http://TitanicProbabilities.blogspot.comThe sinking of the RMS Titanic resulted from a most unlikely culmination of events which cascaded one upon the next, ultimately ending with the loss of 1,514 passengers (710 were saved) and crew, not to mention a newly launched ocean liner. The oversights and mistakes of Titanic's captain, Edward Smith, extended from well before the great ship was launched May 31, 1911 in Belfast, Northern Ireland, to the time the ship's band played Nearer My God to Thee, around 2:10 AM on April 15, 1912. Notwithstanding the adage of "women and children first," only 56 of the 109 children survived.
Perhaps what sets the Titanic's sinking apart from the thousands of others over the centuries is the astounding, indeed head-slapping mistakes that experts in their fields made, each one compounding the previous one in this critical path. Had any one of these critical mistakes (or in some cases, simply random events) not taken place, virtually all of these many hundreds of passengers and crew would have survived, and perhaps the Titanic as well.
Note this interesting warning sign just left of the flag at the stern:
Let's consider the a priori probability of the litany of errors, oversights, and shortcuts, all of which are my own personal estimates. If you choose to change a few or even many of my estimates such that you increase the likelihood by as much as six or eight orders of magnitude, still the tumultuous fiasco would remain one in 50 billion trillion.
Before he was given command of the Titanic on this, his final voyage before retirement, Captain Smith commanded the RMS Olympic, which on September 20, 1911, collided with the HMS Hawke, damaging one of Olympic's three driveshafts. In the urgency of returning the Olympic to service, White Star Lines, its owner, scavenged one of the Titanic's driveshafts to replace Olympic's. The Titanic's maiden voyage, scheduled for March 20, 1912, was thus delayed to April 10. Nobody could possibly have known that this separate collision between two other ships would be Event One in the critical path which would culminate with the sinking of the Titanic and the tragic loss of so many innocent people who were simply traveling to America..
My estimate of the probability of Captain Edward Smith causing the minor but critical collision of the RMS Olympic, one of only two ships in White Star Lines, which delays construction and the launch date of the other White Star Lines ship, the Titanic, which Smith will subsequently command, and sink through compound foolhardiness
1 in 10,000.
(One of Titanic's driveshafts was removed and installed in Olympic to get it promptly back into service)