“Titanic” Disaster: Report of the Committee on Commerce, US Senate (1918) [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

“Titanic” Disaster: Report of the Committee on Commerce, US Senate (1918) [pdf]

senate.gov

89 pointsmiobrien59 comments

I actually like the recommendations parts and already talks about encryption!

>The committee finds that this catastrophe makes glaringly apparent the necessity for regulation of radiotelegraphy. There must be an operator on duty at all times, day and night, to insure the immediate receipt of all distress, warning, or other important calls. Direct communication either by clear-speaking telephone, voice tube, or messenger must be provided between the wireless room and the bridge, so that the operator does not have to leave his station. There must be definite legislation to prevent interference by amateurs, and to secure secrecy of radiograms or wireless messages. There must be some source of auxiliary power, either storage battery or oil engine, to insure the operation of the wireless installation until the wireless room is submerged.

Also the HTML version is here https://www.titanicinquiry.org/USInq/USReport/AmInqRep01.php

Nearly all those recommendations have effectively been implemented in modern boats... Not sure if the law requires it, or boat designers just see it as a sensible design.

Quite impressive for someone to read an incident report and actually implement the recommendations - so often they sit in a filing cabinet forever.

> Quite impressive for someone to read an incident report and actually implement the recommendations - so often they sit in a filing cabinet forever.

That's not really true. There is a saying when it comes to transportation regulations, "Safety regulations are written in blood." That is, nearly all safety regulations are the result of analysis after a tragic accident.

Oh yes, but nearly all accident reports make perhaps 30 recommendations, any one of which would probably have averted the disaster that just happened, of which only perhaps 3 are implemented. The other 27 usually get skipped because they're too costly/politically unpopular/no longer seem important after some other changes have been made to prevent reoccurance.

Genuine question, as I have no domain knowledge: is it usual that 10% of recommendations are adopted and 90% are ignored?

I have no maritime knowledge, but I do handle a lot of incident reports. Yes, it's common for there to be 30 recommendations and 3 get fully implemented. Perhaps a few more get part implemented or people talk about doing them and it goes nowhere.

Based on my work in software systems yes.

Generally when I write a postmortem there is a long list of modifications that could solve the problem. However they all have different costs, different effectiveness, different specificity and may overlap in different ways. This means that the high-cost, highly-specific modification may not be worth implementing when a lower cost and very broad modification can cover that same class of problems (even if not quite as effectively).

As an example you may have two recommendations:

1. Queue the requests and add many retries so that if a problem occurs in the future the requests are not lost and the problem can be fixed or allowed to resolve itself.

2. Add a second implementation of the process using different technologies and dependencies and fail over to it if the first implementation fails.

If this specific type of request is not very latency sensitive 2 is likely not worth it even though it is an improvement over just doing 1. 2 might be the better solution as well however 1 would greatly mitigate not only the specific request that had a problem this time but all similar requests in the system so 1 is good to do even if 2 is done for the other types of request.

In the end I would say that both are good recommendations however the logical business choice is just to do 1.

That's probably how it should be. Every regulation has a cost. If you want to manage that cost efficiently, you should look at the set of recommendations as a portfolio, compare across multiple accidents, and implement the most cost-effective recommendations that will prevent the most accidents.

In aviation and maritime transport the implementation of those recommendations and findings are the reason they are among the safest means if transport.

In moder boats, maybe. In modern life? Not so much >There must be definite legislation to prevent interference by amateurs, and to secure secrecy of radiograms or wireless messages.

Update that to 'the interwebs', and we are [still] sadly lacking.

/!totc

IMO we've done a good job of securing the transport layer, most attacks these days are exploiting data at rest on the client or server.

SOLAS. International maritime law requires a lot of stuff to ensure the Safety Of Life At Sea. SOLAS is initially a treaty which happens because of Titanic, but was updated repeatedly and eventually moved to a model where the safety rules change and you either keep up or you need to explicitly say "Nope, our country hates safety now". Unsurprisingly nowhere civilised wants to do that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOLAS_Convention

SOLAS doesn't make a lot of requirements of recreational vessels but in practice you'll have a Digital Selective Calling VHF radio much like SOLAS requires a container ship to have, because either local laws require it or just it was really annoying without it as you can't talk to anybody. DSC has automated Mayday. So it's practical to teach children how to activate it at about the same age you teach them to make a 911/ 112/ whatever phone call. The radio will make Mayday radio calls, automatically giving its location (unless it doesn't know) and its identity, and explaining that there's a problem, but it doesn't know what the problem is. Somebody will come investigate, because SOLAS also made explicit what is obvious to most mariners, that you should always come help people. The ocean will definitely kill us if it gets a chance, so by the Golden Rule we should all pitch in to save others.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_selective_calling

SOLAS also requires float-release EPIRBS which are beacons that a COSPAS/SARSAT satellite can see from space, and again transmit their identity, so a shore-based emergency response co-ordinator can see e.g. this beacon is registered to a medium sized power yacht named "Example", we don't know what's wrong with it, but its beacon is activated, so either it sank or its in trouble and the beacon was activated manually (or somebody fucked up). The owner's satellite phone doesn't answer, he gives a home number, his wife answered and said he's fishing with two friends, due back this evening.

My little trivia for the Titanic has always been that Violet Jessop was on board, surviving three accidents from sister ships: Titanic, Olympic and Brittanic!

Go read the wiki, it's amazing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violet_Jessop

The report mentions the ship making a C.Q.D. call, which I wasn't familiar with.

The name comes from the earlier telegraph "CQ" call for alerts, named after the French word "sécurité", abbreviated as "sécu" which is how the letters C and Q are pronounced in French. "D" is added to indicate distress. Sending a CQD call means sending the letters C,Q,D in Morse code; this practice was later supplanted by SOS.

Wikipedia has a page with more information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CQD. It mentions the Titanic disaster: "Harold Bride, the junior radio operator, suggested using SOS, saying half-jokingly that it might be his last chance to use the new code."

What I especially appreciate are the recommendations at the end. The Titanic was a disaster, but the good news is that it was carefully analyzed and changes were made to greatly reduce the impacts of problems in the future. For example, laws were changed changed so that there had to be enough lifeboats for everybody on the ship.

Currently software developers are often not learning from previous security disasters. I hope that will change in the future. There are already efforts to start writing up about important problems, and that will be a start.

> Currently software developers are often not learning from previous security disasters.

Perhaps some developers aren't, but many are. It may also be that their recommendations or efforts are ignored or overruled ("that'll make things too slow/costly/etc").

Most importantly, Titanic-like disasters involving numerous losses of life generally prompt regulation or lawsuits at the very least. There is a significant financial incentive not to let accidents happen.

Data breaches or misuse of personal data is not punished (at least not in the US), neither by the government nor by the market. There is no financial incentive there.

There is a significant financial incentive not to let [cost-ineffective] accidents happen.

The regulation to have life boats for all was the trigger for the capsizing of the Eastland in 1915. The addition of lifeboats cased the ship to be too top heavy and it flipped over while boarding. This killed 844 passengers, more than the passengers killed on the Titanic [1].

While it’s important to have backups in failure cases. It’s important to also consider the impact backups have in contributing to other failure cases.

Another example, people often wonder why airlines do not equip passengers with parachutes in the case of a crash. The answer is that people do not know how to use them, and would likely injure or kill themselves. Furthermore, they wouldn’t help in the period of flight where accidents are most likely to happen, which is take off and landing [2].

Disasters are a systems problem. And when looking to mitigate, we need to consider the efficacy of the mitigation and the total influence of mitigation’s on contributing to the likelihood of other failure cases.

[1] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/eastland-disaster-kil...

[2] https://simpleflying.com/commercial-planes-parachutes/

Blaming the new regulation for The Eastland capsizing is verging on dishonesty. The boat was poorly designed and had already nearly cap sized in 1904 and 1906. It was bought for a bargain in 1914 because it was known to be unsafe. The addition of the new six lifeboats was only one modification amongst many which were done without due care and merely the straw that broke the camel back.

Lifeboats in particular were probably the wrong fix, not because of Eastland, which was just an unsafe ship and would doubtless have found some other excuse to kill everybody, but because lifeboat maintenance and testing causes injuries and occasionally deaths, while in the modern era the need to evacuate passengers to lifeboats grows smaller.

I think MAIB (the Marine [edited: this said Maritime but that's wrong] Accident Investigation Branch, a UK government agency) wrote a report about this at one point. In coastal waters particularly the ship's master is realistically never going to encounter a situation where abandoning to lifeboats is the right choice. Fire is the most likely reason to consider it, but modern vessels should be able to contain plausible fires well enough to reach safety, even if as a result the ship is damaged beyond economic repair. Just loading the passengers into lifeboats and putting the lifeboats into the sea is a pretty fraught endeavour, you will probably injure either a passenger or crew member doing it - and that's before any risk from being in a tiny boat out at sea.

More than 1500 people died when Titanic sank.

> Currently software developers are often not learning from previous security disasters. I hope that will change in the future.

Current security disasters are typically exclusively financial or social and don't involve the death of those impacted. So, in a certain sense, I hope this doesn't change in the future.

You can find the full report, along with the appendices with the list of crew and passengers, here: https://books.google.com/books?id=twnY7_eFDuQC&pg=PA7287&lpg...

The tables are also more nicely formatted in this version. And Google has kindly performed OCR as well.

You can download a PDF of the entire 1912 congressional record, of which report is a small part, here: https://books.google.com/books/download/Congressional_Record...

A classic case of correlated failures. If you have multiple redundant systems, but anything that damages one system is also likely going to damage others, then a failure is much more probable than you would expect based on the level of redundancy.

In this case the redundant systems were the watertight compartments. The engineers thought the ship wouldn't sink because it was unlikely for five of them to fail at the same time. But they forgot just how likely it was that any incident (e.g. an iceberg collision) that damaged one compartment would likely also damage many others.

So in other words, redundancy requires subsystems' Pr(failure) to be independent of each other.

I mean the Titanic suffered a 100 meters long side-swipe damage, no redundancy could account for that. No one thought that the Titanic was unsinkable, it's just that no one thought that anyone would smash the ship against an iceberg at that speed, because why would they. Unfortunately the clear, moonless sky effectively camouflaged the iceberg due to the low contrast and false horizon. Even ships today would maintain a lower speed at night when needed despite having a radar and access to satellite images, but the Titanic had to cross the ocean faster than the Olympic did before.

Yeah, no redundancy could account for it, which is why confident predictions that the Titanic was uniquely unlikely to sink due to the presence of redundant systems were so ridiculous.

Keep that in mind next time you think your system is ultra-reliable because you have 50 instances of every service, but they're all running in us-east-1.

Page 3 states that the cost of the Titanic, "fully equipped", was 1.5m pounds sterling.

According to:

https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/monetary-policy/inflation/in...

this equates to around 120m pounds sterling today.

It seems to me that there's no way you could construct anything like her for that amount of money today. I wonder what gives.

Labor laws, mostly.

like how if someone looses a hand in your factory, they get compensation?

Yeah, or the fact that hard hats are required, people are required to be paid more than 50 cents an hour, you can’t force 1 employee to work 80 hours a week continuously, etc. All of that adds to costs. For good reason, don’t get me wrong, but the cost of labor in the western world has exploded over the last 100 years.

Inflation isn't a scalar.

Can you elaborate? I’m intrigued, always thought of it as a scalar

Different things have different price changes over time.

For example, in 1973 a 2N2222 transistor was $0.79 at Radio Shack.

Today, a single 2N2222 is $1.29 at Jameco. It's $0.95 at AmplifiedParts.com. It's $7 for 100 of them at Amazon.

If we go by the price of 2N2222 transistors and use the price for single units at Jameco we get inflation of 1% per year over the last 50 years.

In 1977 the price of volume I of Apostol's "Calculus" in hardback was around $20. Now it is $153 on Amazon, for the same book. By "same book" I don't just mean hardback. I also mean the same content. It was on the 2nd edition in 1977 and Apostol saw no need for any further revisions.

Using Apostol volume I as our yardstick inflation has been 4.6% per year over the last 45 years.

The most complete way to represent inflation would be as a vector whose components are the inflation for each individual good or service.

To get a scalar for inflation they take another vector that represents how much of each good or service that some hypothetical typical consumer consumes and combine them to get what the overall inflation is for a typical consumer.

I've never looked into how the pastDate -> currentDate valuations are calculated. I've seen things like "adjusted for inflation" type notes, but is that just for the single number of the total? Do the adjustments take into consideration how much extra labor costs now vs then? Do the adjustments consider raw material price increases, etc?

You can look up the Wikipedia article on almost any comparable ship and see how much it cost to build. I have done that for several examples, and I would guess that a passenger ship compliant with all current regs and standards and carrying ca. 3500 guests would cost ca. USD$1 billion. So that’s roughly the adjustment for inflation. Also adjustment for the new regs and updated regs since Titanic.

$1B USD is a long way off from the £1.2m -> £120m I replied to though. That 1.2->120 just seemed way too low which is why I asked.

Possibly the true rate of inflation is under-reported

In the nineties the UK basket of consumer goods used to calculate inflation suddenly included a well specified PC.

Not only was this PC a vastly disproportionate weight in the new calculation of deemed essential domestic goods, but strangely the specification never was upgraded and so the effect on calculated inflation was strongly negative.

Consider this was masking inflationary signals for well over a decade before ZIRP took over the economy...

My regular go-to for getting a feeling for the value of old GBP and USD prices is measuringworth.com, which gives a range of values based on not just the regular consumer price index-based inflation, but also some additional indices, like the evolution of wages and GDP. As measured by the latter two, the cost of the Titanic might have been rather more like somewhere between 600 to 1,500 million pounds:

https://www.measuringworth.com/calculators/ukcompare/relativ...

(Edit: Somewhat funnily, it seems one of the help pages on measuringworth.com actually uses the example of the Titanic: https://www.measuringworth.com/tutorial4.php)

Actually I bet you wouldn't be too far off. Random googling seems to suggest that the average cruise ship today is under $1 billion: https://gangwaze.com/blog/how-much-does-a-cruise-ship-cost

These are _much_ bigger ships than the Titanic, and with much more sophistication, complexity, luxury, etc.

If ships were still as simple today as the Titanic was I imagine 120m pounds would actually be pretty close.

The sister ship, Olympic, was refitted after the accident and had a long career to 1935. It had its own set of illustrious fatal incidents. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Olympic

There is a new podcast Did Titanic Sink that suggests it was actually the Olympic that sunk instead of the Titanic and the ships were switched for insurance fraud reasons.

https://www.rnz.co.nz/programmes/did-titanic-sink

That cinsiracy theory is as old as the Titanic. Besides involving the intentional killing of hundreds if people, it never made sense for a ton of reasons. It was alos debunked hundrds if times by now...

I'm only a few episodes in but so far it seems reasonable.

It doesn't involve intentially killing the people, since if the ship didn't hit an iceberg there would have been time to rescue them.

Let's assume the complete BS theory for a second. It would mean to switch two huge ships without anyone noticing. Repainting, changing the interior and all that involves a shipyard. Once that is done successsfully wothout anyone wondering why they are painting Titanic over the letter Britannic or something else, nobody in the crew should realize it. It wouod also mean the naval architect of those ships is in on it as he was onboard. Then it means having some ships in port on stabd by for the rescue ops, again hard to ccordinated without anybody on those ships eondering why they are still in port. In port, well, that it self is stupid. Why not have them on route and near by the Titanic when you scuttle her? Because scuttling is what you have to do, on high seas, without the people opening the valves to turn on you later. And why? Because unless there is some other shipping towing an iceberg to the Titanic to convenently hit, how exactky do you sink a perfectly good ship?

So it either all of that, or it is just an accident caused by bad technology, bad practices, incomoetence, corporate preasure ans greed and bad luck. Your pick on what you want to believe.

Many of your questions indeed have already been answered in the first few episodes. Just a few quick points:

> Repainting, changing the interior and all that involves a shipyard.

The ships were in shipyards together after the damage to the Olympic, and major parts were swapped between them. Sure, many people would notice.

> Why not have them on route and near by the Titanic

They were meant to have ships nearby.

> how exactly do you sink a perfectly good ship?

The iceberg wasn't meant to sink it. When the ship left port, there was a large fire on board, one that had been going for days or weeks.

Ah, I wondered when you would bring up the tremendously dangerous, and absolutely normal for the time, bunker fire. Guess which bunker was emptied first, ad was common practice on coal fired ships? I assume next in line will the pictures showing the extensive heat damage on the hull caused by that fire. Those damages you only see in one picture of a whole sequence when the Titanic left port and simple shadows.

I don't know about damage to the hull but at the official investigation they did mention the fire was bad enough they needed to cut holes in a bulkhead for the smoke to escape. And those two sections, if flooded, would be enough to sink the ship.

I'm not sure if that's the theory on how it was supposed to happen.

> That conspiracy is as old as the Titanic.

Indeed. My Uncle was involved with the installation of Samson and Goliath [0], the two yellow cranes at Harland and Wolff. Goliath was installed in 1969, and the story of the ships being swapped was told to him then.

The story told to him was that Morgan had ships ready to sail to the rescue from New York, but they ended up fog bound and delayed.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samson_and_Goliath_(cranes)

I have always wondered why the General Slocum incident (955 dead) in NYC in 1904 has never received more attention.

I tried to Ctrl-F search for "DiCaprio", but it's just scans.

Why did he have to die, you know?

"Woman and children first", but especially first class :-)

the report says

- the titanic did not beak in two parts

- there was no substantial suction

So the movie is inaccurate

The movie is right. Some survivors said it broke in half, many didn’t. It was thought it went down in one piece until the shipwreck was discovered in the 1980s.

If so, then the video footage of the Titanic in two pieces on the ocean floor must also be inaccurate.

Some passengers got this wrong, but the Titanic did broke in two. It's hull girder couldn't tolerate much bending, as the water filled the front of the ship, it started to break after the stern was up 15 degrees. One passenger claims that he even heard when it first snapped. Many witnessed the ship breaking in two and sinking. Later we found the wreckage that also confirmed it.

Please do not commit the mistake of believing a 100 year old paper over your own eyes or credible evidence.

The ship lies on the ocean floor until today, broken in two parts with almost half a mile separating them.

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