A Titanic blunder

Louise Patton, the granddaughter of the only surviving officer from the Titanic, has written a book revealing the secret her grandfather took to his grave: The Titanic rammed into that iceberg because of one human error.

When the iceberg was spotted two miles away, the First Officer yelled, “Hard-a-starboard!” In a moment of panic, the quartermaster turned the wheel the wrong way. He was immediately corrected, but it was too late. The ship hit the iceberg and less than four hours later it sunk, with 1,517 passengers dead in the icy waters.

Until now, the sinking of the Titanic on her maiden voyage has been told as a fable of hubris, the folly of thinking we could build an unsinkable ship. But now, that story may evolve, and we will talk about the Titanic disaster as one of the most notorious mistakes of the 20th Century.

Here to talk about human error and what it means in this grandest of instances, we’re speaking with Kathryn Schulz, author of Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error.