On April 14, 1912, the legendary Titanic liner crashed. Since birth, the Titanic has been a very famous ship, the most luxurious liner of its era, as well as the largest transport object ever created by man. The terrible catastrophe, which claimed many lives, quickly served as fertile ground for the spread of a wide variety of rumors.
The very first of them is about its unsinkability, created not by the Harland & Wolff shipyard, on which the Titanic was built, and not by White Star Line, the owner of the Titanic, but by the press. The Irish News and Belfast Morning News, June 1, 1911, reported on the Titanic's hull dimensions, described a system of watertight compartments and electrically operated watertight bulkheads, and concluded that Harland & Wolff had made the ship virtually "unsinkable."
Other gossip concerns the "real" reason for the sinking of the Titanic. Based on the Titanic English newspaper special, Walter Lord reported that after the book A night to remember, published in 1955, he received several letters from Ireland explaining the "real" reason why the Titanic went to the bottom. The number of the Titanic's hull, built in Belfast, was 390904. According to this version, the number hid a secret destiny. If you write this number by hand, depicting the number 4 somewhat enlarged and angular and adding a space after the second nine, and then bringing it to the mirror, the number will turn into the inscription “No Pope” - “No to the Pope”. Irish Protestants assumed that this was done on purpose by the workers, and divine retribution was not long in coming. On the other hand, many people in England strongly believedthat hundreds of Belfast workers who were building the Titanic drowned with the ship. This statement is illogical, since their work was completed almost a year earlier.
One myth ultimately proved to be true. Survivors described the last minutes of the Titanic in different ways. Some witnesses claimed that the ship broke in two, while others denied this. Colonel Gracie, in his book published in 1912, categorically rejected the point of view of another eyewitness to the tragedy, 17-year-old Jack Thayer, who claimed that the ship's hull had broken in half. Gracie assumed Thayer mistook the fall of the pipe for the fracture of the ship. But after the Titanic was discovered in 1985 and convinced that it was broken in two, it became clear that Jack Thayer was right. The incredible fact took place on April 15, 1972. The radio operator of the American battleship Theodore Roosevelt received an SOS signal. A Morse code burst through the interference in the headphones calling for help from the sinking Titanic - radio operator Lloyd Detmer decided he was crazy. Just in case, I asked the shore. The response from the shore was surprisingly calm and strange: do not react to the SOS signal, follow the same course. Already at the port, the battleship team was explained that the long-sunken "Titanic", of course, could not send calls for help. And in general, there was no SOS signal. Either the radio operator fancied, or someone rudely joked. However, Detmer found it suspicious that the explanations about his delirium or unidentified hooliganism on the air were given by representatives of the special services, and not by the military authorities. And he started an investigation - at first just out of curiosity. And then I got carried away and ended up in a psychiatric hospital. But before that I managed to dig up a lot of interesting things. Detmer found in the military archives the reports of his fellow radio operators that they too had received strange radiograms - allegedly from the Titanic. Rewrote the dates: 1924, 1930, 1936, 1942. I drew up a table and simply calculated that ghosts appeared on the air about once every six years. In 1978, Detmer was already specifically waiting for the signal. And he assured me that he had received it. Nothing is known about what happened in 1984 and 1990. The radio operator-researcher was recovering at the neurosis clinic in Baltimore. But in April 1996 in the Canadian newspaper Sun there was a note about the next SOS signal from the Titanic, received by the Canadian ship Quebec … Some scientists believe that "a phantom of a radio signal was formed in the space-time field": its something, they say, and caught from time to time. Other scientists argue that the Titanic's SOS signal hit time in both directions. That is, it should have been caught in 1906, 1900, 1894 (and so on). According to other testimonies, there is evidence thatthat decades later, ships in the area of the sinking of the "Titanic" periodically fished out the "escaped" passengers! Moreover, they called their names and surnames corresponding to real persons from the ship! The last time they caught was a ten-month-old girl who was swimming in a lifebuoy with the inscription "Titanic". Unfortunately, she could not tell anything, and after years she did not remember anything from her childhood.
There are still many blank spots in the history of the Titanic. Investigations are ongoing, and, probably, we have to learn many more facts of its creation, triumph and death. As a symbol of vanity and "unsinkability".
