe that I disagree with tend to show certain events in a certain sequence. While that is most definitely not evidence, it might suggest that they too might be using available survival accounts to collate information for those reconstructions - with some added imagination like you said. For instance, based on a few eyewitness accounts, the nature of the damage to the ship and other things (ice chunks in the forecastle) many of us imagine what the size and especially shape of the iceberg must have been, and a few depict it in illustrations. But the actual berg might have been somewhat different.
  11. Luca Gelmetti Luca Gelmetti
    Sorry to be quoting myself, but I felt that a proper explanation was needed to [USER=137378]@Samuel Halpern[/USER] , [USER=208890]@Luca Gelmetti[/USER] , [USER=217060]@Richard C Elliott[/USER] and others as to why I got the impression that approximately 2 minutes elapsed between the "wave" and the final catastrophic break and separation of the bow and stern sections.I read and collated experiences of several people who were still on board when the wave struck but managed to survive, based on their testimonies, reports, third party statements etc. While people like Ligholler, Jack Thayer, George Rheims etc might have entered the water just ahead of the wave, others like Archibald Gracie, John Collins, August Wennerstrom, Richard Williams, Eugene Daly, Carl Jansson etc gave the distinct impression that they were still on board and were washed overboard by the wave. Their individual experiences might have been different depending on where they were at the time, how they survived etc, but they described quite a few events that took place after they were washed into the sea, some of which were obviously before the final break. Carl Jansson described several people including himself trying to run ahead of the oncoming wave but they could not and along with several others, he was washed overboard. Richard Williams' statements suggest that he was washed overboard by the wave even as he and his father Charles Williams prepared to
  12. Richard C Elliott Richard C Elliott
    The wave that is so often depicted striking the Titanic at 2:15 also doesn’t fit into the timeline of events as I see it. By the time the wave would have hit the ship, the Titanic was already well on its way to breaking apart. It’s easy to think of the wave as the final, cataclysmic event, but the Titanic’s downfall was much more complex than that. The real devastation came from the structural collapse, which had already begun before the wave even reached the ship. The wave, while undeniably a force to reckon with, was just one element in a much larger, more complex disaster.You are speaking of the wave as though it was an outside factor, not directly related to the sinking, that added a new element to the situation. It wasn't. The wave was a result of the bow suddenly dipping lower and is generally considered to be a result rather than a cause of the earlier stages of the break-up. I would agree with [USER=146608]@Arun Vajpey[/USER] that it occurred well before the final separation of the two main sections.[QUOTE="Luca Gelmetti, post: 481947, member: 208890"]So I think the Titanic's sinking was a much more layered and prolonged event than most representations show.I would agree on that. Theories of the break-up have gradually evolved into a quite complex sequence of events.
  13. Arun Vajpey Arun Vajpey
    I think the Titanic's sinking was a much more layered and prolonged event than most representations show. The break-up and final plunge were certainly both intertwined and complicated events that are very hard to describe. That said, [USER=137378]@Samuel Halpern[/USER] does a great job in his Centennial Reappraisal book and I believe his calculations are very close to actual events. The illustrations and descriptions on pp118 to 120 are very interesting and allow the rest of us to try and work out what it must have been for the people still on board the Titanic at the time.[QUOTE="Luca Gelmetti, post: 481947, member: 208890"]The wave that is so often depicted striking the Titanic at 2:15 also doesn’t fit into the timeline of events as I see it. By the time the wave would have hit the ship, the Titanic was already well on its way to breaking apart. It’s easy to think of the wave as the final, cataclysmic event, but the Titanic’s downfall was much more complex than that. The real devastation came from the structural collapse, which had already begun before the wave even reached the ship.On p118 of Sam's book there is an illustration of what the Titanic must have looked like at about 02:15am; at that point it was about 10-degrees down at the head and while the hull was probably largely still intact, the graph on p119 shows that the "bending movement" on the keel and rest of the structure was rapidly peaking. The actual
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