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A Surgeon With 300% Mortality Rate From a Single Operation and Other Historic Screwups

Khalid Elhassan October 11, 2020 32 min

Robert Liston - Surgery — Dr. Robert Liston operating. Wellcome Images

19. Sailing Without Binoculars Turns Out to be a Huge Mistake

The supposedly “unsinkable” Titanic, history’s biggest passenger liner at the time, famously struck an iceberg and sank on its maiden voyage. There was not one single mistake, but a series of mistakes, each reinforcing and amplifying the other mistakes, that made the Titanic’s sinking so deadly. However, of all those mistakes, there was one, that if had been avoided, might have averted the whole tragedy. It began just before the Titanic sailed from Southampton to New York on April 10^th, 1912, when the Titanic’s second officer, David Blair, was replaced with the more experienced Charles Lightoller.

The key to the locker containing the Titanic’s binoculars. The Telegraph

However, Blair never got around to giving, and Lightoller never got around to asking for, the keys to a locker that contained the ship’s binoculars. So the Titanic sailed with lookouts who lacked binoculars. During the days-long voyage before disaster struck, nobody figured that binoculars might be necessary for lookouts. If they did, then in an even more astonishing display of mistaken priorities, they did not deem the safety of the ship worth breaking the lock to get the binoculars.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.