“It was the world's largest liner, the greatest creation of human hands. Almost all the achievements of science and technology known to civilizations were used during its construction. On the command bridge of the ship were officers who, besides being the best of the best in the Royal Navy, excelled in all fields of knowledge concerning winds, currents and sea geography.
They were not just sailors, but scientists. The same requirements were imposed on the entire crew - sailors, stokers in the engine room, cooks in the galley, deck stewards, maids and other service personnel. The ship service was in no way inferior to that of a first class hotel….
[…] For some half a minute and with just one turn of the lever in the captain's cabin, engine room and a dozen more places on the deck, ninety-two bulkhead doors could be lifted, dividing the lower part of the ship's hull into nine sealed watertight compartments.
If one of the compartments began to fill with water, these bulkheads would rise automatically. The ship would remain afloat even if any nine watertight compartments were completely flooded, but none of the known accidents at sea could lead to such consequences, so the steamer Titan was considered practically unsinkable."
This is how the story of the famous American novelist and author of short stories Morgan Robertson (1861-1915) "Futility", or The Crash of "Titan", published in 1898 begins.
In Robertson's story, the passenger liner Titan is hit by an iceberg on the April night en route to New York and sinks. Due to the insufficient number of lifeboats on board, along with the ship, almost all passengers go to the bottom.
"Futility" was written 14 years before the fateful flight of the Titanic of the present. Mystical coincidences in the description of ships, their technical characteristics and circumstances of death are amazing.
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The book told about the ship "Titan", which was considered unsinkable, but sank in the Atlantic Ocean after colliding with an iceberg. The author populated his fictional liner with rich passengers - and here the Titan was remarkably similar to the real Titanic. The novel begins with the words "This ship was truly huge" - such was the Titanic.
Like the Titanic, the Titan had everything except the most important thing, namely the required number of lifeboats. Was not on the giant ship and other simple but useful things that would help the passengers to escape.
On the fictional Titan, for example, there was no sharp object on the boat deck - an ax or a hunting knife - to cut through the ropes that hung the boats. The real Titanic did not have the red flares to signal distress, and the lookouts had no binoculars.
In the novel, "Titan" outnumbered all existing ships in mass, and in a collision with any ship, it would simply cut it in half, and he himself would receive, well, perhaps only slight damage in the form of rubbed paint. In fact, the only floating object, Robertson writes in his book, with which the Titan could not compete in mass, was precisely the iceberg, which as a result destroyed the liner.
comparison table
Fictional "Titan" / Real "Titanic"
Displacement (in tons)
70000/52310
Length (meters)
243.8 / 269.1
Collided board
right / right
Top speed (mph)
25 / 23-25
Number of people on board
3000 / about 2200
Cause of death
Iceberg Impact / Iceberg Impact
The month of death
April / April
Ensured safety in ship structure
Watertight compartments, automatic watertight doors / Watertight compartments, automatic watertight doors
Number of boats
24/20
As you can see from this table, the Titanic has a lot of matches with the fictional Titan.
Of course, there were some discrepancies. The book Titan turned over and sank almost immediately after hitting the iceberg. The real "Titanic", having received a hole, kept afloat for 2 hours and 40 minutes. The book Titan sailed from New York, not to New York. And his voyage was the third, and not the first, like the real "Titanic".
Foresight
Morgan Robertson's mystical gift of literary foresight is beyond doubt. Of course, he did not surpass the French writer Jules Gabriel Verne (1828-1905), and it is unlikely that anyone will succeed, who predicted in his works scientific discoveries and inventions in various fields of knowledge: from a submarine and an electric chair to an airplane. helicopter and space flights. However, many of the American's literary "insights" attract the closest attention to his work today.
Thus, in 1905, M. Robertson's book "The Destroyer of Submarines" was published. The author described a military submarine and the combat use of an optical device, a periscope. Robertson even applied for a patent for the invention of a prototype military-grade periscope, but quite rightly was refused.
Because the simplest optical device of this kind was assembled at the beginning of the 15th century by the German Johannes Gutenberg (1398-1468), better known for his contribution to the development of printing technology, and was intended for pilgrims to watch religious ceremonies in Aachen over the heads of the crowd.
Inventor and engineer Simon Lake (1866-1945), who built the first submarine, the Argonaut Junior, for the US Navy in 1894, equipped the submarine with a periscope in 1902, three years before Robertson's story was published. However, this development was classified as a top secret one and was not known to the general public, therefore, one can speak of the genius and mystical gift of M. Robertson's literary foresight in this case too!
In 1914, M. Robertson publishes the story "Beyond the Spectrum", describing the coming war between America and Japan. As in Futility, this story has many coincidences with the real events of World War II: the strike by the aircraft carrier of the Imperial Japanese Army on the US naval bases and the incapacitation of the main forces of the US Pacific Fleet.
27 years before the beginning of real events, the author describes a treacherous attack on Japan without a declaration of war. Only the Japanese invasion fleet is not attacking Pearl Harbor, but San Francisco; and Japanese bombers are bombing American ships not in Hawaii, but in the Philippines!
The protagonist of the story stops the invasion using a top-secret Japanese beam gun-searchlight that he has captured. By the way, this ray gun was once invented by American gunsmiths, but all the drawings were stolen by the ubiquitous Japanese intelligence!
Weapons of mass destruction emitted deadly ultraviolet radiation, causing blindness and burns. Many modern observers exploring the creative legacy of Morgan Robertson for his next literary "providence" saw in this … the damaging factors of a nuclear explosion.