"if a tree falls in the forest and no one blogs about it, does it make a noise?"

Today marks 100 years since the R.M.S. Titanicsank in the North Atlantic, tak­ing the lives of over 1,500 souls  with her in those icy waters. And over the last year or so, the com­mer­cial side of the enter­prise has been heat­ing up at an amaz­ing pace.

The Titanic has always had an allure about it — an amaz­ing feat of engi­neer­ing that was brought down on its maiden voy­age, tales of hero­ism and chivalry (women and chil­dren first), class strug­gles and unfore­seen safety needs. Indeed, it now stands as one of the great­est lessons of all time of man’s hubris in the face of nature, and will for­ever remind us that we need to plan for the worst pos­si­ble con­tin­gen­cies despite our con­fi­dence in our own tech­no­log­i­cal advances.

Titanic

Nat­u­rally, the 100th anniver­sary brings about its own spe­cial obser­vance from long­time admir­ers as well as those who may have just dis­cov­ered the story. The Wall Street Jour­nal tal­lied some of those events and prod­ucts (“Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Titanic Busi­ness 100 Years Later”), such as view­ings of A Night to Remem­ber, memo­r­ial cel­e­bra­tions in sig­nif­i­cant loca­tions like Belfast, Southamp­ton and Cher­bourg, a Titanic fra­grance from sal­vaged sam­ples of essences car­ried by a per­fume maker who trav­eled on the ship, recre­ations of the meals, and much more.

But one of the more cre­ative acknowl­edg­ments of the anniver­sary has to be from The His­tory Press, a British pub­lish­ing com­pany that started the @TitanicRealTime Twit­ter account to chron­i­cle the progress of the ship as if sent from aboard the ship itself. The tweets began exactly a month before and have picked up pace on the last day of the ship’s voy­age on April 14–15.

Each of the tweets is hash­tagged with the appro­pri­ate per­son or cat­e­gory of peo­ple aboard from which it would have come. For exam­ple, crew mem­bers, offi­cers, engi­neers, the cap­tain, first class pas­sen­gers, Thomas Andrew (the ship’s builder), the band­leader, pas­sen­gers in the lifeboats, the Carpathia (the ship that res­cued the sur­vivors) and more all have their own hash­tags. And as the events unfold, we’re able to wit­ness the obser­va­tions first­hand — some­times very eerily.

Here are some rep­re­sen­ta­tive tweets from the Titanic Voy­age account (which has over 400 in total):

A chill­ing and haunt­ing reminder of what hap­pened that fate­ful night. It’s amaz­ing to think of all of the engi­neer­ing advances that went into what was then the largest mov­ing object in the world. There are a num­ber of things that went wrong on that voy­age that led to the death of so many — the way the instruc­tions to port round the ice­berg, the rever­sal of the engines, the safety reg­u­la­tions that didn’t keep up with the advances in the ship’s size, the speed with which the ship sank, etc. But just in terms of the advance of com­mu­ni­ca­tion, the Mar­coni wire­less that they had on board seems so prim­i­tive com­pared to what we have at our fin­ger­tips with smart­phones every day now. Think of how dif­fer­ent the out­come might have been with bet­ter com­mu­ni­ca­tion tools!

May we be thank­ful for what we have at our dis­posal today and for­ever remem­ber the pas­sen­gers, crew and offi­cers of the Titanic.

I leave you with this short playlist of songs that were said to have been the last played by the band as the pas­sen­gers assem­bled for lifeboats: “Song d’Automne” and two dif­fer­ent ver­sions of “Nearer, My God To Thee” from the 1958 film A Night to Remem­ber and of course the 1997 film Titanic.

Titanic 100th Anniversary

Posted by Scott Monty

{ 0 comments }