The Wreck of the Titan: When a book eerily predicted one of the biggest disasters of mankind

The Wreck of the Titan book: All readers who understand me know that I am filmy by nature. In the movie “Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara,” there’s a dialogue that goes, “Everything is written.” At first, it didn’t make any sense to me, but after some time, I read about an event that was forecasted years ago in a novel. I read about how a book predicted the tragedy of the Titanic years before it happened and how exactly what was written in the book came true.

Success after struggle

The writer of the The Wreck of the Titan book was Morgan Robertson. He was not a very prosperous person and tried his hand at various occupations, including working on ships and in the diamond industry. Although he was not very successful initially, he wrote a book that saved his sinking career and would go on to have a huge impact on his life.

His short novel, “Futility, or the Wreck of the Titan,” was published in 1898. The protagonist of the story is an ex-naval man who becomes a deck hand. The novel focuses on how he survives a tragedy and how his relationship with a girl drives his life forward.

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Although it may seem like a simple yet interesting novel, some parts of it are quite striking. In the The Wreck of the Titan book, the sailor is aboard a huge ship that everyone believed to be impregnable and indestructible, which means it cannot sink. Furthermore, the ship in the book was the largest ship in the world at that time. However, in its first voyage, the ship collides with an iceberg and sinks. People in the book do not die so much from the shipwreck as from a lack of resources and sea temperature.

After 14 years…

After 14 years, something eerily similar happened in real life. A well-known shipbuilding company launched its grandest ship, which created a lot of buzz. The ship was said to be unsinkable, just like the ship in Morgan Robertson’s The Wreck of the Titan book. On April 10, 1912, the ship left New York on its maiden voyage from the port of Southampton, UK.

The ship followed the same route as Morgan Robertson’s fictional ship. On the night of April 14, 1912, it hit an iceberg and sunk at the same place where Morgan Robertson’s ship sank. People did not die so much from the sinking of the ship as from the lack of lifeboats on board and the temperature of the sea at that time. The name of this ship was RMS Titanic.

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It is remarkable that both Morgan Robertson’s The Wreck of the Titan book and a short story published in London’s Pall Mall Gazette in 1886 predicted the tragedy of the Titanic in some way. Both understood, knowingly or unknowingly, what was going to happen with the Titanic somewhere. Interestingly, William Thomas Stead, who approved the short story, was also aboard the Titanic in 1912 and died in the tragedy. It cannot be a coincidence!”