The Great Titanic Conspiracy

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The British White Star Line had stiff competition in England and across the globe. Locally, it had a fierce rivalry with the Cunard Steamship Company, Ltd., which in 1906–07 had sent on its maiden voyage the world’s then-largest passenger ships, the Lusitania and the Mauretania. a b Mark Chirnside (2006). " Olympic & Titanic – An Analysis of the Robin Gardiner Conspiracy Theory" (PDF) . Retrieved 4 October 2008. One of the controversial [5] [6] and elaborate theories surrounding the sinking of the Titanic was advanced by Robin Gardiner in his book Titanic: The Ship That Never Sank? (1998). [7] Gardiner draws on several events and coincidences that occurred in the months, days, and hours leading up to the sinking of the Titanic, and concludes that the ship that sank was in fact Titanic 's sister ship Olympic, disguised as Titanic, as an insurance scam by its owners, the International Mercantile Marine Group, controlled by American financier J.P. Morgan that had acquired the White Star Line in 1902. People seem to love a good insurance fraud story, so maybe it’s unsurprising that this conspiracy theory is one of the Titanic’s most popular. This one posits that someone switched the Titanic with another White Star Line ship, the R.M.S. Olympic. But as Paul Burns, vice president and curator for the Titanic Museum Attractions in Missouri and Tennessee, points out, “it just doesn’t make any sense.” The Olympic was the first to be built, and as the line’s namesake, it was considered the lead ship. Its maiden trip was widely heralded, and its first few voyages were unqualified successes. But on just its fifth voyage, the vessel ran into serious trouble.

A fire began in one of Titanic 's coal bunkers approximately 10 days prior to the ship's departure, and continued to burn for several days into the voyage. [24] [25] Fires occurred frequently on board steamships due to spontaneous combustion of the coal. [26] The fires had to be extinguished with fire hoses, by moving the coal on top to another bunker and by removing the burning coal and feeding it into the furnace. [27] This event has led some authors to theorize that the fire exacerbated the effects of the iceberg collision, by reducing the structural integrity of the hull and a critical bulkhead. [28] [29] On April 14, 1912, the Titanic collided with an iceberg, damaging the hull's plates below the waterline on the starboard side, causing the front compartments to flood. The ship then sank two hours and forty minutes later, with approximately 1,496 fatalities as a result of drowning or hypothermia. [1] Since then, many conspiracy theories have been suggested regarding the disaster. These theories have been refuted by subject-matter experts. Don Lynch and Ken Marschall (1992). Titanic: An Illustrated History. Hyperion. pp.136, 139. ISBN 1562829181. The Titanic’s powerful owner, banking magnate J.P. Morgan (far right), is at the heart of many conspiracy theories. Historica Graphica Collection/Heritage Images/Getty Images // Getty Images The Olympic,” they write, “like the Titanic, was fitted originally with the same 14-porthole arrangement on the port side of her forecastle, but two additional portholes were later fitted; they were there in March 1912.”The tear in the hull of the Olympic after the Hawke incident. Kirk and Sons of Cowes/Heritage Images/Getty Images // Getty Images Titanic sank due to enormous uncontrollable fire, not iceberg, claim experts – The Independent. 3 January 2016. Retrieved 3 January 2016. The hull number painted on the ship was 401, the same as its yard number at Harland and Wolff, and its Board of Trade number was 131,428. Yet even if one of its numbers had read “NO POPE,” there weren’t any Catholic workers at Harland and Wolff for it to upset. The company had driven its Catholic employees away in the late 1800s, and “by the twentieth century, Harland and Wolff had a reputation for only employing Protestants,” writes Annie Caulfield in Irish Blood, English Heart, Ulster Fry. Titanic Conspiracies". Titanic Conspiracies | Stuff They Don't Want You to Know. 6 October 2017 . Retrieved 9 October 2017. The Break Up". The History Channel. Archived from the original on 3 November 2008 . Retrieved 11 November 2008.

Senan Molony has suggested that attempts to extinguish the fire – by shoveling burning coals into the engine furnaces – may have been the primary reason for the Titanic steaming at full speed prior to the collision, despite ice warnings. [30] Most experts disagree. Samuel Halpern has concluded that "the bunker fire would not have weakened the watertight bulkhead sufficiently to cause it to collapse." [31] [32] Also, it has been alternatively suggested that the coal bunker fire actually helped Titanic to last longer during the sinking and prevented the ship from rolling over to starboard after the impact, due to the subtle port list created by the moving of coal inside the ship prior to the encounter with the iceberg. [33] Some of these foremost Titanic experts have published a detailed rebuttal of Molony's claims. [34] See also [ edit ] Proponents of either theory point toward a number of clues: the Titanic didn’t allow for a public examination before its voyage, out of fear it would be found out by experts as Olympic in disguise, theorists claim. And then there are portholes. A recent popular Reddit post examines pictures of the Titanic under construction and the Titanic on its first voyage, and finds the second picture suspiciously changed and close to the Olympic. Nope. The late Titanic historian Walter Lord wrote that he received letters from people in Ireland relaying this “NO POPE” story beginning in the mid-1950s. Yet as Burns pointed out in his 1986 book, The Night Lives On, there was no such number attached to the Titanic. Rather, the White Star Line swapped ships for the voyage from Southampton to New York, and the ship billed as the top-of-the-line Titanic was actually an older ship: the Olympic. What’s more, the conspiracy theory suggests, the entire crash was an insurance scam gone wrong. J.P. Morgan and the Heyday of Big Ships

JMS Engineering study. "RMS Titanic: Complete Hull Failure Following Collision with Iceberg" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 9 September 2013 . Retrieved 31 December 2012. The Olympic and Titanic being built side-by-side. Library of Congress/Corbis/VCG via Getty Images // Getty Images L.M. Collins (2003). The Sinking of the Titanic: The Mystery Solved. Souvenir Press. p.16. ISBN 0-285-63711-8. 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.

Find sources: "Titanic conspiracy theories"– news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR ( April 2016) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message) Titanic Disaster: New Theory Fingers Coal Fire – Geological Society of America. 11 November 2014. Retrieved 3 January 2017. Shetty, M. R. (1 February 2003). "Cause of death among passengers on the Titanic". The Lancet. 361 (9355): 438. doi: 10.1016/S0140-6736(03)12423-3. ISSN 0140-6736. PMID 12573421. S2CID 45973512. Were there a conspiracy, one would expect that the insurance policy would have been changed to cover the entire value of the ship,” Chirnside writes. “As it was, White Star could only expect to recoup two-thirds of the ship’s value.” The theory hinges on the fact that Morgan had originally planned to sail on the Titanic but changed his mind shortly before it took off. Yet it doesn’t offer any explanation for how he caused the ship to hit an iceberg and kill over 1,500 people, let alone the three men he supposedly intended to die. To top it off, the theory claims Morgan wanted to kill them because they opposed the creation of the Federal Reserve, even though Astor and Guggenheim don’t appear to have taken a position on it and Straus actually supported it.Titanic researchers Steve Hall and Bruce Beveridge have published a book on the subject, Titanic or Olympic: Which Ship Sank?They’ve also helped to write other books of Titanic history, including Titanic: The Ship Magnificent. The two take the porthole argument straight on. Mark Chirnside. "The Olympic' Class's Expansion Joints". titanic-model.com. Archived from the original on 31 January 2018 . Retrieved 19 April 2012. HOARDING BY BANKS A CAUSE OF PANIC; This, Stewart Browne Says, Is the Objection to Aldrich Plan, Which Does Not Stop It". The New York Times. 18 October 1911. ISSN 0362-4331 . Retrieved 15 January 2023.