10 Ways You Think About The Titanic All Wrong

3. The Lifeboats Were Up To Industry Limits

Only 700 people out of 2,224 passengers and crew survived the Titanic disaster, although even without all the confusion on board of the state of the ship and the releasing of lifeboats nearly empty, the best case scenario would have been of just 1000 people surviving; in possibly the most shocking statistic about the disaster, the ship only carried twenty lifeboats, with a sum capacity of 1,178.

If that sounds almost as bad as none at all, then consider that the chances of a ship going down so fast with no help nearby was treated as all but impossible - if it wasn't such a disastrous sinking, there'd have been time for a ship to make it in time and people could be ferried across. Which sounds like incredibly flawed logic from a modern standpoint, but was how lifeboats were conceived (and thus why people at first refused to get into them - they could just wait).

Thomas Andrews, the ship's architect, had allowed space for more lifeboats, just in case, but given how a full set wasn't expected to be used, the company overruled his choice and kept the boats to a minimum. And I say minimum because despite having such a low percentage of spaces Titanic was well within the guidelines of the time, which had been originally drafted when ships were much smaller. Had the rules been adjusted so they scaled with the size and capacity of an individual ship then we'd have had a very different situation.