10 Conspiracy Theories about the Titanic

As things go, tragic occasions have a way of drawing in crazy conspiracies and paranoid notions.

Late at night on April 14, 1912, the R.M.S. Titanic hit an ice beg and sank into the cold waters of the North Atlantic, killing 1,517 of the 2,223 travelers and team individuals on board. To figure out this appalling and apparently irregular calamity, individuals over the course of the last century have recounted accounts of unfavorable indications of misfortune that were as far as anyone knows disregarded in advance, or turned elaborate paranoid notions to make sense of the "genuine" reason it sank.

Here, we make sense of the most, getting through paranoid notions and fantasies about the misfortune.

10. J.P. Morgan arranged the fiasco to kill his adversaries.

As per this conspiracy, tycoon financier J.P. Morgan arranged the Titanic catastrophe to kill off rival tycoons Jacob Astor, Isidor Straus and Benjamin Guggenheim, who all died on board.

The conspiracy depends on the way that Morgan had initially intended to cruise on the Titanic yet altered his perspective right away before it took off. However, it offers no clarification for how he made the boat hit a chunk of ice and kill more than 1,500 individuals, not to mention the three men he apparently expected to pass on. To finish it off, the hypothesis claims Morgan needed to kill them since they went against the making of the Central bank, despite the fact that Astor and Guggenheim don't seem to have taken a situation on it and Straus really upheld it.

9. The Titanic never sank.

There is a popular conspiracy theory that states that someone switched the Titanic with another White Star Line ship, the R.M.S. Olympic. However, Paul Burns, vice president and curator for the Titanic Museum Attractions in Missouri and Tennessee, argues that this does not make sense because of various reasons.

There is evidence that the Olympic was damaged while sailing from Southampton, England to New York in September 1911, and had to return to Harland and Wolff’s shipping yard for repairs. The company repaired the Olympic and sailed it back to New York and back. It returned to Belfast for more repairs just before the Titanic set sail in March 1912.

The conspiracy theory claims that some person or people found the Olympic too severely damaged to be profitable, and so at some point switched it with the Titanic to purposefully ditch the damaged ship, reap the insurance money and, it seems, kill a bunch of people in the process.

8. A mummy's curse ill-fated the Titanic.

William Stead, a British editor who subscribed to early 20th-century spiritualism and had spent the past several years claiming that a cursed mummy was causing mysterious destruction and disaster in London, was one of the passengers who went down with the Titanic. Like other myths about “Egyptian curses” and “Native American burial grounds,” this myth played off of colonialists’ anxiety about the people whose land they had plundered.

Onboard the Titanic, Stead happily repeated his tale of the mummy's curse to other passengers. After the ship sunk, a survivor recounted Stead's story to the New York World, and the media picked it up. The next month, The Washington Post ran this headline: “Ghost of the Titanic: Vengeance of Hoodoo Mummy Followed Man Who Wrote Its History.”

7. The Ship's number read 'NO POPE' in reverse.

Many people believe that Catholic employees of Harland and Wolff, the Belfast company that built the Titanic, were distressed when viewing the ship’s number, 3909 04, in a mirror. Was this bad luck that foretold the ship’s doom? ?

Nope. The late Titanic antiquarian Walter Master composed that he got letters from individuals in Ireland transferring this "NO POPE" story starting during the 1950s. However as Consumes called attention to in his 1986 book, The Night Lives On, there was no such number appended to the Titanic.

The structure number painted on the boat was 401, equivalent to its yard number at Harland and Wolff, and its Leading body of Exchange number was 131,428. However regardless of whether one of its numbers had perused "NO POPE," there weren't any Catholic laborers at Harland and Wolff for it to disturb. The organization had driven its Catholic workers away in the last part of the 1800s, and "by the 20th 100 years, Harland and Wolff had gained notoriety for just utilizing Protestants," composes Annie Caulfield in Irish Blood, English Heart, Ulster Fry.

Regardless of this reality, guests of the Titanic Exhibition hall Attractions in Missouri Tennessee still sporadically get some information about this legend.

6. Titanic's rafts

Ihe Titanic needed about sixty lifeboats to safely accommodate all the passengers. The chief designer Alexander Carlyle had planned to equip the ship with only 48 boats, but eventually the number was reduced even more to 20. These boats could seat only 1/3 of all the people on the ship, which was surprising given that there were so many people on board. The number of boats depended not on how many passengers were on the ship, but on the ship's weight and tonnage..

There were lifeboat drills on ocean liners at the time of the Titanic's construction, but this particular drill was never conducted on the ship. Captain Edward John Smith may have canceled it due to some unknown reasons, and this delay may have led to the tragedy that occurred. Other ships had warned about icebergs in the area near where the Titanic sank, so maybe Captain Smith didn't believe them. It took over a half an hour for the lifeboats to be launched instead of the standard 10 minutes.

Some people also blame captain Smith for allowing the first batch of lifeboats to leave half empty, the first boat with 65 seats contained just 27 passengers. Why weren't they packed full?

People were reluctant to leave the ship at the beginning and didn't realize how grave their danger was.

5. Fire made the Titanic sink

New research suggests that the original cause of the Titanic's sinking was not ice but fire. Journalist Sonam Maloney has been studying the disaster for more than 30 years, and it was he who discovered a huge 30-foot-long black spot on the hull of the ship. After examining a photo taken before Titanic's departure, he noticed it after obtaining an album of previously unpublished photographs. The fire had to have been burning for three weeks at a very high temperature before somebody noticed it..

Metallurgy specialists are certain that the fire might have effectively debilitated the metal decreasing its solidarity by as much as 75%, that is the reason the ice berg had no issues tearing an opening in the side of the boat, notwithstanding the fire, it would have been unimaginable yet the way that the chunk of ice hit the very spot with the compromised metal is one of the extraordinary connections in the chain of the Titanic's heartbreaking odeal.

If the management of the project knew about the fire and that the ship shouldn't have set off on that fateful voyage, it would have meant bankruptcy for the ship's owners. The thing is that at the time miners were on strike all over the country so there was no coal to sustain the Titanic, but the tickets had already been sold out and other ships had been cancelled since everybody wanted to be the first to sail on the largest ship known to man. That's why the owners of the Titanic bought all of the coal they could find and even though a call from other ships canceling the trip seemed out of the question, it was still possible.

The ship was turned so that the marks from the fire wouldn't be seen by the passengers. Thus, the journey began.

4. Binoculars might have saved the Titanic

Here is one more sad occurrence in the chain of sad occasions. There were no sonar frameworks in those times so to distinguish dangers in front of a liner, look outs kept watch utilizing binoculars, yet the binoculars on the Titanic had been locked away in an exceptional compartment. The only person with the key to the locker, second official David Blair, was supplanted without a second to spare. He was in such a rush to leave the boat that he neglected to hand the key over to his substitution. This game changing carelessness was found just three days some other time when the boat was adrift. In the event that the team had gotten the binoculars, they would have seen the ice berg before and would have had sufficient yime to avert the accident.

3. Titanic over speeding

Some have blamed Captain E.J. Smith for sailing the Titanic at a high speed through the iceberg-laden waters of the North Atlantic. They were falling behind schedule and this was unacceptable, potentially damaging the ship's reputation. The Titanic was moving much faster than it had been designed to, only due to leeway given by Captain Smith..

2. The Californian might have saved the travelers of the Titanic

Bad news was spreading throughout the ship as it sunk. One crewmember shot an emergency flare in the sky, but another nearby ship ignored it. Later, when this came to light, the captain of the Californian lost his job. But new research has vindicated him - at least partly. The reason nobody noticed the signals from the Titanic could be due to an optical phenomenon called 'light refraction'. This caused thermal inversion, which distorted the ship's appearance and made it difficult for people on deck to spot icebergs. Historic researcher ,Tim Moulton, is convinced that a mirage caused by refraction played a role that night too.

1. The Titanic's builders attempted to reduce expenses.

The Titanic had not sunk intact after hitting the iceberg but had broken apart on the ocean's surface. Scientists Tim Foecke and Jennifer Hooper McCarty have cast blame on the more than 3 million rivets that held the hull's steel plates together. They examined rivets brought up from the wreck and found them to contain a high concentration of 'slag', a smelting residue that can make metal split apart. This may have weakened the part of the Titanic's hull that hit the iceberg, causing it to break apart upon impact.