On this edition, two guests - Acclaimed science educator Dr Chris Smith on the fascinating newly-discovered "fifth force of nature" and - on the anniversary of the Titanic sinking in April 1912 - Irish journalist Senan Molony on his comprehensive research into the tragedy that claimed more than 1500 lives.
| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| Across the UK, across continental North America and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes and this is still the unexplained. | |
| Thank you very much for being part of my show, being part of the global family, 530-odd editions of the unexplained we now have out there, and we are rocking. | |
| And I couldn't do any of it without your support. | |
| Thank you very much for the kind things that you say, the guest suggestions, the news stories, the suggestions for how I can give the show a bit of pizzazz and maybe increase the output or certainly increase the pizzazz of the way the thing is presented to you. | |
| All very gratefully received. | |
| Especially, Jimmy, thank you very much for the things that you said and the suggestions that you made. | |
| I'm giving them some thought at the moment. | |
| Very good of you to do that. | |
| But all sorts of things that you suggest, and I'm going to be building them into the future model. | |
| You know, one of the things that I am not and have never been is a business person. | |
| And I did get to speak to Art Bell a couple of times and found that fascinating. | |
| Obviously, speaking to the great man, and he left us, didn't he, three years ago now. | |
| Those three years have flown by. | |
| But it was clear to me that he was a great businessman and had a knack for making stuff work and making money out of it, which I've never been a business person. | |
| I'm a journalist and a broadcaster. | |
| I love making programs. | |
| I love talking to people. | |
| So I've never really been into all of that stuff. | |
| And I guess I'm going to have to learn some of those techniques because this is a competitive and fast-moving world. | |
| And if you don't move with it, then, you know, there's a chance you might get left behind. | |
| So I'm learning all the time, but I don't think I'm ever going to have the business acumen that Art had. | |
| And I wish I could have picked his brains a little more while he was still with us, but sadly, he's not. | |
| Thank you very much to Adam, my webmaster, for his ongoing hard work. | |
| Thank you to Haley for booking the guests on the online show. | |
| And thank you to you for all of your feedback. | |
| If you want to go to my website, check it out. | |
| Maybe send me an email. | |
| Let me know what you think of stuff. | |
| Go to the website theunexplained.tv. | |
| Follow the link, and you can send me an email from there. | |
| Two things we're doing on this edition of The Unexplained. | |
| We are going to be marking another anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic with a conversation with Sennon Maloney, respected Irish journalist, who has a very different and very credible take on the entire tragedy. | |
| I think you'll find him a wonderful guest. | |
| He was from my radio show, and I'm presenting him here to you so that we can keep it in perpetuity online and it just doesn't disappear. | |
| I wanted it to be here. | |
| So he's going to be the second thing you will hear. | |
| And the first thing you will hear is something that made very big news last week and to some extent was overtaken by other events that happened last week, including the very sad death of the Duke of Edinburgh, Prince Philip. | |
| But the story that I'm also going to include here is this one. | |
| The fifth force of nature. | |
| You might have heard about this. | |
| Scientists may have to rewrite our grasp of how the universe works after they unearthed evidence of a fifth force of nature. | |
| Preliminary results from two experiments suggest something could be wrong with our understanding of tiny fundamental particles, the prospect that has the field of particle physics baffled and thrilled. | |
| Well, I spoke on my radio show last night as I record these words to the man behind the Naked Scientist podcast in the UK, very well-known broadcaster, science communicator, scientist, Dr. Chris Smith. | |
| And I wanted to get his take on what this important news means for all of us ordinary people who are not scientists. | |
| So that's what's going to be here first. | |
| Thank you very much for all of your help with my show, for the moral support that you've given to me and to the donations that you've made to the show. | |
| If you've done that recently, thank you very, very much. | |
| Okay, let's get first then to the fifth force of nature and Dr. Chris Smith. | |
| One is always very hesitant with particle physics and the unknown that lies therein. | |
| It was Niels Bohr, actually, forefather of quantum mechanics, who said if you're not completely baffled by quantum mechanics, then you didn't understand it. | |
| And I think that really applies to much of the world of this subatomic physics. | |
| So you're in good company. | |
| But basically, the news that's slowly trickling out, and when they say this is a light bulb moment, actually this is work that's been going on for years because to do the sorts of experiments that it takes to do this, A, take a long time, but you have to gather enormous amounts of data and then you spend enormous amounts of time leafing through that data to try to understand what it's revealing to you. | |
| And what independently has arisen from research in America, Fermilab, and also at CERN, which is the particle accelerator in Geneva, is evidence of muons behaving badly. | |
| Muons have got nothing to do with cats. | |
| They are a form of electron. | |
| They're like a heavy electron. | |
| So a negatively charged particle, about 207 times heavier than electrons are. | |
| So they're like a weighty electron. | |
| And the experiments that they've done in America, what they were doing was to accelerate muons in a circle and apply a magnetic field to them. | |
| And based on what we understand about how subatomic particles and our model of how particle physics works, the applied force should make these muon particles wobble. | |
| And it should make them wobble on a certain trajectory at a certain rate, if everything that we factored into the predictions that we understand about how particle physics and the universe works is right. | |
| So when the observations are made that the wobble is wrong, it tells you there's a missing link. | |
| Something is there doing something and exerting an influence that we can't account for. | |
| And that's one of the observations they picked up in America. | |
| I was rubbish at science at school. | |
| I really had to try very hard at sort of GCSE level of it. | |
| So this has revealed something that we do not yet know the nature of, but because of the effect it has on the muons and making them behave in a way that we didn't expect in an aberrant way, we know that it's there. | |
| So we have to do more work, presumably, to find out what this is. | |
| Something is exerting a force on these particles to make them wobble in a way that we can't account for. | |
| We understand there are four forces of nature. | |
| There's gravity. | |
| Everyone's familiar with that. | |
| The reason you're sitting on your chair, the reason you fall out of the window if you were to do so, unfortunately, is because the Earth is pulling you towards it because the Earth has mass and so do you. | |
| There's another force called the electromagnetic force. | |
| If you jump on the Docklands Light Railway or you go on something which uses a motor to spin, then you are using electromagnetism, discovered by Faraday in London at the Royal Institution during those amazing experiments in the 1800s. | |
| And then there are things we discover more recently, the strong and weak nuclear forces. | |
| These are the forces that hold particles together at a fundamental level. | |
| So everything we've accounted for so far can be explained in terms of those four things. | |
| So when you build a model of how things should behave, you take those into account. | |
| And so when something doesn't follow the rules, it tells you that perhaps there's another one, a fifth one of these fundamental forces of nature that we hadn't accounted for. | |
| And at CERN, what they've done is to slam these muon particles together at really high energies. | |
| And when they do that, you can create or breed a particle called a beauty quark. | |
| It's not a beauty contest, it's just they give these particles these funny names. | |
| There's a beauty quark. | |
| These don't exist normally, they're made by these collisions, but they quite quickly decay. | |
| They fall apart into what should be equal numbers of electrons and muons. | |
| But when you do the measurements, you measure a disproportionate number of one over the other, suggesting that something is skewing the process. | |
| Why is it favoring turning into one particle and not another? | |
| Is something applying a force? | |
| And it's that detection of what we expect to be, or the disparity between what we're seeing and what we expect to happen. | |
| That's the red light going on, saying something interesting here that we can't explain. | |
| We've got a missing piece in our puzzle. | |
| Right. | |
| And how do you think we may be able to harness and deploy this knowledge? | |
| Well, the way you do this is you build various models because at the end of the day, you've got to understand it because you can't use something usefully until you understand how it works, what its mechanism is. | |
| So in order to do that, you need to actually work out what it is. | |
| The way you work out what it is is to design some experiments that will test what it isn't or what it is. | |
| I mean, that's two ways of attacking a problem in maths. | |
| You can prove that something isn't the case under certain circumstances so you know when it is the case or you can turn it around and say we're proving this is this. | |
| So once you've got a handle on how it is appearing to behave you then design experiments to test how those behaviors should change under what circumstances and this enables you to constrain what these things are, what they affect and what they do. | |
| And once you begin to understand that, the mechanism of how they work you can begin to postulate what might be mediating these things. | |
| Is there a particle involved? | |
| Is there some kind of force involved? | |
| And then you can begin to say, isn't this interesting? | |
| If we look at this observation we couldn't explain before, why the universe is expanding, because the universe is getting bigger all the time. | |
| We think there's this notional thing, we don't know what it is, called dark energy that may be driving that. | |
| Maybe that when you start to look at these examples of things like dark energy, you can say, you know what, if we took that problem over here, we could solve the dark energy problem with that. | |
| And you begin to see parallels and then things begin to fit together and they become more plausible because they show how you can fit them together into a sort of grand unified vision of how the universe works. | |
| So this potentially fills a gap in our knowledge and gives us something new to work with. | |
| And presumably if we learn what this is and how to harness it, it might be useful to us. | |
| Ultimately, everything's useful because knowledge is power. | |
| But the more you understand about how the universe works, the more chance you've got of solving the ultimate problem, which is where we came from, why we're all here and where we're going. | |
| But along the way, very useful things spin off and spin out of this. | |
| And the fact that we're on Wi-Fi all over the place, that's because someone decided to solve a problem of how to make measurements with radio astronomy and how to link their telescopes together. | |
| You know, there are so many spin-offs of science that have really practical, tangible, useful applications in the course of the pursuit of pure knowledge that that's why the world's the rich place it is. | |
| Dr. Chris Smith, and clearly this is going to be very exciting in the future. | |
| We'll try and follow that. | |
| And also we'll try and do more to understand exactly what the ramifications of this discovery will be. | |
| It sounds as if they will be sizable. | |
| Coming next, as I said, we're going to be marking another anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic. | |
| Just to remind you, the Titanic British liner, White Star Line, sank in the North Atlantic on the 15th of April, 1912 after hitting an iceberg during what was to have been her maiden voyage from Southampton to New York City. | |
| 2,224 passengers and crew, more than 1,500 people died. | |
| I've been speaking with somebody I've been trying to get on the show for a number of weeks now. | |
| He is enormously impressive, Irish journalist Sennon Maloney, who's extensively researched the Titanic story. | |
| And he will tell you that a major contributory factor to what happened was not the ice, but it was a fire. | |
| Sennon, thank you for giving me your time. | |
| Not at all, Howard. | |
| And the Titanic has this fascination, even though it is so many years now. | |
| It is more than a century. | |
| Why do you think that is so? | |
| Well, because it is simply the Rolls-Royce of shipwrecks. | |
| It is a perfect encapsulation of humanity at that time, you know, the hierarchy of society as it was then. | |
| But it's also an encapsulation of humanity today. | |
| And we all can project ourselves onto that ship and wonder how we would react, because we might fancy that we would be very noble. | |
| And if you're a man, we might give away a place to a woman. | |
| If you're a woman, you might seek to protect your children if you have them and so on and so forth. | |
| But we don't actually know because when you're in that position, you don't know whether you're going to freeze or whether you're going to be valiant or whether you're suddenly going to quail and turn into a coward. | |
| So I think for so many reasons, and also because it brought down the curtain on the Gilded Age, the Edwardian time, a time of certainty and progress, all that was cruelly shattered. | |
| And next thing we had the Great War. | |
| And the 20th century Had suddenly begun very, very badly after the Victoria age of science and progress. | |
| So that's why I think it still has a grip on our imaginations. | |
| And of course, it's still fueled by so many individual stories, by new discoveries, and by the sheer impossible extraordinary fact that a ship, the largest then moving object ever wrought by the hand of man, can sink on its very first voyage. | |
| I think that's what gripped me when I was 14 years old. | |
| And I first read about it in an educational paper that my parents had bought me. | |
| And that was the extraordinary reality. | |
| She did sink on her very first voyage. | |
| And again, when you're rooting yourself in reality and you're stripping away all the frippery about millionaires and aristocrats and so on, it actually comes down to a lot of human mistakes. | |
| And the ship cannot be divorced from her time, the Edwardian era, and the particular circumstances of 1912, when there was a national coal strike that is the opera, if you like, from which the aria, the haunting area of the Titanic is torn. | |
| So now we remember the aria, but we don't remember the opera, which led up to it, you know, and which informed the whole sinking. | |
| You know, the words that came into my head as you were talking were needless tragedy. | |
| This was a needless tragedy. | |
| If a catalogue of mistakes had not been made, and people have differed over the nature of those mistakes and who were responsible for them, but this wouldn't have happened. | |
| But the whole thing is also overlaid with class, something that to this day we can't get away from. | |
| You know, class as a British thing, as an international thing, but in this country particularly, is, you know, the whole story is riven with it, isn't it? | |
| Well, it is to a certain degree. | |
| And I mean, that comes straight into the, plays itself out on the sloping boat decks 109 years ago in a few days. | |
| Today is the 109th anniversary of her leaving Queenstown in Southern Ireland. | |
| Irish people, you know, I'm Irish myself, we would obviously understand the English language and we would have a certain suspicion, if you like, of English officers who tell us to go back to our bunks and that everything is fine. | |
| We take that healthy scepticism with us and it's reflected in the statistics. | |
| I mean, the Irish had a better survival rate, pro rata, compared to people who didn't speak English, like the Syrians, you know, or Turks or Galicians, Russians, Poles. | |
| So that all feeds into it. | |
| And as does a readiness to, you know, defend for yourself. | |
| I mean, very interestingly, second class, you know, the backbone of Britain, the people who queue up for buses, they stood by, whereas some Americans in first class and so on, they fared extremely well in terms of salvation. | |
| The statistics show you all of that. | |
| So the British were rather too stiff upper lip for their own good in relation to, and they were very heavily represented in second class. | |
| But my overall point is that Titanic was, from an Irish point of view, it's an emigrant ship like many, many others. | |
| We've had so many coffin ships. | |
| We could give you a catalogue of ships that went down with very many Irish people aboard. | |
| And the Titanic is no different in that respect, even though she's been invested with all this magnificence and the ship of dreams cachet applied to her. | |
| Well, she was a very humble ship as well for the majority of people who were below decks, not in these fantastic suites of millionaires and who were hoping to have a new life in America. | |
| Well, you had to have your life in the first place, and that meant getting into a lifeboat. | |
| And thus, all the heroism had its counterpoint in the villainy and the cowardliness and doing what you had to do in order to survive, to make that new life. | |
| But also, because prestige was right at the heart of the Edwardian character, I mean, they wanted to make this voyage and they wanted it to be a success. | |
| And a bit like Brexit, it was overshadowed by difficulties and they had to be minimized. | |
| The difficulties were the coal strike. | |
| There had been a seven-week coal strike that threw the whole voyage into question, an actual coal strike, the very first in Britain. | |
| You remember the cataclysm of the 1984 coal strike with Margaret Thatcher was just as bad in 1912. | |
| Million and a half miners out of work. | |
| And the Titanic hadn't got enough fuel. | |
| And they were robbing and pillaging fuel from other ships. | |
| They cancelled a lot of their other sailings. | |
| They had reportedly had barges towed across from the other side of the channel with French coal. | |
| And they had meanwhile added in Scotch coal and taken some Irish coal. | |
| And her bunkers were only 66% full, really, for the crossing. | |
| So she was short of coal. | |
| And I think this is the heart of the whole matter. | |
| Because not only was she short of coal, but she also had an onboard coal fire, which is like you setting out to drive from London to Newcastle, maybe not having quite enough juice to get there. | |
| And then you've got a leak in your fuel tank. | |
| And that's why the Titanic then, it's quite simple, doesn't react to warnings of ice directly ahead because she hasn't got the fuel to divert and come back. | |
| And what's worse for her owners and for the managing directors on board and so on, what's worse for them is the prospect of running out of fuel. | |
| So they say, well, look, no passenger ship has sunk in 60 years. | |
| Let's just put the foot down and go for it. | |
| And that's what happens. | |
| Because of this belief that everybody had that this ship was unsinkable. | |
| And there seemed to be a perception that you could, as you've just said, you can do whatever you like with this ship and it will forgive you, which of course it didn't. | |
| Yeah, well, it didn't. | |
| And hitting a mountain of ice is like hitting a mountain of rock in the North Atlantic. | |
| They shouldn't have taken that chance, but they rolled the dice. | |
| They were playing the percentages. | |
| And unfortunately, the worst card came up. | |
| But then an extraordinary thing happened, Howard, because there are many people listening to us tonight who are amateur sailors and who will know how you are supposed to react when you are on a collision course with anything. | |
| Because don't forget, it's dark. | |
| You cannot tell if this is an iceberg, as indeed it was, or whether it's an oncoming craft that, for instance, hasn't Got lights for whatever reason, or it's a derelict. | |
| You have to trust that it might be governed by a human hand, and therefore, the rule is that you go to the right, you both avoid to the right. | |
| I mean, this would stop a lot of people bumping into each other on Oxford Street if anybody knew that we just go to stand to the right, you know. | |
| That's a rule that was introduced, which does the most good. | |
| It had been in play for like 60 years, and it's still the rule today. | |
| You avoid to starboard. | |
| And any amateur sailor listening to us tonight will know that rule. | |
| And yet the extraordinary thing at the inquiries is that the Titanic said she only ever went to the left. | |
| Do you remember that? | |
| She went to the left, and then she'd seen the berg so late that she scraped along the starboard side. | |
| If she had gone to the right then, does this mean that she would have been struck a blow at another part of the ship that wouldn't have done it such fatal damage? | |
| Yeah, I'll explain it to you very simply because icebergs are not like articulated lorries. | |
| When you're driving on a dual carriageway or whatever, you keep to your side of the road and a lorry will keep to its side of the road. | |
| But icebergs don't obey our nice little patterns. | |
| So when you avoid to the right, let's say that articulated lorry that you're only seeing the cab and the whole width of it is jackknifed across. | |
| So it's extending diagonally to your right. | |
| So that's what they do. | |
| They go to the right, they obey the rule, but suddenly the extraordinary positioning of the berg is actually at an angle and they realize that they're heading for a wall of ice. | |
| So now they have to apply opposite hard rudder and then they go to the left to try and avoid because suddenly the open water is all to the left, but they haven't got enough time to avoid. | |
| And that's why they waste so much time because they follow the rule. | |
| It's actually the rule that imperils all these people. | |
| And that's what they couldn't admit at the inquiries, that because they followed the rule, they collided with the iceberg. | |
| They nearly got away with it, but they had to go all the way back. | |
| So all the time that was wasted going to the right had to be reverse engineered to try and get to the left. | |
| And then they scraped along the starboard side and opened the ship in communication with the sea. | |
| And all those people were doomed to drown 600 miles from land. | |
| And we actually see this. | |
| In the movie, you see the lookouts. | |
| Yeah, and ringing the bell three times. | |
| So that's all they had to do, the lookouts. | |
| But then you see in the movie, you see them making the phone call. | |
| And that was actually admitted at the inquiries. | |
| If you're a lookout, you just have to say, three bells says object direct ahead. | |
| They subsequently make a phone call. | |
| And the only reason you make a phone call as a lookout is to say, guys, you're heading the wrong way. | |
| Or the iceberg extends to starboard. | |
| You've got to go the other way. | |
| So under the rules at the time, the officers, of course, know far better than mere men in the crow's nest. | |
| They hear the sounds and then they determine which, they apply the rule, they follow the rule. | |
| And it's only then when the lookouts make the phone call that the ship makes an attempted correction to the other side. | |
| And that's my argument because the official version is a complete nonsense. | |
| As any, again, any amateur sailor listening to us tonight knows that you don't just avoid to the left. | |
| And the question was never asked at the inquiries. | |
| Well, well, why did you break the rule? | |
| You know, because if you keep on breaking rules, you're going to collide with somebody someday. | |
| You know, if you insist on your brain. | |
| We can only speculate, Senna. | |
| Why would they not ask a fundamental question like that? | |
| Because it's in the interests of officialdom, which is hand in glove with the shipping companies. | |
| And don't forget, also has ships like the Lusitania and the Mauritania as built with naval money, British taxpayers' money, and acquirable in time of war. | |
| Britain is now being outbuilt by Germany at a factor of three to one in terms of dreadnoughts. | |
| Britain has mastery of the seas and wants to keep it. | |
| And if she damages the confidence of a traveling public, then they don't make their bookings on British ships. | |
| Then you have a major problem. | |
| So if the papers get hold, just like today, if the papers get hold of a story that suggests your crew were less than competent and maybe they panicked because they thought their ship was indestructible, that is about as damaging as it gets. | |
| Well, it's actually more damaging than that because the crew is completely competent and followed the rule. | |
| So it just happened to be in this one instance. | |
| Again, think of yourself walking down Oxford Street and somebody's coming towards you. | |
| You're going to collide if you both keep on your B lines. | |
| If you have a rule that you both avoid to the right, then nobody gets hit, you know, and no groceries get spilled or your expensive purchases at Fortnum and Mason's, Howard or not, all over the pavement. | |
| So what happened here is they followed the rule and the rule will save your life, you know, nine times out of ten. | |
| It's why we drive on, you know, the left-hand side of the road. | |
| You know, if you would insist on driving on the right-hand side of the road in Britain and Ireland, you would eventually collide. | |
| So they followed the rule, but in terms of the way the iceberg presented itself, the iceberg is a force of nature. | |
| It's not cooperating with human rules. | |
| So they go to the right and they're confronted by a wall of ice. | |
| And you cannot admit to the traveling public that the official rule on this one occasion, it's saving lives lots of other times, but on this one occasion, it takes 1,500 people to the bottom of the sea. | |
| And that is to do with the following of what you've been taught. | |
| And this was the one occasion when that was the wrong thing to do and when perhaps a more pragmatic approach was called for. | |
| Yeah, exactly. | |
| So there were two terms. | |
| You see, if you crash your car, Howard, and you say, well, I swerve towards the tree and then I swerve the other way and then the tree comes out in front of me, you know, your claim won't be entertained. | |
| So as I say, I mean, the real question has been out there for 100 years. | |
| It's staggering that nobody has said, why did the Titanic only officially admit to making one evasion maneuver? | |
| You see, if you make two evasion maneuvers, that's negligence. | |
| That's incompetence. | |
| If you make one, that's fair enough. | |
| Oh, yeah, the odds were against you. | |
| It was an act of God. | |
| You saw it too late. | |
| Blah, blah, blah. | |
| You know, one is allowable. | |
| Two is contradictory. | |
| Contradictory equals negligence. | |
| Negligence equals payout. | |
| It means disaster for the line. | |
| It means a loss of confidence in the traveling public. | |
| So I think I'm arguing that's what happened here. | |
| And the proof is simply that Titanic always said she only ever went to the left, and that would be breaking the rule. | |
| And every amateur sailor listening to us tonight, and professional men and women as well, they know that's the truth. | |
| And it's an extraordinary thing, but you know, a question was never asked because it was not in their interests to ask those questions, because everybody was, if you like, colluding in a nice little outcome that this is a once-off. | |
| And the same thing happened with the sinking of the Lusitania, which we know a few years later off the coast of Ireland. | |
| She was sunk in May 1915. | |
| But, you know, the official came up with an explanation of a nest of German U-boats lying in wait and so on when it was a lucky shot that disabled the engines and the engines just kept driving forward into the sea and she actually knifed to the bottom. | |
| So people will call me a conspiracy theorist, but I'm actually just a very, very basic realist. | |
| And the coal story is true. | |
| The coal fire on board is true. | |
| It narrowed their options. | |
| It explains why they went into an area that they were warned about. | |
| And then we can see from the official testimony that the explanation that was given doesn't stand up to the remotest scrutiny. | |
| And indeed, some commercials to take certain, and so I want to get to those. | |
| But the basic point we're making is that they might have got away with this. | |
| The ship might have survived, but for the fact that the fire on board, which is something that hasn't been talked about a lot through history and you've certainly highlighted, weakened the structure of the ship to make it susceptible. | |
| And that's why it was damaged as it was, and that's why it went down so quickly. | |
| Am I right when I summarize it that way? | |
| Well, you are. | |
| I mean, it's a quick sketch, but I mean, there was a fire on board, and it was in the exact place on the starboard side, very far forward, and exactly affected by, it was a main collision bulkhead, and it's affected by the influx of the water. | |
| As I say, they collided with the iceberg because the placement of the iceberg, the nature of that placement, she's very long, she's diagonal to the ship. | |
| They go the wrong way for the circumstances, but they go the right way to do it the rule. | |
| So it's the rule that dooms the ship, doesn't give them enough time to react when they realize they're heading for a wall of ice. | |
| They try to go the other way. | |
| And then there's a fire that's been blazing on board, and that is actually weakening the steel. | |
| It must hasten the sinking. | |
| And then it's a matter of conjecture. | |
| We can't tell because we can't get at the ship. | |
| She's down below, and she's buried in the sand down there. | |
| But that fire has undoubtedly weakened the composition of the steel. | |
| And this is a very thin bulkhead. | |
| Bulkheads incredibly didn't have much bulk in those days because you have to pay for your extra weight. | |
| It's like having a very, you know, thick wall in your house. | |
| You have to pay for the weight with extra coal to fuel that thing through the air. | |
| But they relied on the cleverness of their design to get them through. | |
| Yeah, and they had thin bulkheads. | |
| I mean, at a space with thousands of tons of freezing water now hurtling against this ship, it was only half an inch thick. | |
| And furthermore, they did another thing. | |
| You won't believe this, but just before you go to your break, they actually got that ship underway again for 10 minutes after the collision. | |
| So everybody sees the movie thinks the ship stopped immediately after the collision. | |
| It did. | |
| And then it got underway again. | |
| I would have told you morning, noon, and night that it was fatally crippled at that point. | |
| I had no idea. | |
| Let's pick this up in just a moment. | |
| I want to talk about the fire and the fact that this ship left the UK bound for New York with a fire on board that had consequences that allied to other circumstances you've just heard about caused one of the world's most notable tragedies and loss of life. | |
| The 15th or the 14th, depending on which side of the Atlantic you were on. | |
| And Sennon, crucial to what you say is that there was a fire on board this ship, a fire that weakened the structure, a fire that made it less effective. | |
| It left port with the fire blazing and continued with the fire blazing. | |
| And a decision was made because obviously your fuel is burning away and that's the fuel you need to power the ship. | |
| So if you lose in fuel, the only thing you can do is put your foot down. | |
| And that's why the Titanic was going unusually fast, yeah? | |
| Yeah, that's my argument. | |
| And when the survivors, which included crew, of course, were landed in New York, the first thing that happened was they rushed to interview all the prominent persons and they'd been sending Marconi grams saying mention prominent names and they all went to talk to the passengers and so on of note, the high society, the New York 400 people. | |
| But some canny reporters also sought out the crew and the crew told an extraordinary story. | |
| All the firemen, according to the New York Tribune and the New York Times, the New York Times, hardly a scurrilous William Randolph Hearst newspaper, and other New York papers, the New York Sun, they all reported that the firemen to a man, and they were all men, they reported that there had been a fire in the Titanic's hold that had raged unabated for five days. | |
| And they were all unanimous in saying this. | |
| And specific firemen were named. | |
| Many of them gave their accurate true names. | |
| And another officer was quoted anonymously, and he pinpointed where the fire was. | |
| So the fire was all the way forward, and it happened to be very close to where the iceberg struck. | |
| So it then has to try and resist the ingress of hundreds of thousands of tons of water as the ship is opened by collision with the iceberg. | |
| Now, this fire was then asked about at the British inquiry, and it was admitted by the chairman of the White Star Line, a chap called Harold Sanderson, who was giving evidence because Bruce Ismay, who was the managing director that everybody knows was on board, he was still giving his testimony in the United States inquiry. | |
| But Harold Sanderson admitted, yeah, there was a fire and it had, you know what, it wasn't just blazing from Southampton. | |
| It had been blazing from Belfast, where the ship was constructed and where she had to be delivered from. | |
| And then there was a week-long layover in Southampton and it continued to blaze there. | |
| And in fact, a chap, I highlighted this in a TV documentary in 2017 on Channel 4 and with the Smithsonian Channel. | |
| And then two years later, a chap walked into the antiques roadshow and he had a disc, a large disc in his hand of metal. | |
| And he said, My grandfather used to work for Harland and Wolf in Southampton. | |
| And my ears immediately pricked up because very few people know that Harland and Wolf, besides being the birthplace cradle of the Titanic in Belfast, they actually had a ship repair unit that was down in the heart of Southampton docks. | |
| They did indeed. | |
| Yeah, for many years. | |
| And this chap said that his grandfather had led a team that had drilled this disc out of a bulkhead in order to work a hose on this fire. | |
| Now, you have to remember that the Titanic was absolutely gigantic and they had not had, you know, they had not had coal fires, spontaneous coal fires of this nature and threat before because we're talking about a bunker that is three stories high. | |
| Okay, it's got 365 tons in it. | |
| A railway wagon would carry 10 tons and you would need 36 and a half of those to have the amount of coal we're talking about. | |
| So it's a gigantic vertical shaft full of coal, masses and masses of coal. | |
| And there's a fire in there and you don't know where it is within the bed or the mountain of coal. | |
| And you're trying to dampen it and you can't get out of it effectively. | |
| Now, why did it break out in the first place? | |
| Well, spontaneous coal fires can occur because it's a very strange, you know, we're always dealing with oil now. | |
| We forget how volatile coal was, but coal could explode. | |
| It could burn even without smoke. | |
| So it would be giving off gases and it would be combusting, but it wouldn't give you any sign of that, except the heat suddenly rises and eventually you get flame. | |
| So I went to see the top scientists on this. | |
| I went to see people like Guillermo Rain, who's a professor of thermodynamics at the Imperial University in London. | |
| I spoke to Dr. Martin Strangward, who's a metallurgist at the University of Birmingham, and I'm saying, guys, what would a coal fire of this intensity have done? | |
| We have some evidence from firemen who said that there were concave and convex bulges caused after the coal was eventually cleared from one of the bunkers that were affected during the maiden voyage. | |
| This is on the Saturday, this is the day before the collision, and you've got a warped and damaged, dented and dinged bunker. | |
| These are all, those words I use are direct quotes from these firemen who are talking about it. | |
| And what you have is an effect. | |
| So I'm describing this and showing the quotes from the transcript to the Spanish professor of thermodynamics. | |
| And I'm saying they're talking about a bulge, two bulges outward and a big bulge inwards, a sort of a W-shaped corrugation in the bulkhead. | |
| And he says, yeah, well that's exactly what you get with this type of mild steel at a certain temperature. | |
| And I said, well, what temperature is that? | |
| And he says, it's a thousand degrees Fahrenheit. | |
| Good Lord. | |
| And then I turn to the metallurgist and I say, well, Martin, what does that temperature do to the composition of that steel? | |
| And we've had steel brought up from the ship, you know, which shows it was pretty, Howard, it was pretty much top of the range steel, but the steel of that time wasn't perfect. | |
| It had a lot of slag in it. | |
| It had a lot of, you know, impurities. | |
| And Martin Strangwood says to me, well, that temperature over a prolonged period would have robbed the steel of 75% of its tensile strength. | |
| And it would have become brittle. | |
| And I said, well, brittle like what? | |
| Like glass? | |
| And he says, that bulkhead would have failed, eventually would have failed catastrophically. | |
| And don't forget, it's already had a hole cut in it for the hose. | |
| The hose is actually described in the evidence, but we never had a person before come forward with the actual disc where the hole went in. | |
| You know, I'm trying to track that guy down. | |
| Please get in contact with talk radio with myself, mysterious Southampton guy who has the disc. | |
| Please contact me because I'll be surprised who would listen to this. | |
| I will make some inquiries too, because I used to work in that area. | |
| No better man, Harry. | |
| We'll see. | |
| But look, this is astonishing that this could happen, that they allowed the ship to sail on fire. | |
| They thought they could deal with it. | |
| They thought that they could cope with the loss of fuel that was burning away by going very fast. | |
| It is then revealed or discovered that the whole thing has been weakened. | |
| So when the impact happens, it has the worst possible effect and the ship goes down very quickly. | |
| And the further tragedy of all of this in 1912, all these years ago, is that if that impact had happened and the ship was not on fire, the ship might have survived. | |
| Yes, you're quite right, Howard. | |
| You put your finger on it because other ships took similar levels of damage. | |
| There was a White Star ship called the Republic that collided with another vessel called the Florida and took almost worse damage. | |
| But she remained afloat for 36 hours. | |
| And that was in 1909. | |
| And of course, this is fresh in the minds of the Titanic passengers because they really believe, as these ships were advertised as unsinkable, they really believe that they are. | |
| And they think that in the case of the Republic, we had the first superstar broadcaster, you know, only trotting after you, Howard, but he was the Marconi man on the Republic who summoned a flotilla of ships to surround them and to take off the passengers in daylight. | |
| And the Titanic passengers are thinking, well, this is just a rerun of the same old thing. | |
| All we have to do is sit tight. | |
| The wireless will get to work and it will summon ships. | |
| But just unfortunately for them, the ships were a little bit too far away on the night the Titanic collided. | |
| And they were taking, were they? | |
| They weren't listening when they should have been. | |
| Well, a lot of them were taking the advice about the ice ahead to heart. | |
| They were taking evasive action, and that meant they were further away because the Titanic just decided to go straight through it. | |
| So these ships were further away than it might ordinarily have been. | |
| Meanwhile, the structural metal damage is hastening the ship's sinking. | |
| I can't say to what degree it hastened it, but it must have done according to the scientific experts. | |
| By the way, the British inquiry called no scientific experts. | |
| They wanted to suppress this fire as soon as it got mentioned. | |
| They tried to, you know, the presiding judge, Lord Mursey, tried to throw a fire blanket over us, if you like, you know. | |
| And the bus comes into this to protect the interests of the people, you know, the owners of the line, effectively, a lot of people were thrown under the bus. | |
| Yeah, and it's worse than that, Harold, because there had been a previous sailing with an unextinguished spontaneous coal fire by a vessel called the Cairn Rona, which was also leaving Britain in April in 1910, it happened to be, sailing for the United States. | |
| There was an explosion in that bunker. | |
| It was, you know, infinitesimally small bunker compared to the Titanic's gigantic stretching bunkers. | |
| There was a loss of life. | |
| There were people killed by the explosion. | |
| There were other people who had jumped into the sea in panic and were never seen again. | |
| And the ship managed to, it happened off Beachy Head and the ship managed to limp back into port. | |
| And on foot of that, the Board of Trade issued an edict that no ship was henceforth ever again to put to sea with an unextinguished bunker fire, a coal fire of any type that was burning uncontrolled, meant that the sailing couldn't go ahead. | |
| So, and you know what? | |
| They hit it. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Yeah, no, that is astonishing. | |
| And I'm glad that we're talking about this. | |
| This needs to be discussed more. | |
| I promised Ted, who texted or rather tweeted, just to ask you this very quickly, and I'm not sure if you can answer this in a minute or less, but there was this conspiracy theory that the ships were swapped and that the Titanic was swapped for its sister ship. | |
| Has that got any mileage? | |
| No. | |
| And, you know, I hate this phrase conspiracy theory when it's applied to the simple story of the fire because the fire is admitted. | |
| The fire was admitted in, and they broke the rules by going to sea without an unexplained fire. | |
| And furthermore, they hid the fire from a surveyor. | |
| And the surveyor gave evidence, if there was a fire, it should have been reported to me. | |
| I should have seen it. | |
| And he wasn't shown the fire. | |
| And so in today's terminology, it's criminal negligence. | |
| It's worse than that. | |
| It's rode off, as they say. | |
| It's corporate manslaughter. | |
| And people would go to jail today. | |
| But we've made great strides. | |
| We've made great strides because, but in those days, inquiries were about reassuring the public and closing the stable door. | |
| They were not about getting to the heart of the matter, much less apportioning guilt. | |
| Your texture asked about the switch theory. | |
| This came out, somebody came out with an idea that because the sister ship, the Olympic, had also been damaged, again, she'd been fairly navigate and negligently navigated. | |
| She came into collision, had some damage and had lost a propeller and so on. | |
| But the suggestion is that it wasn't the Satanic that was sunk, it was her elder sister, the Olympic. | |
| But you don't deliberately sink any ship. | |
| I mean, look what happened to Pan Am. | |
| You remember the Lockerbie flight? | |
| As soon as something happens like that, Pan Am went out of business because of Lockerbie over Scotland when all those many people were killed on the Made of the Seas, whatever that was, in the 80s. | |
| And Pan Am didn't survive. | |
| So, by the way, these ships were underinsured. | |
| So the company was bearing a lot of its own liability. | |
| So the Verticomb's conspiracy theories literally wouldn't hold water. | |
| We're pretty much out of time. | |
| I don't know whether you can answer this in a word, but I promised Frank in Essex I would ask it. | |
| If the ship had continued to go right and hit the iceberg full on, would it have stayed afloat? | |
| If the ship had hit straight on, if she'd crumpled her bows, she would have killed two, three, maybe 400 firemen and other crew because they were all located in the forecastle. | |
| They took the blows. | |
| They were underpaid and they kind of expected it in the same way as third-class passengers had no right to a lifeboat. | |
| The lifeboats weren't even on their decks. | |
| Sennon, I have to leave it there. | |
| Thank you so much for doing this. | |
| It's an absolute privilege to speak with you. | |
| Very quickly, what's your book called? | |
| Oh, thank you very much, Howard. | |
| Yes, I've written a book called Titanic, Why She Collided, Why She Sank and Why She Should Never Have Sailed. | |
| Sennon Maloney, thank you so much for doing this. | |
| Sennon Maloney, amazing speaker, remarkable communicator and diligent researcher. | |
| What do you think about that? | |
| And before that, you heard Dr. Chris Smith about something that has rocked in the last week, the field of science and physics. | |
| We'll bring you more about that. | |
| Thank you very much for being part of my show. | |
| We have more great guests lined up here on The Unexplained. | |
| So until next, we meet. | |
| My name is Howard Hughes. | |
| This has been The Unexplained Online. | |
| And please, whatever you do, stay safe, stay calm, and above all, please stay in touch. | |
| Thank you very much. | |
| Take care. |