The Great Eastern, and risk

My friend Ethan today reminded me of the Great Eastern, an iron steam/sailing ship from the mid-19th Century. The Great Eastern is something of a peculiarity, in that historians seem unable to agree if she was an outstanding failure or an outstanding success.

On the one hand she clearly had difficulties. She apparently bankrupted the company that built and launched her, then lay in an unfinished state for a year before being purchased and completed. Rumors persist that one or more workers were accidentally imprisoned between the layers of her double hull during their construction. Two workers were killed when she was launched, and she suffered several significant accidents during her service life, one of which involved her first funnel shooting off like a rocket when a steam valve was accidentally left closed. Six people were killed in this incident. After five and a half years of service she suffered a broken rudder shaft while at sea, which left her unmanageable. According to some sources, it was only the intervention of a passenger that saved the ship. The Great Eastern then scraped a rock off of Montauk the following August, ripping into her hull. Great Eastern was also a failure as a passenger liner, both at the beginning of her career, and at its end, when she was returned to passenger service after spending some years laying submarine telegraph cables.

Yet the Great Eastern was also quite successful. She was the largest and heaviest vessel in the world at the time of her construction, and for some decades after. Perhaps more significant, the damage she received in her collision with a rock off or Montauk was on a scale with the damage which later sank RMS Titanic, but Great Eastern sailed back to New York harbor unassisted. Also, through her submarine telegraph cable laying activities, she provided the first means of swift communication between Europe and North America. During her career as a cable layer, she laid approximately 30,000 miles of cable. And although I don't see mention of it in the Wikipedia article, I do remember reading elsewhere that the Great Eastern sent the world's first wireless signal, placing her in two major events in communications technology.

I first learned of Great Eastern when I was in high school, during a period in which I was fascinated with the Titanic disaster. Great Eastern's construction included not only the transverse bulkheads that Titanic would be equipped with, but also a pair of longitudinal watertight bulkheads, dividing her into a grid of watertight compartments. Great Eastern also featured a double hull, in which two nested hulls separated the ship's interior from the sea. Titanic only had a double bottom: when she struck her iceberg, the ice only had to breach one layer of her side to enable the sea to pour in.

This being the case, why was Titanic labeled unsinkable? The answer is tricky. Titanic's bulkheads contained watertight doors, several of which could be closed remotely. Whether Great Eastern featured doors in her bulkheads or not I don't know ( I suspect not), but she certainly didn't have remotely operated doors. What was probably more important, however, was the general sense in Europe and the United States that mankind had advanced its technology so far that it could meet any challenge posed by nature (or God, depending on who you asked). Speaking 13 years before he commanded Titanic on her first and only voyage (and went down wth her), Captain Smith said that "modern shipbuilding has come beyond [shipwreck]". Simply put, it was inconceiveable that major disaster could occur, not just because of the nature of Titanic's design, but because really, we were all so beyond that type of thing. And there is one more piece to the "unsinkable" label applied to Titanic and her sister ships (of the three ships, 2 sank; Britanic was lost to a mine in the first World War). Neither the ships owners nor the yard that built them ever claimed that they were unsinkable. The term seems to have arisen in an article in the professional journal, Shipbuilder, which stated that because of their watertight bulkheads, with their automatic doors, the Titanic and her sisters were "practically unsinkable."

What does this have to do with risk? It appears that overbearing confidence led to the safety devices of the Great Eastern being stripped away. A double hull added more weight to a ship, reducing her speed and increasing her fuel demands. Watertight bulkheads also added weight, and they made it difficult for passengers and crew to move about the ship. Hubris led to risk-taking, as it so often does, because it prevented people from seeing that there was any risk at all.