Titanic Irony
Well, I have finally found the exception to Søren Kierkegaard’s famous dictum:
Marry, and you will regret it; don’t marry, you will also regret it;
marry or don’t marry, you will regret it either way.
Laugh at the world’s foolishness, you will regret it;
weep over it, you will regret that too;
laugh at the world’s foolishness or weep over it, you will regret both.
Believe a woman, you will regret it;
believe her not, you will also regret it… etc…
Go down in the Titan, and you’ll regret it.
Don’t go down in the Titan, and you will not regret it.
You may have heard of the deep sea submersible Titan being lost over the last few weeks, after they went down to view the Titanic at the ocean floor, at a depth of approximately 4,000m, and how the wreckage of the Titan was eventually found a few days ago in the depths, on the sea floor.
It is assumed that the Titan imploded under the pressure of sea water at 4,000m, which is approximately 40,000 kPa.
It turns out that the executive management of OceanGate, who made the Titan and managed the tours, had been warned about safety issues and inadequacies, oh, once or twice.
The billionaire who funded and managed OceanGate, Stockton Rush, ended up dying when the submersible imploded.
Irony is not reality according to historical minimalism
While we all certainly mourn with those who lost loved ones, whom we do not know for they move in circles far above ours, this much-publicised episode is so replete with irony that it reminds me of the book of Esther in the Bible.
For I remember reading a historical-minimalist commentary on this book, in which the scholar who wrote it commented that one reason why the historicity of the book can be questioned is that there are many ironies in the book of Esther, that could only arise in fiction.
When I read this comment I questioned his conclusion; such scholars obviously haven’t lived their lives with their eyes open in the real world: in real life, ironies abound, and this episode of the Titan perishing as it visits the wreck of the Titanic is no exception.
The Titanic.
Actually, rather ironically, in fact, or perhaps not ironically, I myself actually have a family connection to the Titanic.
My great grandfather was a radio operator by trade, and he was due to travel on the Titanic as the radio operator, however, at the last minute he changed his mind and decided that he would rather come to Australia than go to New York, and he changed ships.
I am sure there were plenty of radio operators eager to take his place, and a radio operator named Jack Phillips was chosen to replace him.
Had my great-grandfather been on the Titanic, of course, the whole story would have been different and the Titanic might well have been saved, for my great-grandfather is from an Irish branch of the family that is quite meticulous and technically minded — he might well have acted differently from Jack Phillips.
You see, Jack Phillips is implicated in the disaster: the Titanic received six warnings about sea ice. Jack Phillips failed to pass the warnings from the Mesaba about sea ice to the bridge. And later, the nearby SS Californian had stopped for the night because of sea ice and had also warned Titanic by wireless, but Jack Phillips responded by rebuking them and cutting off the transmission.
It was doubtful, anyhow, that the bridge would have heeded the warnings, for the Titanic was widely ‘known’ to be ‘unsinkable’.
Unsinkable
When they were building the ship, Alexander Carlisle, one of the managing directors of the shipbuilders Harland and Wolff pointed out that the geared Welin davits the ship was being fitted with could each manage three life-boats, giving the Titanic the potential to carry forty eight life-boats, and he recommended that the number be doubled, but he was told it was too expensive, and besides, the Titanic not only complied with the Board of Trade regulations, but by being “unsinkable” she had made them obsolete.
Being 882.75 feet long, the ship was the largest ship of its time and the hull was divided by fifteen transverse bulkheads into sixteen supposedly watertight compartments.
A special issue of the Shipbuilder magazine described her as “practically unsinkable” because of the electrically operated bulkhead doors, that “the captain can, by simply moving an electric switch, instantly close the doors throughout and make the vessel practically unsinkable.”
In fact, the pamphlets advertising the Olympic and the Titanic also said they are ‘designed to be unsinkable.’
When the deckhands were loading her luggage, passenger Mrs. Albert Caldwell asked one of the men, "Is this ship really unsinkable?"
"Yes, lady," he replied, "God Himself couldn't sink this ship.”
Uh oh.
Hubris.
Other examples of Hubris
Actually, this puts me in mind of hearing Colin Barnett, the premier of Western Australia, on the news, boasting that the mining boom would never end, just days before it ended.
I was also there in person when a multi-millionaire boasted, “I’m never wrong, I have a gift, I can tell when something is going to be a success, and this share issue is going to be a success,” and I thought to myself at the time, that sounds ominously like hubris waiting to be struck down.
This was on the Friday just hours before the dot com boom actually crashed while he was on the plane to England. The crash wiped his London share issue out in one fell swoop, and his whole fortune with it1.
My advice is, when you hear someone boasting like this, run in the other direction!
Or better still, rebuke him, if he (or she) is your friend:
Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business, and make a profit.” You do not even know what will happen tomorrow! What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes.
Instead, you ought to say, “If the Lord is willing, we will live and do this or that.” As it is, you boast in your proud intentions. All such boasting is evil. James 4:13-16
Your friend will surely thank you for saying this.
The Titanic hubris continued even to the very end: the idea that the Titanic was unsinkable continued to be espoused, even after knell of doom had sounded and the news had come that the Titanic had gone missing, in the very hour in fact when the ship was already sinking to the bottom of the ocean, Mr. A.S.Franklin the vice president of the International Mercantile Marine Company, reassured the public by saying ‘we are perfectly satisfied that the vessel is unsinkable.’
There is no doubt that the Titanic was a great and remarkable feat of human engineering.
But in the end it was simply water, the most common substance on the surface of the earth, humble H2O in its frozen phase, that sank the unsinkable ship.
The Titan
Then we come to the Titan.
For such a tiny little submersible, taking the name Titan must seem like tempting fate, particularly considering the fate of the Titanic.
And (while there are so many contradictory myths it is hard to make sense of them all) the fall of the Titans in Greek mythology is indeed a salutary lesson, too, for they were cast down by Zeus for challenging his presumptive reign, indeed, cast down into the darkest depths of Hades; so might not the names Titan and Titanic both seem just a mite inauspicious, when you were choosing names?
In any case, like the radio operator of the Titanic who ignored the sea ice warnings, and the company who commissioned the Titanic to be built who ignored the concerns of the ship builders about insufficient life boats, the man who owned and built the Titan, Stockton Rush, founder and CEO of the not-for-profit OceanGate, apparently ignored numerous safety concerns.
David Pogue of CBS
CBS Reporter David Pogue went on a trip in the submersible in December 2022, and his report for CBS News Sunday Morning went viral on the internet after the sub lost contact with the surface a few weeks ago. In the segment, Pogue was saying to Rush that “it seems like this submersible has some elements of MacGyvery jerry-rigged-ness”. He said that the device used to steer and pitch the submersible was a wireless Logitech F710 game controller with modified control sticks, and that construction pipes were used as ballast.
David Lochridge, OceanGate’s director of marine operations expressed concerns.
One of the submersible pilots, David Lochridge, had earlier expressed numerous safety concerns in 2017. Lochridge was director of marine operations at the time, and responsible for the safety of all crew and clients, but he was fired by OceanGate.
OceanGate subsequently sued Lochridge for breaching the confidentiality agreement; Lochridge countersued alleging that they had fired him for being a whistleblower, and it was information revealed in the court papers that led to the article in NewRepublic that revealed this whole sordid story to the world.
Lochridge had initially expressed his concerns about the safety and quality of the Titan sub to OceanGate executives, and had offered remedies and solutions to all the issues, but they had ignored his concerns completely.
The court documents said:
Given the prevalent flaws in the previously tested 1/3 scale model, and the visible flaws in the carbon end samples for the Titan, Lochridge again stressed the potential danger to passengers of the Titan as the submersible reached extreme depths. The constant pressure cycling weakens existing flaws resulting in large tears of the carbon. Non-destructive testing was critical… in order to ensure a solid and safe product for the safety of the passengers and crew.
Lochridge wanted “non-destructive testing performed on the hull of the Titan but was repeatedly told that no scan of the hull or Bond Line could be done to check for delaminations, porosity and voids of sufficient adhesion of the glue being used due to the thickness of the hull.”
After this, Stockton Rush asked Lochridge to compile a report.
Over the course of the next several days, Lochridge worked on his report and requested paperwork from the Engineering Director regarding the viewport design and pressure test results of the viewport for the Titan, along with other key information. Lochridge was met with hostility and denial of access to the necessary documentation that should have been freely available as part of his inspection process.
OceanGate officials called a meeting on January 19, 2018, with Stockton Rush, the human resources director, the engineering director, Lochridge, and the operations director.
At the meeting Lochridge discovered why he had been denied access to the viewport information from the Engineering department—the viewport at the forward of the submersible was only built to a certified pressure of 1,300 meters, although OceanGate intended to take passengers down to depths of 4,000 meters. Lochridge learned that the viewport manufacturer would only certify to a depth of 1,300 meters due to experimental design of the viewport supplied by OceanGate, which was out of the Pressure Vessels for Human Occupancy (“PVHO”) standards. OceanGate refused to pay for the manufacturer to build a viewport that would meet the required depth of 4,000 meters.
The Titanic sits on the ocean floor at a depth of around 4,000 metres.
When Lochridge complained that OceanGate would be endangering customers, he was given “10 minutes to immediately clear out his desk.”
Will Kohnen of the Marine Technology Committee
According to NPR, the chair of the Marine Technology Society's Submarine Committee (formerly the Manned Underwater Vehicles Committee), Will Kohnen, also expressed safety concerns to Stockton Rush and said he wasn’t surprised when the sub went missing. “We've been aware of this project for some time and have had some concerns," he said.
The March 2018 letter was obtained by the New York Times from the Marine Technology Committee to Stockton Rush, signed by 38 experts from the Marine Technology Committee, that said,
Your marketing material advertises that the TITAN design will meet or exceed the DNV-GL safety standards, yet it does not appear that Oceangate has the intention of following DNV-GL class rules. Your representation is, at minimum, misleading to the public and breaches an industry-wide professional code of conduct we all endeavor to uphold.
The DNV-GL is a classification and accreditation company based in Norway. The Marine Technology Committee wanted the DNV-GL to be involved in the safety testing process of the sub, so that it could be properly accredited.
Rob McCallum
And in March of 2018 a deep sea explorations specialist, Rob McCallum, had also emailed Stockton Rush warning him against taking passengers on paid trips until the submersible had been tested according to the industry standards. McCallum said, "I implore you to take every care in your testing and sea trials and to be very, very conservative."
Rush replied defensively that he was "tired of industry players who try to use a safety argument to stop innovation ... We have heard the baseless cries of 'you are going to kill someone' way too often. I take this as a serious personal insult".
McCallum then sent Rush another email in which he said: "I think you are potentially placing yourself and your clients in a dangerous dynamic. In your race to Titanic you are mirroring that famous catch cry: 'She is unsinkable'".
What an incredible irony.
Rushing in
Stockton Rush’s name itself is ironic as well, and could be doubted as literary license if this wasn’t real life: Stockton Rush did indeed rush into the whole project, heedless of the many warnings about safety, ignoring all the established protocols and safety measures and the advice of engineers and experts, and now what remains of the Titan and its occupants, including Stockton Rush himself, will sit on the sea floor forevermore, in the darkness of the depths at the bottom of the ocean.
Edited somewhat to remove some irrelevancies
H/T to F— for the inspiration for this post.
Perth being earlier than most places timezone-wise, the crash happened while he was flying to London for the share issue.
Wow! Great essay, thank you.