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DOES ANYONE REALLY KNOW WHAT TIME IT WAS?

A Treatise About Time

(Revised and Expanded 07 April 2019)

By Samuel Halpern

On the night of April 14, 1912, at 10:25pm in New York (NY), a spark-excited radio transmitter blasted out a stream of radio waves into the night air. To wireless operators stationed on the La Provence, Mount Temple, and Frankfurt, and to the wireless operator stationed at , , there came the staccato sounds of a series of dots and dashes that read:

CQD DE MGY Require assistance. Position 41.44 north, longitude 50.24 west. Come at once. Iceberg.

It was a general call of distress (CQD) to anyone who could hear from the (radio call letters MGY) on her maiden voyage to New York. Ten minutes later, at 10:35pm New York time, Titanic sends:

MGY CQD Here corrected position 41.46 north, longitude 50.14 west. Require immediate assistance. We have collision with iceberg. Sinking. Can hear nothing for noise of steam.

For 73 years, the wreck of Titanic remained a mystery, lying at the bottom of the some 13 nautical miles to the east of the so called “corrected” distress position of 41° 46’N, 50° 14’W. Yet, back in 1912, all of Titanic’s surviving officers, as well as Captain Rostron of the rescue ship Carpathia, believed Titanic had gone down in the position worked out by Titanic’s fourth officer . In 1985 Dr. proved that they were wrong.

A TIME GONE WRONG?

At about 4pm NY time, Monday, , 1912, Carpathia’s Captain Rostron sent a wireless message to Olympic’s Captain Haddock that read:1

Capt. Haddock, Olympic: South point pack ice 41.16 north. Don’t attempt to go north until 49.30 west. Many bergs large and small, amongst pack. Also for many miles to eastward. Fear absolutely no hope searching Titanic’s position. Left Leyland SS Californian searching around. All boats accounted for. About 675 souls saved, crew and passengers; latter nearly all women and children. Titanic foundered about 2.20am, 5.47 GMT, in 41.46 north 50.14 west; not certain of having got through. Please forward to White Star, also to Cunard, and New York, that I am returning to New York. Consider this most advisable for many considerations. – Rostron.

The reported foundering time, “about 2:20am, 5:47 GMT,” implied that time carried on Titanic was 3 hours 27 minutes behind Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), or 1 hour 33 minutes ahead of mean time in New York. In the official Senate report that came out of the US Senate investigation into the loss of the SS Titanic, they wrote that an iceberg was sighted from Titanic “at 11.46pm ship’s time, or 10.13pm New

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York time, Sunday evening, April 14.” They listed the foundering time “at 12:47am, New York time, April 15.” Their conclusion was based on the 1 hour 33 minute time difference that was in the testimony given by Titanic’s surviving officers and Joseph Boxhall, and contained in the content of that wireless message sent by Captain Rostron to Captain Haddock. Were they right? Could a time difference of 1 hour 33 minutes really have been the case? Or, was a mistake made in the ship’s foundering time when given in GMT, just like a mistake was made in calculating where it was that Titanic sank?

TIME KEPT AT SEA

On land, time is based on a mean (or fictitious) sun that takes exactly 24 hours to go around the earth each day. However, time on board a ship in the early part of the Twentieth Century was based on the position of the true sun and therefore needed to be adjusted every day, an adjustment that was necessary because of the movement of the ship eastward or westward and something called the equation of time.2 Time kept by the apparent position of the true sun was called Apparent Time Ship (ATS) or more simply Apparent Time. Titanic and other vessels in 1912 set their clocks in accordance with the International Mercantile Marine (IMM) Company’s “Ship’s Rules and Uniform Regulations (July 1907)” that were in effect at the time:

Rule 259. Ship’s Time. The Officer of the Watch [OOW] will see that the ship’s time is changed between the hours of 10pm and 6am, the clocks to be set for Noon before 6am The Engine Room Clock must at all times agree with the Clock in the Wheelhouse, and must be corrected accordingly.

The operative words here are “the clocks to be set for Noon.” On White Star Line vessels, as on vessels of many other lines, clocks were adjusted close to midnight each night so that at Local Apparent Noon (also called solar noon) the next day, when the actual sun crossed the ship’s local meridian and reached its highest point in the sky, the clocks on board would read 12:00 exactly. For westbound vessels, such as Titanic on her maiden voyage, clocks had to be put back each night near midnight. For eastbound vessels, clocks had to be put ahead each night near midnight. As further explained in a 1924 White Star Line brochure given to passengers on westbound voyages:3

“On the voyage from Europe, owing to the alteration in time as the ship proceeds Westward, it is necessary to put the clock back every 24 hours. The alteration in time is made at about midnight, and the clock is usually put back from 35 to 45 minutes on each occasion, the exact amount of time depending upon the distance the ship is estimated to make by noon the next day. During the first 24 hours, however, owing to the change from Mean time to Apparent Time, the alteration is likely to be considerably more than 45 minutes, especially while Summer Time is in use.”

Once again we find that time carried on board these vessels were adjusted to Apparent Time in the days before a worldwide standard of time zones came into being. A complete list of all the IMM Co. rules dealing with time and clocks on board their vessels is provided in Appendix A. As it turns out, ships of the IMM Co., which included the White Star Line, were not the only ones that adjusted their clocks at night so that they read 12:00 at Local Apparent Noon the next day. As

3 explained by Sir James Bisset, former Commodore of the Cunard Line, and who was second officer on Carpathia under Captain Rostron at the time of the Titanic disaster:4

“Going east clocks are put on, going west clocks are put back. The amount depends entirely on the speed of the ship and the distance run. In very fast ships they are usually altered 40 or 45 minutes at midnight, and the remaining few minutes in the forenoon when the ship’s position has been determined. Notices are always displayed in some prominent place informing passengers of the amount of alteration, so they can adjust their watches before retiring…The navigating officer, knowing to within a mile or two the ship’s position, has already put the clocks right for noon, and if he has done this well and truly, the apparently stationary period [when the sun reaches its highest point of the day and is said to be on the local meridian] should coincide with eight bells (twelve o’clock).”

Do we have any direct evidence that this was done that way on Titanic in compliance with those IMM Company rules that were effect? The answer is yes, and it comes directly from two of Titanic’s surviving officers, Second Officer Charles Lightoller and Third Officer .5

Lightoller: “The clocks are set at midnight, but that is for the approximate noon position of the following day.”

Pitman: “They are corrected in the forenoon, perhaps half a minute or a minute; that is all.”

Titanic, like most crack passenger steamers of the time, adjusted their clocks at midnight so when the sun would reach its highest point in the sky at Local Apparent Noon (LAN) the next day the clocks would show close to 12:00. Some time in the early morning, when the navigating officer would get a sun line to determine his longitude more precisely, he might find that he had to make a slight time correction so that the clocks would be accurate when the sun actually reached its highest point at noon. As Pitman pointed out, that correction was typically ½ to 1 minute if at all necessary. At local apparent noon, Sunday, April 14, 1912, Titanic was approximately crossing 44° 31’W longitude, having traveled 1549 nautical miles since taking departure off the Daunt’s Rock light vessel outside of Queenstown harbor back on April 11.6 The time of local apparent noon for that longitude on Sunday, April 14, 1912 came at 2:58pm GMT, or 9:58am mean time in New York. Titanic’s clocks, having been corrected in the forenoon that day, would show 12:00 o’clock; exactly 2 hours and 2 minutes ahead of clocks in New York and other east coast ports in the and Canada. (See Appendix B for details concerning Titanic’s track across the Atlantic.) This is not a recent discovery. In the early 1960s, Leslie Harrison, a friend and supporter of Captain of the steamship Californian, had argued that Titanic was keeping Apparent Time for a longitude of 44½ degrees west thereby putting her clocks 2 hours and 2 minutes ahead of those in New York. He was absolutely correct, but few people wanted to accept that fact because it destroyed some of the time coincidences that the British Wreck Commission came up with in a clumsy attempt to charge Captain Lord of failing to go to the aid of Titanic.

TITANIC’S CALL FOR HELP

In past articles, proponents of a 1 hour 33 minute difference between Titanic time and New York time have put forward arguments based mostly on the testimony of Titanic’s surviving Junior Wireless Operator, . To make their case, they spend much time leading the reader through their own

4 interpretation as to what was said by this star witness, while overlooking other critical evidence presented by this same witness, as well as others, which completely negates their conclusions. These proponents point out that Harold Bride said that he awoke before midnight to relieve Jack Phillips, Titanic’s senior wireless operator, who was working long hours finishing up a backlog of messages to Cape Race. Looking at Bride’s testimony, that much is certainly true. But then they place a time on Bride’s awakening at 11:45pm, just five minutes after the ship collided with an iceberg, even though Bride himself was not at all sure as to what time he awoke other than believing that it was a little before midnight. He made no mention of actually looking at a clock when he got up. Bride said he did not feel the collision but learned about it from Phillips after he got up to relieve him. The proponents of a 1 hour 33 minute time difference also point to Bride’s first-hand account given to a New York Times reporter on April 18th that took place on board Carpathia after she docked in New York. They correctly point out that Bride spoke of Captain Smith coming into the wireless cabin to explain that the ship had struck an iceberg, that he was going to have an inspection made to see what damage was done to the ship, and that the wireless operators should get ready to send a call for assistance but not to send it until he tells them to.7 The proponents then point out that Bride estimated that Smith was away for about 10 minutes, and when he came back, he told the operators to send the call for assistance that Phillips did immediately. Using the argument that Bride awoke at 11:45pm, the time they have Smith coming by the wireless cabin the first time, and then coming back 10 minutes later, at 11:55pm, these proponents conclude that the first wireless message, which was logged at 10:25pm NY time, supports a time difference of 1 hour and 33 minutes between ship’s time and New York time. (Adding 1 hour 33 minutes to 10:25pm NY time gets you to 11:58pm ship’s time for the first wireless transmission.) If the 1 hour 33 minute time difference advocates are right, then the first distress call from Titanic was sent out within the amazingly short period of time of just 18 minutes after the ship made contact with the iceberg. But let’s first look at what Bride actually said at the American Inquiry concerning the time he awoke:

Senator SMITH. Do you know what time you arose from your bed? Mr. BRIDE. It must have been about a quarter to 12, sir; about 5 minutes to 12, ship’s time [correcting himself]. Senator SMITH. Five minutes to 12, ship’s time? Mr. BRIDE. Yes, sir. Senator SMITH. What time did the collision occur? Mr. BRIDE. I could not say, sir. Senator SMITH. You remained in bed until 12:05? Mr. BRIDE. I think it was this side of 12, sir; it was about 5 minutes to 12 [correcting Senator Smith]. Senator SMITH. Then you must have been aroused some - what by this impact? Mr. BRIDE: No; I had promised to relieve Mr. Phillips earlier than usual, you see.

Bride then explained that he had awakened himself and went out to speak to Phillips while still in his pajamas before he even got dressed. Bride then asked Phillips how he was getting on and Phillips said that he had “a big batch of telegrams from Cape Race that he had just finished.” Bride then said he did not remain there but went back to the bedroom to get dressed. He was asked if Phillips told him that the ship was damaged, to which Bride replied, “He told me that he thought she had got damaged in some way and that he expected that we should have to go back to Harland & Wolff’s.” After Bride finished dressing, he came back out into the operating room and took over from Phillips who then went into the bedroom to get undressed and retire for the night. Just as Phillips got into

5 the bedroom, according to Bride, Captain Smith came into the wireless cabin and told them, “You had better get assistance.”8 The question then came up as to exactly what time it was that Captain Smith came to the wireless cabin to tell them to send that call for assistance,

Mr. BRIDE. I have no recollection of the time these various incidents took place, but I can give you a fairly good estimate of the times between the incidents. Senator SMITH. No; but you have fixed as best you could the interval between the time of the collision and the time the captain came to your room and told you to send out the CQD call? Mr. BRIDE. Yes, sir. Senator SMITH. You have fixed that, to the best of your recollection, as 10 minutes? Mr. BRIDE. Yes, sir.

But then Senator Smith asks about the times recorded by Carpathia and Mount Temple as to when they first received Titanic’s call for assistance. To Senator Smith, based on the times that were stated, it appeared to be quite a bit more than just ten minutes after the accident that the call for assistance was sent out.

Senator SMITH. ... In view of all this I would like to know whether you care to modify or elaborate or change your statement that the captain came to the operating room 10 minutes after the accident, or about that, and told you to put out the CQD call? Think it over. Mr. BRIDE. I said the captain came to the cabin 10 minutes after the accident. The captain came to the cabin after I had turned out 10 minutes, and I turned out after the collision had occurred. Senator SMITH. I assume you were in bed? Mr. BRIDE. Yes sir. Senator SMITH. Between the time you turned out and the captain gave the order to send this message - Mr. BRIDE. It was just about 10 minutes. Senator SMITH. I do not know that I care to press that matter any further. Your statement stands that it was about 10 minutes. It might have been a little more. Mr. BRIDE. As far as I recollect; Mr. Phillips did not tell me when it was that he felt the ship striking; but to the best of my recollection it was 10 minutes after I had turned out that the captain came in and told us to get assistance.

Notice that Bride first told Senator Smith that Captain Smith came to the wireless cabin 10 minutes after the accident. But then he changed that to say that Captain Smith came to their cabin about 10 minutes after he awoke and turned out to relieve Phillips. Furthermore, Bride had no idea whatsoever when the collision happened because Phillips never told him that. As pointed out before, Bride never said he looked at a clock when he awoke. For all we really know, it could have been some time after midnight when he got out of bed to take over from Phillips. Maybe Phillips decided not to wake Bride at midnight as planned so he could have more than 3 hours of sleep. It seems that Bride and Philips were up very late the previous night trying to repair the leads of the secondary winding of a transformer in the transmitting equipment that had burnt out. Bride said he went to bed between 8:30 and 9 o’clock that Sunday night. Normally, according to Bride, he would have worked from 2am to 8am, but this night he told Phillips he would take over 2 hours early to let Phillips get some extra sleep. He said that he awoke on his own accord. He was not awakened by Phillips, by

6 some alarm or by the collision. It would be natural for him to think he awoke before the promised time, thus his “I think it was this side of 12, sir;” but he offered no hard evidence of actually doing so. It is also interesting to note that Bride became even less sure of when it was that Captain Smith came into the wireless cabin to tell them to send that first call for assistance when he was called to testify before the British Wreck Commission.

16511. Q. I do not know whether you can help us at all with regard to the time a little more than you have. You have told us you came up at 12 o’clock, and that then you heard this conversation between the Captain and Mr. Phillips. Could you give us any idea of the time - how long had elapsed after your coming up at 12 o’clock, or coming into the room with Mr. Phillips? A. Not with any accuracy. 16512. Q. Give us the best estimate you can? A. I do not think I could.

During the US Senate investigation Bride also made a statement where he said, “As far as I recollect Phillips had finished working with Cape Race about 10 minutes before the collision with the iceberg.” But was that statement accurate given his admission that he was asleep when the collision occurred? At the British Inquiry, Bride said that when came out to relieve Phillips, he was told that all traffic to Cape Race had been cleared. He was then asked by the Attorney-General, “Now, the only other thing I want you to tell me is, did he [Phillips] tell you - can you recollect, whether he said when it was that he had finished relaying the telegrams to Cape Race?” Bride’s answer was, “He did not say.”9 In that exclusive New York Times interview taken the very day Carpathia docked in New York, Bride had this to say:

“There were three rooms in the wireless cabin. One was a sleeping room, one a dynamo room, and one an operating room. I took off my clothes and went to sleep in bed. Then I was conscious of waking up and hearing Phillips sending to Cape Race. I read what he was sending. It was a traffic matter. I remembered how tired he was and I got out of bed without my clothes on to relieve him. I didn’t even feel the shock. I hardly knew it had happened after the Captain had come to us. There was no jolt whatever. “I was standing by Phillips telling him to go to bed when the Captain put his head in the cabin. ‘We’ve struck an iceberg,’ the Captain said, ‘and I’m having an inspection made to tell what it has done for us. You better get ready to send out a call for assistance. But don’t send it until I tell you.’ “The Captain went away and in 10 minutes, I should estimate the time he came back. - We could hear a terrible confusion outside, but there was not the least thing to indicate that there was any trouble. The wireless was working perfectly. “‘Send the call for assistance.’ ordered the Captain, barely putting his head in the door. ‘What call should I send?’ Phillips asked. ‘The regulation international call for help. Just that.’”

Notice that in this account, given the very day Carpathia docked in New York, and before any inquiry had started, Bride said, “I was conscious of waking up and hearing Phillips sending to Cape Race.” At the inquiries he was to say that Phillips had finished working Cape Race before he woke up. So just when did Phillips complete his batch of messages with Cape Race? Was it before or after the collision? We know Phillips was still busy with Cape Race at 9:45pm New York time. And from a report sent to Olympic from Asian, Titanic was heard working Cape Race up to about “10pm Local Time.” After seeing all of this, is there any wonder why at the British Inquiry, concerning the questioning of Harold Bride, the Attorney-General had passed the remark, “that one likes to be satisfied we have got

7 hold of the same gentleman who gave evidence in America?” The only thing that Bride seemed certain about is what he wrote on April 27th in his report to H. R. Cross, traffic manager of the Marconi Company:

“I regret to say my memory fails me with regard to the time of the occurrence or any of the preceding incidents; but otherwise I am sure of all my statements.”

DIGGING DEEPER INTO THE EVIDENCE

Annie Robinson was a stewardess on Titanic the night of April 14, 1912. At the time of the collision, she was in bed. She got up and dressed and came out on E deck when she saw a mail clerk pass along at first, only to return some time later with Purser McElroy and Captain Smith as they headed in the direction of the mail room. A few minutes after, she saw Captain Smith come back from the mail room with , the head of Harland & Wolff’s design team that built Titanic and her sister ship Olympic. Annie then went to see what it was that they had been looking at and found “two mail-bags and a man’s Gladstone bag, and on looking down the staircase [the one by the side of the squash racquets court] I saw water within six steps of coming onto E deck.” The time “was about half an hour after she struck.”10 The time that Captain Smith was on his inspection below is further supported by bathroom steward Charles Mackay. At the time of the accident Mackay was playing bridge in his quarters on the port side of E deck. “A matter of about a quarter of an hour” after the accident happened, Mackay heard Second Steward Dodd give an order to close the hand-operated watertight doors located on F deck below.11 Mackay then “saw the Captain a matter of about 20 minutes after that…I saw him come down the working staircase and go along, I presume, to the Chief Engineer’s room. About 10 minutes after that I saw him come back.” The next order Mackay heard was for all bedroom stewards to get out and go “to their passengers’ rooms to tell passengers to get on warm clothing and proceed to the top deck, the boat deck.”12 We also know from other first hand accounts, such as Assistant Second Steward Joseph Wheat, that Purser McElroy gave an order to get the passengers out and on deck with lifebelts on at “about a quarter-past twelve,” a time that is consistent with Annie Robinson’s account that McElroy was seen a little before that time with Captain Smith heading for the mail room shortly before Smith met up with Andrews there.13 Fourth Officer Joseph Boxhall testified that he saw Captain Smith leave the bridge after reporting to him about the flooding that he saw in the mail room after he came back from a second inspection below. According to Boxhall, the time was “approximately 20 minutes to half an hour” after the ship struck the iceberg.14 After reporting to Captain Smith and seeing him leave the bridge, Boxhall was sent [by Chief Officer Wilde or First Officer Murdoch] to call out the off-duty officers.15 Second Officer Charles Lightoller thought it was “about half an hour perhaps” after the collision when Boxhall came by;16 and Third Officer Pitman thought it “must be 20 minutes” after the collision when Boxhall came by.17 It was about the same time that Boxhall also heard the order given to uncover the boats. The time was just about midnight. It was the time that Captain Smith prudently decided to get the boats uncovered before going on his personal inspection of the ship. The uncovering of the boats was also noticed by second class passenger . As Beesley was heading back to go down the second class staircase from the boat deck to his cabin on D deck he noticed that some officer [most likely James Moody] had started to strip the cover off No. 16, the aft most port-side lifeboat. After getting back down to his cabin, he “put on some underclothing, sat on the sofa, and read for some ten minutes.” Beesley then heard through the open door a loud shout from above, “All passengers on deck with lifebelts on.”18

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Quartermaster was the man at the wheel when the accident happened. He heard a number of orders given that night, including Captain Smith ordering the ship’s carpenter to sound the ship soon after the accident happened. He also heard Captain Smith say, “Get all the boats out and serve out the belts.” Hichens could not remember the exact time, but he said “that was after 12.” Hichens was sent away from the bridge at 12:23 when Quartermaster Perkis showed up to relieve him.19 They both were then sent to help clear the boats. So there is a wealth of evidence that Captain Smith did not even start his inspection of the ship until some time after midnight at the earliest. During the time he was below, the crew was being called out to get the boats uncovered. It was a wise preemptive move in case it became necessary to transfer passengers off the ship if the damage proved worse than what they were hoping it would be. Considering all the evidence from different sources, we can see that Captain Smith was below on a personal inspection of the ship about a half hour after the collision had occurred. In one case, Steward Mackay estimated that he saw Smith going back up the working staircase as late as 45 minutes after the accident happened.20 As we shall see, it was about 45 minutes after the accident, or about 12:25am on Titanic, when the order was first given to actually load the boats with women and children. But the 1 hour 33 minute time difference, so vehemently argued for by a few individuals, is further blown away by the testimony of none other than Joseph Boxhall, an advocate, if not the originator, of the 1 hour 33 minute time difference blunder. Boxhall gave the impression that the first call for help went out, not 18 minutes after the ship struck ice, but about 35 minutes after the ship struck ice. It happened during the questioning of Harold Bride where there was a great deal of confusion as to what time the first wireless message was actually sent out by Phillips, the exact same issue we are talking about here. Carpathia’s Captain Rostron had previously testified that he was first informed about a distress signal from Titanic at 12:35am Carpathia time. Rostron also stated that when it was 12:35am on Carpathia, it was 10:45pm back in New York, a 1 hour 50 minute time difference, just like the difference between time on the SS Californian and NY time that Captain Stanley Lord had given in evidence. Senator Smith, who was questioning Harold Bride, could not understand how ships might carry a different time if they were in the same vicinity of each other. He, as well as many others, did not understand how adjustments to Apparent Time were made on board vessels traveling on the high seas. And so one thing led to another, and the confused senator from the state of Michigan requested the help of Joseph Boxhall to sort it all out for him during the questioning of Harold Bride:21

Senator SMITH. Let us take the ship’s time. By ship’s time the Titanic struck the iceberg at what hour? Mr. BRIDE. Twenty minutes to 12. Senator SMITH. At 11.40; everybody seems to be agreed on that. The captain of the Carpathia received the wireless message from the Titanic at 12.35, ship’s time. Officer Boxhall, you were astir that night, as I recollect it? Mr. BOXHALL. Yes, sir. Senator SMITH. And I have an impression that you said in your testimony that the CQD call was sent out about 35 minutes after the ship struck? Mr. BOXHALL. Approximately about that time, sir, as near as I can tell. The Carpathia’s time you mentioned there a few moments ago as 12.35. That was the apparent time, and his [Rostron’s] clocks had been altered at midnight. That ship was bound east, and his clocks had been altered. Senator SMITH. Twenty-five minutes? Mr. BOXHALL. No; it would be more than 25. Senator SMITH. The first time they were changed?

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Mr. BOXHALL. His clocks were altered probably about thirty-odd minutes at midnight that night. Senator SMITH. That may account for this one message. But your testimony shows that the first CQD call went out about 35 minutes after the collision. Mr. BOXHALL. Yes, sir.

It is interesting that Boxhall would agree that the impression that somehow Senator Smith got was that the first distress call went out about 35 minutes after the ship struck ice. If that were true, that means that the first call for help came at 12:15am Titanic time, 35 minutes after impact assuming the ship struck ice at 11:40pm, not 18 minutes after impact as the 1 hour 33 minute time difference would have it. Worse yet, since we know that the first distress call was logged at 10:25pm NY time, the difference between 10:25 and 12:15 is exactly 1 hour 50 minutes, the same time difference that the British Wreck Commission decided for Titanic, the same time difference that was carried on Californian according to Captain Stanley Lord, and the same time difference carried on Carpathia according to what Captain Arthur Henry Rostron had reported.22 This is a major inconsistency in the testimony of Joseph Boxhall, who would come up with a 1 hour 33 minute time difference just a few minutes later when he was asked specifically what time was it in New York when Titanic struck ice. Furthermore, as we shall see, Boxhall said that he actually used a collision time of 11:46pm, and if we add those 35 minutes to that time, we would have the first wireless message going out at 12:21am ship’s time, which as we shall see, is not too far off from what really transpired.

NAVIGATIONAL CONFIRMATION FOR CARRYING APPARENT TIME

Is there some other way we can check what the difference was between Titanic time and New York time that night? The answer is yes. On the night of April 14, 1912, clocks on Titanic were supposed to have been turned back 47 minutes at midnight.23 Because of the accident, that adjustment had not taken place.24 However, we know the following:

 It is accepted by most that Titanic struck the iceberg at about 11:40pm, 20 minutes to midnight, Titanic time.  We also know Titanic was steaming about 22 knots on a measured heading of 266° true on a rhumb-line course toward a point just south of the Nantucket Shoals Light Vessel.  We also know the exact location of the wreck, 41° 43.5’N, 49° 56.8’W.  We also know, assuming the accident had not happened, that Local Apparent Noon for April 15th would have come 13 hours and 7 minutes after the 11:40pm collision time, or a distance of 289 nautical miles beyond the location of the wreck site using a speed of 22 knots.25

Knowing all this, we find that Titanic would have reached a longitude of 56° 21.5’W at noon on April 15th if the accident had not taken place. Looking up the time for Local Apparent Noon for that longitude on that date, we find that Local Apparent Noon, precisely 12:00 Noon ship’s time, would have come at 3:45pm GMT (or 10:45am NY time). As previously noted, Local Apparent Noon for Titanic on April 14th came at 2:58pm GMT when she was at a longitude of 44° 31’W. The difference between local apparent noon for April 15th (3:45pm GMT) and local apparent noon for April 14th (2:58pm GMT) is 3:45 – 2:58 = 0:47, exactly equal to the 47 minutes of time that we were told that Titanic’s clocks were to have been put back on the night of the accident. This is clear navigational proof that Titanic’s clocks were adjusted to carry Apparent Time based on her noontime longitudes as required by White Star Line rules and procedures.

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HISTORICAL EVIDENCE FOR CARRYING APPARENT TIME

Is there some other way to check that Titanic would be carrying Apparent Time on her clocks that Sunday, April 14, 1912? What we can do is look back a year to June 1911 when her sister ship Olympic sailed on her maiden voyage. on Tuesday, June 20, 1911 quoted a wireless dispatch sent by Captain Smith the day before to the offices of the White Star Line in New York. It read:

On Board Olympic, via Cape Race, 9:30 A.M., June 19, 1911.

Up to this hour the Olympic has exceeded the speed promised by her builders, her average from noon Saturday to noon Sunday being 21.89 knots.

But how does this relate to the time carried on board ship? We happen to have a copy of the log card for Olympic’s maiden voyage westbound that summarized the daily runs of Olympic from the time of her departure off Daunt’s Rock Light Vessel at 4:22pm GMT on Thursday, June 15, to her arrival at 2:24am local time on Wednesday, June 21, off the Ambrose Channel Light Vessel outside of New York harbor.26 The log card listed Olympic’s noontime coordinates for each day of the voyage as well as the distance run to noon each day from noon the previous day. An extract from that card is shown below.

Fig. 1 – Extract from Olympic’s maiden voyage log card.

At noon Saturday, June 17, 1911, Olympic was at 47° 51’N, 32° 20’W. At noon Sunday, June 18, 1911, Olympic was at 43° 45’N, 43° 52’W. The run from noon Saturday to noon Sunday is logged at 542 nautical miles as shown. Given Olympic’s noontime coordinates for the given dates, we can easily look up the time of Local Apparent Noon (LAN) in GMT for each one of them. What we find is that LAN for Saturday came at 2:10pm GMT, and LAN for Sunday came at 2:56pm GMT. The difference in time between noon Saturday to noon Sunday was 24 hours 46 minutes, or 24.77 hours. (That Saturday night clocks would have been put back 46 minutes.) If we now take the recorded distance run between those two given positions, 542 miles, and divide it by 24.77 hours, the time from LAN Saturday to LAN Sunday, we get a speed made good of 21.88 knots, almost precisely what Captain Smith sent out in his wireless dispatch of June 19. What we have here is direct evidence that Apparent Time, based on the ship’s noontime longitude, was being carried on Olympic during her maiden voyage in full compliance with White Star Line rules and procedures. There is no reason to believe that Captain Smith would have done any differently when he took Titanic out on her maiden voyage the following April.

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DIRECT FIRST HAND EVIDENCE

Is there any direct first hand evidence that Titanic time on April 14 was 2 hours 2 minutes ahead of New York mean time, and not 1 hour 33 minutes ahead? The answer is yes, and it comes from none other than Harold Bride himself when Senator Smith asked him if there was a clock in the wireless cabin.27 It was one of the few times that Bride seemed very sure about something.28

Senator SMITH. Did you have a watch or clock in your room? Mr. BRIDE. We had two clocks, sir. Senator SMITH. Were they both running? Mr. BRIDE. Yes, sir; one was keeping New York time and the other was keeping ship’s time. Senator FLETCHER. The difference was about 1 hour and 55 minutes? Mr. BRIDE. There was about 2 hours difference between the two.

It should be noted that Marconi operators logged wireless messages in New York time (mean time for the 75th meridian west of Greenwich) if their ship was west of longitude 40°W, and in GMT if east of longitude 40°W. The question asked by Senator Fletcher came about because 3 days earlier Fletcher had heard from Californian’s wireless operator Cyril Evans that he sent an ice related message to Titanic “at 11 o’clock, approximately; 9.05 New York time.” That works out to a 1 hour 55 minute time difference. Of course Evans was referring to 11 o’clock Californian time on a clock that he kept in his cabin. But Fletcher assumed that Californian and Titanic would have kept the same time because they happened to be relatively near each other on the night of April 14. So when Fletcher suggested a 1 hour 55 minute time difference, Bride immediately corrected the senator and said that there was about a 2 hour difference between the clock keeping Titanic time and clock keeping New York time in Titanic’s wireless cabin. If Titanic time was 1 hour 33 minutes ahead of New York, would he not have said that there was about an hour and a half difference between the two? There is no way one can stretch a difference of an hour and a half into 2 hours. It is quite plain to see that a time difference of 1 hour 33 minutes just does not stand up to the navigational evidence available, to the method by which clocks were adjusted at sea on White Star Line vessels, or to a direct first-hand observation of the two clocks in Titanic’s wireless cabin, one keeping ship’s time and other keeping New York time.

WHAT ABOUT THAT RECOVERED CHRONOMETER?

A chronometer recovered from the wreck in 1996 that was put on display at the Science Museum in 2003 showed a stopped time of 12:39.29 Some people have assumed that this must have been the time that the chronometer stopped working after the bridge submerged. Although a chronometer used for navigation would unquestionably have shown Greenwich Mean Time, it has been suggested that this particular one was set to mean time in New York because if you add 1 hour 33 minutes to the stopped time shown you would get 2:12 ship’s time, which was presumed to be about the time that the bridge would have been inundated. So why would a chronometer be set to mean time for the 75th meridian west (New York time) instead of GMT? Proponents who suggest that this chronometer carried New York time have speculated that they used that particular chronometer to check time signals from Eastern Seaboard stations on the east coast of the United States. It then could be used as a check against the time on the other chronometer that carried GMT and used for navigation. This is an entirely fallacious form of reasoning because mean time

12 for the 75th meridian differs from GMT by precisely 5 hours, 0 minutes and 0 seconds, so that if a time signal was sent out for example at precisely 12:00:00 noon from an east coast station in North America it would be precisely 5:00:00pm GMT, and any error on a chronometer showing GMT would be so noted in minutes and seconds. The marine chronometer was a precision timepiece used aboard ship to provide accurate time for taking celestial observations. It differs from a spring-driven watch in that it contains a variable lever device to maintain even pressure on the mainspring, and a special balance designed to compensate for temperature variations. The beat of a chronometer was in ½ second intervals. The time on a chronometer was invariably set to GMT and was not reset until the instrument was overhauled and cleaned, usually at three-year intervals. The difference between GMT and chronometer time was carefully determined and applied as a correction to all readings of the chronometer. This difference, called the chronometer error, is fast if time shown on the chronometer was later than GMT, and slow if earlier than GMT. The amount by which the chronometer error changed in one day is called the chronometer rate. An erratic rate indicates a defective instrument requiring repair.

Fig. 2 – A typical marine chronometer.

Chronometers carried on vessels carrying more than one were checked against each other every single day while at sea. How a chronometer differed from precise time in GMT, the chronometer error, is what mattered. You do not need, nor would you want, a chronometer to be set to any time reference other than the standard reference that was used for navigation. That standard for British and most other vessels on the high seas in 1912 was Greenwich Mean Time (GMT).30 The processes of determining chronometer error and chronometer rate were very well explained in navigational publications of the period. The principal maintenance requirement of a chronometer was regular winding at about the same time each day. According to White Star Line rules that were in effect at the time of Titanic:

303. Winding Chronometers. – Unless the Commander otherwise decides, he [the First Officer] will wind and compare chronometers at 8am each day, and keep a Chronometer Comparison Book. He will also see that the [ship’s] clock’s are wound.

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According to the Report of Survey of an Emigrant Ship (Board of Trade Surveyors Office, , 3rd April, 1912), Titanic was equipped with two chronometers. The Chronometer Comparison Book kept by Titanic’s first officer, in this case William Murdoch, would have shown the chronometer error and the gain or loss rate for each of the two chronometers carried on board. It would also show the time difference between each chronometer for each day, as well as the difference between comparisons for successive days. When there are two chronometers, the difference between comparisons on successive days is the algebraic difference between their daily rates. That algebraic difference in rates remains the same as long as the gain or loss rate of each chronometer remains the same. However, the difference in rates would change if one of the rates would undergo a change. In that case, there is no good means of knowing exactly which chronometer has departed from its expected performance until some other comparison can be made. According to James Bisset, former Commodore of the Cunard Line and second officer on Carpathia at the time of the Titanic disaster:31

In shape it [the chronometer] resembles a small basin, and has a dial about five inches in diameter. It is contained in small wooden box in which it is slung in gimbals to preserve it in a horizontal position when the ship is rolling and pitching. The box has a glass top so that the time can be seen without opening it. This box fits snugly into an outer padded case which minimizes vibration and jar. The dial has the usual hour and minute hands, and there is also a very plainly marked smaller dial for the second hand which ticks round with a pronounced staccato movement, making it easy to read the time to the nearest half second. A well-founded ship usually carries three chronometers, and they were kept in the chart- room in a specially constructed glass case in which an even temperature was maintained. The navigating officer has charge of them, and it is his duty to wind them at the same time every morning and keep a journal showing how they are behaving.

The advantage of ships carrying three chronometers on board is that if one should depart from its expected performance, it soon would become apparent, and that chronometer would no longer be used on that voyage. A uniform gain or loss rate of up to 1 or 2 seconds per day was not uncommon for a well working chronometer. There were numerous methods for determining chronometer error while in port. Included were the use of time signals at some defined instant, the taking of a single altitude time sight of a celestial body, or the taking of a double altitude sight of a celestial body when on different sides of the meridian.32 It was important that the chronometer error for any given chronometer, along with its gain or loss rate, be known at all times. At the time when celestial sights were taken on the open sea, the senior officer would go out on the bridge wing with his sextant to take the altitude of each celestial body; i.e., the measured angular height of the body above the horizon. At the same time, a junior officer would be looking at a timepiece, called a hack watch or portable chronometer, to get the exact time of each sight to the nearest second when the senior officer calls out “mark.” The time on this hack watch, or portable chronometer, would have been compared beforehand to the time on the ship’s chronometer which was keeping GMT since the ship’s chronometers were never moved from their case in the chart room.33 Along with the time of each sight, the junior officer would take the sextant and read off the vernier scale to get the exact angular measurement for each sight, thus writing down both the sextant reading and the exact time of each sight taken. This process would continue until all sights were completed, a process that took about ten minutes according to Titanic’s third officer Herbert Pitman. With the times and angles of the sights recorded, the process of sight reduction would begin. The first steps in the reduction process would be to adjust the angular measurements for known errors and

14 corrections such as dip of the horizon for the height of eye above water (about 8’ of arc for a 70 foot height of eye on the Titanic) as well as sextant index error, both of which would apply to all sights taken. In addition, an altitude correction that was dependent on the measured angle would be subtracted for each individual sight to compensate for atmospheric refraction after taking into account air temperature and barometer readings. Then there are time adjustments to be made. The first would be to correct for the difference in time between the watch used in taking sights and the time on the ship’s chronometer in the chart room. Then a correction would be made for the chronometer error based on the known chronometer gain or loss rate that was listed. These two time corrections would then be applied to all sights taken, and once done, would give the time of each sight to the nearest second in GMT. From all the adjusted data, the ship’s position can then be derived for the time of the last sight with allowance taken for the ship’s run between individual sights. What we do know about the chronometer that was recovered from the wreck is that the hands of that unit have been dislodged at least once post-restoration, and that different publicly available photos show the hands in different positions, clearly indicating they are not showing whatever time they were when first recovered. More recently a photograph from a booklet for the 1998 Titanic Exhibition in Zürich, Switzerland has been found that shows this same chronometer in the condition it was in before it was restored. The photograph shows that the lower-left quadrant of the glass covering the face was covered in some sort of rust-colored staining, and the glass did not appear to be cracked, as it clearly is after it was restored, and the dial of the chronometer was blackened over much of its face. Despite this, the letter ‘J’ along with ‘Co.’ from ‘J. W. Ray & Co’, and part of the word ‘Liverpool’, were all visible, telling us which way was the 12 o’clock position on the instrument. More importantly, the photo showed the minute hand was completely dismounted and was laying across the face at the top, the windup-state indicator hand was missing, just as it is in post-restoration photographs, and the hour hand was pointing toward a spot ¾ the way between the numerals ‘6’ and ‘7’ indicating a time close to 6:45. In essence, for all the reasons stated, it is a very dangerous mistake when some people assume that that the time shown on this chronometer when it was put on display at the London Science Museum was the time on the chronometer when the bridge submerged. The evidence that has recently been uncovered about this chronometer in its pre-restoration state clearly shows that the time on this chronometer at any point since its recovery is totally unreliable, and cannot be taken to mean anything.

SOME ASTONISHING IMPLICATIONS FOR A 1 HOUR 33 MINUTE DIFFERENCE

Are there other ways to show that a 1 hour 33 minutes time difference between ship’s time and time in New York was a mistaken conclusion? Advocates of the 1 hour 33 minute time difference state that Captain Smith wasted no time in sending out a call for help just 18 minutes after the ship collided with an iceberg, and that sending a distress call about 45 minutes after the collision would be too late. We will address this shortly, but for now consider what Harold Bride wrote in his report to H. R. Cross of the Marconi Company on April 27, 1912:

“Smith entered the cabin and told us to get assistance immediately. Mr. Phillips resumed the phones, after asking the captain if he should use the regulation distress call ‘CQD.’ The captain said ‘Yes,’ and Mr. Phillips started in with ‘CQD,’ having obtained the latitude and longitude of the Titanic. The Frankfurt was the first to answer. We gave him the ships position, which he acknowledged by ‘OK, standby.’ The second answer was from the Carpathia, who immediately responded with his position and informed us he was coming to our assistance as fast as possible.

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These communications I reported myself to the captain, who was, when I found him, engaging in superintending the filling and lowering of the lifeboats.”

We know that the first CQD went out at 10:25pm NY time, and that Frankfurt was the first to respond back almost “immediately.” According to Bride, Phillips told him to report that to Captain Smith. Bride then went out and found Captain Smith on the boat deck. He told Smith that Frankfurt had replied to their CQD, and that Captain Smith then told him to go and find out Frankfurt’s position.

Senator SMITH. You received a reply within three or four minutes, but you only know that from what - Mr. BRIDE. Mr. Phillips told me. Senator SMITH. Just what did he tell you? Mr. BRIDE. He told me to go to the captain and report the Frankfurt. Senator SMITH. What do you mean by the Frankfurt? Mr. BRIDE. He was in communication with the Frankfurt. sir, he had sent the Frankfurt our position. Senator SMITH. Was the Frankfurt the first ship that picked up the C.Q.D.? Mr. BRIDE. Yes, sir. Senator SMITH. And you delivered that message to the captain? Mr. BRIDE. Yes, sir. Senator SMITH. Personally? Mr. BRIDE. Yes, sir. Senator SMITH. Where was he at the time? Mr. BRIDE. He was on the boat deck, sir. Senator SMITH. On the boat deck? Mr. BRIDE. Yes, sir. Senator SMITH. Not on the bridge? Mr. BRIDE. No, sir.

At the British Inquiry, Harold Bride said that he found Captain Smith on the starboard side of the boat deck “superintending the loading of the lifeboats.” With a 1 hour 33 minute time difference, the CQD would have gone out at 11:58pm Titanic time. Yet we know that the order to uncover the lifeboats came no earlier than about 20 minutes after the collision, or about 12:00am ship’s time, when Boxhall was sent to call upon the off duty officers having returned from his second inspection below. This was about 10 to 15 minutes before the order was given to have passengers come on deck with lifebelts on.

Charles Lightoller (second officer): “Yes; I met the Chief Officer [Wilde] almost immediately after, coming out of the door of the quarters. First of all the Chief Officer told me to commence to get the covers off the boats. I asked him then if all hands had been called, and he said, ‘Yes.’”

Lightoller was also asked if any of the boats were uncovered when he came out. His reply, “None, with the exception of the emergency boats,” the two boats that were always kept uncovered and ready for lowering. And how much time does it take to get a lifeboat uncovered and swung out and ready to load with passengers? Once again we can get a very good feel for this from Lightoller:34

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“Well, it would take us from 15 minutes to 20 minutes to uncover No. 4; then to coil the falls down, then to swing out and lower it down to A deck would take another six or seven minutes at least.”

Thus we see a total of about 20 to 25 minutes before a lifeboat could be made ready to load with passengers. And then, depending on how long it took to find passengers that were willing at that time to get into the boat, it might take perhaps another 10 to 15 minutes of loading before the boat was actually ready to be lowered to the sea. It should be very clear from all of this that if Bride saw Captain Smith supervising the loading of the boats, let alone the lowering of boats, when he went out to tell him about Frankfurt, then it had to have been after the order was given to load the boats with women and children. But we know from Boxhall, Pitman and Lightoller, that the earliest the off-duty officers were called out was 20 minutes after the collision, and it was then that they first started to get boats uncovered. And from Lightoller we know it would take another 20 to 25 minutes perhaps before a given boat would be ready to take on passengers. Add this up and we see that it must have been about 40 to 45 minutes after the collision, if not more, when Bride found Captain Smith out on the starboard side of the boat deck “superintending the loading of the lifeboats” to inform him that Frankfurt had responded to the CQD.35 All this fits perfectly with a 2 hour 2 minute time difference between ship’s time and NY time, not a 1 hour 33 minute difference. But there is more. Consider what took place shortly before Titanic disappeared under the Atlantic. Once again let’s look at what Harold Bride wrote in his report to H. R. Cross:

“Again Mr. Phillips called ‘CQD’ and ‘SOS’ and for nearly five minutes got no reply, and then both the Carpathia and the Frankfurt called. Just at this moment the captain came into the cabin and said, ‘You can do nothing more; look out for yourselves.’”

So what time would that be? Looking at a compiled list of wireless messages sent to and from Titanic, we find that at 11:55pm NY time, the SS Carpathia acknowledged the last message it received from Titanic, and also logged at 11:55pm NY time, the Frankfurt tried calling Titanic. That means, if we are to believe a 1 hour 33 minute time difference, that Captain Smith came to the wireless cabin – now get this – at 1:28am, 52 minutes before Titanic sank, to release his two wireless operators. Would anyone believe that Captain Smith would give up calling for assistance that soon? Need more proof of how untenable a 1 hour 33 minute time difference makes? Take the evidence that comes from Californian’s second officer who was watching the display of distress rockets being sent up from Titanic that night. Second Officer Stone testified that the last rocket seen was about 1:40am Californian time, about 20 minutes before he sent the apprentice James Gibson down to tell Captain Lord that they saw a total of eight white rockets and that the steamer that was sending them up “had gone out of sight.”36 But Californian time was 1 hour 50 minutes ahead of New York time.37 This means that Titanic’s last distress rocket was sent up at about 11:50pm NY time. Adding 1 hour 33 minutes to 11:50pm NY time, and we get 1:23am on Titanic when they stopped firing distress signals. That would be almost a full hour before Titanic split apart and sank. Once again, would anyone believe that Captain Smith would stop sending up distress signals an hour before the ship sank? Proponents of a 1 hour 33 minute time difference would have you believe just that.

SPLITTING A PLANNED TIME ADJUSTMENT IN HALF

Up to now we have talked about a planned clock adjustment of 47 minutes that was to take place on Titanic around midnight on April 14. However, because of the accident, this adjustment to Titanic’s clocks was not carried out. As Third Officer Pitman said, “we had something else to think of.” The clock

17 adjustment was to have been made on the two master Magneta clock that were located in the chart room. These master clocks controlled 48 slave clocks located throughout the ship. The 47 minute adjustment was to be equally divided that night so that no one watch-keeping section of the crew would have to work more than one-half the total extra time in what would normally be served in a four-hour watch period. Those working the 8pm to midnight watch that night (what was called the First Watch) were to get 23 minutes of extra time, while those working the midnight to 4am watch that night (what was called the Middle Watch) were to get 24 minutes of extra time.38 This was to be done by putting the master Magneta clocks back 23 minutes a little before midnight, and then again by 24 minutes a little after midnight, after the watch on deck had changed.39 The result of the first partial adjustment to the clocks would delay the striking of 8 bells, the signal that the watch on deck had ended, by 23 minutes. The second change to the clocks was to come during the first half hour after the midnight change of watch, sometime before 12:30am, when the second adjustment of 24 minutes was made, thereby delaying the striking of 1 bell by that amount at that time.40 Thus, instead of 30 minutes each, the time interval for the last “half hour” of April 14th on Titanic, from 11:30pm (7 bells) to midnight (8 bells), was to be 53 minutes long; while the first “half hour” of April 15th on Titanic, from midnight (8 bells) to 12:30am (1 bell), was to be 54 minutes long.41

Fig. 3 – One of two Magneta master clocks used to control slave clocks on Olympic and Titanic.

Is there any supporting evidence that two partial clock adjustments were to be made at those times; i.e., during the last hour of April 14 and during the first hour of April 15? The supporting evidence comes from the logbooks of several White Star Line steamers. In particular, consider what we find in the logbook of the SS Celtic for the evening of December 25th and morning of December 26th for a voyage taken from St. Vincent to Pernambuco in 1914.42 From noon December 25 to noon of December 26, Celtic was heading south-westward on a course of S66°W by standard compass,43 increasing her westward longitude. In her logbook there is an entry in the row for the 12th hour of the PM segment for December 25th that says that clocks were put back 16 minutes. The 16 minutes that was entered into the logbook was the total clock setback time. This amount of time also happens to agree with Celtic’s noontime positional data that was recorded. On December 25th at Local Apparent Noon (LAN) her observed longitude was 30° 03’W. Her dead reckoning (DR) noontime longitude for December 26th was 33° 53’W. The difference in GMT at LAN on the 25th and

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GMT at LAN for the 26th for the longitudes written down in her logbook was exactly 15 minutes and 50 seconds. Thus we see why a total clock adjustment of 16 minutes was made around midnight for the night of December 25. Celtic’s logbook page for the afternoon of December 25th also shows Celtic advancing 12.7 nautical miles every hour carrying 62.0 revolutions per minute on her engines according to the data entered in the ‘distance run’ column for all the hourly segments of the PM that preceded the 12th hour of the PM. However, in the 12th hour segment of the PM, which ended at Midnight, the page shows that Celtic ran 14.4 nautical miles while still carrying 62.0 revolutions per minute on her engines. Celtic’s logbook page for December 26th shows that in the 1st hour of the AM segment the ship also ran 14.4 nautical miles carrying 62.0 revolutions per minute on her engines. However, in the hourly segments for the AM that followed, her hourly advance was back to 12.7 nautical miles despite carrying the same number of revolutions on her engines.

Fig. 4 – Extracts from the logbook pages of Celtic for December 25 and 26, 1914.

It is obvious from the hourly advance data that the speed of Celtic was 12.7 knots while running at 62.0 revolutions per minute. But the reason for the greater advance in mileage for the last hour of December 25th and for the 1st hour of December 26th is due to the way the total 16 minute clock adjustment was carried out. One-half of the total adjustment time, 8 minutes, was added into the 12th hour segment of the PM for December 25, and the other 8 minutes was added into the time of the 1st hour segment of the AM for December 26. This means that those that served in the First Watch, from 8pm to Midnight, served a total of 4 hour and 8 minutes on deck instead of their usual 4 hours, and those that served in the Middle Watch, from Midnight to 4am, also served a total of 4 hour and 8 minutes on deck instead of their usual 4 hours. We know this to be true by simply comparing the ratio of 68 min/60 min = 1.13 to the ratio of the hourly run distances of 14.4/12.7 = 1.13. This proves beyond any doubt that one- half of the full 16 minute adjustment amount was applied in the last hour of December 25 (most likely between 7 and 8 bells), and the other half in the first hour of December 26 (most likely between 8 bells

19 and 1 bell). Midnight, when 8 bells was struck, came at the end of the last hour of December 25 for Celtic that year. In terms of a standard time reference, 8 bells were struck at 02:08 26 December 1914 GMT.44 Now there are some people that have suggested that the first of two partial time adjustments on Titanic was made before the collision had taken place. Some even suggesting that a 24 minute setback took place as early as 10pm in unadjusted April 14th hours. However, it will be shown later on that this was not the case. But even if they had put the clock back 23 or 24 minutes as some claim they did, the time difference between ship’s time and New York time would have been 1 hour 39 minutes or 1 hour and 38 minutes, not 1 hour and 33 minutes.45 There is simply no foundation whatsoever for a 1 hour 33 minute time difference except for an error being made by whoever worked out Titanic’s foundering time in GMT. Could it have been the same person who miscalculated the location where Titanic came to a stop? We will explore this in some detail later on, but for now let us look at the issue of a partial clock adjustment coming before the accident.

THE TIME OF COLLISION AND THE TIME OF FOUNDERING

There are two very basic questions that need to be answered:

1. When did the accident actually take place, before or after midnight as seen on an unadjusted clock? 2. How long after the accident did Titanic disappear beneath the surface?

In answering these questions we will be looking at the evidence of those who were there. We will also consider the navigational evidence to support our conclusions and present verification through external observational evidence. In addition we will look into several time enigmas, including various times on stopped pocket watches, the confusion created by changing time references, and a solution to an apparent time paradox.

THE TIME OF COLLISION

What time did Titanic collide with the iceberg? To answer that let us consider three different approaches. The first is to look at what those who were there had to say, passengers and crew alike. The second method is to consider the issue from a navigational point of view. The third method is to see what was seen from a nearby stopped steamer.

TESTIMONIES AND WRITTEN ACCOUNTS

Here is just a sampling of statements from passengers and crew members regarding when the ship struck the iceberg. Some came from testimony that was given, and some from written accounts in affidavits, letters, articles or books that they wrote.

Mr. William E. Carter (First Class Passenger) – “I was in the smoking room for several hours prior to the collision with Major Archie Butt, Colonel Gracie, Harry Widener, Mr. Thayer, Clarence Moore, of Washington; William Dulles and several other men. At exactly seventeen minutes to 12 o’clock [11:43] we felt a jar and left the room to see what the trouble was outside. We were told that the ship had struck an iceberg. Many of the men were in the card room, and after learning what had happened returned to their games.”

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Mr. James R. McGough (First Class Passenger) – “I was awakened at 11.40pm, ship time; my stateroom was on the starboard side - deck E - and was shared with me by Mr. Flynn, a buyer for Gimbel Bros., New York, at Thirty-third and Broadway.”

Mr. Spencer Silverthorne (First Class Passenger) – “At about 10:30 my friends retired and I went into the smoking cabin to continue a book which I was reading. At 20 minutes of twelve I sat reading when I felt a jar which shook me in my seat but which was not nearly as severe as one would suppose for the damage which was done.”

Mrs. Helen Bishop (First Class Passenger) – “My husband awakened me at about a quarter of 12 and told me that the boat had struck something.”

Mrs. Marian Longstreth Thayer (First Class Passenger) – “[The time was] fourteen minutes to twelve.”

Mr. Alfred Fernand Omont (First Class Passenger) – “We played [Bridge in the Café Parisien] on until about 11.40pm and then there was a shock. I have crossed the Atlantic thirteen times, and the shock was not a great one, and I thought it was caused by a wave...When the shock had happened, we saw something white through the port-holes, and we saw water on the ports. When the waiter opened the port-hole we saw nothing except a clear night.”

Mr. Hugh Woolner (First Class Passenger) – “The Titanic struck at 11.45 pm.”

Mr. George A. Harder (First Class Passenger) – “About a quarter to 11 I went down to my stateroom with Mrs. Harder and retired for the night; and at 20 minutes to 12 we were not asleep yet, and I heard this thump. It was not a loud thump; just a dull thump.”

Mrs. Margarette “Daisy” Spedden (First Class Passenger) – “At 11:40 in the night we were awakened by a sudden shock, a grinding noise and the stopping of the ship’s engines.”

Mrs. Eleanor Cassebeer (First Class Passenger) – “I had already prepared for the night and was brushing my hair before the mirror when I felt a slight vibration…My wrist-watch indicated 11:44, and I am convinced that this is the exact hour of the collision, as purser McRoy [sic] himself, after dinner, had adjusted my watch to ship’s time.”

Mr. (First Class Passenger) – “I wound my watch - it was 11:45 P.M. - and was just about to step into bed, when I seemed to sway slightly. I immediately realized that the ship had veered to port as though she had been gently pushed. If I had had a brimful glass of water in my hand not a drop would have been spilled, the shock was so slight.”

Mr. Elmer Zebley Taylor (First Class Passenger) – “It was twenty-five minutes to twelve when the jar came. I looked at my watch and noted the time.”

Mrs. Edith Louise (Rosenbaum) Russell (First Class Passenger) – “At 11:30, the steward, as was the custom on English boats, called out, ‘Lights out, it is 11:30,’ so I handed a number of letters to the library steward, telling him that I would pay him for the

21 postage stamps the next morning, and took two books from the library to read. We all filed out of the drawing-room, and went to our respective rooms. I walked down to the end of A deck which was on the same deck as the library, entered my room, turned on the electric light, and was preparing to retire, when I felt a slight jar.”

Mr. Lawrence Beesley (Second Class Passenger) – “I had been in my berth for about ten minutes when, at about 11:46pm, I felt a slight jar, and then soon after a second one, but not sufficiently large to cause any anxiety to anyone, however nervous they may have been.”46

Marie Jerwan (Second Class Passenger) – “In the evening, as usual, there was a concert in the lounge until 8:15, then a worship in the dining saloon… After having a cup of coffee and several rolls, I returned to Mrs. Ball and her brother in the lounge where we chatted for several minutes more. Then I went to look at the time on the clock in order to set back my watch 50 minutes to have the correct time the next day. Mr. Bateman did the same thing. It was, I suppose, the last time that he wound his watch, poor Mr. Bateman. As it was 10:30, we wished him good night, Mrs. Balls and I, then we went up to go to bed… Not being able to sleep, I started to read. It was a quarter till midnight when a big shock was felt which shook all the boat.”

Mr. Olaus Abelseth (Third Class Passenger) – “I went to bed about 10 o’clock Sunday night, and I think it was about 15 minutes to 12 when I woke up; and there was another man in the same room - two of us in the same room - and he said to me, ‘What is that?’ I said, ‘I don’t know, but we had better get up.’ So we did get up and put our clothes on, and we two went up on deck in the forward part of the ship.”

Mr. Berk Pickard (Third Class Passenger) – “I was one of the third-class passengers on the Titanic. My cabin was No. 10 in the steerage, at the stern. I first knew of the collision when it happened, about 10 minutes to 12. We had all been asleep, and all of a sudden we perceived a shock.”

Edward Wheelton (First Class Steward) – “I had just come off watch. I went to bed. I was awakened between 10 minutes to 12 and a quarter to 12 by a shock. It felt as if it was the dropping of a propeller or something like that.”

August H. Weikman (Saloon Barber) – “I certify that my occupation on the Titanic was known as the saloon barber. I was sitting in my barber shop on Sunday night, April 14, 1912, at 11.40pm, when the collision occurred.”

George F. Crowe (Saloon Steward) – “I was on duty up until about 10.30 on the night of the disaster, and I turned in about 11 o’clock; it might have been a little later. About 11.40 there was a kind of shaking of the ship and a little impact, from which I thought one of the propellers had been broken off.”

James Widgery (Bedroom Steward) – “When I heard the noise, it woke me up. That was about 25 of 12. I looked at the clock hanging on the bed.”

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Henry Etches (Bedroom Steward) – “I was awakened by something, but I did not know what it was, and I called to my mate and I said ‘What time is it that they are going to call us next?’ It was then between 25 minutes and 20 minutes to 12.”

Walter Nichols (Assistant Saloon Steward) – “At 11:40 I was awakened by feeling a bit of a vibration. The ship went on for a bit; then the engines stopped. Nobody was frightened, and some of my roommates didn’t want to trouble to get up and see what the trouble was, but I put on my coat and took a run out to look. It was very black outside, and I couldn’t see anything except that there was some ice on the deck forward.”

Joseph Boxhall (Fourth Officer) – “The collision was at 11.43, I think.”

Robert Hichens (Quartermaster) – “[She struck at] twenty minutes to twelve.”

Albert Haines (Boatswain’s Mate) – “The right time, without putting the clock back, was 20 minutes to 12.”

George Rowe (Quartermaster) – “I felt a slight jar and looked at my watch. It was a fine night, and it was then 20 minutes to 12.”

Reginald Lee (Lookout) – “The first thing that was reported was after seven bells struck [11:30]; it was some minutes, it might have been nine or ten minutes afterwards [11:39 or 11:40]. Three bells were struck by Fleet, warning ‘Right ahead,’ and immediately he rung the telephone up to the bridge, ‘Iceberg right ahead.’ The reply came back from the bridge, ‘Thank you.’”

In the above we see a range from 11:35 to 11:50pm in the time of collision. But it is very clear that the majority placed the time between 11:40pm and 11:45pm. It should be noted that Boatswain’s Mate Albert Haines specifically mentioned that the time he gave was unadjusted time, “without putting the clock back” that night. Since many of the passengers and some members of the crew would take time from one of the 48 slaves clocks on board the ship, how is it that there appears to be a spread of about 5 minutes between most of the reported times of the collision? The answer is a combination of things. First of all most people when asked the time would tend to round off the reading of the minute hand to the nearest 5 minute mark. So 11:40 or 11:45 would be the expected response if the more precise time was somewhere between those two times. The other explanation has to do with how time was kept on those slave clocks that were scattered throughout the ship that people could use to get ship’s time and to set their personal timepieces by. Captain Smith, when in command of the Olympic, is on record as saying, “when the minute hand [of the Master clock] comes to pass the line of the minute, the effect is that the finger moves and that releases the contact, and the whole [bunch of slave clocks] goes with a jump.” He also said, “We have two [master clocks on board]. They have a large system in the ship, and they put in two [master clocks] to work the whole lot.”47 The slave clocks on board ran off the master clocks. They did not show seconds, only minutes. Every time a master clock would advance a minute, so too would a slave clock. The time shown on a slave clock depended on how accurately the hands were set on them in the first place, and what was the time showing on the master clock when the whole lot was started up. If one master clock differed from another by one minute, for example, then both master clocks would carry that one minute difference until

23 that difference was corrected.48 Additionally, it should be expected that time taken off of people’s personal windup timepieces would show much greater variances than one or two minutes, depending on how accurately they were adjusted last, and how accurately they ran over a period of time between windings. However, there were a few instances where the time of the accident was notably outside the range given above.

Archibald Gracie (First Class Passenger) – “I was awakened in my stateroom at 12 o’clock. The time, 12 o’clock, was noted on my watch, which was on my dresser, which I looked at promptly when I got up. At the same time, almost instantly, I heard the blowing off of steam, and the ship’s machinery seemed to stop. It was so slight I could not be positive of it. All through the voyage the machinery did not manifest itself at all from my position in my stateroom, so perfect was the boat.”

Edwina Troutt (Second Class Passenger) – “Sunday was a very cold day & the evening was spent in prayer & reading. Mr. Milling, Mr. Andrew & myself were in the Library talking over various things. He [Milling] went to bed about 10:30 & at 10:55 I heard the ship make a stumbling noise, enough to wake me.”

John Collins (Assistant Cook) – “I had a clock by me, by my bed, and my clock was five minutes fast, and it was exactly a quarter past 11 when the ship struck the iceberg, and it wakened me…the clock was 20 minutes pass 11, and the accident took place at a quarter past 11, if my clock was right. I could not exactly say.”

C. E. Andrews (Officer’s Steward) – “I came off watch about a quarter to 11 and went down and turned in. About 20 minutes after that [11:05] I was wakened up by a movement of the ship…Well, sir, to my recollection, about 20 minutes past 11, sir...Well, that is, so far as I know, sir, because I was in my bunk. There was no clock about. I think I was lying down about 20 minutes.”

Let’s first look closely at what Archibald Gracie had to say. He said that he was awakened in his stateroom and noticed his watch on his dresser showed 12 o’clock. And then, “almost instantly,” steam is blowing off from the stopped ship. Yet we know that steam did not immediately blow off when the collision happened. Second Officer Lightoller made no mention of steam blowing off when he first came out of his room and looked around the bridge area a few minutes after the collision before returning to his cabin to wait in case he was needed. Later, about twenty minutes according to Lightoller, Fourth Officer Boxhall called on him and told him about the collision and that the ship was taking on water. When he got up he noticed that “the steam was roaring off.” A similar story comes from second-class passenger Lawrence Beesley who said he found steam blowing off from the boilers when he went up on deck for the third time after the accident. Similarly, we find that Sir Cosmo Duff-Gordon observed steam blowing off only after going up to the boat deck for a second time where he found “the noise there was perfectly indescribable.” And a similar story comes from Norman Chambers who noticed steam blowing off when he went up on deck for the second time, this time with his wife, following the collision.49 So it is likely that it was not the collision that awoke Gracie at midnight.50 It seems that the blowing off of steam first started about 10 minutes after the accident since it would take some time for the boilers to overpressure and cause the safety valves to open, especially since all the dampers were shut at

24 the time of the accident, and in some cases fires were already being drawn.51 The other evidence that tends to show that Gracie was not awakened by the accident is the time that his pocket watch stopped when he went into the water just as a big wave, induced by the sinking of the ship, washed its way along the deck. Gracie said, “…my watch, that I spoke of before, when I looked at it afterwards on the Carpathia, had stopped, and the time indicated was 2.22.” Like Archibald Gracie, Jack Thayer also left the ship just as it was going down. Jack Thayer said, “I finally came up with my lungs bursting, but not having taken any water. The ship was in front of me, forty yards away. How long I had been swimming under water, I don’t know. Perhaps a minute or less. Incidentally, my watch stopped at 2:22 A.M.” So coincidentally, both Gracie’s and Thayer’s pocket watches happened to stop at 2:22am. But unlike Gracie, Jack Thayer was awake and winding his watch when the accident happened. Thayer said that it was 11:45pm when the ship struck. If steam started to blow off around ten minutes after that, as also noted by Fourth Officer Joseph Boxhall upon his return from his first inspection below,52 and if Gracie’s watch was keeping about the same time as Thayer’s watch, it would have showed a time close to 12 o’clock when the steam was blowing off. As for Edwina Troutt’s account in her letter to Mrs. Milling, the time of 10:55 is what one would expect to see if she had put her watch back about 45 to 50 minutes before retiring. A number of people would have done so, having been informed that the clock was to go back about that amount of time that night. As far as the baker John Collins is concerned, it may be as simple as having the wrong time on the clock near his bed. He did seem a bit hesitant when he said, “…if my clock was right. I could not exactly say.” And as far as Steward C. E. Andrews, he had no clock to refer to at all. He only assumed he was lying in his bunk for about 20 minutes when the accident happened. He also said that he may have dozed off for a short time. He originally said he went to bed at a quarter to 11 and the ship struck about 20 minutes later. That would make it 11:05. However, he later said it struck at 11:20, and he admitted to Senator Bourne that it was entirely a guess. As we have seen, the majority of passenger and crew alike placed the accident between 11:40 and 11:45pm And as noted by Boatswain’s Mate Albert Haines, it was “without putting the clock back.”

NAVIGATIONAL VERIFICATION

At Local Apparent Noon on Sunday, April 14, Titanic was about 126 nautical miles before the corner, a point in the North Atlantic at 42°N, 47°W, that marked the end of the great circle part of the route that she was following toward New York. She had been carrying an average of 75 to 76 revolutions per minute on reciprocating engines since noontime Saturday, and had ran 546 nautical miles in 24 hours and 45 minutes. That was an average speed made good of 22.06 knots against the North Atlantic Current. When Titanic came to a final stop following the collision with an iceberg, it is estimated that she was located close to 41° 46’ N, 49° 57’W, about 2.5 miles north of the wreck site. The distance over ground from her approximate April 14th noontime position to her final stopping point is a little over 258 nautical miles over the route taken. If the time of collision was 11 hours and 40 minutes past noon, then the speed made good works out to be 22.1 knots, consistent with her performance over the previous day’s run. If, however, the clocks were put back 24 minutes sometime before the accident, as some people would have us believe, then the time from noon to the collision would be 12 hours and 4 minutes, and the speed made good over ground works out to be 21.4 knots, or almost ¾ of knot slower. When the collision took place, Quartermaster George Rowe, who was stationed out on the poop deck, took a reading of the taffrail log which indicated that the ship ran 260 nautical miles through the

25 water since noon that day.53 This represents an average speed of 22.28 knots through the water taking 11 hours and 40 minutes from noon to the time of the accident. Furthermore, we have learned from Quartermaster Robert Hichens that in the two-hour period from 8 to 10pm (while he was the standby quartermaster) the taffrail log reading that was called in about ½ minute before 10pm showed that the ship had advanced about 45 nautical miles since 8pm, the time he came on watch.54 The reading of the taffrail log gives the distance run by the ship through the water and is not affected by current. The distance through the water per unit time is also a function of the revolutions carried on the engines. If the average revolutions per minute were kept the same all afternoon and evening, as we were told they were, then the average advance through the water per unit time should remain about the same all afternoon and evening. If d is the distance through the water of a period of t hours, and if D is the distance through the water over a period of T hours, then as long as the average revolutions per minute of the engines remained about the same, we get: d/t = D/T or T = t x D/d

If D is the distance traveled through the water between noon and the collision, 260 miles, and if d is the distance through the water over two hours, 45 miles, and if t = 2 hours, then T, the time from noon to the collision, works out to be 2*260/45 = 480/45 = 11.56 hours, which is a duration of 11 hours 33 minutes. This is just 7 minutes (1 percent) short of 11 hours and 40 minutes. Now what do we get if we take the claim of those that say that clocks went back 24 minutes sometime before the accident. If that were true, then the time duration from noon to the accident would be 12 hours and 4 minutes, or 12.07 hours. Dividing the 260 miles that we got from QM Rowe by 12.07 hours gives an average speed through the water of 21.55 knots. In two hours, that is an average advance of only 43.1 nautical miles, which rounds to 43 miles. On the other hand, if there were no clock setback, and the time from noon to the collision was 11 hours and 40 minutes, which is 11.67 hours, then dividing 260 miles that we got from QM Rowe by 11.67 hours gives an average speed through the water of 22.29 knots. In two hours, that is an average advance of 44.6 nautical miles, which rounds to 45 miles. Only one of these values is consistent with the 45 mile, two-hour advance that was noted by QM Hichens, and consistent with how the ship performed during the previous day’s run while carrying the same number of revolutions.

EXTERNAL OBSERVATIONAL EVIDENCE

There is also some supporting observational evidence that demonstrates that the collision took place about 11:40pm in unadjusted Titanic time that was 2 hours 58 minutes behind GMT, or 2 hours and 2 minutes ahead of mean time in NY. Time on the SS Californian, which witnessed the firing of distress signals from Titanic that night, was 3 hours 10 minutes behind GMT, or 1 hour 50 minutes ahead of mean time in NY. Therefore, there was about a 12 minute difference between clocks on these two ships. By most accounts that we have seen, the collision took place between 11:40 and 11:45pm on Titanic. This would correspond to around 11:30pm on Californian. According to Californian’s Third Officer Charles Groves, he started to notice a light on the horizon somewhere around 11:10pm but thought it might be just a rising star and did not pay much attention to it. Around 11:25pm Groves started to pay a little more attention to this light realizing that it was the light of a moving steamer. By around 11:30pm he thought that this steamer was approaching his

26 vessel from about 3 points abaft his starboard beam, though he said that did not actually take any bearings on it. At the time, according to Groves, his own ship was pointing about NE by compass. It was at this time that he dropped down to the deck below to tell his captain that what looks like a passenger steamer appears to be coming their way. According to Groves, Captain Lord asked, “Can you make anything out of her lights?” and Groves said, “Yes, she is evidently a passenger steamer coming up on us.” Captain Lord testified that he noticed this steamer coming up from the east, and kept following it casually until it appeared to have stopped somewhere around 11:30pm (11:42pm Titanic ATS). When Groves came down to the chart room to report this approaching steamer, Captain Lord told him to go back up to the upper bridge and try to establish contact with the steamer by Morse lamp. Groves then followed these instructions and set up the lamp to signal the steamer when he noticed that the steamer appeared to have shut out most of her deck lights. He recalled the exact time as 11:40pm on Californian (11:52pm Titanic ATS) because they struck one-bell on Californian to inform the watch below to get ready to come up and take over the watch on deck in 20 minutes time. About 5 minutes later Captain Lord came up to the upper bridge to have closer look at the lights of this stopped steamer for himself.55 According to Lord, Groves mentioned to him that he thought it was a passenger steamer that had stopped. Lord, however, remarked that it did not appear to him to be a passenger steamer, but a vessel more like his own, a tramp steamer that stopped for the night on account of this vast field of ice that blocked their path westward. In the extreme clearness of the night, the lights of the stopped steamer seemed to be only about 5 miles away, within range of omnidirectional Morse signaling lamps that most vessels carried. Groves then told Lord that he believed it was a passenger vessel because she had just shut out her lights, which was in keeping with the practice on some ships that he had served on where deck lights would be put out before midnight to encourage passengers to retire for the night. It is widely believed that what was actually seen by these two men were the lights of Titanic which came up from the east and stopped soon after colliding with an iceberg. Before the collision, Titanic was on a course of 266° true steaming at about 22 knots. When the iceberg was first reported, Titanic was put into a hard turn to port in a failed attempt to avoid making contact. However, after initial contact was made with the iceberg, the helm was shifted hard over to the opposite side so as to minimize damage along the starboard side of the vessel.56 This resulted in the ship swinging over to starboard after the iceberg passed astern. The iceberg was last seen off Titanic’s starboard quarter before it disappeared into the dark night.57 Taking into account the turning characteristics of Titanic, the movement of Titanic before, during, and immediately after colliding which the iceberg is shown to scale in Figure 5 below.58 A few minutes after Titanic came to an initial stop her engines were restarted. But this was only for a very short period of time, possibly to move the ship away from some nearby floating ice in case they needed to launch lifeboats, or perhaps to take sternway off the vessel after her engines were run astern.59 When Titanic was finally dead in the water, about ten minutes after the allision event took place, she was pointing northward,60 almost end-on to Californian, and showing her a single masthead light, a red sidelight, and a glare of light aft to those on Californian. It was the assuming of an acute angle toward Californian as Titanic drifted to a stop that made Charles Groves believe that the steamer had shut most of her deck lights out. At that time, pointing toward the northeast by magnetic compass, Californian would be showing only a relatively dim, stationary and unnoticed stern light on the northern horizon to those on Titanic at that time. Relative to the stopped Californian, Titanic would be on a line of bearing of SSE by magnetic compass (about 135° true),61 and at a distance of about 12 to 13 miles away.62

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Fig. 5 – Movement of Titanic during the collision sequence.

The observations seen from Californian would not have happened at the times that were reported if, as some people believe, Titanic’s clocks had been put back 23 or 24 minutes sometime before the accident took place. A collision time of 12 hours and 3 or 4 minutes past noon just doesn’t hold up no matter how you look at it. What we can say is that the collision happened close to 11:40pm Apparent Time Titanic for April 14, a time corresponding to 2:38am April 15th GMT.

THE TIME OF FOUNDERING

Most accounts put the time of foundering close to 2:20am on clocks that were still set for April 14th time. Let’s look at the evidence.

TESTIMONIES AND WRITTEN ACCOUNTS

Here are just a few statements from passengers and crew members alike. Some in testimony they gave, and some from written accounts in affidavits, letters, articles or books that they themselves wrote.

Mrs. Marian Longstreth Thayer (First Class Passenger) – “The after part of the ship then reared in the air, with the stern upwards, until it assumed an almost vertical position. It seemed to remain stationary in this position for many seconds (perhaps twenty), then suddenly dove straight down out of sight. It was 2.20am when the Titanic disappeared, according to a wrist watch worn by one of the passengers in my boat.” [ was in lifeboat No. 4.]

Miss Daisy Minahan (First Class Passenger) – “The Titanic was fast sinking. After she went down the cries were horrible. This was at 2:20am by a man’s watch who stood next to me.” [Daisy Minahan was in lifeboat No. 15.]

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Mr. Hugh Woolner (First Class Passenger) – “She sank finally at 2.22 am.” [Hugh Woolner was in Collapsible lifeboat No. D.]

Mr. Lawrence Beesley (Second Class Passenger) – “A watch in our boat gave the time as 2:30 A.M.” [Lawrence Beesley was in lifeboat No. 13.]

Reginald Lee (Lookout) – “There was a lady there had a watch, and after the ship went down she told me that her watch said half-past two.” [Reginald Lee was in lifeboat No. 13 along with Lawrence Beesley.]

Annie Robinson (Stewardess) – “Well, I looked at my watch when the ship went down and it was twenty minutes to two. That was by altered time when we were in the boat, and I do not think we were in the boat more than three-quarters of an hour.” [Annie Robinson was in lifeboat No. 11.]

Herbert Pitman (Third Officer) – “2.20 exactly, ship’s time. I took my watch out at the time she disappeared, and I said, It is 2.20, and the passengers around me heard it…2.20 a. m., the 15th of April.” [Pitman was in lifeboat No. 5.]

Joseph Boxhall (Fourth Officer) – “No; I can not say that I saw her sink. I saw the lights go out, and I looked [at my watch] two or three minutes afterward and it was 25 minutes past 2. So I took it that when she sank would be about 20 minutes after 2.” [Boxhall was in emergency lifeboat No. 2.]

It is apparent that Lawrence Beesley and Reginald Lee heard “half-past two” from the same lady passenger in boat No. 13. Hugh Woolner wrote 2:22 as the foundering time in a letter to a friend while on board Carpathia. As previously noted, he also wrote that the ship collided at 11:45pm in that same letter. These are the same exact times that were reported by young Jack Thayer. So it may have been that Woolner had spoken to Thayer while on board Carpathia. Marian Thayer in boat No. 4, Daisy Minahan in boat No. 15, and Third Officer Herbert Pitman in boat No. 5 all put the foundering time at 2:20 from watches seen while they were in their respective lifeboats.63 Annie Robinson said her watch showed 1:40 but stated that her watch was keeping altered time. She apparently set her watch back before retiring for the night by about three-quarters of an hour. The precise planned adjustment was for 47 minutes that Sunday night. Third Officer Herbert Pitman, he was specifically questioned about the time carried on his watch:

Senator SMITH. I neglected to ask you whether, in fixing the time [2:20am] when the Titanic disappeared beneath the water, you gave me ship’s time? Mr. PITMAN. Yes; that is ship’s time. Senator SMITH. You had the accurate ship’s time? Mr. PITMAN. Yes, sir. Senator SMITH. When were the ship’s clocks set; do you know? Mr. PITMAN. They are set at midnight every night. Senator SMITH. They were set at midnight? Mr. PITMAN. Every night. Senator SMITH. And were they set at midnight Sunday night? Mr. PITMAN. No; we had something else to think of.

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Senator SMITH. Exactly; so that you got the ship’s time? Mr. PITMAN. Ship’s time. Senator SMITH. From midnight Saturday? Mr. PITMAN. Yes. Senator SMITH. And your watch Mr. PITMAN. Was correct. Senator SMITH. Was correct? Mr. PITMAN. Yes, sir.

What Pitman told Senator Smith at the US Senate investigation was that his watch was keeping Apparent Time and that it was set last at midnight Saturday night; set to a time so that it would have read 12:00 at local apparent noon Sunday, a time that was 2 hours 58 minutes behind GMT.

EXTERNAL OBSERVATIONAL EVIDENCE

For external observational evidence we can again turn to the upper bridge of the stopped Californian. At 2:05am Californian time, the lights of the steamer that was firing distress signals that night had suddenly disappeared from view. At the time this happened it was observed by Californian’s Second Officer Herbert Stone and Apprentice James Gibson. In his testimony before the British Inquiry, James Gibson stated: 64

“We were talking about it all the time, Sir, till five minutes past two, when she disappeared...[I was then ordered to] call the Captain and tell him that that ship has disappeared in the south-west; that we are heading west-south-west, and that she has fired altogether eight rockets...[The Captain] asked me were they all white?...I told him that they were all white...He asked me the time...[I told him] five minutes past two by the wheelhouse clock.”

It must be pointed out that the bearing and heading information that Gibson told Lord came from Second Officer Stone, the officer of the watch, who allegedly was taking bearings on the steamer from the standard compass. It was the same officer who told the Wreck Commission, “I could not understand why if the rockets came from a steamer beyond this one, when the steamer altered her bearing the rockets should also alter their bearings.”65 Of course, as pointed out to him, if those rockets stayed on the same line of bearing as that steamer, which he claimed was altering her bearings from the time he saw the second of eight white rockets, then they had to come from that steamer and not some other vessel that was beyond. What was really happening here was Californian was swinging around somewhat erratically that night, giving the impression that the vessel was altering her bearings toward the southwest if one was not too careful when taking observations. That vessel could not have been altering her bearings the way Stone described since she was presenting a red port sidelight to Californian until after the seventh rocket was seen. When the lights of the steamer disappeared, Gibson was ordered to go down to the chart room and wake Captain Lord. On his way down he passed through the wheelhouse and noticed the time on the clock. It was then 2:05am Californian time, or 2:17am unadjusted Titanic time. Titanic lookout was the crew member that was put in charge of emergency lifeboat No. 1. This is what he had to say:66

“She [Titanic] took a heavy cant and her bow went down clear...and that is the time when I saw her lights go out, all her lights. The next thing I saw was her poop…It could not have

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been more than two or three minutes after that that her poop went up as straight as anything; there was a sound like steady thunder as you hear on an ordinary night at a distance, and soon she disappeared from view…in my estimation she must have broken in half...abaft the after expansion plate.”

The lights of a steamer disappearing at 2:05am Californian time, equivalent to 2:17am Titanic ATS, was no random coincidence. About three minutes after her lights went out, Titanic’s remaining stern section was seen to tip up and then slide beneath the surface. The time was 2:20am unadjusted time.

STOPPED POCKET WATCHES

The following is a list of several stopped pocket watches of survivors and victims of the sinking.

Pocket watch Owner Time on Watch Survived Augustus Weikman (Saloon Barber) 1:50 Boat A Robert Daniel (First Class Passenger) 2:20 Boat ? Frank Prentice (Kitchen Storekeeper) 2:21 Boat 4 Archibald Gracie (First Class Passenger) 2:22 Boat B Jack Thayer (First Class Passenger) 2:22 Boat B

Pocket watch Owner Time on Watch Recovered John March (Postal Clerk) 1:27 # 225 Mackay-Bennett Malkolm Johnson (Third Class Passenger) 1:37 # 37 Mackay-Bennett John Chapman (Second Class Passenger) 1:45 # 17 Mackay-Bennett Edmond Stone (Bedroom Steward) 2:16 # 41 Mackay-Bennett Carl Oscar Asplund (Third Class Passenger) 2:19 # 142 Mackay-Bennett Austin Partner (First Class Passenger) 2:25 # 166 Mackay-Bennett (Musician) 2:25 # 224 Mackay-Bennett Unknown victim 2:28 RMS Titanic Inc. Robert Norman (Second Class Passenger) 3:07 # 287 Mackay-Bennett John Gill (Second Class Passenger) 3:21 # 155 Mackay-Bennett

We have already noted that Jack Thayer and Archibald Gracie both claimed that their pocket watches stopped at 2:22, which we also noted was the time that Hugh Woolner wrote in a letter to a friend while on board Carpathia. Other pocket watches that stopped close to the accepted foundering time of 2:20am as seen above were those of Austin Partner, Edmond Stone, Frank Prentice, Robert Daniel, and Wallace Hartley. But there were a few recovered watches that showed times that appear to be far different. John March did not survive the sinking but his pocket watch did. It stopped at 1:27. If we take the time of that wave that swept so many people overboard as occurring about 2:15am unadjusted time, then we get a 48 minute difference between that time and the time on March’s watch. This corresponds very closely to the planned 47 minute time adjustment for that Sunday night. The same is true for Malkolm Johnson whose watch stopped at 1:37, a time that is close to the time that Stewardess Annie Robinson carried on her watch when the ship went under. It is likely that both John March and Malkolm Johnson, like Annie Robinson, had set their personal time pieces back earlier in the evening before retiring. Augustus Weikman survived the sinking. His pocket watch also survived but stopped at 1:50. Weikman wrote in his affidavit that he was in his barber shop at the time of the accident which he said

31 occurred at 11:40. However, one should not necessarily assume he was looking at his pocket watch at the time the collision happened. He may have been looking at a windup wall clock in his shop, or he found out about the time of collision later on, and only repeated what he was told. The 11:50 time on his stopped pocket watch is 30 minutes earlier than the accepted foundering time of 2:20 suggesting that it may have been put back earlier. However, Weikman was part of the Victualing Department, not the Deck or Engine department crew. He did not stand any watch. If he did put his watch back at all, it would most likely have been for the full expected adjustment amount, just like Annie Robinson did. But his pocket watch stopped ten minutes after the time that Annie Robinson noticed on her watch, a watch that we were told by Annie was keeping “altered time” when the ship went down. Perhaps the answer is that Weikman’s pocket watch was keeping altered time like Robinson’s but it did not stop immediately when he was swept off the deck while trying to free one of the remaining collapsible boats? Or maybe it simply stopped working well before he was swept off. We can only speculate and have no real way of knowing. The other anomalies in those stopped watch times are the recovered timepieces of Robert Norman and John Gill. Norman did not survive the sinking, but his recovered watch stopped at 3:07. Interestingly, this is 47 minutes after the accepted time that the ship foundered. What this suggests is that Robert Norman did not set his watch back the previous night or morning and it was still keeping April 13th time instead of April 14th time. If he simply forgot to set his watch back by the 45 minute adjustment of the night before, then his watch showing 3:07 would be 45 minutes ahead of 2:22, the time that showed on Gracie’s and Thayer’s watches when they stopped working that night. It should also be noted that under detailed X-ray examination of Norman’s watch,67 it was found that it was partially wound when it entered the water. Unlike several other pocket watches, Norman’s watch was key-wound and required a pocketknife to open a glazed bezel in order to set the hands to the correct time, making daily time alterations somewhat more difficult to do. In the case of John Gill, it seems his watch was simply set an hour ahead for some unknown reason. It showed 3:21. But the majority of stopped pocket watches showed times ranging from 2:16 to 2:25, well within what would be expected from the 2:20am foundering time quoted by Third Officer Pitman and Fourth Officer Boxhall. A foundering time of 2:20am unadjusted Apparent Time Titanic would have corresponded to 5:18am 15 April GMT. The time from collision to sinking was 2 hours and 40 minutes.

CHANGING TIME REFERENCES

In 1963 Quartermaster George Rowe wrote a letter to Ed Kamuda of the Titanic Historical Society where he talked about many things including what he was doing at the time the collision happened.68 In that letter Rowe wrote:

“At about 11:40 I was walking from starboard to port and on turning round on the port side she gave rather an odd motion which was similar to going alongside a quay a bit heavy. I looked forward and was amazed to see what I thought to be a sailing vessel…but as we passed it we were so close I saw it was an iceberg…My watch should have ended at 12:22 but time went by and no relief turned up.”

George Rowe read the time on his watch as 11:40pm when the collision happened. He, expected to get about 22 minutes added to his time on deck but his relief, QM Arthur Bright, did not show up when he was supposed to. As noted before, the clocks for the crew that stood watches was to go back twice that night, 23 minutes in one watch and 24 minutes in the other watch. In his 1963 letter, George Rowe was clearly

32 referring to unadjusted time since he talked about being relieved at 12:22. Normally, it was the practice for the relief crewmember to show up a minute or two before 8-bells were struck. George Rowe’s relief that night was Quartermaster Arthur Bright. Bright had this to say about relieving Rowe before the American Inquiry:

“[I was] in the bunk, asleep...[Walter Wynn] came and called me and told me that the ship had collided...He says, ‘The ship is going down by the head.’...I did not feel the impact at all. It did not wake me up...I got up and dressed myself then...I went out to the after end of the ship to relieve the man I should have relieved at 12 o’clock, a man by the name of Rowe. We stood there for some moments and did not know exactly what to do, and rang the telephone up to the bridge and asked them what we should do. They told us to bring a box of detonators for them - signals. Each of us took a box to the bridge.”

Notice Bright’s reference to relieving Rowe at 12 o’clock and how that differs with Rowe’s written statement about being relieved at 12:22 above. The difference in times given is due to a difference in time references. Bright was talking about partially altered time, after a clock used by the watch-keeping crew would have been put back by one-half the full adjustment amount. Rowe, on the other hand, was referring to unadjusted ship’s time for April 14th in his letter that he wrote 51 years after the event. From both Rowe’s statement and Bright’s testimony it is clear that Bright did not show up on time to relieve George Rowe. Why? On Titanic and other White Star Line vessels it was the practice to strike a one-bell warning 15 minutes before 8-bells were to be struck giving notice to the watch below to start to turn out and get ready to take over the watch on deck. It was also the time that the stand-by quartermaster would notify the off- duty officers to turn out, then take the air temperature and pressure from the ship’s thermometer and barometer, take the temperature of the water, and just before 8-bells being struck, record the taffrail log reading that would be called in from the quartermaster stationed out on the poop. It would also be the job of the standby QM to strike 8-bells to signify the end of the watch, and 8-bells would be struck by the lookouts up in the crow’s nest in reply as mandated by White Star Line rules. These were normal duties that were done by the standby QM in their normal work routine.69 But on the night of April 14, 1912, the accident happened well before any of this was to be done. The simple answer as to why Bright did not show up on time is that he slept through the accident and nobody bothered to make sure he got up until the ship was already noticeably down by the head.70 Luckily for him, his mate Walter Wynn, who went up to the well deck after being awakened after the accident, must have realized that he was missing some time after all hands were called out. After spending time uncovering some of the boats, Wynn testified that he went back down to his quarters to get a knit bag and a knife. It was probably then that he noticed Bright still in his bunk. When Bright finally got up and got dressed, he went aft to relieve Rowe out on the poop, apparently not being told to do otherwise. Besides Wynn and Bright, the other off duty quartermaster at the time of the accident was Walter Perkis. According to Perkis:

“I turned out after being called by the joiner of the ship. He came to the room and told us we had better turn out...He told us, then, that we had struck something. I took no notice of it. I stayed there until I though it was time to turn out to relieve the deck at 12 o’clock.”

Notice the same reference to relieving the deck at 12 o’clock that Bright used, a reference to partially altered time when 8-bells was to be struck. In the case of Quartermaster Walter Perkis, despite being told by the ship’s joiner (whose quarters were right next to those of the quartermasters down on E deck) that the vessel had struck “something,”

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Perkis decided to stay in his quarters until it was time to go on duty. The person that QM Perkis was to relieve that night was QM Robert Hichens who was the man at the wheel at the time Titanic struck the iceberg. According to Hichens:

“I left the wheel at 23 minutes past 12, sir. I was relieved by Quartermaster Perkis. He relieved me at 23 minutes past 12. I think the first officer, or one of the officers said, ‘That will do with the wheel; get the boats out.’”

Hichens was taking his ‘trick at the helm’ at the time the ship struck. He came on watch at 8pm as standby quartermaster until 10pm. At 10pm Hichens took over the wheel from Quartermaster Alfred Olliver who then replaced Hichens as standby quartermaster. At the US Senate investigation Hichens was asked directly by Senator Smith, “How long had you been at the wheel when the collision occurred?” to which Hichens replied, “One hour and forty minutes, sir.” Hichens expected to be at the wheel 2 hours and 23 minutes because of the clock change that was to take place. As we have seen, Walter Perkis showed up at 12:23, which is exactly at the time he should have relieved Hichens as seen on a clock keeping unadjusted time. If clocks had been put back, the time should have showed 12:00, not 12:23. Hichens was also asked if they had put the clock back by the time he left the wheel. His response was, “I do not know, sir. I did not notice it.” But he did notice that the time was 12:23 when Perkis showed up to relieve him. And we know directly from Perkis that he waited until it was time to relieve the deck which would be at 12 o’clock on a clock showing partially altered time. When looking at the direct evidence that is available to us it becomes very obvious that the clocks were not put back that night because of the accident. As Third Officer Pitman stated, “No; we had something else to think of.” But not everyone knew that the planned clock adjustment at midnight was not carried out. At the US Senate investigation in 1912 QM George Rowe had this to say:

“I felt a slight jar and looked at my watch. It was a fine night, and it was then 20 minutes to 12. I looked toward the starboard side of the ship and saw a mass of ice. I then remained on the after bridge to await orders through the telephone. No orders came down, and I remained until 25 minutes after 12, when I saw a boat on the starboard beam…I telephoned to the fore bridge to know if they knew there was a boat lowered. They replied, asking me if I was the third officer. I replied, ‘No; I am the quartermaster.’ They told me to bring over detonators, which are used in firing distress signals...I took them to the forebridge and turned them over to the fourth officer. I assisted the officer to fire them, and was firing the distress signals until about five and twenty minutes after 1. At that time they were getting out the starboard collapsible boats. The chief officer, Wilde, wanted a sailor...I went to the boat. Women and children were being passed in...The order was then given to lower the boat.”

So let’s put all of this in sequence using Rowe’s timeline from his 1912 testimony:

11:40 (by his watch) – Ship collides with iceberg along the starboard side 12:25 (by his watch) – Rowe calls the bridge to inform them that a boat was seen in the water 1:25 (by his watch) – Rowe leaves the bridge to help load and take charge of Collapsible C

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Fig. 6 – QM Rowe on the afterbridge sees a boat in the water on the starboard beam.

Seeing a boat on the starboard beam as early as 12:25? Was this possible? Consider the following. According to both Second Officer Lightoller, Third Officer Pitman and Fourth Officer Boxhall, the order to first uncover the boats came close to 20 minutes after the collision, after Boxhall returned from his second inspection forward and reported that the mail room was flooding. For the next 20 to 25 minutes, members of the deck crew were involved in uncovering and swinging out the boats while Captain Smith personally got involved in going below to see the flooding for himself where he met up with Thomas Andrews.71 According to independent estimates, as we shall see, the order to first load the boats with women and children came about 45 minutes after the accident. And then it would take at least 10 to 15 minutes to get people loaded into a boat safely, and then another 5 minutes, or thereabouts, to safely lower a boat about 60 feet to the sea below. The first lifeboat to leave Titanic, No. 7, left about an hour after the collision took place. It could not have been much sooner than that. So the earliest time that Rowe could have seen a lifeboat in the water would be about 12:45 on an unadjusted clock, about 20 minutes later than what he said. Although QM Rowe made no reference to QM Bright being with him in his testimony at either the American or British inquiries, QM Bright testified that he was with Rowe when they called the bridge and were told to bring over boxes of detonators. According to Fourth Officer Boxhall’s testimony:

“I knew one of the boats had gone away, because I happened to be putting the firing lanyard inside the wheel-house after sending off a rocket, and the telephone bell rang. Somebody telephoned to say that one of the starboard boats had left the ship, and I was rather surprised.”

Was this the call from Rowe out on the poop? There were only 4 loud-speaking telephones in the wheelhouse. One connected to the crow’s nest, a second connected to the forecastle head, a third to the engine room, and the fourth to the afterbridge on the poop. We know nobody was stationed on the forecastle head. We also know from George Hogg’s testimony that he and Evans vacated the crow’s nest about 20 minutes after replacing Fleet and Lee to help swing out the boats. Hogg also said he tried calling bridge on the phone and got no answer.72 And of course that call received by Boxhall could not have come from the engine room. So it seems that it could only be the call from Rowe out on the poop that Boxhall took informing him that a boat was seen in the water. And it would be Boxhall, who was put in charge of sending up socket distress signals, who would be the one asking Rowe to bring over those detonators. According to Rowe, they stored distress socket signals both on the forebridge and aft in the Quartermaster’s locker under the poop.73

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From Rowe’s 1963 letter to Ed Kamuda:

“I said I was the after QM. They asked me if I knew where the distress rockets were stowed I replied yes and he said bring as many as you can on to the forebridge. I went down under the poop to the locker.”

According to Rowe’s testimony before the British Inquiry in 1912:

17684. Q. How long do you think it was from the time you commenced firing the rockets till you finished firing the rockets? – A. [Rowe] From about a quarter to one to about 1.25. 17685. Q. Yes, that is right. You gave evidence in America about it, and I see what you said there was: “I assisted the Officer to fire them” - that is, rockets - “and was firing distress signals until about five and twenty past one.” That is accurate? – A. Yes.

Now it should be apparent that it shouldn’t take 20 minutes to go down one deck to the storeroom by the steering engine under the poop to get to the locker where they kept the signals and then carry them to the bridge. Rowe knew exactly where they were kept. And we have also seen that the first boat was not launched until about an hour after the accident happened. So is there some explanation that can make some sense out of the times quoted by Rowe? I believe the explanation is simply that QM George Rowe was keeping Bridge Time on his personal timepiece that night. At 8pm his watch would have shown 8:00 when 8-bells was struck when he took his position out on the poop deck, having last been the quartermaster at the wheel when his last watch ended two hours earlier at 6pm The collision happened about 11:40pm, and when he looked at his watch at the time it showed 11:40. But Rowe also knew that the master clocks were to go back by one- half the full adjustment amount near midnight thereby extending his watch on deck by that amount of time. And at midnight he would set his watch back by about 23 minutes and expect his relief to show up about a minute or so before it showed 12:00 once again. As we know his relief, QM Bright, did not show up at the expected time. He arrived late as we were told. When Bright finally arrived, both he and Rowe knew that Titanic was involved in an accident. But what should they do? Nobody bothered to given them any orders – two souls lost in all the confusion that took place. The ship was stopped and steam was blowing off loudly from the forward funnels and lifeboats were swung out and being loaded. At 12:25 on his now adjusted timepiece, George Rowe decides to call the bridge after seeing a boat in the water on the starboard side. It was at that time that Fourth Officer Boxhall told him to bring detonators up to the forebridge. He and Bright immediately dropped down to the aft well deck, went past the third-class entrance, through the third-class smoking room, then through an emergency door which led to the aft-end storeroom on the port side where they kept the Quartermaster’s locker and the extra detonators. Picking up two metal boxes, Rowe and Bright then come out from there and went up the port side stairs of the aft well deck onto the second-class promenade on B deck. They then most likely took the vertical ladder used by the crew near the second- class smoke-room bar up to A deck where they crossed over to the starboard side. From there up another vertical ladder used by the crew near the starboard-side electric crane to the boat deck, and then forward to the bridge. When Rowe came onto the bridge he was asked not only to get involved with firing the socket signals at intervals of 5 to 6 minutes, but also was asked to work one of the Morse signaling lamps out on the port wing cab in trying to establish contact with this stopped steamer seen about one-half point on their port bow at that time.

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Fourth Officer Boxhall:

“I even got the quartermaster who was working around with me - I do not know who he was - to fire off the distress signal, and I got him to also signal with the Morse lamp - that is just a series of dots with short intervals of light - whilst I watched with a pair of glasses to see whether this man [vessel] did answer, as some people said he had replied.”

Although Boxhall did not see a reply to his and Rowe’s attempts at communicating by Morse lamp with this steamer, others around them said they thought they saw reply signals coming from the steamer at times.74 When Rowe first came onto the bridge, he noticed that Titanic’s head “was facing north,” probably after looking at the compass on the bridge, something very natural for a quartermaster to do who does two-hour tricks at the wheel, and having to cross the bridge several times going to and from the Morse lamp on the port wing cab that he said he used. When George Rowe told Mr. Butler Aspinall on day 15 of the British inquiry that the time he spent firing socket signals was “from about a quarter to one to about 1.25,” it was probably his best guess. And despite Rowe’s later claim in the 1960’s that no rockets were fired before he arrived on the bridge, we see that Boxhall had came into wheelhouse with the firing lanyard after sending one up of them when the call came from Rowe to report that a boat was in the water. QM Bright does not lend too much additional insight as to the time he spent on the bridge after he and Rowe arrived. He said that he, Rowe and Mr. Boxhall fired the distress signals, and that he thought the firing of those signals continued for “probably half an hour.” He also “could not say” if they were using the Morse signaling lamps, nor was he able to say anything about the color of the distress signals only that “they burst after they got up in the air.” Clearly Bright was not spending too much time on the bridge or noticing everything that was going on there. How many socket signals did he personally fire off, if any, is very questionable. Bright said they would fire one at a time “at intervals,” but he “could not say” what the duration of those intervals were. He did, however, explain that “after we would fire one we would go and help clear the boats away, and then we would come back again.” As we have seen, Boxhall referred to “the quartermaster who was working around with me,” implying a single quartermaster, not two. In Bright’s case, he probably was spending more time clearing and loading the boats than actually assisting with the firing of distress signals. On the number of signals sent up, QM Bright thought that “six were fired in all.” In another letter that QM Rowe wrote to Ed Kamuda in 1968, Rowe stated “you can take it for granted that 7 were fired.” Second Officer Lightoller roughly estimated “somewhere about eight at intervals of a few minutes - five or six minutes, or something like that.” Fourth Officer Boxhall estimated “between half a dozen and a dozen.” Third Officer Pitman and Steward Alfred Crawford both estimated a dozen or more had been sent up.75 The simple fact is that nobody was actually keeping count.76 If Rowe’s estimate of the time he spent on the bridge firing distress signals is about right, then he and Bright were on the forebridge for only about 40 minutes, enough time to fire 7 signals off at average interval of 6 to 7 minutes apart. And if Boxhall, as he implied, had been firing them before Rowe and Bright arrived with the extra signals, then it is entirely possible that about a dozen signals were actually sent up over a period of time that lasted almost an hour. What we know for certain is that eight were seen from the deck of the SS Californian over a period of about an hour. But some of those distress socket signals may easily have been missed when Gibson and Stone were not looking over the weather cloth while they stood watch on Californian’s upper bridge. Both Rowe and Bright were sent to help finish with the clearing, loading, and then taking charge of collapsible lifeboats C and D, respectively. This was just after Boxhall was asked to take charge of emergency lifeboat No. 2. From Boxhall:

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“I was sending the rockets up right to the very last minute when I was sent away in the boat... I have approximated it nearly half an hour, as near as I could tell [before the vessel sank]... [I was sent away] in the emergency boat No. 2... Mr. Wilde was superintending the filling. The order was given to lower away when I was told to go in it and the boat was full; they had started the tackles when I got in... There was only one boat hanging there in the davits, No. 4… I noticed as I was being lowered that they were filling No. 4 boat... I know the starboard emergency boat [No. 1] had gone some time, and that they were working on the collapsible boats when I went.”

The launching of lifeboat No. 2 occurred around 1:45 on an unadjusted clock,77 just about a half-hour before the ship split in two and all her lights went out. When QM Bright left the bridge, he was first sent to finish setting up collapsible boat C on the starboard side before crossing over to work on collapsible boat D on the port side.

“As soon as the boat was up in place I was sent away to clear another one in place…on the port side, right forward, close to the bridge.”

Arthur Bright also noticed that “all the lifeboats were away before the collapsible boats were got off.” He also saw J. Bruce Ismay, Managing Director of the White Star Line, “standing there” by collapsible C when there were “only two boats left.” When asked about the time when he left the ship, QM Rowe had this to say:

Senator BURTON. Was the Titanic down by the head? Mr. ROWE. Yes, sir. When we left the ship the fore well-deck was awash; that is, when we pushed off from the ship. It was 1.25 when I left the bridge to get into the boat. When the boat was in the water the well deck was submerged. It took us a good five minutes to lower the boat on account of this rubbing going down. Senator BURTON. She must have sunk soon after you left? Mr. ROWE. Twenty minutes, I believe. Senator BURTON. Did any boats get away after yours? Mr. ROWE. One boat [boat D] got away after mine, on the port side.

If the ship sank “twenty minutes” after Rowe left the ship, then he had to leave about 2am unadjusted time. Putting all this together, we can now see a clear sequence develop here. Boxhall leaves the ship in boat No. 2 on the port side about a half hour before the ship sank, making it about 1:45 to 1:50am unadjusted time. Before either C or D is sent away, lifeboat No. 4 is lowered. The next boat to leave the ship was collapsible C on the starboard side about 2:00am unadjusted time, which was soon followed by collapsible D on the port side about 2:05am unadjusted time. Fifteen minutes later, at 2:20am unadjusted time, the stern disappeared beneath the surface. When Rowe said that he left the bridge at 1:25 to get to the boat it had to be partially adjusted time taken from his timepiece. So it appears that Rowe’s “25 minutes after 12,” when he saw a boat in the water, corresponded to about a 12:45-12:50 unadjusted time, only a few minutes after the first lifeboat was launched. His leaving the bridge at “about five and twenty past one” corresponded to about a 1:45- 1:50 unadjusted time, about the time that the last of the socket signals was sent up by Rowe before being ordered to take charge of boat C. Both these times strongly suggest that Rowe had set his pocket watch back about one-half the expected setback time at midnight, as he would routinely do.

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If we now undo what QM Rowe did to his watch by adding back those 23 minutes, then we get the following timeline of events according to Rowe using unadjusted Apparent Time Ship (ATS):

11:40 ATS – Ship collides with iceberg along the starboard side. 12:48 ATS – Rowe calls the bridge to inform them that a boat is seen in the water. 1:48 ATS – Rowe fires the last sock signal and leaves the bridge to finish loading and take charge of collapsible C.

Being out on the poop deck alone, Rowe had no idea that they never got around to altering any of the clocks because of the accident. And he probably never bothered to ask. Are there any other instances where certain crew members thought that clocks had been put back by half the full adjustment amount that night?

Lookout George Hogg:

“My watch was from 12 to 2, sir...I waked up, at 20 minutes to 12, with the confusion in the forecastle. I rushed up on the deck, and I saw there was not much confusion on deck, and I went below again, with some of my shipmates. I asked the time, then, of my mate [Alfred] Evans, and he said, ‘It is a quarter to 12. We will get dressed and get ready to go on the lookout.’ I dressed myself, and we relieved the lookout at 12 o’clock, me and my mate Evans. We stopped about 20 minutes, and lifted up the back cover of the nest, the weather cover, and I saw people running about with life belts on. I went to the telephone then, to try to ring up on the bridge and ask whether I was wanted in the nest, when I saw this. I could get no answer on the telephone...I went straight to the boat deck. I assisted in starting to uncover the boats. Then I was sent for a Jacob’s ladder [by the boatswain]. I was told to drop it. As I got past the No. 7 boat on the starboard side, Mr. Murdoch, chief officer, said: ‘See that those plugs are in that boat.’ I put the plugs in, and I said: ‘The plugs are all correct,’ and I jumped out again. I jumped out to assist with the falls; and he said: ‘You step in that boat.’ I said, ‘Very good, sir.’ Mr. Murdoch lowered one end, and I am trying to think of the man that lowered the other end. Evans lowered the other end.”

According to Hogg, the accident woke him up along with many others in the forecastle. Like so many others he rushed up on deck and then went below again where he asked his lookout mate Alfred Evans what time it was. Evans told him it was “a quarter to 12.” It was then assumed that it was time that they would have to get up anyway to get ready to go on watch up in the crow’s nest. They were scheduled to relieve lookouts and Reginald Lee at 8-bells. Frederick Fleet and Reginald Lee went up to the nest at 10pm when 4-bells was struck. It was the same time that Second Officer Charles Lightoller was replaced by First Officer William Murdoch, and the same time that QM Robert Hichens took over the wheel from QM Alfred Olliver. Fleet and Lee went up to the crow’s nest and replaced George Symons and Archie Jewell who had been in the nest since 8pm. According to Frederick Fleet:

“Well, I reported an iceberg right ahead, a black mass...[It was] just after seven bells...The watch was nearly over. I had done the best part of the watch up in the nest... [We normally get] two hours; but the time was going to be put back - that watch...We were to get about 2 hours and 20 minutes.”

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We have already seen that Fleet’s mate, Reginald Lee, had stated that the collision occurred “about nine or ten minutes” after 7-bells [11:30] were struck. Fleet confirms that it was “just after seven bells” but also says that they were to get “about 2 hours and 20 minutes” in what would otherwise be a two-hour watch up in nest. An interesting choice of words, “we were to get,” not that they got to spend 2 hours and 20 minutes up in the nest. Fleet also told Senator Smith at the US Senate investigation that after they warned the bridge of an iceberg ahead, he and Lee remained in nest for “about a quarter of an hour to 20 minutes” until their relief showed up. That relief was George Hogg and Alfred Evans. If Fleet and Lee were relieved 20 minutes after the accident, and if the accident happened 9 to 10 minutes after 7-bells were struck as Lee had said, then the time from 7-bells to when they were relieved was only 30 minutes, not the 53 minutes if the clock had been put back 23 minutes as expected. At the British inquiry Fleet was directly asked to confirm the amount of time he and Lee spent in the nest before the accident:

17260. Q. [The Attorney-General] I want you to give us some idea. You came on duty at 10 o’clock. We know that the berg was struck at about 11.40. That gives us an hour and 40 minutes, during which time you were in the crow’s-nest all the time. That is right, is it not? – A. [Fleet] Yes.

Recall that this is the same time that Quartermaster Robert Hichens said he was at the wheel when the accident happened. If the clock had been put back at anytime between 10pm and the time of the accident, then Fleet and Lee would have been up in the nest for more than two hours, and the same would be true for the time that QM Hichens would have been at the wheel. So why did Hogg and Evans go up to relieve Fleet and Lee 20 minutes after the accident, while QM Perkis did not go to relieve QM Hichens until 12:23? I believe the answer is very simple. After the accident, when Hogg asked his mate Evans what time it was after returning to their quarters in the forecastle, Evans gave him the time from someone who had been on duty when the ship struck. The time showing on the only slave clock located in the entire forecastle, which was in the crew’s galley down on C deck,78 would have indicated about 11:45 if anyone cared to go and look. What they did not know was that the clocks had not been altered, and in all the confusion that existed at the time, they simply assumed that it was about the time for ‘one-bell’ to take place to call the watch below to get ready to take over the watch on deck. But we know from Boson’s Mate Albert Haines, who was on duty and in charge of the watch on deck at the time of the accident, that the right time, without the clock being put back, was twenty-minutes to twelve when the accident happened. Unlike most of the deck crew in the forecastle who did not carry personal timepieces, the ship’s quartermasters did, having to stand watch on remote parts of the vessel like the poop deck, and having their quarters down on the port side of E deck just off the working alley, far from the forecastle or any space that had one of the ship’s slave clocks installed. QM Perkis may very well have set his watch back by 23 minutes before retiring, which is why he said he was due on deck at 12 o’clock; i.e., when 8-bells was supposed to be struck in partially altered time. As Perkis said, he stayed below and waited until it was time to go and relieve the deck, and thus showed up at the expected time for watch change that night; 12:23am in unadjusted hours. What Perkis did not know, as was also the case of George Rowe, was that the clocks were not put back that night because of the accident, and that “all hands” had been called out of forecastle to clear the boats. In fact, the accident totally negated the need to put the clocks back because Titanic was obviously not going to reach her planned noontime position for April 15.

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SOME FALLACIOUS ARGUMENTS AND ASSUMPTIONS

Despite what we have seen above, there are some individuals who insist that the accident happened some time after the first of the two planned clock adjustments were made that night. Portentous statements such as:

“Evidence abounds that the famous time of the accident – 11:40 o’clock – was recorded on clocks set back 24 minutes from April 14th ship’s time based on noon that Sunday…In fact, it is virtually impossible to reconcile testimony from various Titanic crew members without taking into account adjusting the crew’s clocks…and crew members uniformly stated the accident took place about five minutes before the one bell.”

The truth of the matter is that the abounding evidence suggests that clocks were not set back before the accident. The only way to reconcile the times reported by crew members with times reported by most passengers and victualing staff, for both the time of the accident and the time of foundering, is that all clocks were keeping the same time. If clocks available to the watch-keeping crew were somehow set back while those in public spaces used by passengers and victualing staff were not, then you would expect to see a dichotomy in time reported for the collision as well as the sinking. That dichotomy in time between what was reported by most crew members and passengers simply does not exist. Some of these time-change advocates have even suggested that the 11:40pm collision time was in partially altered time, while the 2:20am foundering time was in unadjusted time. This would make the time between collision and foundering 2 hours and 16 or 17 minutes instead of the accepted 2 hours and 40 minutes. In other words, what some of these time-change advocates are saying is that two separate time references were being quoted by witnesses that night, a partially altered time for the collision, and an unadjusted time for the foundering. If this does not seem to make any sense to you, you can be sure that it just doesn’t. What these time-change advocates are doing is taking things well out of context when quoting what was said by certain crew members to support their hypothesis. If you ask a member of the deck crew who was on duty during the First Watch, the 8pm to midnight watch, what time did they work, they would invariably say from 8 to 12. When a crew member such as Frank Osman said, “I was waiting for one bell, which they strike, one bell just before the quarter of the hour, before the four hours, when you get a call to relieve,” he was correct except for one little important detail that he left out. On the night of the accident, the First Watch, the 8 to 12 watch, was not supposed to be on duty for only four hours as Osman said, but for 4 hours and 23 minutes because the clock was to be put back at midnight that night. The one-bell warning was to come at a quarter of an hour before 12 o’clock in partially adjusted hours, or 12:08 in unadjusted hours. Yet somehow, advocates for a time change manage to interpret Osman’s remarks as saying that he had only five minutes more to wait for one-bell to be struck when the accident took place. Of course, Osman said no such thing. The watch on deck at the time, being Sunday night, had nothing much to do. Normally, they would be washing the decks at that time of night.79 But most were just hanging around the seamen’s mess playing cards, reading, or just conversing with their watch mates. The only other event that was to take place after seven bells was struck in the normal course of events was the calling of the watch below 15 minutes before eight bells was to be struck. That is all Osman was doing, hanging around just outside the seamen’s mess along with Boson’s Mate Albert Haines and a few others. We know that clocks were to go back at midnight. Both Lightoller and Pitman testified to that, and we have evidence that passengers were informed that the clocks were to be put back on westbound voyages around midnight. And midnight was also the time when they closed the smoking rooms and Café

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Parisien, and when the night stewards were to come on duty. Those rooms were still a good twenty minutes away from closing when the ship struck ice. We also know that the clock was not put back before Lightoller went off duty at 10pm when they struck four bells, because Fleet and Lee came on duty at 10pm and expected to serve more than 2 hours up in the nest, and Boxhall, according to Lightoller, was to serve more than two hours after he, Lightoller, went off duty at 10pm. That leaves only the interval between 10pm and midnight for any clock change to take place. So what about the period from 10pm to the time of the accident? Hichens, who took over the wheel from Olliver at 10, said he was at the wheel for 1 hour 40 minutes when the lookouts sighted the iceberg ahead. Fleet also agreed that he and Lee were up in crow’s nest for 1 hour 40 minutes when they sighted the iceberg. Boxhall, who came on watch at 8pm, agreed he had been on duty about 3½ hours when the accident happened. All of these are consistent with no clock adjustment taking place prior to the accident. Furthermore, we know from Lee that the berg was sighted just about 9 or 10 minutes after seven bells (11:30pm) were struck, again consistent with the accident occurring about 1 hour 40 minutes after 10pm. We were also told by most passengers, victualing staff and crew members that the ship struck ice between 11:40 and 11:45. This would not be the case if clocks were put back 23 or 24 minutes before the accident. If the accident really happened after the clock had been put back, then those passengers in the smoking rooms and Café Parisien should have been on the way below to turn in, and the lights in those places would have been turned off in accordance with White Star Line rules and procedures listed in brochures that were given to passengers. That was not the case. What would have happened around midnight, had there been no accident, is that the ship’s master clocks would have been put back by half the full adjustment amount, 23 or 24 minutes, and slaves clocks throughout the ship would have shown the time that the adjustment took place, which would have been a time close to 12 o’clock. Slave clocks could only advanced. They could not move backward. Only when the time on a master clock returned to the time that was showing when it was put back would all the slave clocks that were connected to it begin to advance once again with each minute’s tick of the master clock.80 As to some of those selected statements quoted by these time-change advocates, let us take a real close look at them.

Frank Osman (seaman): “I was waiting for one bell, which they strike, one bell, just before the quarter of the hour, before the four hours, when you get a call to relieve.”

This we already addressed. Yes, Osman was waiting for one bell because there was nothing else to do that Sunday night by those who were on watch. They were hanging around the mess room in case they were needed. At one-bell, one or two men would be assigned to go down to call upon the watch below and let them know it was time to turn out. Nowhere does Osman state how long it actually was before that one bell was to occur when the accident happened.

Edward Buley (seaman): “I was in the watch on deck, the starboard watch. At 12 o’clock we relieved the other watch.”

A little misstatement here. It was at 8 o’clock when his watch, the Starboard watch, relieved the other watch, the Port watch. His watch, the Starboard watch, was itself to be relieved by the Port watch at 12 o’clock, when 8 bells was to be struck. But the 12 o’clock time that these seamen were referring to would be partially adjusted time, the time on a clock that was put back by 23 minutes that night. Buley was still on duty reading in the seaman’s mess when the accident happened.

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George Symons (lookout): “There was an order came to the forecastle door by the boatswain to ‘stand by, as you may be wanted at any moment.’ By the time I got on deck, it must have been about one bell, a quarter to twelve.”

Again, one must look at the context behind this. Symons, like most of the deck crew, did not carry a watch. He said that he heard about the time of collision afterwards, and then estimated, in answer to the question asked of him, that the time he got out on deck must have been about a quarter to 12. If someone had looked at the clock in the crew’s galley down in C deck, for example, it would have showed 11:45. Symons, who almost slept through the accident, was informed by George Hogg, who awoke and ran up on deck when the accident happened, that the ship had struck ice and that he, Symons, had better get up. As Symons was getting dressed, the boatswain came to the forecastle door and told all the men to standby as they may be wanted “at any moment.” Nothing here that can be used to prove that any of the clocks were put back earlier.

George Moore (seaman): “Sunday night about a quarter to 12 I was on watch below and turned in… About 10 minutes to 12 the boatswain came and piped all hands on the boat deck, and started to get out boats.”

Not much different from any other account. About a quarter to 12 he was still turned in, and the boatswain came by about 5 minutes later. No one-bell wake-up call. Again we see an account consistent with finding out later what the time was. Nothing here that can be used to prove that a clock change had taken place.

Frederick Clench (seaman): “I went on deck...and saw a lot of ice. I should say about 10 minutes...after I was awake...I went down below and put my Guernsey on, my round hat on, and after that I sat down on a stool having a smoke. Then...I heard the boatswain’s pipe call all hands on deck.”

Again, nothing here that can be used to prove that a clock change had taken place.

Herbert Pitman (third officer): “I had a look around, and I could not see anything, and could not hear any noise, so I went back to the room and sat down and lit my pipe. I thought that nothing had really happened, that perhaps it might have been a dream, or something like that. A few minutes afterwards I thought I had better start dressing, as it was near my watch, so I started dressing, and when I was partly dressed Mr. Boxhall came in and said the mail room - there was water in the mail room.”

Somehow these time-change advocates want us to believe that when Pitman said “it was near my watch” it had to be about 5 minutes before the time that he was due on deck when Boxhall came by, which we were told was about 20 minutes after the ship struck the iceberg. Digging deeper, we find that Titanic’s third officer was aroused by a noise that sounded to him like the ship “was coming to anchor” when the ship stuck ice. He then remained in his bunk for “three or four minutes” before getting up to have look around outside his quarters. At the British inquiry Pitman said that when he got up to have a look around he met Second Officer Lightoller, who also got up to look around a few minutes after the ship struck, and asked Lightoller if the ship had hit something. According to Pitman, Lightoller replied, “Yes, evidently.” After receiving that information, Pitman said that he “went to bed” where he remained for about “five minutes.” At the end of those five minutes, “I thought I might as well get up, as it was no use trying to go to sleep again, as I was due on watch in a few minutes.”

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Now we know that the ship struck about 11:40. If that was partially altered time, as these time- change advocates want us to believe, then in five minutes time it would have been 11:45, or one-bell, the time when Third Officer Herbert Pitman and Fifth Officer were due to be called out by the standby quartermaster Alfred Olliver to get ready to go on deck in fifteen minutes time. But what does Pitman do after staying in his bed for up to “three or four minutes” after the ship struck? He gets up and goes out of his room to have a look around, meets up with Lightoller doing the same, and then goes back to his own room to go back to bed. Does he start to get dressed because it was about the time of one-bell and someone would be knocking on his door at any moment? No, he tells us that he goes back to bed again to try and sleep. Not exactly what you would expect one to do unless the clock had not been put back yet, and you thought that you could really get a little more sleep before being called out to take over the watch on deck. In unadjusted hours one-bell was to come at 12:08. Yet somehow, these time-change advocates would have us believe that when someone says something that is not very specific such as, “it was near my watch” or “I was due on watch in a few minutes,” that what they meant was 5 or 10 minutes later. Keep in mind that it was Third Officer Herbert Pitman who, when asked specifically if the clocks were put back Sunday night, replied, “No; we had something else to think of.”

George Hogg (lookout): “I waked up at 20 minutes to 12. I rushed up on deck...and I went below again. I asked the time, then, of my mate Evans, and he said, ‘it is quarter to 12. We will get dressed and get ready to go on lookout.’ I dressed myself, and we relieved the lookout at 12 o’clock, me and my mate Evans.”

This too we already addressed. Both Evans and Hogg were off duty when the ship struck. They both got up to go on deck to see what the confusion was all about and then went back down again. Evans was apparently told by someone that it was about a quarter to twelve. As far as what they knew, they were due up in the nest in fifteen minutes time. And that is exactly what they did. In all the confusion, nobody told them if the time had been altered or not, and they apparently didn’t bother to ask. Someone, such as Boson’s Mate Albert Haines, would have known for sure.

Arthur Bright (quartermaster): “At 8 o’clock I turned in. One of the watch on deck came and called me and told me that the ship had collided. I went out to the after end of the ship to relieve the man I should have relieved at 12 o’clock, a man by the name of Rowe.”

Somehow these time-change advocates would have us believe that the clocks had already been put back by this isolated statement from Bright. As we saw before, there was a lot more in what Bright said than what is typically quoted by these time-change advocates. The person who woke Bright up was not one of the men on deck as he first said, but his own watch mate Walter Wynn who was part of the same watch section that Bright was in. When he was awakened by Wynn, he was told that “The ship is going down by the head,” something that was not noticeable until some time well after the accident. But the important piece of information from Bright is that he went aft after being told the ship was down at the head to relieve Quartermaster George Rowe, the man he “should have” relieved at 12. Bright was clearly referring to an adjusted 12 o’clock time, and admitted that he was late in getting up and going out to the poop. As we also saw in that letter written by George Rowe to Ed Kamuda of the Titanic Historical Society, he felt the ship collide at 11:40 and said that his watch “should have ended at 12:22 but time went by and no relief turned up.” When Rowe wrote that letter he was clearly referring to unadjusted April 14th time. He gave an interval of 42 minutes between the time of collision and when he was to go off duty. We also know, based on the times he gave at the 1912 inquiries, that he must have put his

44 timepiece back by one-half the full adjustment amount at the time when he expected that it would be done on the bridge. Another quotation brought up by these time-change advocates comes from a story told by Lawrence Beesley in his book, The Loss of the SS Titanic. In that book Beesley talks about a conversation he had with one of the stokers in his lifeboat:

“One of them–I think he was the same man that cut us free from the pulley ropes–told us how he was at work in the stoke-hole, and in anticipation of going off duty in quarter of an hour,–thus confirming the time of the collision as 11.45,–had near him a pan of soup keeping hot on some part of the machinery; suddenly the whole side of the compartment came in, and the water rushed him off his feet. Picking himself up, he sprang for the compartment doorway and was just through the aperture when the watertight door came down behind him, ‘like a knife,’ as he said; ‘they work them from the bridge.’”

The stoker that Beesley was referring to was Leading Fireman Fredrick Barrett, and some of these time- change advocates point to this as some sort of proof that a change of watch was expected in 15 to 20 minutes time thereby somehow proving that a clock change had already taken place before the accident happened. An anecdotal story at best. But how accurate was it considering that Fred Barrett admitted before the Wreck Commission that he did not carry a watch with him while working in the stokehold, and that he could not really tell them the time of certain events that took place, including the time that he got to lifeboat No. 13, the same boat that Beesley went away in?81 Barrett only spoke in purely subjective terms of how long one event took place after some other event took place. When the ship struck the iceberg, 3 hours and 40 minutes of Barrett’s time in the stokehold had gone by, and it is entirely possible that in preparation to going off duty, he might have decided to warm up a pot of soup on some machinery as Beesley tells us. Hearing even from Beesley that the ship struck about 11:45, it comes as no surprise that he would say that his watch was about to end in 15 minutes when the side of the ship opened up.82 We do know from Barrett that he was busy talking to Second Engineer John Hesketh at the time that the accident took place. Hesketh, the engineer in charge of the 8 to 12 watch down in the machinery spaces that night, was with Barrett in Boiler Section No. 6, the forward most boiler room, in the process of carrying out a required inspection of all the ship’s coal bunkers from forward to aft before going off duty in accordance with IMM Rule 428. It certainly would have been very late to first start this required task if the watch was about to end in fifteen to twenty minutes of time. What else do some of these time-change advocates like to claim? One of their fallacious claims is:

“Men of the off-duty Port watch did, in fact, relieve their opposites in the on-duty Starboard watch as scheduled some 20 minutes after impact with the iceberg.”

This is factually incorrect. Men of the off-duty watch did not take over the watch as scheduled. After being awakened by the collision, many of the men who were off duty came up on deck to see what had happened. Take the case of Able Bodied Seaman Frederick Clench:

“I put on my trousers and I went on deck on the starboard side of the well deck and I saw a lot of ice…With that, I went in the alleyway again under the forecastle head to come down and put on my shoes. Some one said to me, ‘Did you hear the rush of water?’ I said, ‘No.’ They said, ‘Look down under the hatchway.’ I looked down under the hatchway and I saw the tarpaulin belly out as if there was a lot of wind under it, and I heard the rush of water coming through…I should say [it was] about 10 minutes [after the collision]… I went

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down below and put my guernsey on, my round hat on, and after that I sat down on a stool having a smoke. I thought she would not sink then, sir. Then after I lighted the pipe, I heard the boatswain’s pipe call all hands out on deck. We went up to where he stood under the forecastle, and he ordered all hands to the boat deck. We proceeded up on the boat deck, and when we got up there he told us to go to the starboard side and uncover the boats.”

The watch below was not called up to take over the watch on deck but to help uncover and swing out the boats. In fact, it was a call for all hands on deck as Second Officer Lightoller found out from Chief Officer Wilde after he was called out by Joseph Boxhall. This call for all hands took place about the time that Evans and Hogg went up to the crow’s nest to replace Fleet and Lee.

George Symons (lookout): “What awakened me was a grinding sound on her bottom. I thought at first she had lost her anchor and chain, and it was running along her bottom. I would not get up. The others got up, but I would not get up as I thought there was nothing the matter...[Lookout George] Hogg came down to me and told me I had better get up...[Whilst I was dressing] an order came to the forecastle door by the boatswain to ‘Stand by, as you may be wanted at any moment’ to the hands in general who were in the forecastle...I did not know the time then...By the time I got on deck it must have been about one bell, a quarter to twelve...I came on deck and I went into the mess room in the course of ordinary events to see if there was any coffee. From there I heard the water coming in to No. 1 hold. I looked down No. 1 hold, and hardly had I looked down there when the order came for ‘All hands on the boat deck.’ The order I got on the boat deck from Mr. Murdoch, and also the boatswain was, they gave an order to uncover the boats and get the falls out. I assisted generally in the boats on the starboard fore end, 3, 5, and 7...I should think, roughly estimating it, it would be about five minutes to twelve [when I noticed this water reaching nearly to the coamings of the hatch], because, as I was on my way to the [boat] deck, so they struck eight bells in the crow’s-nest.”

Several things become very clear from this lengthy account. George Symons, like most of the men who were asleep in the forecastle, had no idea what time it was when the ship struck, but found out afterward that it was a little before a quarter to twelve. We see that Symons first went to the mess room after getting dressed and going up on deck. It was probably then that he would have found out what time it was. What he would not know, unless he was told, was whether the clock had been put back or not. According to Symons all hands in the forecastle were informed shortly after the collision by the boatswain to stand by as they may be needed soon. The time on the clock in the crew’s galley (if he went down to see it) would have shown that it was about 11:45 at that time. As we have seen before, lookouts Evans and Hogg assumed that they were due up in the nest in fifteen minutes time, and in fact, went up to the nest and replaced Fleet and Lee. From Symons we see that 8 bells were struck up in the nest after all hands had been called to go up to the boat deck. Apparently, those bells were heard over the deafening roar of steam blowing off from the funnel exhausts as the men were on their way up to uncover the boats. There was no regular change of watch. Now some of these time-change advocates say that 8 bells would not have been struck unless the clock had been put back by the planned amount. This is simply not true. The ship was already dead in the water. She was not going to make that planned noontime longitude for April 15. There was no reason anymore to put the clock back, and there is zero evidence of anyone seeing a clock change that night. In fact, we were told specifically that they weren’t put back.83 When those eight bells were struck up in nest that night, it took place about 30 minutes after seven bells had been struck, not the 53 or 54 minutes that

46 some time-change advocates say it was. As we have seen, there simply is no real basis for any clock change, partial or otherwise, having taken place on the night of the accident.

A PARADOX IN TIME

In an affidavit addressed to Senator Smith at the American Inquiry, Miss Daisy Minahan wrote that she and her brother along with his wife came to the à la Carte Restaurant for dinner at about 7:15pm and noticed a dinner party going on that included Captain Smith, Mr. And Mrs. Widener, Mr. and Mrs. Thayer, and Major . She said that Captain Smith departed between 9:25 and 9:45pm She remembered this very well because her brother suggested at 9:25 that they should leave and go to bed. According to Daisy, they left the restaurant about 20 minutes later at 9:45 after staying up to hear one more piece from the ship’s orchestra. But we also know from the testimony of Titanic’s Second Officer Lightoller and Fourth Officer Boxhall that Captain Smith arrived on the bridge that night around 9pm. Lightoller was fairly precise on this point.

13607. Q. Well, it was now nine o’clock, and you had worked out in your head that you would probably get the 49 degrees meridian by half-past nine? – A. [Lightoller] Just let me correct that. It must have been a few minutes before nine, because I remember the Commander came on the bridge at five minutes to nine, and I told him then that I had already sent word round, so it was perhaps ten minutes or a quarter to nine, as a matter of minutes. 13629. Q. How long was the Captain on the bridge with you? You say he came on the bridge with you about five minutes to nine? – A. [Lightoller] About 25 minutes or half-an- hour. 13630. Q. If it was half-an-hour that would carry you to within five minutes of half-past nine? – A. Yes.

So according to Lightoller, Captain Smith was on the bridge from 8:55pm to about 9:25pm. But how could he be there if he first left that dinner party between 9:25 and 9:45pm as Daisy Minahan said he did? The answer could very well be in the pocket watch carried by Daisy Minahan’s brother, Dr. William Minahan. At midnight Saturday night, April 13, Titanic’s clocks were set back 45 minutes. If Daisy’s brother forgot to set his watch back for April 14th time, then it would be about 45 minutes faster than Titanic’s clocks that Sunday night. If this is what happened, then 9:25 on his watch would actually be 8:40pm ship’s time Sunday night. That is more than enough time for Captain Smith to leave the dinner party and reach the bridge by 8:55pm, the time that Lightoller said he arrived. Additional information to support this explanation comes from a newspaper account by Mrs. Lillian Minahan, Daisy’s sister-in-law, that Titanic researcher Daniel Klistorner uncovered. According to the account, Lillian Minahan briefly mentions the dinner at the restaurant and people in the reception room playing cards and listening to music. She also mentioned that she, her husband and sister-in-law retired early.

“It was about 9.30 when I got into bed and I know I had been sleeping soundly for two hours or more when both the doctor and myself were awakened by frantic cries outside our door.”

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Obviously you cannot leave the restaurant at 9:45 and be in bed by 9:30 the same night. Time does not run backward. But if you left the restaurant at about 9:00pm ship’s time, 20 minutes after 8:40, then you certainly can be in bed by 9:30. Sometime before retiring Lillian Minahan obviously took notice of the correct ship’s time that Sunday night. Did her husband Dr. William Minahan use an unadjusted pocket watch time as a means to convince his sister that they should leave the restaurant early by suggesting that it was later than it really was? In any event, there really is no paradox. Daisy was simply told the wrong time, intentionally or otherwise.

LAST CONTACTS

Let us now consider the issue of time as it relates to some wireless messages that have been thought to have originated from Titanic during her last desperate hour. There are some who will raise the argument that Titanic time could not have been set to her noontime longitude at the time she foundered because the last wireless transmission heard from Titanic by Virginian’s wireless operator was logged at 12:27am NY time, and this would put the foundering time at 2:29am on Titanic if her clocks were still set for 2 hours and 2 minutes ahead of NY. This would be a valid argument if Virginian’s clock showing NY time in her wireless cabin was accurate, and if what was heard by Virginian’s operator actually came from Titanic. Additionally, consider the proximity of Virginian. She only heard directly from the Titanic once, at 11.10pm NY time, and thereafter depended on messages that were relayed to her from other stations. Is it likely that in the last few minutes before Titanic foundered, Virginian was able to hear transmissions from Titanic that other vessels that were much closer to Titanic could not hear? As we shall see, Carpathia’s wireless operator believed that Virginian’s operator was mistaken as to what he heard. At the time Titanic sank, Carpathia was only about an hour and a half away from picking up the first lifeboat from Titanic. At about 16 knots, that puts Carpathia about 24 nautical miles from where Titanic actually sank. Virginian was eastbound from Halifax to Liverpool on Sunday night, April 14, 1912. At 11:10pm NY time, Virginian picked up a CQ call from Titanic that contained Titanic’s position. Two minutes later Virginian tries to call Titanic but gets no response. She then receives a call from Cape Race (MCE) informing her that Titanic struck an iceberg and requires immediate assistance. At 11:30pm NY time Virginian informs Titanic by way of Cape Race that she is coming to her assistance and that she is 170 miles north of Titanic’s distress position.84 The next reported signals from Titanic that were entered into Virginian’s wireless log are for 12:10am, 12:20am and 12:27am NY time:

12:10 – Hear MGY [Titanic] calling very faintly his power greatly reduced. 12:20 – Hear two ‘V’s signaled faintly in spark similar to MGY’s. Probably adjusting spark. 12:27 – MGY calls CQ. Unable make out his signal. Ended very abruptly as if power suddenly switched off. His spark rather blurred or ragged. Called MGY suggested he should try emergency set, but heard no response.

It seems that in the last entry the operator only heard a transmission of the letters CQ from the same transmitter that sent out those two ‘V’s just seven minutes earlier, the one that came in faintly in a spark similar to that of Titanic. The letter ‘V’ was used by Marconi wireless operators worldwide when adjusting their spark. In this case, a simple transmission of dot-dot-dot-dash followed by dot-dot-dot- dash. Then seven minutes later, at 12:27am NY time, Virginian’s operator hears a single transmission of the letters ‘CQ’ which he described as ending abruptly as if the power was switched off. But it should be

48 noted that ‘CQ’ was a general call-up sign used worldwide in trying to establish communications with other wireless stations that may be listening.85 It could have come that night from almost anywhere, including a far off, high powered land station up to 2000 miles away equipped with a rotary disc discharger like Titanic had.

An article called, “Wireless Telegraphy for Marine Inter-Communication, ” by W. W. Bradfield of the Marconi Company, appeared in a June 10th 1910 issue of The Electrician – Marine Issue. In that article it was stated:

“The standard equipment for marine work is either the 1½ kw set just described or a 5 kw set, where a disc machine takes the place of a spark discharger. Both sets are capable of exceeding their guaranteed limits.”

The advantage of a rotary spark discharger used in the 5 kW set was that it produced a more efficient higher power radio signal than did the older spark discharger used in the 1½ kW set. With a rotary spark discharger, a highly damped discharge of the primary circuit condenser took place that produced a prolonged, less damped radio frequency oscillation in the secondary coil of the transmitter which was then radiated into the air by the antenna. In addition, the rotary spark discharger produced a very noticeable musical sounding note in the earpiece of a receiver that depended on the rotational speed of the disc and the number of discharge electrodes that were mounted on the disc. Titanic and Olympic were the first passenger vessels to be equipped with a 5 kW set. Initially, Olympic was to have the 1½ kW set installed, but that was later changed for the more powerful 5 kW set sometime before her maiden voyage in June 1911. However, it is not clear that a rotary spark discharger was initially installed on Olympic when she first sailed as it was in Titanic the following year. At the time of the Titanic disaster, Harold Bride said that he believed that Titanic was the only passenger steamer that was equipped with a rotary spark transmitter.86 However, that may not have been the case. Alec Bagot, the junior wireless operator on Olympic at the time of the Titanic disaster was called out of bed early by Olympic’s senior wireless operator Ernie Moore to tell him about the unfolding real-life drama. Alec Bagot vividly described what happened:87

“So when the first Wireless Officer of RMS ‘Olympic’, E. J. Moore, awakened me with such lack of originality, I wasn’t impressed and said so as boldly as any junior may to his senior. But Ernie was serious. ‘It’s true, I’m telling you. It’s true. Don’t fool around. Get up.’ With that he dived back to the operating room and began calling MGY to ‘Titanic’. With the old spark system you could read every letter as the high voltage crashed noisily across the rotary gap. Moore did not look up when, three minutes later, uniform over pajamas, I joined him over his shoulder he handed me a message addressed Commander, Olympic. Urgent. The Bridge. ‘It’s SOS’ he said.”

If Alec Bagot’s description was accurate, then it appears that by Olympic had also been fitted with a rotary disc discharger, as was her sister ship Titanic.88 By 1912 there were a number of vessels equipped with 5 kW sets with rotary disc dischargers,89 as well as a number of high-power land stations equipped with rotary spark dischargers. So the question that needs to be asked is where did those transmissions come from that were recorded in the Procés-Verbal (PV) of Virginian for 12:10, 12:20 and 12:27am NY time? Could they have come from Titanic as Virginian’s wireless operator was led to believe? An argument in support of the proposition that they came from Titanic was made based on some evidence seen on the wreck.90 The field regulators in the high voltage generating circuit of the transmitter

49 in the Silent room had their handles in a position that showed that an extra amount of field resistance was applied to increase the speed of the motor, while the alternator had a little less resistance to help bring the alternator voltage back up. The conclusion drawn was that the two Marconi operators were trying to get more power for the transmitted spark because of decreasing power being supplied by the ship’s DC power generators. The argument that is stated is that Phillips would have asked Bride to go into the Silent room, where the transmitter was kept, and readjust the field regulators to control the speed of the motor and the amount of current flowing through the alternator field while Phillips would be sending ‘V’s from the transmitting key in the adjacent operating room. Of course the problem here is that this scenario is only speculative, for we cannot find any support for this in any account given by Harold Bride that described what took place during their last minutes in the Marconi room before the ship went down. At the US Senate investigation, Bride had this to say: 91

“Mr. Phillips sat down again at the telephone and gave a general call of C.Q.D., but I think that our lamps were running down; we did not get a spark. We could not tell, because the spark of our wireless was in an enclosed room. We could not hear at any time whether it was sparking.”

In his written report on April 27th to H. R. Cross of the Marconi Company, Bride wrote:

“We had nearly the whole time been in possession of full power from the ship’s dynamo, though toward the end the lights sank and we were ready to stand by, with emergency apparatus and candles, but there was no necessity to use them. Leaving the cabin, we climbed on top of the house comprising the officers’ quarters and our own, and here I saw the last of Mr. Phillips, for he disappeared walking aft.”

At the British investigation into the loss of Titanic, Bride said:

“Mr. Phillips called once or twice more, but the power was failing us and I do not think we were getting a spark, as there were no replies... we left the cabin…We climbed up on top of the Marconi cabin and the officers’ quarters.”

There was never any mention of trying to adjust the spark before deciding to leave the cabin. The last time that Phillips and Bride would have spent time adjusting the spark of the transmitter was the night before. For five and a half to six hours, from about 11pm Saturday night until about 4:30 or 5 o’clock Sunday morning, Bride and Phillips were busy trying to repair Titanic’s 5 kW transmitter. What happened was that the leads from the secondary of the transformer burnt through inside the casing by making contact with some iron bolts holding the woodwork and frame together thereby shorting the secondary winding to ground. After binding these leads with rubber tape, Phillips and Bride once more had the apparatus in working order, but not before they would have adjusted the transmitter for optimum performance. Thus the need to adjust the field regulators in the high voltage circuit of the transmitter before going back on line. It should also be noted, that Jack Phillips apparently cut the power from the DC mains before abandoning the wireless cabin as evidenced by the open position of the switch on the DC switchboard in the Silent room. Did they also bother to shut the lights? Hearing what seemed to be transmissions from Titanic well after she foundered was also noted as late as 1:58am NY time. Mount Temple’s operator John Durrant reported, “Birma tells Frankfurt that he thinks he hears the Titanic, so calls him [MGY] and says, ‘Steaming full speed to you, shall arrive you six in morning. Hope you are safe. We are only 50 miles now.’”92 This was an hour and a half after that single ‘CQ’ transmission was heard by Virginian’s operator in a blurred or ragged spark that apparently

50 came from a transmitter with a rotary disc discharger. Could Birma have heard the same station that was picked up by Virginian’s operator about an hour and a half earlier? This would be about 4am Titanic time, about the time that Carpathia was getting close to lifeboat No. 2, the first lifeboat to be picked up. Two minutes later, at 2:00am NY time, Carpathia’s wireless operator Harold Cottam also tries to call Titanic, and like Birma, gets no reply.93 Sometimes in desperation, people tend to hear what they want to hear. According to Carpathia’s Harold Cottam, the last transmission from Titanic that was put down by Virginian’s operator was not right. What Cottam said was, “I think that [last message] is false. The signals [from Titanic] were good right away to the end.”94 Cottam went on to explain that the last message he heard from Titanic was at 11:55pm NY time, “His last message was, ‘Come as quickly as possible; our engine room is filling up to the boilers,’ and his signals were perfectly right to the end of the message.” As we have seen, according to Harold Bride, he and Phillips could not really tell if they were actually transmitting a signal anymore, and there is no mention of them trying to adjust the spark. As Bride explained, they could not hear if they were getting a spark, and other ship’s did not reply to the last transmissions that they sent out. The last lifeboat to be lowered from Titanic was collapsible boat D on the port side of the boat deck just aft of the bridge wing. The water was just 10 feet below the level of the boat deck when Second Officer Charles Lightoller lowered that boat around 2:05am.95 The water was just starting to spill onto A deck below. After lowering collapsible boat D, Lightoller went up to the top of the officer’s quarters to work on unlashing collapsible boat B which was stored there on the port side of the forward funnel. When Bride left the wireless cabin, he too climbed on top of the officer’s quarters and found men working to free the collapsible boat. He arrived just in time to help Lightoller and others push that boat down onto the boat deck below. It was only moments before a large wave swept aft as Titanic took a sudden surge forward washing many people off and setting the overturned collapsible boat adrift. Bride estimated that he and Phillips left the wireless cabin about 10 minutes before the ship went under.96 Now consider this. Assume that the last wireless transmission from Titanic was at 12:27 NY time, and furthermore, assume a 1 hour 33 minute time difference between ship’s time and NY time. That means that Bride and Phillips would have abandoned the wireless cabin at 2:00am (12:27 + 1:33), while Lightoller was still in the process of loading collapsible D with people on the boat deck, and the water was still below the level of A deck more than 10 feet below him. This is a situation that is totally inconsistent with what Bride described to W. R. Cross of the Marconi Company. Bride said that they “could hear the water washing over the boat deck” when he and Phillips cleared out of the wireless cabin and climbed on top of the officer’s quarters. According to Bride, the last message that Phillips sent out was a general “CQD MGY” distress call. Upon hearing no response, the two operators vacated the cabin having received permission from Captain Smith to do so several minutes earlier. It is possible that this last transmission, a general “CQD MGY” distress call, may have been the one that was sent out at 12:10am NY time and described by Virginian’s operator as, “Hear MGY calling very faintly, his power greatly reduced.” At the same time, 12:10am NY time, three vessels tried calling Titanic but received no response. They were Olympic, Frankfurt and Baltic.97 Also at that same time the Caronia reported two stations, MSP and MSC, exchanging messages about Titanic and using Titanic’s call letters MGY within that exchange.98 So what exactly did Virginian’s operator really hear at 12:10am NY time? With a 2 hour 2 minute difference, this would have taken place about 2:12am Titanic time, just about 10 minutes before the ship went under. As Bride told Senator Smith, “The motor and alternator that was working with our wireless set were running when we left the cabin, 10 minutes before the ship went down.” It was just enough time for him to climb to the top of the officer’s quarters and help push collapsible boat B off the roof and onto the boat deck below as he said he did. It was only moments before he and the overturned collapsible boat were swept off when the ship took a sudden surge forward.

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The following table is a list of what we believe to be the last known wireless contacts with Titanic by ship and land stations.

Last received signal from Titanic Ship or Land Station NY Time Titanic ATS Source Cape Race [MCE] 11:35pm Apr 14 1:37am Apr 15 PV Virginian Mount Temple [MLQ] 11:47pm Apr 14 1:49am Apr 15 PV Mount Temple Baltic [MBC] 11:47pm Apr 14 1:49am Apr 15 PV Ypiranga; PV Baltic99 Ypiranga [DYA] 11:50pm Apr 14 1:52am Apr 15 PV Ypiranga Caronia [MRA] 11:52pm Apr 14 1:54am Apr 15 PV Caronia Birma [SBA] 11:53pm Apr 14 1:55am Apr 15 Telegraphic office form100 Frankfurt [DFT] 11:55pm Apr 14 1:57am Apr 15 PV Caronia Carpathia [MPA] 11:55pm Apr 14 1:57am Apr 15 Carpathia’s Harold Cottam101 Olympic [MKC] 11:55pm Apr 14 1:57am Apr 15 PV Olympic Asian [MKL] 11:58am Apr 14 2:00am Apr 15 PV Olympic

Appendix C provides the reader with more details concerning the propagation of radio signals at night, and the sensitivity and selectivity of radio receivers used in Marconi stations in 1912.

SO WHAT REALLY HAPPENED ON TITANIC AND WHEN?

To answer the question of what really happened and when, let’s start with Boxhall’s return from his first inspection below and reported that he saw no damage following the collision with an iceberg. Not convinced that the ship did not sustain any damage, Captain Smith ordered Boxhall to go back down and find the carpenter to sound the ship forward. As Boxhall was going down the stairs from the bridge he met the ship’s carpenter coming up to report that the ship was taking in water in the forward cargo holds. Boxhall then told the carpenter to go up and report to Captain Smith, and then continued to go down to investigate for himself. Along the way down he met John R. J. Smith, one of the mail clerks who also happened to be on his way to the bridge. It was then that Boxhall learned that the mail hold was filling fast with water. With that, Boxhall decided to go directly to the mailroom where he saw water come within 2 feet of G deck at that time. But was the ship in danger of sinking? And was it immediately necessary to start asking other vessels to rush to the aid of a vessel that many considered to be “practicably unsinkable?” Norman Chambers was awakened down in his stateroom, E-8, on the starboard side when the ship collided. At the request of his wife he went up on deck to investigate and returned with nothing unusual to report. He then went back up on deck again, this time with his wife, and still found nothing too unusual going on except that the ship had taken on a very slight list to starboard. They then went below again to return to their stateroom. When he got back down to E deck, Chambers noticed a couple of mail clerks wet to their knees, having brought up some registered mail from the deck below. He then went to see what was going on and found that water had risen to within 2 feet of the deck below them which was F deck Then, according to Chambers,102

“While we were standing there three of the ship’s officers – I did not notice their rank or department – descended the first companion and looked into the baggage room, coming back up immediately, saying that we were not making any more water. This was not an announcement, but merely a remark passed from one to the other.”

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So even though the ship was obviously wounded, it was the impression of one of the officers that the flow of water into the ship’s hull had been checked or at least reduced. Even when Bruce Ismay went down to find Chief Engineer Bell shortly after speaking to Captain Smith on the bridge, Ismay was told by Bell that the ship was seriously damaged but that he was quite satisfied that the pumps would keep her afloat.103 Based on the water level that Chambers observed at that time, and based on the water level that Annie Robinson saw a half hour after the collision, we can estimate that Chambers’ observation took place around 12:00am or a little after, after he came down from the boat deck for the second time and saw nothing too unusual going on up there. From a timeline perspective, when Boxhall returned from his second inspection below to report to Captain Smith that he saw water come within 2 feet of G deck by the mailroom, Boxhall said that Captain Smith simply left the bridge without saying a word. It is likely that Smith went to tell Chief Officer Wilde, who reported much earlier that the forepeak tank was filling with water, to call out all hands and start uncovering the boats. It is also likely that Captain Smith then went to his own chart room to work up the ship’s position, and then went to the wireless cabin to let the operators know that they may have to send out a call for assistance, left them with the ship’s coordinates that he just worked out, and told them not to send it until he completed an inspection to see just how badly damaged the ship really was. It seems that Smith would not take such drastic action as asking other ships to rush to his aid unless it was absolutely necessary. After all, the ship was designed to be her own lifeboat under the worst imaginable calamity. It was well known by Titanic’s designers that Titanic could remain afloat even if all four compartments ahead of the machinery spaces were completely open to the sea. After leaving the wireless cabin, Captain Smith started his personal inspection below along with Purser McElroy and the mail clerk that Boxhall met earlier. At the time, the ship was starting to trim down by the head, but it was barely perceptible to most people. It is difficult to trace all the movements of everyone, or the precise times that they were seen at various places. But we know from Night Watchman James Johnstone that Thomas Andrews was seen headed toward the stairs that led to the mail and baggage rooms after returning from the engine room presumably having first spoken to Chief Engineer Bell. When Johnstone looked down the stairs to the mailroom, he saw water coming onto G deck. It was soon after that Steward Joseph Wheat met Johnstone on F deck, and Johnston told Wheat, “I think it is a bit serious.” This must have been a few minutes after Boxhall had been there because Boxhall said the water was first coming within 2 feet of G deck when he was there, and now it was seen coming onto G deck when Joseph Wheat was there. So it seems Andrews must have been there shortly after Boxhall, and would see the water rising from the mail hold into the sorting and baggage rooms. A little while later, Norman Chambers saw the water coming up near F deck when he saw what looked like three officers (possibly engineers from the Engineering Department) there. We also know from Annie Robinson that Captain Smith came by about half an hour after the collision with Purser McElroy and a mail clerk, and then was seen returning from the mailroom with Thomas Andrews. She then went to those same stairs and saw that the water was within 6 steps of coming onto E deck. Before Smith left Andrews to go back up to the bridge, Robinson overheard Andrews telling Smith, “Well, three have gone already, Captain,” a reference to Holds 1, 2 and 3.104 It seems that soon after Captain Smith returned to the bridge, he gave that order that was overheard by Quartermaster Robert Hichens to get the boats swung out and serve out the belts. Previously, before going on his inspection, the order was given to get the boats uncovered. We have evidence that the order to get the passengers called out occurred around 12:15,105 and we know from QM Hichens that he left the bridge at 12:23.106 Although Captain Smith went back up to the bridge following his inspection below, Thomas Andrews remained below. His detailed work was not finished. He knew that the ship would not be in danger of sinking if the flooding could be contained to the first four compartments. And in the first compartment it was only the peak tank that had flooded, everything above it was still dry. He also would

53 have known that the ship would trim down by the head to about 1½ degrees, and the rise of water in front of watertight bulkhead D, where the mailroom was, would continue to slow down and stop when it became level with the outside waterline. It would stop rising before coming onto E deck at that location. But that optimistic view assumes that any flooding in the machinery spaces aft of that bulkhead could be well controlled. Soon after departing company with Captain Smith, it is likely that Andrews found out from Chief Engineer Bell, or one of the other engineers, that the flooding in Boiler room No. 6 could not be controlled with the pumps, something that would only be confirmed after the lights came back on in the stokeholds. He and Bell would then know that the ship could no longer be saved. Once Andrews saw water coming onto E deck by those stairs leading down to the mailroom, he would know for certain that the ship he helped design would not last very long. About 40 to 45 minutes after the collision, Andrews was seen rushing up the Grand Staircase taking three steps at a time with “a look of terror” on his face. Among those witnessing this were Mrs. Frank Warren and Mr. William Sloper.107 It was at this time that it became clear to Andrews that the damage to Titanic was fatal.

Fig. 7 – The rise of water in Hold 3 based on eyewitness accounts.

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As reported by Fourth Officer Boxhall:

“The Captain did remark something to me in the earlier part of the evening after the order had been given to clear the boats. I encountered him when reporting something to him, or something, and he was inquiring about the men going on with the work [to clear the boats], and I said, ‘Yes, they are carrying on all right.’ I said, ‘Is it really serious?’ He said, ‘Mr. Andrews tells me he gives her from an hour to an hour and a half.’ That must have been some little time afterwards. Evidently Mr. Andrews had been down [below].”

We know that Boxhall had come back onto the bridge after first spending some time clearing some boats on the port and starboard sides, personally helping to uncover some of them. As they were swinging out some of the aft boats on the port side, someone reported that a light was seen ahead. Boxhall then went to the bridge to have a look at this light. But he also said that before he saw this light, he went to the chart room to work out the ship’s position which he showed to Captain Smith before taking it to the wireless cabin.108 This was the so called “corrected” position transmitted 10 minutes after the initial distress position had been sent out. Boxhall’s conversation with Smith obviously took place after Andrews told Smith the bad news. Once Andrews told Smith that Titanic had from 1 to 1½ hours left, Smith would certainly have gone to Phillips and Bride to tell them to send out that call for assistance. At the same time he would have given the order to start loading the boats with women and children and send them away out onto the open sea. Able Bodied Seaman John Poingdestre was standing just outside the crew’s mess room on the port side when the collision happened. He, like many others, rushed up on deck and saw ice in the well deck. He even brought of piece back down to the mess room with him. While below he met the carpenter who was busy sounding the ship. The carpenter told him that there was 7 feet of water in the firemen’s compartment, the second watertight compartment forward. After remaining below for some time, Poingdestre heard the boatswain pipe “all hands up and get the lifeboats ready.” He then went up to the boat deck and started taking the covers off the boats; first on the port side, then on the starboard side. Having assisted in clearing about 10 boats, Poingdestre went back down to the seaman’s quarters on the port side under the forecastle to get his boots. As he was coming out of there, a wooden fore-and-aft bulkhead separating the seaman’s quarters from third-class passenger space gave way and flooded the place. He then got out of there as fast as he could and went back up to the boat deck.

“I was going up on to the boat deck to go towards my own boat, and I heard the Captain pass the remark, ‘Start putting the women and children in the boats,’ and then I went to my boat, No. 12.”

When asked how long it was after the collision that this took place he said, “Well, about three-quarters of an hour, my Lord.”109 In his book, The Truth About the Titanic,110 Archibald Gracie wrote:

“From my own conclusion, and those of others, it appears that about forty-five minutes had now elapsed since the collision when Captain Smith’s orders were transmitted to the crew to lower lifeboats, loaded with .”

So we see from separate and independent accounts that the order to load and lower the boats with passengers came about 45 minutes after the collision. The time would be about 12:25am Titanic time. It was estimated by Andrews that the ship had from an hour to an hour and a half left. As it turned out, the ship lasted a little longer, almost two hours from that point in time before it foundered. At 12:27am

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Titanic time, the first call for help was being sent out by wireless in juxtaposition with the order to send passengers away in the boats and onto the dark, cold sea. Now proponents of a 1 hour 33 minute time difference like to point out that Harold Bride had stated in evidence that Phillips had finished working Cape Race about 10 minutes before the collision, which would put the time at 11:30pm ship’s time. They then point out that the wireless operator on Californian heard Titanic working Cape Race till 11:35 Californian time [9:45 NY time], Virginian’s operator had an entry in his wireless log that Cape Race was working Titanic at 9:45pm NY time, and that Asian had told Olympic that he heard Titanic working Cape Race up to about 10pm as we have mentioned before. Now if you put all of this together using a 2 hour 2 minute difference, we have Titanic still in communications with Cape Race at 11:47pm, which is 7 minutes after the impact with the iceberg. This, according to proponents of a 1 hour 33 minute time difference, was “impossible” because Bride implied that Phillips finished with Cape Race at 11:30. Of course, as I had pointed out before, Bride told the New York Times reporter on April 18th that he heard Phillips working Cape Race when he awoke before coming out to relieve him, and that he never felt the collision or knew about it until Phillips told him that some sort of accident had taken place. Harold Bride was asleep when the collision happened, as were so many other people on board Titanic. Phillips, who was busy with Cape Race, knew that something had happened to the ship, and that the ship had come to a stop. But Phillips was not aware that the ship had been in any way seriously damaged. Many stewards who were awake in their quarters down on E deck, in what was called the Glory Hole, thought that the ship had lost a propeller. And like Phillips, many of them speculated that the ship may have to return to Belfast for repairs. There was no reason for Phillips not to finish his business with Cape Race or stop exchanging messages with operators on other nearby ships.111 Bride admitted that the collision did not wake him up, and neither did Phillips. The truth is that we really don’t know what time it was when Bride came out to relieve Phillips. Maybe it was the sound of steam blowing off? We have four somewhat different versions of a story taken from this one person to go by.112 But what is more certain comes from piecing together the evidence from many other sources, in particular that which is not as subjective in nature or dependent on the inconsistent memory of any single eye witness.

HOW COULD THE 1 HOUR 33 MINUTE TIME DIFFERENCE HAVE COME ABOUT?

On day 4 into the US Senate investigation into the loss of Titanic, Third Officer Herbert Pitman and Second Officer Charles Lightoller were asked about the time the ship struck the iceberg and the time that she foundered.

Senator SMITH. What was the Greenwich time compared with the ship’s time? Mr. PITMAN. I can not say. Senator SMITH. Can you say, Mr. Lightoller? Mr. LIGHTOLLER. I can give you the Greenwich time. Senator SMITH. I wish you would. Mr. LIGHTOLLER. 5.47 - 2.20 - 5.47 Greenwich mean time: 2.20 apparent time of ship.

The difference between Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) and ship’s time from what Lightoller gave was equal to 3 hours and 27 minutes. Then on day 10 into inquiry, it was Titanic’s Fourth Officer Joseph Boxhall’s turn to answer a question about the time carried on board Titanic when the accident happened. The exchange was:

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Senator SMITH. Mr. Boxhall, you seem to be the one upon whom we must rely to give the difference between ship’s time and New York time; or, rather, to give ship’s time and give the New York time when this accident occurred. Mr. BOXHALL. At 11.46pm, ship’s time, it was 10.13 Washington time, or New York time. Senator SMITH. And that was the time of the impact? Mr. BOXHALL. There is a question about that. Some say 11.45, some say 11.43. I myself did not note it exactly, but that is as near as I can tell I reckoned it was about 11.45.

The difference between ship’s time and that in New York and Washington from what Boxhall said was equal to 1 hour and 33minutes. In 1912, as they are today, New York and Washington were both keeping mean time for the 75th meridian of west longitude. Clocks in both those cities were exactly 5 hours behind GMT. Thus, according to information from these surviving officers, if the ship struck at 11:46pm ship’s time, and it was 10:13pm in New York and Washington, then it had to be 3:13am GMT. And if Titanic foundered at 2:20am ship’s time, and it was 5:47am GMT, then it had to be 12:47am in New York and Washington when Titanic sank. But were these officers correct about the times that they testified to? Do they hold up when everything else we now know is considered? Having traveled 1549 nautical miles since departing off the Daunt’s Rock Light Vessel outside Queenstown harbor on April 11, we know that Titanic had to be close to 43° 02’N, 44° 31’W at local apparent noon (LAN) three days later on April 14.113 At the longitude of that location on that particular date, local apparent noon came at 2:58pm GMT. Time on the ship’s chronometers, by which the ship was navigated, were therefore 2 hours 58 minutes ahead of ship’s clocks that were set the night before, with a possible small correction in the forenoon, to show exactly 12:00 o’clock at local apparent noon. But when we consider the information that was put into the Rostron message to Haddock, and what Boxhall and Lightoller said during the Senate inquiry, we find ourselves with an enigma. How could there have been a difference between Apparent Time Ship (ATS) and GMT of 3 hours 27 minutes when the accident happened if the time difference between Apparent Time Ship and GMT was 2 hours and 58 minutes at noon? As we have seen before, the 3 hour 27 minute time difference between GMT and Titanic Apparent Time first showed up in that wireless message from Carpathia’s Captain Rostron to Olympic’s Captain Haddock that was logged at 4:10pm NY time on Monday, April 15. In that message Rostron wrote: “Titanic foundered about 2.20am, 5.47 G.M.T., in 41.46 north. 50.14 west.” The information in that message is exactly what Lightoller repeated before the US Senate investigation as we have seen. Also notice that Rostron accepted as correct the erroneous distress position that was sent out by wireless from Titanic. It is almost certain that the information in that message had to come from one of Titanic’s surviving officers. Could it have come from Joseph Boxhall who was the officer who worked up the famous 41° 46’N, 50° 14’W distress coordinates? Are those coordinates, which we now know to have been in error, some way tied to the 3 hour 27 minute time difference between ship’s time and GMT that first appeared in Rostron’s message to Haddock, and later restated by Lightoller and indirectly by Boxhall at the US Senate hearings? I believe the answer is yes, and here’s why: Consider the following. According to Boxhall, he obtained his distress position by starting from the position of a celestial fix that was taken around 7:30pm ship’s time by Second Officer Charles Lightoller and Third Officer Hubert Pitman. By taking Titanic’s course and speed and running it up to the time he used for the collision, Boxhall came up with a set of SOS coordinates at 41° 46’N, 50° 14’W. But today, since the discovery of the wreck in 1985, we know that his SOS position was about 13 miles too far west of where Titanic actually foundered. Undeniably, a mistake was made that night.

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So let us consider the following steps by working with GMT as a time standard, the same time standard that is used by navigators worldwide:

1. 7:30pm ship’s time April 14th equates to 10:28pm GMT April 14th based on Titanic’s noontime longitude which was 2 hours 58 minutes behind GMT (2 hours 2 minutes ahead of mean time in NY). 2. Boxhall equated an 11:46pm ship’s time of impact to 10:13pm NY time for April 14. This is the same as 3:13am GMT April 15. Boxhall never said how he came up with that time difference, and for this simple exercise, it really does not matter. 3. A run time from 10:28pm GMT April 14th (the time of the 7:30 celestial fix) to 3:13am GMT April 15th (time of impact used by Boxhall) is 4 hours and 45 minutes, or a run time of 4.75 hours. 4. Using Boxhall’s speed of 22 knots, the distance from the celestial fix to his SOS position is simply 22 x 4.75 = 104.5 nautical miles. 5. We were told by many that Titanic struck the iceberg at 11:40pm ship’s time. Without any clock alterations,114 11:40pm ship’s time April 14th equates to 2:38am GMT April 15th (again based on Titanic’s noontime longitude on April 14). 6. The run time from 10:28pm GMT April 14th (the time of the 7:30 celestial fix) to 2:38am GMT April 15th (the collision at 11:40pm ATS April 14th) is 4 hours and 10 minutes , or a run time of 4.17 hours. 7. Using once again a speed of 22 knots, we find that the distance from the celestial fix to impact with the iceberg is 22 x 4.17 = 91.7 nautical miles. 8. The difference between these two distances is 104.5 – 91.7 = 12.8 nautical miles, a distance that almost exactly corresponds to the distance between the wreck site (taken to the center of the discovered boiler field) and Boxhall’s SOS position.

The above shows very plainly that if Joseph Boxhall had not made a mistake in time, he would have obtained a distress location that is very close to the wreck site location instead of being 13 miles too far west. It should be noted that the precise time of when the celestial fix was actually taken does not really matter in this simple exercise. We were told by Third Officer Pitman that sights were taken, “Between half past 7 and 20 minutes to 8.” You can take the time of these sights as 7:30 or 7:40 or any time in between when doing this simple exercise. A different time for the fix will only increase or decrease the two run times that we obtained by a small amount exactly the same way. That amount will cancel out when taking the difference between the two run distances that you get. You will still get a difference between distances of 12.8 nautical miles. The numbers don’t lie. Figure 8 below shows the location of the wrecksite along with Boxhall’s distress position. It also shows the times in GMT when the vessel would have reached the locations shown traveling on the her westward courseline from the celestial fix to Boxhall’s SOS position. Also shown are the corresponding times in ATS for clocks that were keeping unadjusted time for April 14th (shown in paranthesis and regular font), and the ship’s time of impct given by Boxhall (shown in paranthesis and italic font). The position shown for 2:38am GMT (11:40pm ship’s time) in Figure 8 above is 12.8 nautical miles east of Boxhall’s SOS position for 3:13am GMT. Clearly, this shows that a collision time of 3:13am GMT, or 10:13pm NY time, is obviously coupled to the erroneous distress position that Joseph Boxhall derived. Unfortunately, the erroneous location of the distress position has led Titanic’s surviving officers to later believe that clocks on Titanic at the time of collision and time of foundering were 1 hour 33 minutes ahead of clocks in NY and Washington. The reality is that those clocks were 2 hours and 2 minutes ahead of clocks in NY and Washington as displayed on the two clocks that were kept in the

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Marconi room and witnessed by Titanic’s junior wireless operator Harold Bride. The reality is that Titanic struck an iceberg at about 11:40pm ATS (2:38am GMT) at a location that was about 13 nautical miles east of where she was thought to be.

Fig. 8 – Area of the wreck and positions of Titanic along a 266° true courseline.

So the question remains, what mistake did Joseph Boxhall actually do that lead to an error in the ship’s distress position and a corresponding error in time? Only two miles of the 13 mile overrun can be accounted for by Boxhall using 11:46pm instead of 11:40pm as the collision time. The remaining 11 mile overrun is worth 29 minutes of steaming time at 22 knots which translates to 14 minutes-of-arc in longitude. Other than a mistake in time, a possible explanation for the incorrect CQD position is that Boxhall used the wrong column from a traverse table, or he took the logarithm of a sine function instead of a cosine function from a book of nautical tables. Either of these two would account for an error of 14 minutes-of-arc in longitude.115 Another possibility that comes to mind is that Boxhall accounted for a clock change that never took place. However, to be 3 hours and 27 minutes behind GMT, the clocks would have had to be put back by 29 minutes. Yet this does not agree with what we were told was to be the amount of adjustment that night. As noted previously, the clock was to go back 23 minutes in First Watch, and 24 minutes in the Middle Watch. So how else could a 29 minute discrepancy in the difference between ship’s time and GMT have come about? Let’s look at the following possibility. When Captain Haddock of Olympic asked Captain Rostron of Carpathia to send over the details concerning the foundering of Titanic on Monday, April 15, Rostron wanted to send him Titanic’s position and time of foundering. As we have noted, the position he gave was the erroneous distress position that was transmitted from Titanic by wireless that night, and the time he gave was 2:20am, ship’s time, that he got from Titanic’s surviving officers. What Rostron also wanted to send to Haddock was the corresponding time in GMT that Titanic foundered, something that may not have been easily recalled at the time by her surviving officers. Remember, when Senator Smith asked Third Officer Pitman about the difference between GMT and time on Titanic, Pitman’s reply was, “I can not say.” So how could they

59 figure out the time in GMT when Titanic foundered if they only knew that it was 2:20am ship’s time as seen on their personal timepieces; a time that was last adjusted to show 12:00 when Titanic reached local apparent noon on April 14th according to Third Officer Pitman? Now it is possible that Joseph Boxhall had in his possession, or was able to recall, the coordinates (in latitude and longitude) and time (in GMT) of the celestial fix that was put down on Captain Smith’s chart around 10pm that Sunday night. After all, Boxhall stated that he had used that position several times that night along with the ship’s true course heading when working on “stellar deviations” to check compass deviation error,116 and it was Boxhall who was the one who worked up the coordinates of that celestial fix from sight data that was taken sometime between 7:30 and 7:40pm by Second Officer Lightoller and Third Officer Pitman. We also know that Boxhall said that he took 11:46pm ship’s time as the time of impact for his workup,117 used a speed of 22 knots, and used a course heading of S86°W (266°) true to derive his distress coordinates.118 So one way to find the difference between ship’s time and GMT is to measure the distance between the coordinates of that celestial fix and the coordinates of the SOS position that Boxhall derived. Then if you divide that distance by 22 knots, the speed that Boxhall said he used, you will get the time that it would take Titanic to travel the calculated distance from the coordinates of the fix to the coordinates of the SOS. If you then add that travel time to the time that was put down for that celestial fix, which would have been recorded in GMT, you should get the time in GMT for when the collision occurred; a time that supposedly would correspond to 11:46pm ship’s time according to Joseph Boxhall. Well, you may ask, how can we get to the coordinates and time of that celestial fix to test this possibility? The answer lies with working the problem backwards from some known position at some known point in time. From the simple exercise we did above, it appears that the distress coordinates that Boxhall should have obtained, if he had used 11:40pm instead of 11:46pm, would have been a point just north of the wreck site on the ship’s courseline toward the erroneous SOS position. Therefore, for our starting point, let us take a point on that line due north of the wreck. The coordinates of this point are 41° 46.9’N, 49° 56.8’W. What we will do now is run the ship back from that point, 41° 46.9’N, 49° 56.8’W, at 22 knots on a course of 086° true (the reciprocal of 266° true) from 11:40pm, the time of the collision event that is most accepted, to the time when the celestial sights were taken. Although we don’t know the exact time when those sights were completed, we can pick any time we like between 7:30 and 7:40pm because the precise time does not really matter when deriving the end result for this example. (It is easy to show that choosing a somewhat different time than what we do here will only shift the position of the fix eastward or westward by a few miles, and that shift, whatever it is, simply drops out of the overall equation when computing the collision time at Boxhall’s SOS position in GMT.) So for the fun of it, let us assume that sights were completed by 7:38pm Since Titanic’s clocks had been set to read 12:00 when local apparent noon occurred Sunday, and since local apparent noon occurred at 2:58pm GMT on that date and place, we find that 7:38pm Titanic Apparent Time Ship would have corresponded to 10:36pm (22:36) GMT 14 April; the time that would have been put down on the chart for the celestial fix and used by Boxhall for some of the other calculations that he talked about. Now, assuming no clock changes occurred in between, the time difference between 11:40pm and our assumed 7:38pm celestial fix time is 4 hours and 2 minutes. At 22 knots, Titanic would have traveled 88.7 nautical miles back to 41° 52.7’N, 47° 58.1’W, the coordinates of the celestial fix if taken for 7:38pm ship’s time. Now the distance between that fix position and Boxhall’s SOS position works out to be 101.5 nautical miles. If you then divide that distance by 22 knots, the speed that Boxhall said he used for his work, you will find that it would take Titanic 4 hours 37 minutes to go from the fix position to Boxhall’s SOS position. So all that Rostron or Boxhall had to do was simply add that travel time, 4 hours 37 minutes, to the time of the fix that he had in GMT.

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Adding 4 hours 37 minutes to 10:36pm (22:36) GMT 14 April and you get 3:13am (03:13) GMT 15 April for when the ship would have reached Boxhall’s distress position. (See the attached area chart in Figure 9 below.) And since New York and Washington were exactly 5 hours 0 minutes behind GMT, when it was 3:13am GMT 15 April it would be 10:13pm 14 April in New York and Washington, the collision time that Joseph Boxhall stated before the US Senate committee.

Fig. 9 – Area chart of North Atlantic showing track of Titanic from Noon to the time of collision.

Of course what Boxhall and the other surviving officers did not know at the time is that Titanic never reached his famous SOS position. It sank almost 13 nautical miles to the east. Thus we see how a difference of 3 hours 27 minutes between ship’s time and GMT may have come about, and how it is once again directly linked to the erroneous distress position that Joseph Boxhall derived. This was the same 3 hour and 27 minute time difference between ship’s time and GMT that appears in the foundering time that was put into the wireless message from Carpathia’s Captain Rostron to Olympic’s Captain Haddock late Monday afternoon, and repeated by Titanic’s surviving officers at the US Senate investigation weeks later. Strangely enough, that specific time difference never came up during the British investigation or any time afterward. The chart in Figure 9 above shows the track of Titanic from Local Apparent Noon (12:00pm ATS) Sunday, 14:58 GMT April 14th 1912, to the erroneous Boxhall SOS position for 03:13 GMT April 15th 1912. Also shown are the positions for the Corner turn at 5:50pm ATS (20:48 GMT) April 14th, the derived celestial fix put down for 22:36 GMT April 14th, and the collision with the iceberg at 11:40pm ATS April 14th (02:38 GMT April 15th), as well as the now known location of the Titanic wreck site.

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1 HOUR AND 50 MINUTES AHEAD – THE BRITISH INQUIRY

The British Wreck Commission settled on a ship’s time that was 1 hour and 50 minutes ahead of New York time. How did this come about? The simple answer appears to be that they equated Titanic time to time on the SS Californian. At the British Inquiry, Californian’s Third Officer, Charles Victor Groves, testified that he saw the lights of an approaching steamer shut out at 11:40pm Californian time. Californian’s Second Officer, Herbert Stone, testified that Charles Groves told him that the steamer they had off their starboard beam had been stopped since 11:40pm. The Commission also heard evidence that Titanic collided with an iceberg at 11:40pm. Later, 8 white rockets were seen to come from that stopped steamer which the British Commission concluded must have been Titanic since Titanic was firing distress socket signals during the same period of time, and Titanic’s Second Officer Charles Lightoller told the Commission that he thought that 8 distress signals had been sent up. Furthermore, Californian’s Second Officer Herbert Stone also claimed that he saw a stern light from this steamer disappear at 2:20am. The Commission also heard evidence that Titanic sank at 2:20am. As a result, the Commission seemed to conclude that time on Titanic must have been the same as time on Californian. As it turned out, Californian’s Captain Stanley Lord told the Wreck Commission that Californian was at a noontime longitude of 47° 25’W that Sunday, April 14. For that date and location, local apparent noon occurred at 3:10pm GMT, or 10:10am NY time. Therefore, time on Californian was 1 hour 50 minutes ahead of New York, or 3 hours 10 minutes behind GMT. There is no reason whatsoever for Titanic to have carried the same time as Californian. The noontime positions of the two ships were far different. But it seems that the British Wreck Commission was not interested in such details. It seems that it was more convenient to equate the times that both ships carried in order to make a stronger case against the SS Californian. The end result was that the British Commission decided on a time difference of 1 hour 50 minutes between Titanic ATS and NY time, and showed that result in the list of wireless messages to and from Titanic that they compiled.

1 HOUR AND 39 MINUTES AHEAD – A TIME FOR LAWYERS

During the Limitation of Liability Hearings that were held in New York in 1915 questions were raised as to the time of collision and the time of foundering of Titanic in terms of NY time. In the amended answers of the petitioner, the Oceanic Steam Navigation Company (also known as The White Star Line), the time of the collision was given as 10:06pm NY time on April 14, 1912, and the time of foundering was given as 12:41am NY time on April 15, 1912. The difference between these two events comes out to be exactly 2 hours 35 minutes. We know that during the US Senate investigation in 1912, Titanic’s Fourth Officer Joseph Boxhall had at one point told Senator Alden Smith that he thought the ship collided with the iceberg about 11:45pm Titanic time:119

“There is a question about that. Some say 11.45, some say 11.43. I myself did not note it exactly, but that is as near as I can tell I reckoned it was about 11.45.”

It appears that lawyers for the White Star Line had settled on 11:45pm for the time of collision. For the foundering time, they accepted 2:20am. This then gives us the 2 hours and 35 minutes between collision and foundering. Now equating 11:45pm Titanic time to the 10:06pm NY time, and equating 2:20am Titanic time to 12:41am NY time, gives a difference between Titanic time and NY time of 1 hour 39 minutes, or 3 hours and 21 minutes behind GMT. As it turns out, a difference of 3 hours and 21 minutes

62 from GMT precisely corresponds to the difference between Local Mean Time for the location of Boxhall’s erroneous SOS position and GMT.120 So we see that there is very little mystery as to how the answers to those two questions asked of the petitioner were derived. The lawyers for the White Star Line took 11:45pm for the collision time and 2:20am for the foundering time and were told to subtract 1 hour and 39 minutes from each, the time difference that corresponded to the longitude in which everyone believed the accident happened. It was a simple thing for the White Star Line to do, and I guess the interrogating lawyers didn’t have reason to question how those times were derived. The reality of all of this is that time on Titanic was 2 hours and 2 minutes ahead of time in New York on April 14, 1912; a time that corresponded to her noontime longitude on that date.

SUMMARY

This article was concerned with the difference between Titanic time and New York time. In particular, I have addressed the question of a 1 hour 33 minute time difference that had its origin in a wireless message sent late Monday afternoon, April 15, 1912, from Captain Rostron of Carpathia to Captain Haddock of Olympic. In this article I have shown the following:

A 1 hour 33 minute time difference for Titanic has absolutely no solid basis whatsoever. It does not correspond to any noontime longitude, expected or otherwise, or to any planned clock time change, partial or full. It was likely the result of an error made while trying to determine Titanic’s foundering time in GMT to put in a message that was sent from Carpathia to Olympic on April 15. A 1 hour 33 minute time difference would imply that the first wireless transmission from Titanic would have been sent out at 11:58pm Titanic time, just 18 minutes after the collision. This was about the time Captain Smith first started his personal inspection of the flooding below, and before it was known that the damage inflicted on the ship was fatal. Titanic’s fourth officer Joseph Boxhall gave Senator Smith the impression that the first distress message was sent out about 35 minutes after the ship struck ice, or almost twice the 18-minute time interval that a 1 hour 33 minute time difference would make. A 1 hour 33 minute time difference would imply that Captain Smith would have released his wireless operators, Jack Phillips and Harold Bride, as early as 1:28am Titanic time, more than 50 minutes before Titanic sank. A 1 hour 33 minute time difference would also imply that Captain Smith had ordered the firing of distress rockets stopped as early as 1:23am Titanic time, almost one full hour before Titanic sank.

In this article I have also shown that Titanic would have been carrying Apparent Time on her clocks based on her noontime longitude for April 14, 1912.

IMM Company rules that were in effect required that clocks be set at night so they would show 12:00 at Local Apparent Noon the next day. Surviving officers Charles Lightoller and Herbert Pitman explained that clocks on Titanic were adjusted around midnight with a possible minor correction in the forenoon so that they would be accurate at noon the next day. White Star Line brochures given to westbound passengers said that Apparent Time is carried while the ship is at sea, and that clocks are put back around midnight each night, the amount depending on the expected distance the ship was going to make to noon the next day.

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Log card evidence from Olympic’s maiden voyage and an intercepted wireless message from Captain Smith prove that Olympic was carrying Apparent Time on her clocks based on her noontime longitudes in June of 1911. Titanic would have done the same. The time difference between GMT of Local Apparent Noon (LAN) for Titanic on April 14th and GMT of Local Apparent Noon for her projected April 15th LAN position was exactly 47 minutes, the reported planned clock adjustment for the night of April 14. This once again proves that Titanic was keeping Apparent Time based on her expected noontime longitudes as required by IMM company rules. Local Apparent Noon for Titanic on April 14th came at 2:58pm GMT, putting Titanic’s clocks 2 hours 2 minutes ahead of clocks in New York and other east coast cities. Leslie Harrison, a friend and supporter of Captain Stanley Lord of the Californian, identified this fact in the early 1960s. Titanic’s first wireless distress message was sent out at 10:25 NY time, or 12:27am Titanic time, in juxtaposition with the order to load and lower the lifeboats to the sea with women and children. It came after Captain Smith had completed his personal inspection below and after Thomas Andrews was seen rushing up to the bridge with a look of terror on his face. It fits perfectly with Harold Bride finding Captain Smith supervising the loading of the lifeboats when he went out to report that they received a first response to the CQD from the SS Frankfurt. The last CQD from Titanic may have been sent out at 12:10am NY time, or 2:12am Titanic time. After hearing no reply, Phillips and Bride vacated the wireless cabin and climbed to the top of the officer’s quarters just in time for Bride to help push collapsible lifeboat B off the roof and onto the boat deck below. It was just moments before Bride and others were swept off the deck by an induced wave when the bow took a sudden plunge forward. A 2-hour difference, not an hour and a half, was seen on the two clocks carried in Titanic’s wireless cabin by surviving wireless operator Harold Bride. One clock showed Titanic time and the other clock showed mean time for the 75th meridian of west longitude as required by the Marconi Company for vessels west of longitude 40°W. There is a very good possibility that the 1 hour 33 minute time difference came about when Titanic’s surviving officers later tried to figure out how Titanic managed to reach a longitude of 50° 14’W that was put into the erroneous distress position that was sent out by wireless that night.

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APPENDIX A

IMM Company Rules Regarding Time Kept and Clocks on Board

According to the IMM Co. “Ship’s Rules and Uniform Regulations (July 1907)” –

35. Sounding Whistle at Noon. Except in narrow waters, the whistle is to be sounded on all steamers every day at noon.

39. Navigation. … The Officers are required to work up the ship’s position as soon after noon as practicable, and then take it to the Commander in the Chart Room, and see the result pricked on the Chart. Commanders are to confer with the Officer in charge of the bridge as to the ship’s position, and the course to be steered, …

116. TIME TO BE KEPT. Seventy-fifth meridian time must be used for time of arrival and departure from Sandy Hook Lightship, Five Fathom Bank Lightship, and other points of arrival and departure in the United States and Canada. Greenwich Mean Time must be used in Abstract Logs after the English or Irish land is made. When passing points and ships at sea, either eastbound or westbound, Greenwich Mean Time, as well as ship’s time must be used.

259. SHIP’S TIME. The Officer of the Watch will see that the ship’s time is changed between the hours of 10pm and 6am, the clocks to be set for Noon before 6am The Engine Room Clock must at all times agree with the Clock in the Wheelhouse, and must be corrected accordingly.

303. Winding Chronometers. Unless the Commander otherwise decides, he [the First Officer] will wind and compare chronometers at 8am each day, and keep a Chronometer Comparison Book. He will also see that the clock’s are wound.

305. Engine Room and Deck Clocks to Agree. When passing points of departure or arrival, he [the First Officer] will see that the Engine room and Deck times agree.

420. Deck and Engine Room Times to Agree. He [the Chief Engineer] will be careful to keep the time or clock by which the engine department is worked as nearly as possible the same as the Deck Department or Bridge time.

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APPENDIX B

Titanic’s Route of Travel and Her Noontime Positions

Based on what we were told about Titanic’s route of travel,121 and the distances run each day,122 we are able to find approximate geographic coordinates for local apparent noon on all three days up to noon, April 14th 1912. Not only that, we can easily derive the time, in GMT, when local apparent noon occurred using the ship’s longitude and the equation of time for each date. The results are shown in the table below.

Cumulative Leg Distance123 distance Leg of Route Traveled (nautical miles) (nautical miles) Course traveled from Daunt’s Rock light vessel to LAN on 14 April Daunt’s Rock LV to point off Old Head of Kinsale 14.1 14.1 Point off Old Head of Kinsale to Fastnet Light 41.1 55.2 Fastnet Light to LAN April12 429.1 484.3 484.3 LAN April 12 to 19:00 GMT April 12 114.6 598.9 19:00 GMT April 12 to LAN April 13 404.7 519.3 1003.6 LAN April 13 to LAN April14 545.8 545.8 1549.4 Intended course from LAN on 14 April to Ambrose Channel light vessel LAN April 14 to the Corner (42°N, 47°W) 126.1 126.1 1675.5 Corner to point off Nantucket Shoals LV 1022.8 2698.3

Point off Nantucket Shoals to Ambrose LV 192.8 1215.6 2891.1

The following table provides the approximate noontime positions for Titanic on each of the dates shown as well as the time (in 24-hour format GMT) that local apparent noon occurred on each of those days.

GMT at Location Coordinates location Departure Daunt’s Rock April 11 51° 43’ N, 08° 16’ W 14:20 Local Apparent Noon April 12 50° 06’ N, 20° 43’ W 13:24 Local Apparent Noon April 13 47° 22’ N, 33° 10’ W 14:13 Local Apparent Noon April 14 43° 02’ N, 44° 31’ W 14:58

In addition to the above, we also can easily derive the interval of time between each day’s run, and the average speed-made-good per day. This is shown in the table below.

Days Run Time Interval124 Average Speed-Made-Good per Day125 Daunt’s Rock to LAN April 12 23 hours 04 minutes (23.07 hours) 484.3/23.07 = 21.00 knots LAN April 12 to LAN April 13 24 hours 49 minutes (24.82 hours) 519.3/24.82 = 20.93 knots LAN April 13 to LAN April 14 24 hours 45 minutes (24.75 hours) 545.8/24.75 = 22.05 knots

The track of Titanic across the North Atlantic is shown in the following chart below. Included are the noontime positions for April 12, 13 and 14, the position for 19:00 GMT on April 12 reported to La Touraine, and the position of the wreck site. Also shown are the locations of the Daunt’s Rock light

66 vessel, Fastnet Light, the Corner, the Nantucket Shoals light vessel, and the Ambrose Channel light vessel for April 1912.

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APPENDIX C

Radio Propagation, Skip Distances and Receiver Sensitivity

The strength of a received radio signal depends on many things, including the power of the transmitter, the gains and orientation of the transmitting and receiving antennas, the propagation loss between transmitter and receiver, and any gain in the receiver itself. The ability to read a signal also depended on the selectivity and sensitivity of the receiver; i.e., its ability to tune out unwanted out-of- band signals, and to detect wanted signals in the presence of in-band noise, respectively. Nighttime propagation at Medium Frequencies (300 to 3000 KHz) has a far greater range than daytime by about two to three times because of sky wave propagation caused by refraction off the F layer of the ionosphere. During the day, distance is limited by what is called ground wave propagation. There is no sky wave during the day at these frequencies because of absorption by the D layer of the ionosphere which disappears at night. On occasion, there can be multiple hops at night between the ionosphere and the Earth extending coverage to very great distances. Usually, there is much more propagation loss in these multiple hop situations requiring very sensitive receivers to detect transmissions, something not readily available in 1912. The term “skip distance” is usually used in the wrong sense. It is the distance from the transmitter to the point where the sky wave is first returned to Earth. The skip zone is a region of silence, a dead zone, between the point where the ground wave becomes too weak to be detected and the point where the sky wave is first returned to Earth. When the skip distance is short enough so that there is no zone of silence, then there is no skip zone. However, in a region where the sky wave and ground wave may be of near equal intensity, there could be severe fading caused by the sky wave alternately reinforcing and canceling the ground wave. This is due to the longer path that the sky wave has to travel that brings it in and out of phase with the ground wave. This, at times, would make it difficult to detect signals in addition to any other impairments caused by interference from other stations fading in and out, as well as any added atmospheric noise disturbances. The energetic particles that come from the sun to create the visible aurora alter the ionospheric layers that affect radio propagation. These incoming particles cause rapid radio signal fading called fluttering as a result of changes to the multiple paths that the radio waves take during these disturbances. During some peak sunspot periods, variations in the Earth’s magnetic field up to about 2 degrees have been reported. 1912, as it turned out, was not a year of peak sunspot activity or magnetic disturbance. Nevertheless, the aurora borealis was very much active the night of April 14, 1912 as reported by several passengers that took to the lifeboats; e.g., second class passenger Lawrence Beesley’s account. On the night of April 14, 1912, conditions for radio reception were far from ideal. Consider what senior operator E. J. Moore of Olympic wrote in his PV:

“10.50pm Hear MGY [Titanic] signaling to some ship about striking an iceberg, not sure it is MGY who has struck an iceberg, I am interfered by X’s [atmospherics] and many stns wkg [stations working].”

In Virginian’s PV we find:

“10:00pm Bi for CC. 10/30 press finished first received greater part of it X’s strong.”

Virginian’s operator was standing by (Bi) for the press report from Cape Cod (CC). The press report finished first at 10:30pm, and that he had received the greater part of it before being interfered with by

68 strong atmospherics (X’s). Wireless signals from Titanic were being transmitted on a wavelength of 600 meters, or 500 kHz. We know that the land station at Cape Race was able to pick up Titanic’s transmissions that night. The operating frequency of 500 kHz is below what is called the critical frequency. The critical frequency is the highest frequency that a signal if sent straight up vertically will be refracted straight down. So at 500 kHz at night you will have sky waves that are refracted at all angles and theoretically there should not be any skip zone. But if the there is some variations in the density of the F layer there can be some angles that refract differently creating some weird coverage effects. You can and do get regions of signal fade caused by destructive interference between ground wave and sky wave, or even between a double hop sky wave and a single hop sky wave. As far as the ability to receive Titanic’s signals, the received signals would start to get lost in the background noise as the transmitting power was getting weaker near the end. Once the power became so low as to not support the development of a spark, transmission would simply come to a complete end. Harold Bride said that Jack Philips continued to send for a short time after making his last contact. When it became clear that nobody was responding anymore, that is when he shut things down and abandoned the wireless cabin. As far as the selectivity of wireless receivers, they were essentially passive devices that were not very selective in terms of the bandwidth that was allowed to pass through. The Marconi multiple tuner worked in 4 switched ranges: 80-150 metres, 150-1600 metres, 1600-2000 metres, and 2000-2600 metres. This gives a total range from 115 kH to 3.75 MH. However, the bandwidth was not very sharp and therefore allowed a relative wide band of noise and interference to pass through to the magnetic detector compared to what later date superheterodyne receivers with multiple stages of amplification and passband filtering would allow. The other thing to keep in mind is the modulation method of wireless telegraphy was on-off keying, a simple form of amplitude modulation. Anything in the way of noise or interference was simply additive. If an interfering station came in at 1/3 the power of the desired signal (about 5 dB down) it was heard at 1/3 the level of the desired station, just like in AM radio broadcasting today with the automatic gain control cut out. As far as the sensitivity of the magnetic detector, it was somewhat dependent on the setting of the magnets. This is because the detection principle depended on setting up a magnetized state in the iron band that ran through the device opposite the magnetic poles as it passed near them which was retained due to the hysteresis effect. If RF oscillations are produced in a coil that is wound over the iron band it tends to demagetize that part of the band passing through it while these oscillations last. This creates a small demagnetized length of band. So as the band is moving across at 7 to 8 cm/sec with areas that are magnetized and other areas that are demagnetized it induces a current in the separate telephone coil that is also wound over the moving iron band. After that, it depends on the sensitivity of the operator’s ear to detect the sound. Strong RF oscillations will demagetize more of the iron than weak signals. Therefore a stronger induced current will be set up in the telephone coil and produce a louder sound. If the magnets are too close, weak signals would not demagnitize the iron enough to be heard. If they are too far away, then the iron would not be magnitized enough and again weak signals would not be heard. In addition, the magnetic detector, or Maggie as it was called, created its own noise by the movement of the iron band past the stationary magnets. It created a form of “hissing” sound in the background that made it difficult to read very weak signals.

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1 From copy of detailed wireless log made by Olympic’s operator E. J. Moore furnished to Senator William Alden Smith, May 25, 1912. American Inquiry, p. 1138. 2 The time it takes for the real sun to go around the earth is not uniform throughout the year because the orbit of the earth is an ellipse, not a circle, and the earth’s axis is titled with respect to the plane of its orbit. 3 Courtesy of Mark Chirnside. 4 Commander James G. P. Bisset, R.D., R.N.R., Ship Ahoy!! Nautical Notes for Ocean Travelers, With Charts and Diary., Third Edition, Charles Birchall Ltd., Liverpool, 1924. 5 American Inquiry, p. 294. 6 Samuel Halpern, “Keeping Track of a Maiden Voyage,” Irish Titanic Historical Society’s White Star Journal, Vol. 14, No. 2, August 2006. 7 In his subsequent testimony and written report to the Marconi Company, Bride never mentioned that Capt. Smith came twice to the wireless cabin before the first CQD call went out. But in this first account, taken down on April 18, 1912, he did. 8 American Inquiry, pp. 144-146. 9 British Inquiry, 16490-16492. 10 British Inquiry, 13272-13282. 11 This 15 minute time period is supported by Assistant Second Steward Joseph Wheat. (British Inquiry, 10936-10937.) 12 British Inquiry, 10675-10701. 13 British Inquiry, 13229. 14 British inquiry, 15379. 15 The three off-duty officers he went to call upon were Second Officer Charles Lightoller, Third Officer Herbert Pitman and Fifth Officer Harold Godfrey Lowe. Chief Officer Henry Tingle Wilde, who normally would have been off duty, was already awake at this time. 16 British inquiry, 13781. 17 British inquiry, 14949. 18 Lawrence Beesley, The Loss of the SS Titanic, Houghton Mifflin Co., 1912. 19 British Inquiry, 1017-1041. 20 Fifteen minutes after the collision the order came to close the watertight doors on F deck, twenty minutes later Capt. Smith was seen coming down the staircase, and 10 minute later, he was seen going up the staircase. Thus, 15+20+10=45 minutes. 21 American Inquiry, p. 905. 22 The actual time difference between Carpathia ATS and New York mean time was 1 hour 57 minutes. See: Samuel Halpern, “12:35 A.M. Apparent Time Carpathia,” Great Lakes Titanic Society website, July 2010, http://www.glts.org/articles/halpern/1235_ats_carpathia.html. 23 American Inquiry, p. 451. 24 American Inquiry, p. 294. 25 The accident happened at 20 minutes to midnight, and from midnight to local apparent noon would have been 12 hours and 47 minutes for a total of 13 hours and 7 minutes of travel from the accident location to noon the next day. 26 See Mark Chirnside and Sam Halpern, “Olympic and Titanic: Maiden Voyage Mysteries,” ET Research (ref: #5540), http://www.encyclopedia-titanica.org/maiden_voyage_mysteries.html. 27 American Inquiry, p. 906. 28 One of the jobs that Bride had was to keep up their procès-verbal, their official record of proceedings. 29 In this photo: https://i.pinimg.com/564x/bc/a2/2c/bca22cdc656ecf3d26e62e547b12e893--titanic-artifacts-titanic-history.jpg, the chronometer shows a time of 12:39. However, in this photo: https://i.pinimg.com/736x/1b/1e/18/1b1e1815034c185294626c39b9f6728f--titanic-artifacts-death.jpg, the recovered chronometer shows the hour hand pointing toward 9 while the minute hand is clearly dislodged, lying across the upper right side of the dial. 30 It is interesting to note that French vessels were using mean time for the meridian of Paris for navigation purposes back in 1912. They changed to the Greenwich meridian in 1914. The Paris meridian was 2°20′14.03″ east of the Greenwich meridian. 31 Commander James G. P. Bisset, R.D., R.N.R., Ship Ahoy!! Nautical Notes for Ocean Travelers, With Charts and Diary., Third Edition, Charles Birchall Ltd., Liverpool, 1924. 32 Bowditch, section 314, 1918 edition. An example of determining chronometer error by time signals for a vessel in an east coast port of North America is as follows: A time ball drops at precisely 5h 0m 0spm GMT and the chronometer time reads 4h 57m 52.5s. The chronometer error is therefore 2m 07.5s slow of GMT, and the correction is additive. 33 For the short period of time that it takes to take the star sights, the accuracy of the hack watch would be more than adequate. 34 British Inquiry, 13855.

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35 Independent confirmation that the order to first load the boats came about 45 minutes after the collision comes from Able Bodied Seaman John Poingdestre and passenger Archibald Gracie. Adding 45 minutes to an 11:40pm collision time gets us to 12:25am ship’s time when the order to first load the boats was given. 36 British Inquiry, 7935-7936. Also Stone’s written report to Capt. Lord on April 18, 1912, while at sea. 37 American Inquiry page 715. Californian time was based on a noontime longitude for April 14th of 47° 25’W. 38 American Inquiry, p.451. Ideally, the split in time would have given each watch section 23½ minutes of extra time on deck that night. However, the slave clocks that were controlled by Magneta master clocks only could be advanced by whole minutes of time. 39 The time shown on these clocks was also referred to as “Bridge Time.” It was the time that controlled the working of the vessel. 40 Samuel Halpern. “Changing Watch Schedules,” http://www.titanicology.com/WatchSchedules.html. 41 Bells were struck every half hour during a typical 4 hour watch, with 1 bell after the first half hour, two bells after the second half hour, and so on until 8 bells were struck at the end of a watch. More details can be found in: Samuel Halpern. “Changing Watch Schedules,” http://www.titanicology.com/WatchSchedules.html. 42 Samuel Halpern, “From the Logbook of the White Star Liner Celtic,” http://www.titanicology.com/From_Logbook_Celtic.htm. 43 Magnetic variation at noon 25 December was 19° 30’W. Compass deviation was put down as 1°W. 44 At LAN December 25, 1914, Celtic’s clocks were exactly 12 hours 0 minutes behind GMT for 30° 03’W longitude. 45 It is interesting to note that the longitude of Boxhall’s erroneous SOS position, 50° 14’ W, gives a time that is 1 hour 39 minutes ahead of New York mean time. This was the time difference that was used by lawyers for the White Star Line during the Limitation of Liability Hearings held in New York in 1915. 46 From an account written by Beesley while he was on board Carpathia and later published in the Toronto World, April 19, 1912. In his book, The Loss of the SS Titanic, Beesley wrote: “After undressing and climbing into the top berth, I read from about quarter-past eleven to the time we struck, about a quarter to twelve.” 47 Information from Mark Chirnside. 48 This was noted on Olympic right after the Hawke incident in 1911 where there was a minute difference between the clock in the wheelhouse and the clock in the engine room. And this too may explain some of the differences in times reported. If one master clock showed 11:42, and the other master clock showed 11:43, then someone looking at a slave clock connected to master A might say the collision was at 11:40 if rounding to the nearest 5 minute mark, while another person looking at a slave clock connected to master B might say it was at 11:45 if rounding to the nearest 5 minute mark. 49 From an account written by Chambers for his college alumni newspaper. Reproduced in the book by George Behe, On Board RMS Titanic, 2011, Lulu.com. 50 In his book, The Truth About the Titanic, Gracie admitted that the correct ship’s time of the collision was about 11:45. He attributed that to a failure to correctly adjust his watch the day before. This explanation does not hold up because it would have resulted in a 45 minute error on his watch. What Gracie was not willing to admit was that he, like several others, sleep right through the collision and was awakened by subsequent events. 51 The boiler had a working pressure was 215 lbs/in2 and were tested to 430 lbs/in2. 52 British Inquiry, 15576. 53 American Inquiry, p. 519 and p. 523, and British Inquiry questions 17608-17630. 54 British Inquiry questions 965-966. 55 Only the lights of these ships were visible. It was too dark to see any hull form or superstructure from far off on the moonless night. 56 Testimonies of QM Alfred Olliver and QM George Rowe. 57 Testimonies of AB Joseph Scarrott and Fireman Alfred Shiers. 58 Samuel Halpern, “She Turned Two Points in 37 Seconds,” www.titanicology.com/Titanica/Two-Points-in-Thirty-Seven- Seconds.pdf. 59 British Inquiry 3715-3729. According to Trimmer Patrick Dillon who was in the engine room when the impact came, Titanic’s engines came to a stop about 1½ minutes after the collision. They were then stopped for about ½ a minute before going astern slowly for about 2 minutes and then stopped again. Then he noticed the engines going ahead for about 2 minutes before they came to a final stop. 60 British Inquiry, 17670-17674. 61 This bearing line comes from independent observations from Californian’s third and second officers, Charles Groves and Herbert Stone. It was at the time that Stone took over the watch from Groves, about 12:10am Californian time. By that time, Californian had swung onto a compass heading of ENE, and Titanic was bearing dead on her starboard beam, SSE by compass. This is also supported by the testimony of Apprentice James Gibson who came on watch about 12:15am 62 A complete description of the Titanic and Californian situation is given in a 4-part article by this author called, “A Light on the Horizon,” published in the Titanic Historical Society’s Titanic Commutator beginning with Issue 177.

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63 The lifeboats were equipped with dim oil lamps, and many passengers and crew had matches. 64 British Inquiry, 7533-7565. 65 British Inquiry, 7922. 66 British Inquiry, 11510-11518. 67 Rory McEvoy, “A Time to Remember,” Antiquarian Horological Society, December 2016. 68 Published in Titanic Historical Society’s Titanic Commutator, No. 156. 69 American Inquiry, p. 450. 70 From an analysis of the various angles of trim and heel that the Titanic took on as water was flooding into her hull, the ship was down by the head about 2 degrees 30 minutes after the collision. In about an hour she was down a little over 3 degrees. In 90 minutes she trimmed down about 4 degrees, and by 2 hours after the collision she was down 5 degrees. From about 15 minutes before the end to about 5 minutes before the end, the ship went from 6 degrees down to 10 degrees down shortly before she broke in two. (See “Angles of Trim and Heel,” in Titanic Historical Society’s The Titanic Commutator, No. 174, by this author.) 71 British Inquiry, 13281-13292. 72 American Inquiry, p. 578. 73 Titanic carried a total of 36 socket signals (British Inquiry Report). Some were kept on the forebridge, and some were kept in metal boxes aft in the Quartermaster’s locker under the poop. (See American Inquiry p. 522). 74 At the British Inquiry Californian’s Second Officer Herbert Stone stated that he was using the Morse lamp at intervals from before any rockets were seen “and during the time that they were being sent up.” 75 American Inquiry, p. 293 and British Inquiry, 17973. 76 For certain, 17 out of 36 distress signals were certainly not fired as they were discovered and photographed in a box at the wreck site. 77 Bill Wormstedt, Tad Fitch and George Behe, “Titanic: The Lifeboat Launching Sequence Re-Examined,” Revised April 2010, http://wormstedt.com/Titanic/lifeboats/lifeboats.htm. 78 Samuel Halpern, “Titanic’s Master of Time,” App. A, www.titanicology.com/Titanica/TitanicsMasterOfTime.pdf. 79 American Inquiry, p. 656. 80 Samuel Halpern, “Titanic’s Master of Time,” www.titanicology.com/Titanica/TitanicsMasterOfTime.pdf. 81 British Inquiry, 2148-2149. 82 In a newspaper article, Barrett was quoted as saying, “We were working away, and thinking our watch was nearly up, when all of a sudden the starboard side of the ship came in on us.” 83 American Inquiry, p. 294. 84 PV Virginian. 85 In a general call on the landline wire was a “CQ.” This “CQ” call preceded time signals and special notices. “CQ” had been generally adopted by telegraph and cable stations all over the world. Naturally, “CQ,” went with the operators to sea and was likewise used for a general call. This call sign for “all stations” was adopted soon after wireless came into being by both ships and shore stations. (See http://www.stormy.ca/perc/sos.html). 86 American Inquiry, p. 135. Harold Bride told Senator Smith, “It was the only set afloat with the Marconi Co., with the disk discharger.” 87 Alexander Bagot, Roaming Around: Memoirs of a Marconi Operator, Ch. 8 – ‘Wireless at Sea - Olympic - Titanic,’ unpublished. 88 This may have been done during Olympic’s refit following the Hawke collision before she was put back into service. 89 In 1910 it was listed that Great Britain alone had 176 naval ships equipped with wireless sets and 113 mercantile marine vessels equipped with wireless sets. 90 See: http://marconigraph.com/titanic/cameron/ps01.html, and http://marconigraph.com/titanic/cameron/ps02.html. 91 American Inquiry, p. 159. 92 British Inquiry, 9571. 93 PV Mount Temple. 94 British Inquiry, 17145-17147. 95 Bill Wormstedt, Tad Fitch and George Behe, “Titanic: The Lifeboat Launching Sequence Re-Examined,” Revised: April 2010, http://wormstedt.com/Titanic/lifeboats/lifeboats.htm. 96 American Inquiry, p.158. 97 From the PV of Mount Temple. 98 PV Caronia. The time was noted as 5:10am GMT as Caronia was at that time east of 40°W longitude. 99 PV Baltic shows a message sent to Titanic at 11:50pm NYT stating she was 243 miles east and coming, but all her entries were in 5 minute increments. PV Ypiranga has Baltic message saying she is rushing to Titanic at 11:47pm NYT. 100 Samuel Halpern, “The Enigmatic Excursion of the SS Birma,” http://www.titanicology.com/Titanica/Inigmatic_Excursion_of_SS_Birma.pdf.

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101 British Inquiry, 17145-17146. 102 American Inquiry, p. 1042. 103 American Inquiry, p. 3. 104 Shan Bullock, Thomas Andrews Shipbuilder, 1912. 105 British Inquiry, 13229. 106 British Inquiry, 1017. 107 See endnote 56 of Chapter 6 in J. Kent Layton’s, Atlantic Liners, A Trio of Trios, Lulu Press, 2009. 108 British Inquiry, 15385. 109 British Inquiry, 2844-2874. 110 Colonel Archibald Gracie, The Truth About the Titanic, Mitchell Kennerley, 1913. 111 Carpathia’s Harold Cottam placed an entry in his reconstructed wireless log that said “5.30pm signals exchanged with the ‘Titanic’ at frequent intervals until 9.45pm” (British Inquiry, 17067.) The 9:45pm NY time is interesting in that it would conflict with Phillips being in communications with Cape Race at that time as implicated by the Californian, Virginian and Asian accounts. 112 In chronological order these would be the story Bride told to a New York Times reporter on April 18, his testimony before the American inquiry on April 20, his written report to H. R. Cross of the Marconi Co. on April 27, his continued testimony before the American inquiry on April 29 and May 4, and his testimony before the British Wreck Commission on May 23. 113 S. W. Halpern, “Keeping Track of a Maiden Voyage,” www.encyclopedia-titanica.org/keeping-track.html. 114 As stated in evidence by Boatswain’s Mate Albert Haines, who was in charge of the watch on deck at the time of collision, “The right time, without putting the clock back, was 20 minutes to 12.” 115 Dave Gittins, Titanic: Monument and Warning, an e-book, copyright 2005 by D. Gittins. Also refer to: “The SOS ‘Position.’ Boxhall gets all boxed up.,” at: http://users.senet.com.au/~gittins/sospos.html. 116 British Inquiry, 15678. 117 British Inquiry, 15639. 118 A true course heading of S86°W was also confirmed by Lightoller. See British Inquiry, 13498. 119 American Inquiry, p. 918. He also told Senator Burton that he thought the collision was at 11:43 (American Inquiry, p. 932). And , he also said he used 11:46 in his calculation of the SOS position (British Inquiry, 15639-15640). 120 The Boxhall CQD longitude was 50° 14’W. Expressing this in degrees, we get 50.23 degrees west of Greenwich. If we divide this number by 15 degrees per hour we get 3.35 hours, or 3:20:56. Rounding this to the nearest minute, we get a time that is 3 hours 21 minutes behind GMT, or 1 hour 39 minutes ahead of NY time. 121 This route was known as the southern track taken by steamers heading westbound across the Atlantic leaving Queenstown. From Queenstown, vessels heading westward to New York would first head around the southern coast of Ireland to a lighthouse off the southwest coast of Ireland know as Fastnet Light. From there, the vessel would travel a great circle path across the Atlantic to a point called ‘The Corner’ located at 42°N, 47°W. Then it would follow a rhumb-line course to a point just south of the Nantucket light vessel and from there to the Ambrose Channel light vessel outside New York harbor. In 1912, this particular route was in effect from January 15 through August 23. 122 From a memorandum provided at the US Senate investigation by Titanic’s surviving third officer Hubert Pitman. See American Inquiry, pages 420-421. The distances given, 484, 519 and 546 miles, were confirmed by others. 123 Rhumb line distances shown here are based on a mid-latitude calculation method for a spherical earth. One minute of arc in latitude is equal to one nautical mile. 124 The time interval from LAN one day to LAN the next day is just 24 hours plus the amount of time the clocks were set back. This hold for all days except the first day out. Because they took departure in the afternoon at 2:20 PM GMT off the Daunt’s Rock light vessel, the time of the first day’s run is 24 hours minus the difference between their departure time in GMT on April 11 and the time of LAN in GMT on April 12. That difference was 2:20 – 1:24 = 0:56. Therefore 56 minutes from 24 hours leaves 23 hours and 4 minutes, the time interval from departure at the Daunt’s Rock light vessel outside of Queenstown harbor on April 11 to local apparent noon on April 12. 125 Speed-made-good is not the same as speed through the water such as measured by a taffrail log. Speed-made-good is the actual distance traveled over the surface of the Earth divided by the time traveled over that distance. It is the result of the ship’s travel through the water plus the effects of current, wind and steering error.