The Tiny Mistake That Doomed the Titanic
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 screwups, each of which reinforced and amplified the other mistakes, that made the Titanic’s sinking so deadly. However, of all those screwups, there was one mistake, that if it had been avoided, might have averted the whole tragedy. It began just before the Titanic sailed from Southampton to New York on April 10th, 1912.
On that day, the Titanic’s second officer, David Blair, was replaced with the more experienced Charles Lightoller. However, Blair never gave, and Lightoller never asked 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.
