The Night Lives On Read Online Free

this,” Franklin later testified at the U.S. Senate investigation. “During the entire day we considered the ship unsinkable, and it never entered our minds that there had been anything like a serious loss of life.”
    How close to “unsinkable” really was the Titanic ? Did she embody the latest engineering techniques? Was she as staunch as man could make her? Did she at least represent what we have now come to call “the state of the art”?
    The answer is “No.” Far from being a triumph of safe construction, or the best that could be done with the technology available, the Titanic was the product of a trend the other way, a trend that for 50 years had seen one safety feature after another sacrificed for competitive reasons.
    In 1858 a ship had been built that really did comeclose to being unsinkable. This was the Great Eastern, a mammoth liner of 19,000 tons and nearly 700 feet in length. She proved a commercial disaster—unwieldy, under-powered, uneconomical, and unlucky—but in one respect she was superb. She brilliantly incorporated every safety feature that could be devised.
    The Great Eastern was really two ships in one. Two feet, 10 inches, inside her outer hull was a wholly separate inner hull, the two joined together by a network of braces. Like the Titanic, she was divided into 16 watertight compartments by 15 transverse bulkheads, but on the Great Eastern, the bulkheads ran higher and had no doors. To get from one compartment to another, it was necessary to climb to the bulkhead deck, cross over, and go down the other side. The bulkhead deck was also watertight, with a minimum of hatches and companion-ways. Finally, the Great Eastern had two longitudinal bulkheads extending the whole length of her boiler and engine rooms. This honeycomb of walls and decks gave her a total of some 40-50 separate watertight compartments.
    The acid test came on the night of August 27, 1862, two years after she began her trans-Atlantic service. Steaming for New York with 820 passengers, the Great Eastern was off Montauk Point, Long Island, when she scraped an uncharted rock, ripped a gash in her outer skin 83 feet long and 9 feet wide. Considering her size, the hole was comparable to the damage that sank the Titanic.
    But the Great Eastern did not go down. She sagged to starboard, but the inner skin held and the engine rooms remained dry. Next morning she limped into New York Harbor under her own steam.
    Her survival was a tribute to the engineering genius of her builder, Isambard Kingdom Brunel—and to the mood of the times. The mechanical engineer was the western world’s new hero—and no wonder. Twenty years before the building of the Great Eastern , the only way to cross the Atlantic was by sailing packet. Slow, cramped, and unpredictable, the trip could take a month. Then, almost overnight it seemed, came these absurd-looking floating “teakettles.” Their pistons hissing and clanking, their tall chimneys belching smoke and sparks, their paddle wheels thrashing the waves, they quickly cut the trip to less than ten days. The men who wrought this miracle—the engineers who made steam do their bidding—were deferred to on every question involving the design and construction of these new contraptions. If Brunel wanted his “leviathan” to be the best in every way—size, speed, strength, and safety—that was the way it would be, regardless of cost.
    But the engineers did not have the last word for very long. The speed and reliability of the new steamships meant a great surge in trans-Atlantic travel, with profits further fattened by the growing emigrant trade and generous mail contracts. The stakes were high, and by 1873 eleven major lines were fighting for their share. Entrepreneurs and promoters moved in, and the perfect ship was no longer the vessel that best expressed the art of the shipbuilder. It was the ship that made the most money.
    Passengers demanded attention; stewards could serve them more easily if