Yesterday I had the opportunity to visit Titanic: the Artifact Exhibition at the Minnesota Science Center in St. Paul. I’m not sure what I was expecting, but I left saddened and amazed at the same time.

In 1912, you had an America and Western Europe that was going through amazing technological progress. The sheer size of the ship was massive: it took over 3 million rivets to assemble the outer hull, and it burned 40 pounds of coal per second. Titanic was a symbol of the times, a ship that was presumed indestructable, offering both unsurpassed luxury for the wealthy and affordability for the working class – a third-class (“steerage”) room cost the equivalent of $650 today, far less than many from Mexico and South America pay people to get them to our country. Its three-turbine propulsion system was an engineering marvel.  Titanic was divided into a dozen or so watertight chambers so that if one or two of them were breached, the boat would still float. The iceberg took down 6 of them, if I remember correctly.

One fact stuck in my head: of all the women that were on Titanic, only three had husbands who survived the disaster. Only 20% of the men on board survived – but of men who had wives, only three men survived. (Here for more on survival rates.) That tells me that the men whose families were on the ship had one foremost priority: get their families off safely. The men whose families were not on board had no such higher motive, and did not cede room in the lifeboats for others’ women and children. As they say, tragedy often reveals both the best and worst in people.

[Quick note: the Titanic had more than enough lifeboats for all of its passengers. Most of them launched prematurely, with husbands worrying about the safety of their families, wanting to make sure the lifeboat was not so crowded that it might sink. If I remember correctly, the first third or so of all lifeboats launched were filled with less than a third of their potential passengers. There were life preservers for everyone (white vests filled with blocks of cork for bouyancy), but the water was below freezing and hypothermia set in within a half hour.]

As you make your way through the exhibit, you cross an amazing collection of personal materials. Teapots from the dining room that somehow survived in perfect condition. Personal items of passengers. A wide assortment of money. Playing cards that look remarkably similar to what we use almost a century later. This is where the exhibit hits home, and Titanic becomes not just a boat that hit an iceberg, but a collection of people. People from the highest social standing to the lowest. Some making their way back to America to resume their businesses, some headed there to start a new life, filled with hope and aspirations. These were real people, and seeing their combs, luggage, and postcards is what reminds you of that.

On a wall at the end of the exhibit is a quote by an Irish poet named Jack Foster: “We are all passengers on the Titanic.” Sound familiar? After 9/11, we were all New Yorkers. We all understood the horror of the tragedy that occurred and felt it could have happened to us. As a country, we banded together to give assistance however we could to the families who lost loved ones. The children who survived the Titanic were assisted through massive charitable giving, even putting some through college. It is sad that it takes a disaster on a scale like this to unite people, but apparently not much has changed in a century.

There are many lessons to be drawn from the Titanic. In an effort to make its planned departure date, much was rushed. The ship ended up sailing without one pair of binoculars on board, a simple detail that may have prevented the disaster. The iceberg field that the Titanic passed through was also navigated by a half dozen other ships that night and the following day, including the Carpathia that rescued its survivors. None of these ships was hit because they were able to steer around the icebergs. They had binoculars to see them, and they weren’t so big that they could not maneuver easily. Rushing through a giant venture and overlooking important details because you are trying to meet some arbitrary date can have major adverse consequences. (Are you listening, Nancy Pelosi?)

You know I’m a supporter of free markets, but there is room for some government guidelines in many industries. People have to know what the rules are in order to compete, and part of the government’s role is to define basic rules of the game. After the Titanic sank, the U.S. and other countries agreed on a variety of new changes. They restricted some radio frequencies from personal use and designated which frequencies would be used by ships, making it easier for them to communicate quickly when they are in trouble. They imposed restrictions on how far north a shipping vessel could navigate, to avoid the kind of waters Titanic found. The result of these actions: since the Titanic, no other such ship has sunk because it hit an iceberg.

If you are down in the St. Paul area, I encourage you to check out the exhibit. It’s $23 for admission to the museum and the exhibit, but it was definitely well worth the money.