Futility or The Wreck of the Titan is a novel written by Morgan Robertson in 1898. The story is about the ocean liner Titan and its sinking, which bears many similarities to RMS Titanic, which would sink 14 years later.
The story stars John Lee Rowland, a former lieutenant in the Royal Navy; he’s an alcoholic who has fallen to the lowest levels of society. Dismissed from the Navy, he begins work on the Titan. The ship sinks shortly before the middle of the story. After the shipwreck Rowland saves a girl and jumps into the iceberg with her; in the end, they are rescued by a ship.
Although the novel was written before the real Titanic set sail on its historic voyage of no return, there are some overlaps between the real story and the fictional one. Like the Titanic, the fictional ship sank in the North Atlantic, and there were not enough lifeboats for all the passengers. There is also a similarity in size (800 feet long for the Titan versus 882½ feet for the Titanic), speed (25 knots for the Titan, 23 knots for the Titanic), and life-saving equipment.
Here are other similarities between the real story of the Titanic and the Titan’s fiction:
Unsinkable
Number of propellers and masts
Launched in April
They hit an iceberg
The Sunken Unsinkable
Number of passengers
The number of passengers on Robertson’s ship was 3,000 and it had only 24 boats. In reality, the Titanic had two thousand 207 people on board and only 20 lifeboats, an insufficient number for the number of passengers, both in the novel and in real life.
Length of the ship
The length of the ship in the novel was 243 meters; somewhat less than the actual length of the Titanic, which was 268 meters (only 25 meters difference).
There are many similarities between Morgan Robertson’s little-known novel and the real tragedy that occurred years later, and although it is nothing more than an impressive coincidence, in the end, reality ended up imposing itself on the historical record and popular culture, thanks also to James Cameron’s wonderful film that has marked us all.
Story originally published in Spanish in Cultura Colectiva