![]() ![]() Over the years, all sorts of people have offered up alternative theories to explain why the Titanic sank, ranging from being struck by a torpedo from a German U-boat to being brought down by an Egyptian mummy’s curse, Dan Bilefsky reports for The New York Times. “So he closes down efforts to pursue the fire and he makes this finding that the iceberg acted alone.”Īn article from the New York Tribune published shortly after survivors made landfall. “He was a shipping interest judge, and, in fact, he presided at a toast at the Shipwrights' Guild four years earlier saying ‘may nothing ever adversely affect the great carrying power of this wonderful country,’” Molony says. An official inquiry by British officials in 1912 mentioned it, too, but Molony says the narrative was downplayed by the judge who oversaw it. Just after survivors made landfall, several people who worked on the ship’s engines cited a coal fire as the cause of the shipwreck. You don’t want don’t want a loss of public confidence in the whole of the British maritime marine.” “They’d been facing massive competition from the Germans and others for the valuable immigrant trade. “Britannia rules the waves,” Molony says. Molony believes that the fire had started as early as three weeks before the Titanic set out for its maiden voyage, but was ignored for fear of bad press and the desire to keep the ship on schedule. “The best suggestion at the time was that this was a reflection." But Monology disagrees because, at the time the photograph was taken, he says, there was no road or dock on the shore which could have been reflected on the hull.Īccording to engineers from the Imperial College London, the streak in the photograph may have been caused by a fire in one of the Titanic’s coal bunkers-a three-story-tall room that stored much of the coal that fueled the ship’s engines. “We asked some naval architects what this could be, and nobody knew and everybody was intrigued,” Molony says. ![]() ![]() As they pored over the images, Molony was shocked to see a 30-foot-long black streak documented on the outside of the Titanic’s hull, close to where the iceberg struck its starboard side. About four years ago, Molony and a collaborator purchased the photographs from a descendant of the company’s director, who had found them stored in an attic. The photos had been taken by the engineering chief of Harland and Wolff, the Belfast-based company that built the doomed vessel. Because the bunkers where the crew stored coal for the engines sat right next to the hull, the heat from the fire would have transferred directly to the skin, damaging the Titanic's structure.įor Molony, who has spent decades studying the Titanic, the "smoking gun" came in a recent discovery of a trove of photographs documenting the ship’s construction and preparations for its maiden voyage. By that he means that while modern ships contain two hulls, at the time, the Titanic, like most ships of its day, just had the one. "The ship is a single-skin ship," Molony tells. Through researching photos and eyewitness testimony from the time, Molony contends that a fire spontaneously lit inside one of the Titanic’s enormous coal bunkers and critically weakened a crucial segment of the ship’s hull. In "Titanic: The New Evidence," which airs on the Smithsonian Channel on January 21, Irish journalist Senan Molony argues that the hull of the infamous ship was compromised weeks before it set sail. ![]() But after more than a century, a new documentary offers evidence that the iceberg wasn’t the only reason for the sinking of the “unsinkable ship.” Instead, the floating mountain of ice may have happened to strike the exact spot where the hull had been weakened by a coal fire blazing in the bowels of the passenger ship. The sinking of the Titanic has long been a cautionary tale about the dangers of hubris. ![]()
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