Titanic Thoughts

I came across a book recently, Down With the Old Canoe, that discusses the constant interest in that giant luxury ship that sank way back in April of 1912. The book documents pre iceburg and post, examining the interest in Titanic that transcends time and generations. As a student of Titanic and possessor of fascination on what people do when facing imminent death, I learned many new things from this book. I recommend the book, and it brings to mind some quotes I have saved from authors and historians and survivors about Titanic:
“But Titanic took even more with her to the bottom of the Atlantic that night, she stole away forever the confidence and faith of an age.” ---Narrator of video

“Soon as the day after the Titanic sank, everybody knew that she was gone, it didn’t turn out to be so difficult to put in lifeboats for everybody, which was immediately done. The German ships, the French ships, the other British ships, all, within a week, had obtained lifeboats and life rafts to take care of everybody on board, even though they had said until the Titanic sank, that it was just totally impractical to try to have lifeboats for everybody. It took no time at all to change their minds, but it needed a disaster to do it.---Walter Lord, author A Night to Remember.

A week ((after disaster) had barely passed, but Titanic had already changed forever the complacent era that built her. -----Narrator of video


American Hearings in Waldorf Astoria “The Titanic Senate Hearings we would have to call the first hearings that had any kind of showmanship value. It was a social event where people wanted to go and hear it, it was psychodrama, it was theater, and nothing before had quite been seen like that.”--- Narrator, A&E television production

“The confident era that had created her (Titanic) was changing forever. Just two years after the Titanic disaster, the technology that was supposed to make life better for mankind would be used for its destruction in the First World War. By 1913 the lavish lifestyles of the Edwardian rich would be dealt a further blow by the introduction of income tax. And no longer was it acceptable to sacrifice the lives of the less fortunate to save those of the wealthy. The seeds of a social conscience had been sown. To the world stunned by her demise, Titanic appeared to have triggered the end of an era. The loss of man’s unsinkable ship seemed almost a divine warning. Like it or not, things were about to change.”---Narrator, History Channel Production


“There’s a sense, in today’s world, again, of man interfering with aspects of the natural world and there’s old Titanic lying there as a lesson for us for the future. It does seem to be that the continuing appeal of Titanic is that it’s a kind of a parable, or universal lesson in the mystery of the human condition, a dramatic revelation of man’s nobility and his fallibility in this mysterious and very capricious world that we live in.” Michael McCaughan, Curator of Maritime History Ulster Folk and Transport Museum.


“There was peace in a world having even tender to its way. Nothing was revealed in the morning the trend of which was not known the night before. It seems to me that the disaster about to occur was the event that not only made the world rub its eyes and awake, but woke it with a start, keeping it moving at a rapidly accelerating pace ever since, with less and less peace, satisfaction and happiness. To my mind, the world of today awoke April 15, 1912.”---quote from John B. “Jack” Thayer, Titanic Survivor