10 Ways You Think About The Titanic All Wrong

10. It Wasn’t Really About Speed

The story of Titanic's collision with the iceberg is pretty simple - ship speeds along, lookouts don't see iceberg, ship turns too late, iceberg cuts hole in ship. Except not a single one of those statements is actually true. So let's go through them all and look at what really happened on that cold night in April 1912.

For starters, while speed was a very big deal on board - she moved faster than most other ships out on the ocean and there were rumblings of an attempt to break the record for fastest crossing of the Atlantic - how fast Titanic was going wasn't as deciding a factor in her fate as modern day versions present it.

In fact, speed wasn't really a big deal for White Star at all - they were much more concerned with the luxury of the ship, hence the decadent first class sections, complete with that grand central staircase - and while Titanic was moving fast upon collision it was nothing extreme; the ship never went at full speed. It's simple physics to suggest that had the ship been moving slower then there would have been more time to turn, which is technically true, but to say that it was excessive and someone was at fault for this implies there was an element of negligence or of putting the passengers in danger, which wasn't the case.