The Dangerous History of Transatlantic Steamship Travel - IT'S HISTORY
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- čas přidán 12. 06. 2024
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If you wanted to take a trip from New York City to Liverpool, all you would need to do is pack your bags, pay for an airplane ticket and board the plane and in less than 24 hours you are on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean on a completely different continent. But it wasn’t always this easy and this fast. In fact, traveling across the Atlantic was often a dangerous task that took months or years if you even survived. As a result, man has always been trying to find new ways to make this journey, faster, safer and more efficient. One example of this was the invention of steamships. These revolutionary vessels ruled the waves just a few centuries ago before becoming obsolete as man found even faster, safer and more efficient ways to travel, trade and fight wars. This, however, begs the question what happened to these transatlantic steamships which used to be the primary form of travel across this vast ocean?
Chapters:
3:00 - The History of Transatlantic Steamships
4:45 - The First Transatlantic Steamship - SS Savannah
7:24 - Advancements in steamship technology - The SS Great Western
9:42 - The disappearance of the USS President
12:36 - A ship too big for its own good - The SS Great Eastern
15:02 - Why a crew purposely set fire to its own ship - The SS Baltic
16:51 - The boat that constantly crashed - RMS Adriatic
18:44 - Why a Grand ship became a coal dumpster - SS Frisia
21:24 - Why The sinking of the RMS Titanic changed ship travel forever
26:10 - A shipping disaster worse than the Titanic, The RMS Lusitania
30:38 - Why the RMS Queen Elizabeth was lost to fire
IT’S HISTORY - Weekly tales of American Urban Decay as presented by your host Ryan Socash.
» CONTACT
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» CREDIT
Scriptwriter - Brandon Evans,
Editor - Sebastian Ripoll,
Host - Ryan Socash
» SOURCES
/ itshistory
» NOTICE
Some images may be used for illustrative purposes only - always reflecting the accurate time frame and content. Events of factual error / mispronounced word/spelling mistakes - retractions will be published in this section.
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Thank you for a fantastic and fascinating report.
Love the flagpole...a piece of history.....
I wanna move back
Great idea
My guess is that eugenics is part of the global Marxist agenda.
#2 steam ships like genealogy is not obsolete
Our culture has a golden calf for a god .
Steam/ sail is really efficient
Trying to go home and keep my car and gun .
Good job here
USA is lost
Kissinger killed it
@@timothybelgard-wiley4823 Cool
If I’m going to be honest, this video is very under researched. You used images of totally different ships while talking about some of the ships like Adriatic and Baltic, and you reported false facts like Titanic and Lusitania being sister ships while they were from totally different class of ships from different companies. I hope you can put more work into your videos instead of just overdramatizing these stories and stretching them into a half-hour long video WHILE reporting false facts.
The Titanic and Lusitania were not sister ships.
Titanic and Olympic ?
@@jtgd Olympic, Titanic and Britannic were sisters for White Star and Lusitania and Mauertania were sisters for Cunard
He actually says that in the video. They were contemporary
Good boy
@@1985jimmydean white star line
Titanic
Brittanic
Olympic
Cunard line
Lusitania
Mauretania
Aquarania
My family and I crossed the Atlantic on the SS France and the SS United States in the 1960's when I was a baby. My parents talked about the trips for the rest of their lives. I wish those ships had got a mention, but I know you couldn't cover every one. I miss you so much, Mom and Dad! 😥
Thats awesome i so want to cross the Atlantic in this manner.
I experienced annual lectures by a survivor of the Lusitania starting 1967 and lasting till maybe '69 or '70. It was probably the most exciting of the rare evening assemblies we had at my New England boarding school, given by a visiting handwriting expert who showed up about once a month or two. He must have been quite young at the time of the sinking but had accumulated a great deal of photo documentary material and the entire lecture was given as a slideshow.
I believe it's exponentially, not expedentialy.
U have the pics from the 1903 Baltic when explaining the 1871 Baltic, they are 2 very different looking ships, big error there…
You missed one the S.S. United States, still afloat in Philadelphia. I believe it still holds the transatlantic speed record.
It still does...
Yes, it presently, does👍😁!!
Mind blowing - only 200 years from steam ship crossing Atlantic to Mars missions...
In one of the Halo novels, an elite remarks about how not long ago they were sailing the high seas of their home planet
When my father was 14, Lindbergh flew the Atlantic. When I was 14, Apollo 11 landed on the moon.
@XczarODSK. WOW, it took THAT, long?? Could've accomplished alot more, if money, religion, and tradition didn't stand in the way 🤔!!
What mars mission?
i have a bridge to sell you
I'm extremely surprised the SS United States wasnt mentioned, but hopefully that'll be in a follow up video! :)
Also that the Queen Mary is only mentioned in passing, without showing or mentioning that it, too, still exists afloat.
Brunel’s SS Great Britain still exists in Bristol, in the same dock it was built. Great story.
The SS Great Eastern:
“She was used to lay the first telegraph cable to America, and finally broken up in 1888. The ship was built so strongly that it took 200 men two years to take it to pieces.”
Or brunulll as he calls him 😞.
Would you ever do a history lesson on great lakes freighters?
"the ship was not meant to sink..."
what a revolutionary idea!
That's what they said about the Bismarck. And we all know the end of that story. -- The Doctor
the ship will sink it a mathematical certainty with that amount of underwater damage she can't float
Another well produced and informative documentary. Bravo
Your discussion of White Star Line's Baltic (I) is illustrated with photos of Baltic (II) (1903), a much, much newer ship of totally different design.
YES....19TH CENTURY BALTIC DISCUSSION WITH PHOTOS OF DIFFERENT BALTIC FROM 20TH CENTURY.
👍
There was one guy on the Titanic that got drunk while the ship was sinking and it saved his life because the alcohol help him to live until he was rescued!!!
I once read that upon demolition of the Great Eastern, the bones of one of its original engineers was discovered trapped with his toolbox inside the double hull. It was considered to be a haunted ship.
That’s just a mith
there were multiple white star ships named Baltic and Adriatic, you used them interchangeably, the Baltic you showed was built in 1903, and the Adriatic you showed most of the time was built in 1906. just wanted to point that out.
Actually, 1904, not 1906.
@@toddkurzbard Adriatic was launced on September 20th 1906, and had her maiden voyage on May 8th 1907. Several sources point that out. 🤔
@@Reshumbox yes your right it’s maiden voyage was 1907
Ok so the OP was off by one year….this “informative” video was off by 3 decades and showed an entirely different ship for the Baltic and Adriatic. If he’d shown pictures of the Collins line’s Baltic and Adriatic from the 1850’s it would have been at least closer to accurate as those ships were rigged for sails like the original 4 white star steamers were. The lack of sails, hill construction and multi-deck superstructure gives the misidentification in the video away instantly, no ship in the early 1870’s was built that way.
The picture on the intro is the SS Princess May, a Canadian-Pacific liner on the Rocks near Sentinel island Alaska. She was saved from the pictured fix with minor damage, $20,000 worth of 1910 dollars
@Tom Frazier. Sister ship of SS "PRINCESS SOPHIA", and SS "PRINCESS ALICE" I recall 🤔, correct?
@@rogerrendzak8055 Yeah, other Canadian-Pacific ships. As a kid I was given Jim Gibb's Pacific Coast Shipwrecks.
You mentioned the Great Western and the Great Eastern, both built by Brunell, but no mention of the SS Great Britain, which was actually the first iron steamer, with a screw propeller, to cross the Atlantic. She was also at that pivotal period in which, she bore both a steam engine AND sails. (At the time, 1843, there was a fear that a steam ship might lose its power and need to fall back on the use of sails, and often it turned out to be the other way around...cheaper to use the sails, but the engine was great when there was no wind, or running slow!) She served 30 years as an emigration ship to Australia, and then a cargo ship until 1933. She was eventually brought back to Bristol, UK and beautifully restored where she operates as a museum today.
Yet another fascinating subject. And on d again, you've covered the topic phenomenally. Well done. 👏
SS Great Eastern was the largest ship by length for 30 years surpassed by SS City of New York in 1888, and by tonnage for 43 years surpassed by RMS Celtic in 1901.
Piity there was no mention of the Normandie by CGT. It was called the lightship and Versailles au Mer. With interior desgns by Ruhlmann, Subes, Henri-Expert, Patout and Lalique.
6:40 The penmanship in the logbook from the Savannah is beautiful. Id love to know how to write like that.
Great video! Thanks for giving us the dates and names clearly and the links for more info!
@ryan thank you for doing the great work that channels like History and Discovery used to do! Every one of your videos is a must watch!
Have Spent 45 Years As A Historian Saving Historical Buildings & Restoring 7 HistoricalHomes Have Lived In Them All & Know Much Of My Family Tree Roots & Did More Historial Searching Connecting The Dots! Now After Knowing All Of This I Rest My Historical Digest Of Need In Life & Making New Memories Of Discovery In Living. Wish Everyone The Best In Discovering Your Historical Past & Family Roots. Just Realized Every Historical Building Is Not Always Possible In Life. always, Tommy🤠
My grandmother did come here by way of ship from Japan in the 1950s. Same for my grandfather's parents back in the 1920s. No idea what ship they were on.
The SS City of Tokio took some issei here in the 1880s.
@Doc Holiday. Find out!! It's not to, hard!
Olympic came first, Titanic second, and Britannic was the third sister. They were called the Olympic class ships.
Duh
Great video and excellent narration!
... coming from Anno 1800, and from setting trade routes with Great-Eastern...
Awesome period !
"Ayesembard Kingdom Brun'l" he said, showing a photo of Isembard Kingdom Brunel...
how long did it take to create this video? fantastically done and informative!
Despite the inaccuracies.
Great Eastern was the largest ship in the world until the construction of the Lusitania.
...did you know that one of America's original and amazing frigates USS Chesapeake was captured in battle and her eastern live oak timbers now supports the roof of "the Chesapeake mill" in England, didn't that happen to the mayflower to? Love your videos, keep em coming....signing up now.....
Fantastic. Well done as always Ryan. Thank you.
Glad you enjoyed it!
Great video! Love the change, ty
Why use a photo of the Princess May for the thumbnail? She wasn't active in the Atlantic when that incident occured.
Taking my first transatlantic here soon, luckily now it’s extremely safe and pretty relaxing
Tiny Queenstown, Maryland would have been very surprised if the Baltic sailed in. The Queenstown of ocean travel is now called Cobh - in Ireland.
Another marvelous video. Nice job🚢
The nearest ship was actually around 10 minutes away but their people who would respond to the request to help were asleep and the captain was too some saw the titanic but the captain said to ignore it and they were in court after the sinking of the titanic
You are the best man I've ever heard in my life I love you and all you do please don't stop,
One of the Titanic famous passengers was a women from Denver named Molly Brown, who survived on one of the life boats. The story of her life was presented in the musical play and movie "The Unsinkable Molly Brown". written by Meredith Willson.
Damn, I had a lot of respect for this channel, but all the historical inaccuracies in this video alone, not to mention that you used the famous photograph of the incident of the Princess May (a coastal liner, nothing to do with transatlantic travel) in your thumbnail for the only purpose of baiting some more viewers is just disappointing.
Many years ago I went on a Caribbean Cruise. Throughout the cruise my ship came across the Queen Elizabeth 2 several times, and every time that we did the passengers on my ship would excitedly point out that the QE2 was in the vicinity. It was as if that ship itself was a celebrity.
The QE2 is most certainly a celebrity.
The fact you used the word “expedentially” , which isn’t even a word I might add, instead of the proper word “exponentially” , bugged me way more than it should have lol
My Great-Grandfather lived in Grenwich, London, near the docks. His house was a terraced wooden house, so might have been made by reclaimed naval timbers. There are no timber houses in London now.. I have looked very hard to find any that remain. The same is true for Liverpool, and many of the dockyard workers terraced brick houses are now being knocked down to make modern tower blocks, on the side of the river Mersey.
Fyi It's not "Britannic and her sisters Titanic & Olympic", it's "Olympic and her sisters Titanic & Britannic"
Olympic came first and was the only of the 3 ships to live a full service life. Titanic came second but was sunk by a iceberg on her maiden voyage. Britannic came third and is most famous for her white paint job during her time as a hospital ship. She to would sink after hitting a sea mine.
It never took months to cross the Atlantic with powered ships, it took at most 10 days. Now sailing without steam power took about 21 days but never months.
Awesome video bro👍😁
There's no way to prove if My Heritage is even accurate. It probably just throw names and what not on your profile.
Still, this channel is awesome 👍.
Years to cross the Atlantic?? Years?
Maybe Ray Charles was navigating! 🤷🏻♂️🤣🙄
Probably sailing ships.
@@DocHolliday1851 LOL, which took just over 2 months to cross, the logistics alone of being on the water for years don't add up, years worth of fresh water, food, ect?? Think about it.
Including the trips going back and forth
@@jangles1839 "Hey, what I say"😁!!
One of our original frigate's, the USS Chesapeake was taken in battle by HMS Shannon and taken to England and eventually she was broken and it's wood used to build a mill, it is known today as the Chesapeake mill...
24:58 the nearest ship to the Titanic was not the Carpathia. But she was the closest which responded. However there was another ship so close to the ship that it was seen. The name of this ship was the Californian. They both saw each other but the crew of the Californian had ad that time no radio operator online. They used a moreslight witch was not seen on RMS Titanic.
Good video on the whole! But I found it curious that you introduced the Olympic-class liners with Britannic (the youngest sister) before Olympic and Titanic. Speaking of the eldest sister, you show Olympic at 22:51 (the open A Deck promenade and the longer B Deck promenade towards the stern) while discussing Titanic's dimensions, though the two sisters were identical in length and beam, which is fair enough!
yeah but most folks dont know that they just think all 3 are the same. I see folks say it all the time lol
I thought she was called Oceanic, not Olympic, but I see the papers refer to the Olympic-class. Or was Oceanic a different ship?
Liverpool to Queenstown, Maryland? That’s surely incorrect.
Queenstown/Cobh Ireland?
QUEENSTOWN, IRELAND. NOT MARYLAND.
Great story! My dad came from Germany on the SS Berlin in 1956
👍! My Grandparents (who were Polish/Ukrainian) came across in 1920, on the SS "BREMEN", I believe.
My mom came from Germany in the 1950s on the Queen Mary.
More ship docu's! Heck yea!
The Bender’s mentioned are my relatives. Matches what my Grandfather said happened. My Grandpa had to learn English before he could go to school. My dad was born in Russel, Ks. The Bender’s were also amazing brick layers.
Dude- I enjoy your videos- but it’s expoNentially, not expodentially.
Very interesting video - thanks. Did those iron ships rust out quickly? (Btw: some helpful distinctions might be adopted/adapted & deliberately/definitively.)
How about a video on the SS United States, the QE2 and the construction of the Queen Mary 2. Your video history was quite informative and excellent.
I enjoyed your engaging dialoge & story flow, but your images often were inaccurate relative to the commentary, casting doubt on the accuracy of the narrative. You call it "History" so please try harder to be true to it with the accompanying images. Thank you! :)
Only the SS Savannah did it's journey mostly on sails, the first REAL transatlantic steamer was SS Curacao, the first trip was in 1827; it opened the first transcontinental regular steam mail service. The voyage from Hellevoetsluis (near Rotterdam) to Paramaribo, Suriname started April 26, 1827 and ended on May 24 (according to others, using the engine for 11 days: The paddle [sic] had to be changed several times and the boiler was leaking.) The Curaçao conducted three trans-Atlantic passages.
There was one ship closer to the titanic but the captain thought that they were celebrating when they were shooting off the flyers
Why don't you do a history about the Packet Ships that served the transatlantic trade from the 1830s up to as late as the early 1880s. Interesting stories there.
Lucitania's Captain did not ignore warnings or orders. British naval command refused to give him an escort. They tried to cover it up at his trial.
I really enjoyed the video! Jim Lichty
I'd love to salvage some vacuum tubes from one of these sites
Vacuum tubes 🤔??
I never realized how many saloons were on these ships.
Alot of drunks, back then!! Why? NO marijuana 😁!!
I suspect that they were salons rather than saloons. 🙂
.
Even today cruise ships have stocked bars. Makes sense you'd have saloons on them way back when. People have always carried alcohol on voyages.
The thumbnail isn't real
Very few are.
You confuse Adriatic (I) with Adriatic (II) (1906), interchanging illustrations of them both during the same narrative.
Fun fact about the Titanic expedition: the Navy was involved because a sub had gone down in the area. The Navy involved Cameron because
1) He was the only guy with the submersible that go that deep
2) They needed a plausible explanation for what they were doing if the Soviets came sniffing around before they located the submarine and
2.5) Cameron had already tried a few times to find the Titanic with no luck, but he was confident that between his sub and the Navy's resources, he could do it. And of course the sub had gone down near where the Titanic did
So the Navy agreed that if Cameron would use his sub to find their sunken submarine, he could search for the Titanic at the same time, and if they found the submarine first the Navy would remain on site for, at most a few more days to support his search for the Titanic. That was as long as they felt they could stay before the Soviets started to suspect something else was up. I believe it was the last day before the Navy pulled out that they finally found the wreck.
Oh wow! I had no idea and that is a very interesting point. Thank you for sharing!
Cameron? You mean Robert Ballard, right?
Very interesting
Many ship do stil use steam as a power source today. A little more advanced but stil on steam
Great content🚢⛴
The steam ships didn't all go to WWII and weren't all replaced by planes. After the Titanic sunk came the diesel engine for ocean liners!
@Amber Higgins. No, diesel didn't become standard after the 'Titanic', sunk. All ships that participated in WWll, were steam! The introduction of diesel onto ships, started right before WWll. Even with diesel, they were still actually steam ships, as the engines still operated, by steam. Diesel just boiled the water, to make the steam! Doesn't matter, what fuel is used. That's what the termination 'SS', depicts. Hey Amber, do you realize your surname was very instrumental, during WWll? The Higgins craft/ boat (an American, invention) helped US troops with the D-Day, invasion, and in island 'hopping', towards Japan 🗾🇯🇵. You'll see footage, of little square boats, whose front end drops, letting off soldiers!! That's the Higgins, boat☺️!!
FYI, 'tonnage' does not refer weight, it refers to a ship's revenue-earning enclosed space with the word 'ton' being derived from the Greco-Roman 'tun', a unit of measure for the amphorae their ships carried.
The Baltic and Adriatic you're referirng were different from the photographs shown, which are of the later 'Big Four' series (Cedric, Celtic, Baltic, Adriatic)
Curiously, the Titanic took longer to sink than the Lusitania on account of the placement of its coal bunkers athwartships rather than the Lusitania's parallel placement - which allowed seawater to get around the watertight doors.
But for a change in safety regulations, Cunard had planned to keep the Queen Elizabeth going 'til 1975. There had been a spate of fires at sea and the Queen would next an extensive rebuilding that wouldn'tve been cost-effective for the limited time she was going to be operated.
Can you imagine storming Normandy in one of those ships as low in the water 🌊 as they are for troop transport during WW2?
Brew-nell, emphasis on the second syllable.
Some errors in this video but good try . Also forgot Normandie , Queen Elizabeth, also the Baltic , Cedric , Atlantic etc we’re the 1st ones . There were another set ( big 4 as the baltic , Cedric , Adriatic , etc . ) the Atlantic (1) was a horrible disaster in the 1870s , 1873 I think
Also William Jennings Bryan ran more then 2x , we forgot the Mauritania and all the early German ships . Kaiser Wilhelm , kronprintz Cecelie and deutchland . Also europa, Bremen , uss United States , majestic , berengaria , vaterland , Mauritania II, liberte and Ile de France . The early france and Paris of 1912 and the France of 1960. Sorry Js
SS Atlantic April 1ST 1873. Dashed against the rocks at Lower Prospect, Nova Scotia. Greatest loss of life for White Star before Titanic. The SS Atlantic dead buried just outside the city where Samuel Cunard was born. "Isn't it Ironic" Alanis Morissette.
@@JohnJohnson-oe3ot SS "UNITED STATES", not 'USS'! USS determines military, ship's, only.
Many well to do were playing with the new commuication systems to send private communications to friends & relatives ~
All three White Star sisters Olympic Titanic and Brittanic were identical enternally except with modifications to its in length and after the disaster when Olympic had modifications were made a further second skin was added . Brittanic was exactly the same. How do I know. My father was a woodworker and worked on all three as an apprentice and tradesman. I still have some of his tools used at the time.
Nothing compared to going by boat from Europe all the way to Australia and New Zealand all those years ago.
The 1st was the Olympic the second olimpic class ship was the titanic the third the Britannic.
They were all sister ships
Interesting 🤔
just out of interesst, can i ask where you live now, the place out of the myheritage ad looks like a place near my home
Really makes me wonder on what's out there now...( floating wrecks )
Yeah, like the SS "LORELEI"! Get what I mean 🤔?? Hint:👻🚢😉!!
I understand eight of the 15 dogs aboard the Titanic were saved. I also hear the swimming pool is still full!! 🤣
Too much advertising, but very interesting.
The wreck of the Queen Elizabeth in Hong Kong Harbour featured in the Roger Moore-era James Bond film, The Man With the Golden Gun, where British Intelligence are using it secretly as a spy base (as one officer points out, with the price of real estate in Hong Kong it was quite practical!)
....hey, when I was in the service, I served on the 72-73 westpac cruise on the "ageless warrior", the carrier USS Coral Sea, we did a little over 2 months on the line, we got 8 days in Hong Kong for R and R, the queen Elizabeth had only recently having the fire that doomed her, anyway, they had hydroplanes and I enjoyed a couple rides that cruised pretty close, a sad and ugly end to a once beautiful ship, I don't know how it is now, but there were several derelict ships, simply abandoned and rusting into the harbor, interesting harbor traffic, its like rush hour in cars, but its boats instead, ships from small freighters to 12 ft sailboats and the ever present junks, our shuttle boat bounced off a few ferrying our crew back and forth, they did a amazing job shuttling us, despite the close calls, nobody was hurt, it always had a perpetual chop til after dark when traffic pretty much stopped for the night, met a good friend who I stayed with and was amazing as a translator and got me amazing deals on some clothes and two guitars, an 8 track stereo boom box, god I'm old...but she managed to scare up a nice American rib steak dinner with fries and even a really good chocolate milkshake, I got 5 tattoos in 6 days, my mother freaked out....lol hey I was 18.....in those days they got like a quarter inch thick scabs on them, I was a BT and they iched like crazy, anyway that's my QUEEN Elizabeth story. ...sorry some cool memories though 😎
@@timothybelgard-wiley4823 a couple years down the line of the Elizabeth was actually ripped up from the seabed to clear the path for largest ships now entering the harbor!
Can I get a video about steamboat travel within countries and on rivers?! Thanks in advance.
Steam ship. Revolutionary. I see what ya did there. That was a good one to hide in there.
According to forensics that have inpsected what happened, the Titanic did NOT break in half until it was under water. However, due to it being so heavy, and other factors, it did break up on the way down.
Try saying "Cry-Me-Er" not Krame=ia and please not "Brew-nil" but "Brew-Nell. But most of all thanks for the great video on steam ship history.
Wow
An enjoyable video Brian. One note I think is in error but I’m not sure. I thought it was the Queen Mary the was painted gray in WWII to be a troop carrier. It’s in Long Beach, California today. It was The Gray Ghost.
The enterprise carried that nickname to.
it's EXPONENTIALLY, not expodentially! :)
I had heard it was the owners son that set the fire. Something about him being really spoiled and selfish and he burned the ship to get back at his father for some imagined slight im sure.
Half my ancestors came over in 1626 on the sail ship "Dove" and the other half were already here to greet them when they got off the boat!