Exactly 100 years ago these very hours, what was then the most advanced, largest ship in the world hit an iceberg and sank, taking the lives of some 1,500 people.
I first heard about Titanic when I was still a kindergartener. No surprise, perhaps. My father was born in 1906, which means he was almost 6 years of age when Titanic sank. Even in his hometown of Temesvár (present-day Timisoara, Romania) the sinking of the Titanic was big news. Everyone must have been talking about the disaster for days, weeks, months to come, and this must have left quite an impression on my father, who was always interested in things technical. It was from my father that I first heard about things such as an iceberg having 90% of its mass underwater, spark-gap transmitters, Morse code and SOS signals; all in the context of Titanic of course.
I also had a great uncle who was born in 1894. He was the one who taught me how to play chess. He was a young adult already when Titanic sailed… much to his misfortune, it also meant that he was a young adult in 1914, which meant serving in the first World War.
Titanic was a marvelous ship. She was the pinnacle of high-tech engineering. I find it especially haunting that her lights stayed on almost until the very end, thanks to her redundant electrical systems and, just as importantly, her heroic engineers.
Yet she went down, and two years later, the world that created it also went down in flames. I am reminded of a computer game from the 1990s, The Last Express (produced, incidentally, the same year as James Cameron’s Titanic). In this game, the player is tasked with solving a series of murder and conspiracy mysteries… on board the very last Orient Express to travel from Paris to Istambul before the outbreak of the Great War.
I hope we learned more than just the art of building safer ships in the past 100 years.