Space Station #5 (1973)

I always thought that song was eminently crank-worthy. But geez, what a horrific story about his suicide (link).  Don't look if you can't undo such knowledge.

Titanic Centennial: Murdoch's Suicide

"...even the most respected history of an event is at best an approximation." 

~James Cameron, writing in the preface to The Titanic Disaster Hearings

"The whole incident can’t be verified, yet can’t be dismissed."

~Walter Lord, referring to the alleged suicide of William Murdoch.

Perhaps nothing is more controversial regarding Titanic (even today) than exactly why she steamed headlong into disaster. And not just into an iceberg but into an enormous ice field--that fact was clearly established in both the US and British inquiries and by reconstruction of extant the facts from other ships in the vicinity of the disaster. Here's a good visual of what Titanic came upon that night:

original

The sworn testimony of several witnesses clearly established that Captain Smith knew of the ice danger via wireless messages (marconigrams) as early as noon the day of the accident, April 14th. He even knew the expected arrival time at the ice field based on coordinates, direction and travel speed--between  11 PM and midnight (the mishap occurred at 11:40 PM). Smith did order a change of course slightly more to the south but the reason why he didn't slow Titanic down went down with him to the sea bottom. Surely he was not that stupid. Afterwards, meddling interference by White Star Line Managing Director J. Bruce Ismay was floated as a likely reason (Ismay wanted to set a record crossing time and he never lived down those suspicions, though he was never officially charged). Clearly negligence was a factor. But the chain of command puts William T. Murdoch in charge and the whole story looked even worse shortly after the sinking.

In the initial days following the disaster, a Titanic crew member alleged that the bridge had ignored 15 minutes of warnings from the crow's nest.  From the book, The Sinking Of The Titanic And Great Sea Disasters, published in 1912 (I've footnoted subsequent historical challenges):

SUNDAY night the magnificent ocean liner was plunging through a comparatively placid sea, on the surface of which there was much mushy ice and here and there a number of comparatively harmless-looking floes. The night was clear and stars visible. First Officer William T. Murdock was in charge of the bridge.[1] The first intimation of the presence of the iceberg that he received was from the lookout in the crow's nest. 

Three warnings were transmitted from the crow's nest of the Titanic to the officer on the doomed steamship's bridge 15 minutes before she struck, according to Thomas Whiteley, a first saloon steward (waiter). 

Whiteley, who was whipped overboard from the ship by a rope while helping to lower a life-boat, finally reported on the Carpathia aboard one of the boats that contained, he said, both the crow's nest lookouts. [2] He heard a conversation between them, he asserted, in which they discussed the warnings given to the Titanic's bridge of the presence of the iceberg.    

Whiteley did not know the names of either of the lookout men and believed that they returned to England with the majority of the surviving members of the crew.

'I heard one of them say that at 11.15 o'clock, 15 minutes before the Titanic struck, he had reported to First Officer Murdock, on the bridge, that he fancied he saw an iceberg!' said Whiteley. "Twice after that, the lookout said, he warned Murdock that a berg was ahead. They were very indignant that no attention was paid to their warnings.'  Murdock's tardy answering of a telephone call from the crow's nest is assigned by Whiteley as the cause of the disaster.[3] 

When Murdock answered the call he received the information that the iceberg was due ahead. This information was imparted just a few seconds before the crash, and had the officer promptly answered the ring of the bell it is probable that the accident could have been avoided, or at least, been reduced by the lowered speed.

The lookout saw a towering "blue berg" looming up in the sea path of the Titanic, and called the bridge on the ship's telephone. When, after the passing of those two or three fateful minutes an officer on the bridge lifted the telephone receiver from its hook to answer the lookout, it was too late.

The speeding liner, cleaving a calm sea under a star-studded sky, had reached the floating mountain of ice, which the theoretically "unsinkable" ship struck a crashing, if glancing, blow with her starboard bow.

Had Murdock, according to the account of the tragedy given by two of the Titanic's seamen, known how imperative was that call from the lookout man, the men at the wheel of the liner might have swerved the great ship sufficiently to avoid the berg altogether. At the worst the vessel would probably have struck the mass of ice with her stern.

Murdock, if the tale of the Titanic sailor be true, expiated his negligence by shooting himself within sight of all alleged victims huddled in life-boats or struggling in the icy seas.[1]

When at last the danger was realized, the great ship was so close upon the berg that it was practically impossible to avoid collision with it.

The first officer did what other startled and alert commanders would have done under similar circumstances, that is he made an effort by going full speed ahead on the starboard propeller and reversing his port propeller, simultaneously throwing his helm over, to make a rapid turn and clear the berg. The manoeuvre was not successful. He succeeded in saving his bows from crashing into the ice-cliff, but nearly the entire length of the under body of the great ship on the starboard side was ripped. The speed of the Titanic, estimated to be at least twenty-one knots, was so terrific that the knife-like edge of the iceberg's spur protruding under the sea cut through her like a can-opener.

The Titanic was in 41.46 north latitude and 50.14 west longitude when she was struck, very near the spot on the wide Atlantic where the Carmania encountered a field of ice, studded with great bergs, on her voyage to New York which ended on April 14th. It was really an ice pack, due to an unusually severe winter in the north Atlantic. No less than twenty-five bergs, some of great height, were counted.

Icefield in the vicinity of the Titanic sinking April 15, 1912. original

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[1] Murdoch did not survive. Several books and movies portray him committing suicide, including James Cameron's 1997 Titanic. Walter Lord, the first Titanic historian, had discounted Murdoch's suicide in his 1955 book A Night To Remember but reversed his opinion when letters written by survivors to family members surfaced. Lord was a technical consultant to Cameron's 1997 film and passed away in 2002. Interestingly, when Murdoch's living descendants complained of Murdoch's portrayal in Titanic and threatened to sue, Cameron responded by endowing a scholarship in Murdoch's Scottish hometown. The facts of the alleged Murdoch suicide are explored in most detail here. <-- a website devoted to Murdoch.

[2] The lookout on duty, Fredrick Fleet, survived in lifeboat No. 6. He was subpoenaed at both the US and British inquiries. He denied Whiteley's claims. The other lookout, Reg Lee, was saved in lifeboat No. 13. and subpoenaed at the British hearings. He also denied the claims.

[3] This has been factually contested. Whiteley was not picked up in life boats No. 6 nor No. 13 which contained the two lookouts. Instead he appears to have been saved by climbing aboard overturned collapsible boat B. Whiteley is an interesting character and appears to have gone on to have some interesting Rose Dawson-like adventures: flying ace, & stage and film actor. He has no Wikipedia page entry but is covered by Encyclopedia Titanica here. Whiteley actually sued the White Star Line in 1914 for "steering error" and negligence, but the suit never went to trial.

Titanic Centennial: Stranger Than Fiction?

From the preface to Walter Lord's A Night To Remember:

In 1898, a struggling author named Morgan Robertson concocted a novel about a fabulous Atlantic liner, far larger than any that had ever been built. Robertson loaded his ship with the rich and complacent and then wrecked it one cold April night on an iceberg. This somehow showed the futility of everything, and in fact, the book was called Futility when it appeared that year, published by the firm of M F. Mansfield. 

Fourteen years later, a British shipping company named the White Star Line built a steamer remarkably like the one in Robertson's novel. The new liner was 66,000 tons displacement; Robertson's was 70,000 tons. The real ship was 882.5 feet long; the fictional one was 800 feet.  Both vessels were were triple screw and could make 24-5 knots. Both could carry about 3,000 people, and both had enough lifeboats for only a fraction of this number. But, then, this didn't seem to matter because both were labelled 'unsinkable.'
...
Robertson called his ship the Titan; the White Star Line called its ship the Titanic. This is the story of her last night. 

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Robertson's uncanny story is linked here. Futility was republished in 1912 as the Wreck of the Titan. Interestingly, Robertson also "invented" the periscope, and predicted a Japanese sneak attack on the US. He died of apparent suicide in 1915.

Titanic Centennial: Rigel, the Canine Hero

I have no clue whether this is true or not. It makes a good story though. From "The Sinking of the Titanic and Great Sea Disasters," p. 125:

Not the least among the heroes of the Titanic disaster was Rigel, a big black Newfoundland dog, belonging to the first officer, who went down with the ship.* But for Rigel, the fourth boat picked up might have been run down by the Carpathia. For three hours he swam in the icy water where the Titanic went down, evidently looking for his master, and was instrumental in guiding the boatload of survivors to the gangway of the Carpathia.

Jonas Briggs, a seaman aboard the Carpathia, now has Rigel and told the story of the dog's heroism. The Carpathia was moving slowly about, looking for boats, rafts or anything which might be afloat. Exhausted with their efforts, as well as from lack of food and exposure to the cutting wind, and terrorstriken, the men and women in the fourth boat had drifted under the Carpathia's starboard bow. They were dangerously close to the steamship, but too weak to shout a warning load enough to reach the bridge.

The boat might not have been seen were it not for the sharp barking of Rigel, who was swimming ahead of the craft, and valiantly announcing his position. The barks attracted the attention of Captain Rostron, and he went to the starboard end of the bridge to see where they came from and saw the boat. He immediately ordered the engines stopped, and the boat came alongside the starboard gangway.

Care was taken to get Rigel aboard, but he appeared little affected by his long trip through the ice-cold water. He stood by the rail and barked until Captain Rostron called Briggs and had him take the dog below.

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*First Officer William Murdoch, who was in command of the bridge when Titanic struck the iceberg. He commited suicide in front of several witnesses before the ship went down, but that has been disputed.

Blessed Are The Wealth Makers

Wallace Hume Carothers (1896-1937)

DuPont made a fortune selling things like gunpowder and nitrocellulose to warring governments (mainly to our own) up through and including the First World War. During the roaring 1920s (and flush with cash before the crash) they decided to pursue pure research into material science and established a new division at their fledgling Experimental Station located near Wilmington, Delaware.

The company hired a young PhD chemist named Wallace Carothers to start up a new group. Carothers was fascinated by long chain macromolecules ubiquitous in nature but which had only recently been recognized as "polymers." With the exception of Bakelite, the first synthetic plastic,* other synthetic polymers were unheard of, let alone commercially successful.

DuPont's research gamble paid off and Carothers and his group brought the company enormous success, first with the serendipitous discovery of neoprene, the first synthetic rubber, and then with nylon. Neoprene and nylon were tangible wealth creation: making things of value from what were, at the time, essentially waste products.

Nylon was Carothers' baby. Not only did he invent a synthetic replacement for silk, he purposefully developed a new method of making polymers called step-growth polymerization. He used the same durable type of linkages used by proteins (amide bonds), mimicking nature. Nylon was the first synthetic fabric and was commercialized around 1938, just in time to replace Asian silk which, along with natural rubber, went missing during the Second World War.

We have a lot to thank Carothers for but he didn't stick around. He checked out early, killing himself in 1937.
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* I have two items made from Bakelite: One is a late 1940's era Viewmaster device and the other is my father's old Kit-Cat clock which I described here. Both of these items have the characteristic fragility and tendency to chip common to Bakelite.

Forgotten Americans: Jack Thayer, Titanic Survivor

My grandmother had that book and I loved it so much as a kid that she gave it to me. Logan Marshall's The Sinking of the Titanic and Great Sea Disasters was rushed into print in 1912 shortly after the disaster. Inside are several accounts of survivors, some of whom later became immortalized in the movie Titanic (which I won't link to out of spite for James Cameron).

Jack Thayer was 17 and travelling with his parents. His wiki bio is here.  He was first to insist that the Titanic split in two when she went down. Here are the drawings that Thayer made while on board the rescue ship Carpathia and his description of the Titanic's final moments as published in 1912:

...I jumped out, feet first.  I was clear of the ship; went down, and as I came up I was pushed away from the ship by some force. I came up facing the ship, and one of the funnels seemed to be lifted off and fell towards me about 15 yards away, with a mass of sparks and steam coming out of it. I saw the ship in a sort of a red glare, and it seemed to me that she broke in two just in front of the third funnel.

This time I was sucked down, and as I came up I was pushed out again and twisted around by a large wave, coming up in the midst of a great deal of small wreckage. As I pushed my hand from my head it touched the cork fender of an overturned life-boat. I looked up and saw some men on the top and asked them to give me a hand. One of them, who was a stoker, helped me up. In a short time the bottom was covered with about twenty-five or thirty men. When I got on this I was facing the ship.

The stern then seemed to rise in the air and stopped at about an angle of 60 degrees.  It seemed to hold there for a time and then with a hissing sound it shot right down out of sight with people jumping from the stern.  The stern either pivoted around towards our boat, or we were sucked toward it, and as we only had one oar we could not keep away.  There did not seem to be much suction and most of us managed to stay on the bottom of our boat.

Thayer's theory was dismissed for 70 years until Robert Ballard used his account to help locate the wreck--which he found in two pieces--just as Thayer had said.

For those who have kids: some little models used to be commercially available that reproduce the exact way that the ship sank: link. I own one.  Fun for the kids and grown-up kids alike.

Gilbert Newton Lewis (1875-1946)

Poor under appreciated G. N. Lewis, perhaps the most famous chemist never to win a Nobel Prize, despite having been nominated 35 times. A few of his accomplishments included:

• From 1912 to 1941, at a time went Germany still dominated the field, he put the University of California chemistry department on the international map: Lewis did for Berkeley chemistry what Oppenheimer and Lawrence did for physics there.
• In 1923, he formulated the electron-pair theory of acid-base reactions. In the so-called Lewis theory of acids and bases, a "Lewis acid" is an electron-pair acceptor and a "Lewis base" is an electron-pair donor. It's hard to overemphasize how conceptually useful this concept remains in chemistry.
• Also in 1923, Lewis published a monograph on his theories of the chemical bond and formulated what later became known as the covalent bond. These ideas reached back to 1916. 
• Lewis coined the term "photon" and was involved in many of the theoretical and experimental problems of his day including: electrolytes, thermodynamics, and valence bond theory. 

So what went wrong? According to the Wiki:

In 1946, a graduate student found Lewis's lifeless body under a laboratory workbench at Berkeley. Lewis had been working on an experiment with liquid hydrogen cyanide, and deadly fumes from a broken line had leaked into the laboratory. The coroner ruled that the cause of death was coronary artery disease, but some believe that it may have been a suicide. Berkeley Emeritus Professor William Jolly, who reported the various views on Lewis's death in his 1987 history of UC Berkeley’s College of Chemistry, "From Retorts to Lasers", wrote that a higher-up in the department believed that Lewis had committed suicide.

Is this true? Why? I intend to read Jolly's book. Meanwhile, Patrick Coffey, a businessman and former chemist who moonlights as a historian, thinks otherwise:

He was brilliant intellectually, he could cut right through to the simplest solution to any problem. The downside of Lewis was he was very prickly and made a lot of enemies.

He'd been home-schooled as a child. He never seemed comfortable outside his closed environment. He probably needed to get in more fights on the playground.

He built his own support system, but when he got out of that system, if anybody gave him any slight at all he'd hold a lifelong grudge. Lewis's exacting nature sometimes got the best of him.

By the time of his death, he'd completely estranged himself from at least four Nobel laureates, and one of them was Irving Langmuir.

Yeesh, Coffey makes the Chemistry Nobel sound like the Oscars. He goes on to say:

There's nothing criminal here, but it's interesting, that probably the two greatest physical chemists [Lewis and Langmuir] of the 20th century had lunch together the day one of them died. 

Read the linked article and make up your own mind. I'm still gathering facts.