Prelude To An Allision - Titanic's Fatal Encounter Revisited

[marina_irc]

Very much so. Human night vision is mediocre at best and acclimatization only helps slightly. But for someone looking ahead in the dark while on a vessel moving in the same direction, like the lookout or OOW of a ship, there is another factor that adds itself to the equation - depth perception - which also drops sharply at night. An additional problem is that humans don't instinctively realize how much their visual acuity is affected at night, particularly in assessment of a closing object. Since that is mainly due to physiological limitations, no amount of training or experience can improve it beyond a very small degree. So, for Fleet/Lee and Murdoch, cisualization and then range estimation of the closing iceberg that night would have been quite difficult.

The Imperial Japanese Navy programme was one of those brilliant but very fragile things (like their pilot training) that they did; they tested all recruits specifically for night vision and chose those in about the 99th percentile and then gave them training as specialised night lookouts to maximise their potential and properly understand their limitations, and then equipped them with long range detection night binoculars specially developed for long-range observation and tracking in low light conditions. But, of course, they couldn't train replacements effectively as they took casualties over the course of the war, and radar was so much more superior that it ended up pointless by late 1943. Anyway, it wouldn't be possible to duplicate the same acuity from a liner's lookouts, but there's nonetheless no real question that lookout duties were not realy treated as seriously as they could have been.

 

[Arun Vajpey]

I am sure that all that training helped, but that - or anything else - would not be able to exceed human physiological limitations. As you doubtless know, we have 2 types of photoreceptors in our retinae - Rods & Cones. Rods are the ones that are active during low-light and night conditions; apart from not being able to distinguish colour, rods have very low spatial acuity. That is the reason why depth percetion at night is so poor among humans and if one is trying to guage the range of of a closing object - like the OOW on the bridge of a ship moving forward - is a very difficult task.

But there's nonetheless no real question that lookout duties were not realy treated as seriously as they could have been.

That's true. A lot of Captains treated lookouts with disdain, which IMO is a pity because at the very least they provided extra eyes. Even somone like Captain Turner, whom I have respect for, felt that lookouts were little more than BoT decorations or something like that and he said so when he testified during the Limitation of Liability hearings.

Getting back to limitations of human night vision, the significantly reduced spatial acuity at night affects us in ways we don't even realize. "Seeing" something at any time involves 3 steps - first, the light from the object falls on the retinae of the observer's eyes; that is then transmitted by the optic nerve to the brain which then forms the necessary 'image'; finally the information and any action needed as a result is sent to relevant parts of the body. At night, particularly when trying to visualize an indistinct closing object, the aforementioned visual process is sluggish and there's is the rub. So, for someone like Fleet or Lee, even the ability to realize that they might be seeing something in the horizon under such dark conditions is slowed down without them being actually fully aware of it. In other words, when Fleet's eyes first saw "something" on the horizon that night, it would have taken him several seconds to actually realize that he was indeed doing so and then be prompted into the action of ringing his bell. Given the actual atmospheric conditions that night, IMO that latent period could have been as much as 25 to 30 seconds.

 

[Ian Donaldson]

The Imperial Japanese Navy programme was one of those brilliant but very fragile things (like their pilot training) that they did; they tested all recruits specifically for night vision and chose those in about the 99th percentile and then gave them training as specialised night lookouts to maximise their potential and properly understand their limitations, and then equipped them with long range detection night binoculars specially developed for long-range observation and tracking in low light conditions. But, of course, they couldn't train replacements effectively as they took casualties over the course of the war, and radar was so much more superior that it ended up pointless by late 1943. Anyway, it wouldn't be possible to duplicate the same acuity from a liner's lookouts, but there's nonetheless no real question that lookout duties were not realy treated as seriously as they could have been.

I am interested in your comments regarding the Japanese involvement in enhancing night-vision capability. You will, no doubt be aware that the test for colour blindness, still in use to this day, was developed by Dr. Shinobu Ishihara, an ophthalmologist, in Tokyo in 1917. Laterally, the Japanese went ahead of the West in developing scientific lenses and as we know most of the cameras in use today are of Japanese origin.
Of further interest to anyone wishing to explore further the role of the lookouts on April 15th, I have recently published my own thoughts on Fleet and Lee's contribution leading up to the collision, including the limitations placed upon them that night. It is entitled -
One Starry Night: The Titanic Lookouts: Egos, Errors, and Excuses
It is available on most of the major bookseller's websites in ebook, paperback and hardcover editions.

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[marina_irc]

@Arun Vajpey I am not sure if it was pseudoscience or not to test for night vision and select the best performers. Nonetheless they did it. Speaking dangerously in your area of expertise, I have always understood that most human biologic functions have a statistical or stochastic distribution of some type, so that some people are better than others at night vision and with a sufficiently large population this is testable seemed rational to me.

@Ian Donaldson the programme is fairly well known in naval histories. I actually believe the first IJN publication on night warfare to reference it was circa 1913. The surviving Japanese officers also produced a “Night Warfare” study from the different services post WW2 under American/allied supervision; that one is available in English.

 

[Arun Vajpey]

I am not sure if it was pseudoscience or not to test for night vision and select the best performers.

You are correct. Those night vision tests DID make sense and some people DO have better night vision than others. There can be individual variations in the presence of Rods & Cones; also there are many studies related to Ethnic variations in night vision but results are not necessarily conclusive and there are disputed opinions about it. Anyway, that is not relevant to us here.

What I am talking about is the significant limtations of night vision among us humans in general compared with many animals. Perhaps more importantly, the relatively great daytime vision we have - especially colour perception through cones - "deteriorates" significantly as the day progresses towards dusk and night and rods become more important. Our stone age ancestors were able to realize and accept that change much better because they had very few tools and relied entirely on their own senses to survive, which was why they made themselves secure as darkness arrived. But as a "highly developed" creature, the contemporary Man takes so much for granted that certain physiological facts get pushed into the background. Since we have very bight flashlights, headlights, strobes, floodlights, searchlights etc to be put to use as necessary, we don't often realize how limited our night vision can be without those aids.

When you are next in an area where you can be certain of personal safety, test it for yourself. Try walking along a really dark path on a moonless night with no external light sources to show you the way. You'll see what I mean. Trees on the sides of the path seem to suddenly appear out of the darkness.

 

[Samuel Halpern]

According to what Fleet told Lesley Reade in an interview, when he first spotted the iceberg he asked Lee, his lookout mate, "Do you what that is?" to which Lee replied, "No." He then told Reade that he thought that he had better strike the bell. At 38 ft per second, you can easily calculate how far the ship continued on by the time the bell was actually struck after initial sighting. Anyway, my timeline always started at the striking of the bell. That to me is T=0.

 

[Arun Vajpey]

At 38 ft per second, you can easily calculate how far the ship continued on by the time the bell was actually struck after initial sighting

That's very interesting information Sam. If that had really happened, by my way of thinking - and no more:

• If Fleet felt inclined to check with Lee that the latter too had seen something, that meant Fleet himself had first gazed at the horizon at the spot where he thought he saw that something but was not sure....10 seconds
• Fleet then asked Lee if he was seeing anything and for the latter to deny it, he - Lee - also would have followed his partner's gaze at the spot on the horizon before answering...15 seconds.

If Fleet then made the decision to ring the bell and did so, it brinrs us to the 25 to 30 seconds that I have always believed passed between Fleet's very first sighting of 'something' on the horizon and his ringing the bell.

 

[marina_irc]

That's very interesting information Sam. If that had really happened, by my way of thinking - and no more:

• If Fleet felt inclined to check with Lee that the latter too had seen something, that meant Fleet himself had first gazed at the horizon at the spot where he thought he saw that something but was not sure....10 seconds
• Fleet then asked Lee if he was seeing anything and for the latter to deny it, he - Lee - also would have followed his partner's gaze at the spot on the horizon before answering...15 seconds.

If Fleet then made the decision to ring the bell and did so, it brinrs us to the 25 to 30 seconds that I have always believed passed between Fleet's very first sighting of 'something' on the horizon and his ringing the bell.

To be honest, I'd be astonished if that wasn't true. Most people try to understand something before acting on it, and with good reason. In many professions simply reacting without a full understanding of the situation can make the situation worse.

Perhaps if Titanic had had a turbo-electric or some other highly reversible drive system, simply immediately ordering the equivalent of "crashback" and then trying to figure out more details would have been more viable. But she did not, and turning in the wrong direction could make the situation worse. And the lookouts didn't and couldn't have enough information to see if the iceberg "favoured" one side of the ship or the other. My personal opinion is that Murdoch spent those seconds simply trying to determine which direction he should order Titanic to turn because it was not obvious from what he could see.

 

[Julian Atkins]

I got a ‘like’ today on this. From something I posted last year on this thread.

Set me thinking again. If Murdoch did momentarily wait to execute the orders as I believe is my understanding of Sam’s hypothesis, then why didn’t he send down to the engine room on the telegraph beforehand “stand by”?

 

[marina_irc]

I got a ‘like’ today on this. From something I posted last year on this thread.

Set me thinking again. If Murdoch did momentarily wait to execute the orders as I believe is my understanding of Sam’s hypothesis, then why didn’t he send down to the engine room on the telegraph beforehand “stand by”?

Because he was on the bridge wing the entire time trying to interpret the evidence to the best of his ability; it was not that long and it probably fully consumed his attention.

 

[Arun Vajpey]

If Murdoch did momentarily wait to execute the orders as I believe is my understanding of Sam’s hypothesis, then why didn’t he send down to the engine room on the telegraph beforehand “stand by”?

It is like Marina said. Although he would have been on full alert as the OOW that night, the 3 bells from the Crow's Nest would still have been something of a jolt to the system. So, from that moment on all Murdoch's senses and thoughts would have been focused on the closing object on the horizon. His first priority would have been to assess its position in relation to the ship's line of travel and the action he could/should take to avoid or mitigate damage.

So, I agree with Sam that Murdoch took a short but finite time to do that. His later actions would reflect the decisions he made from that assessment.

 

[Julian Atkins]

Humour me! If Murdoch had not been alone on the bridge and the potentially unwell Boxhall had been next to Hichens instead of Moody, and Moody been on the bridge with Murdoch then Murdoch could have called out to Moody to ring down ‘stand by’ on the engine room telegraph?

The simple fact as I see it was Murdoch was alone on the bridge and could not anticipate how quickly the engine room would respond to his own telegraph orders. Because they were not on ‘stand by’. He couldn’t know that when he made those telegraph orders how long it would take the engineers to respond. (If they were having a cup of tea like apparently Boxhall was at this time, then it seems a pretty lax way of running a ship).

 

[Arun Vajpey]

Was Boxhall required to be on the navigating bridge? Unlike Murdoch and Moody, I was under the impression that Boxhall was on a sort of "stand by" on that shift.

I would have thought that it was Captain Smith's decision whether to put the engine room crew on standby. If he had recognized the danger really posed by the ice ahead, he probably would have done so before retiring to his cabin. As OOW, would Murdoch have had the authority to order the engine room crew to go on standby if  he felt afterwards that the approaching ice field presented a greater risk than considered earlier?

Once the 3 bells from the crow's nest sounded, there was only so much that Murdoch could think and do within the time frame available. As it was, he did very well and almost pulled off a miracle.

 

[marina_irc]

I don’t believe Boxhall was needed on the bridge in normal conditions; the problem was that being in the vicinity of ice was treated as “normal”. However even in normal operations it seems like the waste of an officer to have Moody standing there monitoring the Quartermaster. Wasn’t there an automatic rudder angle indicator available for the OOW, or do I misremember?

 

[Mike Spooner]

Don't make excuses for Boxhall not been on the bridge at the time of the iceberg contact. After all that what he is paid for. The only person allowed off the bridge has to be Murdoch. The only reason I can think of is may be Boxhall had diarrhoea problems.