On April 14, 1912, the British passenger liner R.M.S. Titanic struck an iceberg. The ship sank in a fraction of the time designers had estimated following a worst case scenario. The purpose of this article is to examine the atmospheric refractive phenomena that might have played a significant role in obscuring the iceberg from Titanic’s two lookouts. We describe a way in which these phenomena can easily and inexpensively be brought to students in our introductory physics classrooms.

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Officers in Titanic’s bridge may have been the first to see the iceberg as Fleet noted that the ship seemed to already be turning when he phoned the bridge.
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Debate continues as to why the lookouts were not equipped with binoculars. Fleet and Lee testified that company policy did not require lookouts to use binoculars. Also, rumors persist that an employee, who left the Titanic before its maiden voyage, forgot to turn over the key to the locker where the binoculars were kept in storage. According to another version, the employee took the binoculars with him when he left the ship, as they were his personal set of binoculars.
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The refractive phenomena discussed in this paper may also have been the reason that the crew of the S.S. Californian did not render assistance to the Titanic. These effects may have caused the crew of the S.S. Californian to misinterpret the size of, and distance to, a nearby ship that was, in fact, Titanic.
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© 2022 Author(s). Published under an exclusive license by American Association of Physics Teachers.
2022
Author(s)
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