One common oversight is the fact that the collapse of the first funnel at a relatively shallow angle occurred when the forward expansion joint, over which several funnels stays crossed, opened as the hull was beginning to stress. The opening of the joint stretched and snapped the stays. The forward momentum of the ship as she took a sudden lurch forwards and downwards sent the unsupported funnel toppling onto the starboard bridge wing. This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Titanic conspiracy theories"– news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR ( April 2016) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message) Senan Molony has suggested that attempts to extinguish the fire – by shoveling burning coals into the engine furnaces – may have been the primary reason for the Titanic steaming at full speed prior to the collision, despite ice warnings. [30] Most experts disagree. Samuel Halpern has concluded that "the bunker fire would not have weakened the watertight bulkhead sufficiently to cause it to collapse." [31] [32] Also, it has been alternatively suggested that the coal bunker fire actually helped Titanic to last longer during the sinking and prevented the ship from rolling over to starboard after the impact, due to the subtle port list created by the moving of coal inside the ship prior to the encounter with the iceberg. [33] Some of these foremost Titanic experts have published a detailed rebuttal of Molony's claims. [34] See also [ edit ] Alternative versions of this theory claim the Rothschild banking family or the Jesuits were the ones who arranged Astor, Straus and Guggenheim’s deaths on the Titanic. As The Washington Post notes, invoking the Rothchilds as international conspirators is “a centuries-old anti-Semitic trope… The Rothschild family founded banking houses across Europe in the early 1800s, and they have been a favorite target of conspiracy theorists ever since.”

The theory hinges on the fact that Morgan had originally planned to sail on the Titanic but changed his mind shortly before it took off. Yet it doesn’t offer any explanation for how he caused the ship to hit an iceberg and kill over 1,500 people, let alone the three men he supposedly intended to die. To top it off, the theory claims Morgan wanted to kill them because they opposed the creation of the Federal Reserve, even though Astor and Guggenheim don’t appear to have taken a position on it and Straus actually supported it. Mark Chirnside. "The Olympic' Class's Expansion Joints". titanic-model.com. Archived from the original on 31 January 2018 . Retrieved 19 April 2012. The Olympic was the first to be built, and as the line’s namesake, it was considered the lead ship. Its maiden trip was widely heralded, and its first few voyages were unqualified successes. But on just its fifth voyage, the vessel ran into serious trouble. The Titanic made a turn by rotating one-third of the way from the bow, which caused her rudder to hard over and crushed her starboard side into an iceberg. This would have caused the ship to flood, capsize, and sink within minutes, damaging the starboard side of the hull and potentially the superstructure. [4]Nope. The late Titanic historian Walter Lord wrote that he received letters from people in Ireland relaying this “NO POPE” story beginning in the mid-1950s. Yet as Burns pointed out in his 1986 book, The Night Lives On, there was no such number attached to the Titanic. A fire began in one of Titanic 's coal bunkers approximately 10 days prior to the ship's departure, and continued to burn for several days into the voyage. [24] [25] Fires occurred frequently on board steamships due to spontaneous combustion of the coal. [26] The fires had to be extinguished with fire hoses, by moving the coal on top to another bunker and by removing the burning coal and feeding it into the furnace. [27] This event has led some authors to theorize that the fire exacerbated the effects of the iceberg collision, by reducing the structural integrity of the hull and a critical bulkhead. [28] [29] HOARDING BY BANKS A CAUSE OF PANIC; This, Stewart Browne Says, Is the Objection to Aldrich Plan, Which Does Not Stop It". The New York Times. 18 October 1911. ISSN 0362-4331 . Retrieved 15 January 2023.

The RNC is partnering with the Republican Jewish Coalition and Rumble — a virulently antisemitic platform — for the third GOP debate". Shetty, M. R. (1 February 2003). "Cause of death among passengers on the Titanic". The Lancet. 361 (9355): 438. doi: 10.1016/S0140-6736(03)12423-3. ISSN 0140-6736. PMID 12573421. S2CID 45973512. Were there a conspiracy, one would expect that the insurance policy would have been changed to cover the entire value of the ship,” Chirnside writes. “As it was, White Star could only expect to recoup two-thirds of the ship’s value.”a b Mark Chirnside (2006). " Olympic & Titanic – An Analysis of the Robin Gardiner Conspiracy Theory" (PDF) . Retrieved 4 October 2008. The British White Star Line had stiff competition in England and across the globe. Locally, it had a fierce rivalry with the Cunard Steamship Company, Ltd., which in 1906–07 had sent on its maiden voyage the world’s then-largest passenger ships, the Lusitania and the Mauretania. That’s not all. It “is simply impossible to pass off a one-year-old ship for a new one,” Chirnside says, pointing to a number of small differences between the two, including “additional steel plates that were fitted to the bedplates of Olympic’s engines,” added in 1911, and still there in further inspections in the 20s and 30s. When the Titanic was investigated by the British board of trade, no such plates were found. Rather, the White Star Line swapped ships for the voyage from Southampton to New York, and the ship billed as the top-of-the-line Titanic was actually an older ship: the Olympic. What’s more, the conspiracy theory suggests, the entire crash was an insurance scam gone wrong. J.P. Morgan and the Heyday of Big Ships

Don Lynch and Ken Marschall (1992). Titanic: An Illustrated History. Hyperion. pp.136, 139. ISBN 1562829181.

L.M. Collins (2003). The Sinking of the Titanic: The Mystery Solved. Souvenir Press. p.16. ISBN 0-285-63711-8. Titanic Conspiracies". Titanic Conspiracies | Stuff They Don't Want You to Know. 6 October 2017 . Retrieved 9 October 2017. The Titanic’s powerful owner, banking magnate J.P. Morgan (far right), is at the heart of many conspiracy theories. Historica Graphica Collection/Heritage Images/Getty Images // Getty Images a b Daugherty, Greg. "Seven Famous People Who Missed the Titanic". Smithsonian . Retrieved 8 January 2018.

a b Bruce Beveridge and Steve Hall (2004). Olympic & Titanic: The Truth Behind the Conspiracy. Infinity Publishing. ISBN 978-0-7414-1949-1. Robin Gardiner (1998). Titanic: The Ship That Never Sank?. Ian Allan Publishing. ISBN 978-0-7110-2633-9. The Olympic,” they write, “like the Titanic, was fitted originally with the same 14-porthole arrangement on the port side of her forecastle, but two additional portholes were later fitted; they were there in March 1912.” The Break Up". The History Channel. Archived from the original on 3 November 2008 . Retrieved 11 November 2008.The Olympic and Titanic being built side-by-side. Library of Congress/Corbis/VCG via Getty Images // Getty Images