What’s an Hour Got to Do With It?

[Encyclopedia Titanica]

What’s an Hour Got to Do With It?​

by Sam Halpern
There has been much speculation over the years since the discovery of the wreck to explain why both of these distress positions were so far to the west of where Titanic actually sank. Some of the reasons included overestimating the ship’s speed, errors in time, and errors in calculations. Some of the explanations were quite imaginative and backed with very little evidence, while others were somewhat more plausible.

In this article, I will focus on the initial CQD position worked out by Captain Smith and show how a very simple and understandable mistake made in the rush to derive a distress position led to a wrong result.



Why were Titanic's reported positions so far from her actual location?

 

[Arun Vajpey]

Most interesting article @Samuel Halpern and excellent reasoning. Obviously, the mathematical and cartographic calculations are well beyond my level of understanding but since it comes from the best authority, it must be as it is.

The only surprise - and not necessarily a doubt - that I felt was the consideration that Captain Smith might have calculated the difference between 8pm and 11:40pm as 4 hours and 40 minutes, an hour too much. Some might call it a "schoolboy error" but under the pressure of the moment that the Captain was in, it is just possible that he made that mistake.

But could there have been a partly explicable reason for that error? I ask because the is something that I did not quite understand in the paragraph dealing with how they made the logged entries of the ship's position. The following is an excerpt from your article.

What we also know about Titanic that Sunday is that at around 7:30 p.m., a set of star sights was taken by Second Officer Charles Lightoller and Third Officer Herbert Pitman to get an accurate fix of Titanic’s position for that particular time. That position, which was later worked out by Fourth Officer Joseph Boxhall, was later used by Boxhall to derive a corrected distress position for Titanic. It is also known that about an hour and a half before those star sights were taken, sometime after 6 p.m., Fifth Officer Harold Lowe was asked to work out what is called an 8 p.m. dead reckoning (DR) position for Titanic so that it could be entered into Captain Smith’s night orders book. That was a routine navigational choir that was done every evening during that period of time.

If 5/O Lowe was asked to work out the ship's position by Dead Reckoning "sometime after 6pm", how long would it have taken him to do so? If he had completed doing that just before 7pm and made the relevant entry in Captain Smith's night orders book, would Lowe not have entered the correct time then - about 7pm - even if the process was nominally called the "8pm DR entry"? If that was done, Boxhall, who was off duty at the time, might not have known about the time of that entry.

If Captain Smith had used the 7pm time in the Night Orders book as the starting point for his calculation of the ship's position after the accident, then his assumption that the ship had travelled about 4 hours and 40 minutes would have been correct. Did Captain Smith himself then have to do the calculations about the Titanic's stopped position after the accident or, considering the unusual circumstances (to say the least), might he have passed Lowe's entries to Boxhall and ordered him to do it based on a travel time of 4 hours and 40 minutes? (This might seem unlikely, but at that point Captain Smith would have his hands and head full of the damage to the Titanic, its possible outcome and orders he was going to give.) If so, it would have been the 4/O who could have wrongly assumed that Lowe's entry was made at 8pm and made the calculations that put the Titanic's position about 20 miles west of what it actually was; if Boxhall then passed the results of that calculations to Smith who then took it to the wireless room himself, it could explain the anomaly.

However, 50 years later, in 1962, Joseph Boxhall claimed in a BBC interview that Captain Smith used the ship’s 8 p.m. DR position that was copied into his night orders book as his starting point. According to Boxhall’s account, the reason that he was asked to work out a revised distress position is that he pointed out to Smith that, according to what he had seen, the ship was running ahead of her dead reckoning position that night.

Well, neither Captain Smith nor Phillips survived the disaster. By 1962, Lowe, Lightoller and Pitman were dead. And Boxhall was an older man giving the interview 50 years after the disaster.

 

[Samuel Halpern]

The premise in this article is that Smith took, as Boxhall later claimed, his starting point the 8pm DR that was written into the night orders book. (By the way, the 8pm DR is also written into the ship's log book eventually.) The result of Lowe's calculation was written on a chit of paper and placed in Smith's navigation room. If you are asking could the position have been written down as 7pm instead of 8pm, I doubt it because it was specifically for where the ship will be at 8pm ATS. More likely one can ask if it was Lowe who made an error in calculating the 8pm DR? If Lowe calculated the DR for a time that was 3 hours and 10 minutes past the corner turn instead of 2 hours and 10 minutes, then that too would explain why Smith got the wrong result for his CQD.
But in all honesty, if it was the 8pm DR that was in error by an hour, I think it would be easily noticed questioned when it was put down on the chart because it would be noticeably more than 48 miles from the corner point unless nobody bothered to look.

In any event, it seems that a simple one-hour mistake was made somewhere that led to the wrong result.

 

[Arun Vajpey]

Thank you Sam for that explanation. It is most interesting. From your calculations it seems highly likely that someone made an error of an hour with the time & position co-ordinates that placed the stopped Titanic after the accident about 20 miles west of where it actually was. I just find it hard to believe that even in the heat of the moment an experienced mariner like Smith would have read that 4 hours and 40 minutes had elapsed since Lowe's 8pm DR entry and what Smith knew to be 11:40pm, the time that the Titanic collided with the iceberg. Mariners like him would have spent most of their lifetime looking at things like entries of ship's positions, related times etc and using them for further calculations later and while acknowledging that what you said could have happened, I cannot help but look for alternative explanations. I hope that you don't mind.

The result of Lowe's calculation was written on a chit of paper and placed in Smith's navigation room.

I presume that Lowe would have entered the time that he made that calculation on that chit of paper, along with the Titanic's position at that time. But then, who would have copied Lowe's calculations into the Captain's Night Orders Book and when? I presume that only the Captain was allowed to do so since those would be his orders.

If you are asking could the position have been written down as 7pm instead of 8pm, I doubt it because it was specifically for where the ship will be at 8pm ATS. More likely one can ask if it was Lowe who made an error in calculating the 8pm DR? If Lowe calculated the DR for a time that was 3 hours and 10 minutes past the corner turn instead of 2 hours and 10 minutes, then that too would explain why Smith got the wrong result for his CQD.

I did not quite understand that, Sam, especially the highlighted part. Are you saying that after taking a DR position of the ship at around 7pm, Lowe extrapolated the co-ordinate values to a presumed position an hour later (8pm) based on the ship's speed and entered that as the 8pm DR position? If so, would he not actually have been close to being correct since the Titanic did not change its speed within that timeframe? And Captain Smith, checking back after the impact, would have seen the close-to-correct 8pm position and should have realized that 3 hours and 40 minutes had passed, but apparently did not. Somehow, Smith appears to have thought that Lowe' coordinates actually represented the 7pm position and so later added 4 hours and 40 minutes from there to the time of the accident.

Sometime after 6 p.m., Fifth Officer Harold Lowe was asked to work out what is called an 8 p.m. dead reckoning (DR) position for Titanic.

In his American testimony, Lowe admitted that he was busy working out the ship's position but did not make it clear who ordered him to do so. It might have been the OOW (Lightoller) or Captain Smith himself and the 5/O's repeated reference to the Captain makes me believe that it was in fact Smith who gave that order, something that he would have remembered later after the collision. Is it possible that after Lowe completed those calculations just before 7pm and then extrapolated the results to fit the prerequisite 8pm DR using the ship's then 22-knot speed as the guideline?

Following is a relevant excerpt from Lowe's American testimony.

Senator SMITH.
Did you make a report to the captain?

Mr. LOWE.
I handed him the slip report.

Senator SMITH.
Did you hand it to I him personally?

Mr. LOWE.
On his chart room table. [I assume Lowe meant the chart table within the Captain's Quarters and not the main chart room]

Senator SMITH.
Did you call his personal attention to it?

Mr. LOWE.
No; we never do. We simply put the slip on the table; put a paper weight or something on it, and he comes in and sees it. It is nothing of any great importance.

Senator SMITH.
What did you do it for?

Mr. LOWE.
It has always been done, so that the position of the ship might be filled in the night order book.

If Lowe had completed his DR calculations by around 7pm and entered it on the chit of paper and placed it on the chart room within the Captain's Quarters, the latter might have seen it and noted the actual ship's time but as he was on his way to see Ismay, decided to make the entry into the Night orders book later. We know from Ismay's testimony that around 7:10pm the Captain came to the First Class Smoking Room to get the infamous Baltic ice report back from the Chairman and soon afterwards appeared at the Widener's party table in the a la carte restaurant. Therefore, is it possible that the co-ordinates on Lowe's chit on the table remained there waiting to be seen by the Captain who later forgot about it? If so, it is further possible that the relevant entry was not made at all into the 8pm slot of the Night Order book.

Boxhall, who might or might not have seen Lowe's chit within the Captain's Quarters, was the one who later claimed that the Captain used the information there to calculate his CQD position after the accident. But if neither Smith nor Boxhall realized that Lowe had calculated the 8pm DR position based on his 7pm co-ordinates and the former had seen the 5/O place the chit there around 7pm, it could explain why Smith could have added 4 hours and 40 minutes to the time of the accident to calculate the CQD position of the stopped Titanic. It might seem far-fetched, but if Smith was working entirely based on the co-ordinates in Lowe's chit and there was no matching entry in his Night Orders book, it is a possibility. But that would, of course, put Smith's CQD position around 20 miles west of the actual one, which was what happened in the real world.

 

[Richard C Elliott]

I just find it hard to believe that even in the heat of the moment an experienced mariner like Smith would have read that 4 hours and 40 minutes had elapsed since Lowe's 8pm DR entry and what Smith knew to be 11:40pm, the time that the Titanic collided with the iceberg.

I don't find it hard to believe at all. I imagine him starting off, even before looking at the DR position, by mentally running through a quick appromation of what he is about to do. He doesn't think of the time as 11:40 pm but as "20 minutes to 12" so mentally computes the interval as "about 4 hours". So far he is correct, but the figure 4 sticks in his mind and in his later paper calculation he accidentally notes 4 instead of 3.

It is the sort of error I have made many times when moving from a mental arithmetic approximation to a full calculation. I think it is remarkably easy to do and I find Sam's suggestion very persuasive.

 

[Samuel Halpern]

I cannot help but look for alternative explanations. I hope that you don't mind.

Not at all. Why should I? I welcome alternative explanations.

It is the sort of error I have made many times when moving from a mental arithmetic approximation to a full calculation.

So have I. While flying a plane in my younger days I had passed a waypoint once because I overestimated the time when I expected to be there. The good news was that I had flown the same route before, and started to realize that things didn't look familiar as my calculated alter course time came up. My out was contacting ATC asking to be vectored to my destination airport. It was when I was told what course to take to get there that I realized that I must have flown passed the visual waypoint that I would normally have altered my course for the destination airport. I have to admit, shamefully, that I missed seeing that visual waypoint because at the time I was passing it, I wasn't looking for it. It was later, when going back and checking my flight plan that I saw where the error was. Since that experience, I decided to always use a calculator even for the simplest calculations for short or long flights.

If Lowe had completed his DR calculations by around 7pm

You keep on bringing that example up. Let me explain. The approximate position where the ship will be at 8pm was needed to be put in Capt. Smith's night orders book. The position for 8pm is worked out in advance by a junior officer during the 6 to 8pm Dog Watch. The position obtained is then written down on a chit of paper and given to the captain if he was there, or place under a paper weight and left on the chart table in his navigation room. It is marked for what it was, where the ship is expected to be at 8:00pm ATS, the start of the First Watch (the 8 to midnight watch). It is not for the time when the calculations were done. On that Sunday night Lowe would have written on slip something like "Ship DR position 8:00pm ATS 14 April 1912 (10:58 pm GMT 14 April 1912) 41.53N, 48.07W. 5/O H.G. Lowe."

You also asked how long would it take to work out the position. Probably about 10 to 15 minutes at most, including checking your own work. Most of it is simple arithmetic plus the use of a couple of look up tables.

 

[Samuel Halpern]

Here's an example showing the 8am and 8pm DRs entered into a page from the logbook of the Celtic.

 

[Arun Vajpey]

Thanks for explaining that Sam. Still, there must have been some sort of subconscious reason if Captain Smith really made that error; can it be the fact that almost 5 hours had actually elapsed between the time Lowe placed that chit of paper on the table in Smith's little Chart Room@ If the Captain had seen it in passing, that might have left an impression on his 'body clock', which I have read was particularly strong among sailors from a bygone era.

 

[Samuel Halpern]

Still, there must have been some sort of subconscious reason if Captain Smith really made that error

I cannot deal with someone's subconscious. I do know that he and Boxhall had worked out their positions knowing that time was running short, and that probably affected their actions. What we do know is that both made mistakes under the pressure of the moment to get things done quickly.

 

[Pegglesworth]

Excellent article! Also the queries bring out the verity of the article. Just one question from an ignoramus, when did they change the ships clocks? Could this have affected it?