Titanic lifeboats: Too little, too late

A lot of people don't understand why the Titanic didn't carry enough lifeboats for every man, woman and child on board. The answer -- outdated regulations set forth by the British Board of Trade allowed her to sail without "lifeboats for all." At the time, the board of trade regulations for lifeboat capacity were based on the size of the ship. Titanic (and other big ships like her) was three times larger than any ship the board had dealt with when the regulations were last re-visited.

Law only required Titanic to carry 16 lifeboats. The ship's builders, however, knew the regulations didn't account for "lifeboats for all" and were planning for a time when the regulations -- or common sense -- would dictate a change. The builders installed a new kind of davit (the armature that lowers a lifeboat over the ship's side) that could swing back to lower more than one lifeboat from each davit station. In this way, Titanic could have doubled or tripled her lifeboat capacity without a major re-design.

Titanic actually exceeded existing regulations by adding four "collapsible" lifeboats to her complement of boats. As fate would have it, when the lifeboats went from a regulatory obligation to a necessity on the evening of April 14-15, Titanic found herself with 2,208 people aboard with lifeboat capacity for 1,178. Tragically, the boats weren't fully loaded and only 705 people actually escaped the ship aboard her few lifeboats.