Titanic: The Final Word with James Cameron Page #8

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and there's woodwork

from other parts of the ship,

clearly there's no middle part

of the ship anymore.

Why didn't the light bulb go off

in anybody's head?

Because the wreck hadn't been found yet,

and so there wasn't

as much worldwide interest.

And so, there weren't groups of people

like ourselves focusing on this

as much as we are now.

STEPHENSON:
Well, and then there is

that institutionalized myth.

- Exactly. Who saw it break.

- There were survivors who said it broke.

And they tried to tell the story,

and they were shouted down by experts,

who insisted over the years that,

"No, it couldn't have broken.

You're mistaken."

- But this is the fun part of history.

- STEPHENSON:
Yeah.

Because everybody wanted to

think of Titanic as this majestic...

They wanted to romanticize it.

We wanted it to sink as this beautiful icon

that just passed away into another world.

And be sitting on the bottom of...

And is sitting on the bottom

in some ghostly, perfect way.

Ruth Blanchard said, "People say that

I'm wrong, and that I didn't see right,

"and that the ship

didn't really break in two.

"I was only 12,

"but I saw it, and we were

all talking about it in the lifeboat.

"'Did you see that the ship broke in two?

"'One part went this way,

and the rest went back down."'

Now, they can't

all be having this hallucination.

We heard a terrible explosion,

and as all of you know,

the Titanic had four funnels.

And when we heard this explosion,

the Titanic broke in half.

I remember at one of our conventions,

when Ruth Blanchard talked about

the ship breaking in two,

and this was before they found the ship,

and one of the officers at the society

grabbed the microphone

and explained

how it was just her perception

because the funnel had fallen.

And in hindsight,

I wish she had taken the microphone back

and said, "Were you there?"

I called Don Lynch to this investigation

for his insight into the experience

of the Titanic survivors.

He spent his entire career

gathering their stories.

Many of the survivors

were his close personal friends.

Well, when I firstjoined

the Titanic Historical Society in 1974,

and I realized

nobody had made an effort to find them.

And so, I started tracking them down.

I got to know a number of them,

I got to know some of them fairly well.

The story of the Titanic is in the survivors,

that's how we know what happened.

And people sort of ignored that

all those years.

There was always this fascination

with the ship and the shipwreck,

and they didn't feel

we could learn more from the survivors.

CAMERON:
The question is,

what does seeing it break mean?

Does it mean

seeing the ship suddenly move,

associated with a loud noise?

- No, they see an actual clean break.

- Right. Okay.

So, do we know where the clean break is?

- Right here?

- STEPHENSON:
That's where

the clean break is. And this is based

on the wreck.

- You're saying based on...

- On observations from the wreck.

Well, it should be, actually,

at the promenade deck.

It should be towards the top

of the promenade deck,

or just at the bottom of the boat deck,

midway between the second

and third funnels.

- Here.

- THOMAS:
There you go.

- Oh, so that's right.

- He's just about right.

CAMERON:
The '95 animation gets

this detail wrong.

It shows the clean break

just behind the third funnel,

and we now know that

it broke in front of it.

Okay, I'm gonna fix this

in the new animation.

So, we know where she broke.

The question now is, how?

It all comes back to,

did it detach in the vertical position?

And what does that mean to

what subsequently happened to the stern?

'Cause the stern is

where all the people were.

And there are so many conflicting accounts

of the stern being vertical, but not vertical.

Kind of also, you know,

"How wrong was the movie?"

That's kind of important to me

as well, you know.

But I think we were right about

the idea that the bow swung down,

once the forces were relieved,

and it broke, swung down,

and took off for the bottom with a high rate.

Right. So, one thing is very strong enough

to hold the bow attached to the stern.

Double bottom.

- STEPHENSON:
Double bottom...

- Double bottom is holding it together.

Titanic was constructed

with a double bottom,

which in theory made the ship's underside

more resistant to damage and flooding.

Could this innovation have delayed

Titanic's breakup and bought time,

maybe only minutes,

to save additional lives?

Did a piece of the double bottom

hold the bow and stern together

till the very last moment?

We've all been thinking of this as the

classic break-the-sword-over-the-knee,

one split, and that's fine,

'cause that does account

for the primary fracture at Frame 12 aft.

But is it possible that there is

some sort of rotational component?

Because I want to ask whether or not

you're looking at,

in medicine, what's called

a "greenstick fracture."

- Oh, absolutely.

-If you take a bone and twist it,

it doesn't cleave, it fractures

in a complicated spiral way.

The so-called "greenstick fracture"

is the way in which

the keel broke away from the ship,

to account for how it's isolated

from the rest of the wreck.

Sometimes when structures fail,

the last part to fail will stay connected

to both ends.

Maybe we should take it over to the...

- Do you wanna go?

- Okay. Yeah.

- STEPHENSON:
Grab your banana.

-(CHUCKLING)

- MARSCHALL:
Hello?

- I beg your pardon?

A little early in the party for that,

don't you think?

Right. So, yes.

It actually works quite well.

This is one of our scientific analysis tools.

Yeah, it's pretty good, because

look what happens when you rip through.

A banana turns out to be a great way

to model the breakup of Titanic.

So imagine that

the bow is going underwater,

and the stern's being lifted up.

And you've got

a center of buoyancy right here.

This is gonna be so cool,

'cause it's gonna break just like the ship.

So it starts to break at the top,

there's a buckling failure underneath,

which you can see right there.

Starts to tear down. Right?

So now the stern's falling back,

the bow's sinking down,

and as they separate...

Whoa, check that out.

There is the double bottom

separating from the stern

and from the bow.

All right?

Now the only thing that's missing...

You've got to tear it.

And this is how the bow separates

and drops down, like that.

Now the stern's sitting at the surface

with this big piece of double bottom.

The stern now floods, goes vertical,

heads for the bottom

at high speed, like this.

And this big piece of windage here,

that's flapping in the breeze, bends back,

breaks off, and goes frisbeeing off

across the debris field

about a quarter of a mile away.

Banana peel theory.

(CHUCKUNG)

Okay, let's rewind the clock to

the early morning hours of April 15, 1912.

Go back to the moment

just before Titanic broke

in order to understand

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