S4 Ep41: A Future Foretold? The Wreck of the Titan
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Have you ever heard the expression, the pen is mightier than the sword? What about life imitates art? Or you cannot predict the future, but you can create it? When writers write, we are creating whole worlds out of our minds. But what happens when those words become reality? ♪

Welcome to Strange and Unexplained with me, Daisy Egan. I once wrote a story about a woman jumping off a building while miserable slack-jawed gawkers looked on. And Lord, I hope that one didn't come true after I wrote it. Although now that I think about it, I did come upon an awful scene on a busy New York street sometime after that in which a woman did indeed jump out a window. Oh, dear God.

Maybe I should start writing stories about an all-woman political administration, or larger Trader Joe's parking lots, or somehow finding out I have Irish citizenship and a million dollars. But before I get on that stranger, let's put our floaties and goggles on and sail back to the late 1800s to explore the moment when fiction became fact with The Wreck of the Titan. ♪

One wonders if the folks who bought passage on the ill-fated Titanic ever stopped to consider a popular short story published about 14 years earlier called Futility before stepping aboard the unsinkable modern marvel of the sea. Perhaps if they had, they might have thought twice about taking the journey. That's because Futility is about the world's largest and fastest ocean liner hitting an iceberg and sinking into the sea.

Morgan Robertson was many things before he became a writer. In 1877, at the age of 16, after spending the summers of his youth at the side of his father, a ship captain on the Great Lakes, Robertson joined the Merchant Marines, where he served nine years. As a sailor, Morgan traveled the world and became first mate before he finally returned stateside and settled down to become a diamond setter in New York.

Robertson married a gal named Alice M. Doyle and spent the next 10 years working as a jeweler, at which point he started writing stories. Robertson was kind of an accidental author who decided to write because when he read his preferred genre of seafaring stories, he was annoyed by the many inaccuracies he found in them. Between his own offshore experience and his father's lifelong profession, Robertson held a wealth of knowledge on the subject and it seems like something he was passionate about.

I mean, supposedly his New York City apartment was even decorated like a sea cabin. I'm picturing the inside of one of those seafood restaurants from the 1970s, with an open treasure chest filled with plastic jewels and strings of fake pearls near the hostess stand and a lobster pot on the wall covered in netting, with some plastic lobsters inside and Lighthouse salt and pepper shakers on the tables.

Something tells me Robertson would probably be annoyed by the inaccuracies inside of my brain as well. Also, now I really want lobster. Anyway, basically, Robertson thought he could do better at writing accurate and more compelling seafaring fiction, and decided to try his hand. And I'll be damned, but for a hobbyist revenge writer, he certainly was prolific.

Over the course of his writing career, Robertson wrote more than 200 short stories that were published in 14 books and in many periodicals like McClure's and the Saturday Evening Post.

So, it seems like writing was more than a passing fancy for Robertson, especially since he made a pittance for it. He wrote out of love for it, not money. Though, frankly, anyone who goes into the writing trade hoping to get rich is barking up the wrong tree. For every wealthy writer, there are a thousand more furiously writing their novels in their Notes app, in between fielding orders at the Starbucks drive-thru. Novels, the likelihood of which will never see the light of day.

In his own words, Robertson described his career and his lack of any reasonable compensation in an article in the Saturday Evening Post in the early 1900s. Quote, I have written more than 200 short stories. My name has appeared as author of stories in every leading magazine in the United States and frequently in the English periodicals. I have published 14 books, none of which retailed for less than a dollar. I frequently go into public libraries to see my 14 volumes strung in a row.

I go to these libraries for books because I have not enough money to buy one. I am broke. I am the rolling stone that gathered no moss." And honestly, I'm kind of relieved it isn't just me who is a broke-ass writer and that I can take some comfort in knowing that I keep the prestigious company of a man who eschewed working with diamonds in favor of telling stories.

In 1898, Robertson published a 67-page short story called Futility. It would quickly become his most well-known story. Even at the time of its release, it garnered media coverage. The Nashville Banner announced the forthcoming publication of the Sea Story on April 30, 1898. Not six weeks later, the New York Times praised it as a remarkable story.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Futility is the story about a naval officer on a British passenger ocean liner that hits an iceberg in the North Atlantic and sinks, killing nearly everyone on board.

After the disaster, the hero of the story finds God, which is wild to me. If you believe in God, who do you think put that iceberg there that ended up killing hundreds of people in the first place? That's rhetorical. Please don't DM me. He gets the love of his life back and defeats the demons of his alcoholism. The story begins, quote, She was the largest craft afloat and the greatest of the works of men.

In her construction and maintenance were involved every science, profession, and trade known to civilization.

End quote.

Sound familiar? Ever heard of a ship like that? Like one of the most famous ships to ever set sail? And not return? Yet, this was 14 years before the colossal and legendary wreck of the great ocean liner known as the Titanic. How could Robertson have written something so prescient? If he were alive today, he would be snapped up by the Simpsons writing team in a heartbeat.

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Was he looking into the future when he wrote Futility? Oh, did I mention that the ship in the story Futility was called the Titan? Yeah. The similarities are not just fleeting. On Robertson's Titan, the people who perished in the wreck were rich and notable. The Titan's passenger list boasted captains of industry who met their end or struggled to survive on that cursed journey.

The real Titanic sank with the likes of American business mogul John Jacob Astor IV, Nepo baby Benjamin Guggenheim, and the co-owner of Macy's, Isidore Strauss, and his wife, Ida Strauss, on board. The last two were the ones who chose to lay in bed together as the ship went down in the movie.

The similarities go on. Aside from the similar names of the ships, both ships were manufactured in England and their dimensions were strangely close. A 2011 article about Robertson and Syracuse.com lays out the likenesses as follows. Quote, length in feet, Titan 800, Titanic 882.5.

Watertight Compartments, Titan 19, Titanic 16. Propellers, Titan 3, Titanic 3. Maximum Passengers, Titan 3000, Titanic 3000. Passengers on Board, Titan 3000, Titanic 2200. Lifeboats, Titan 24, Titanic 20.

Month of voyage, Titan, April, Titanic, April. Sank, Titan, after hitting iceberg, Titanic, after hitting iceberg. Speed at impact, Titan 25 knots, Titanic 22.5 knots. Time iceberg hit, Titan near midnight, Titanic 1140 p.m. Location, Titan, North Atlantic, off Newfoundland, Titanic, North Atlantic, off Newfoundland.

Obviously, there were differences between the story and the real events, such as the hero of the story fighting off and killing a polar bear, though honestly, who's to say some actual survivor didn't then subsequently find himself on some landmass where he encountered a polar bear? My money would be on the bear, though.

Robertson did get so many details of the future Titanic disaster correct, though, right down to the location of the ship capsizing, that it felt eerie to those who had read it. After all, the Titans' claim to fame and futility was that it was the largest ship afloat and that it was unsinkable, just like the real-life Titanic. Unsinkable. ♪♪

When the actual Titanic sank, people remembered Robertson's maritime tale straight away. On April 17th, so just days after the real ship sank, a story ran in England's Burton Mail with the headline, Forecast Fulfilled. It began, quote, How strangely imagination may anticipate history has seldom been more remarkably shown than in the disaster to the Titanic.

It was foretold in many of its details in a curious little novel by Mr. Morgan Robertson entitled Futility, published in the United States 14 years ago. End quote. Some people called Robertson a psychic. Religious folks said he was touched by God and believed completely that Robertson had the gift of prophecy. Parapsychologists and woo-woo types believed he had a premonition that inspired him to write Futility.

This wasn't too surprising for the time. Robertson's story in The Real Titanic had many striking parallels, but also supernatural explanation and spiritualism were de rigueur for 1912.

Between the public's predisposition to buy the idea of literary precognition and Robertson's publisher's quick revamp of the story to punch up the similarities and reprint it as Wreck of the Titan, it's no wonder the book-reading public bought into the notion that the writer was somehow blessed with the gift of foresight.

Robertson dismissed the idea that he was psychic, putting the similarities down to his general maritime knowledge. When asked about whether he possessed otherworldly visions of the future, according to Time magazine in 2012, Robertson had stated, quote, end quote. ♪

The writer of the Time magazine article, Hiba Hassan, quoted Paul Heyer in the article. Heyer is a Titanic scholar and professor at Wilfrid Laurier University who summed things up like this, quote, Robertson was someone who wrote about maritime affairs. He was an experienced seaman and he saw ships as getting very large and the possible danger that one of these behemoths would hit an iceberg, end quote.

So Robertson insisted his clairvoyance was a product of an extensive knowledge of maritime matters. Mostly. Mostly.

In 1915, journalist Henry W. Francis wrote in a book of remembrances called Morgan Robertson the Man that the author of Futility believed that, quote, some spirit entity with literary ability denied physical expression had commandeered his body and brain for the purpose of giving to the world the literary gems which made him famous, end quote.

So, it seems, even Robertson, however briefly, espoused the idea that he was given some kind of second sight into the future. It's not uncommon for creators of works of seeming genius to purport to have received divine inspiration. Sometimes it's hard, even for the person who did the creating, to believe that a mere human could create something so good. But unless the first person who ever steamed a lobster and ate it with drawn butter did so out of divine inspiration...

We should have more faith in ourselves. We can come up with some pretty great ideas on our own. One wonders, though, regardless of whether the story came to him from a disembodied spirit or from his own mind, why, when the Titanic was scheduled to set sail with much fanfare, Robertson didn't try to alert people. If a spirit came to him with the story, maybe it wasn't fiction after all. You'd think he might have at least reached out to someone in the press and been like, uh, hey, I think the ship is doomed.

At the very least, it might have drummed up interest in the story again. At best, someone in charge might have been like, this guy might be on to something. Maybe we shouldn't try to set sail so fast that we won't be able to turn the boat if an iceberg appears out of nowhere and the lookouts aren't paying close enough attention because Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio are making out on the deck below.

Whether Robertson himself did or did not believe he was divinely inspired, people clung to the idea that he was some kind of seer, whether religiously ordained or supernaturally gifted. And when you consider the amount of conspiracy theories that have swirled around the Titanic since it crashed into that iceberg in 1912, that kind of whisper gallery about the whole thing tracks. Conspiracy theories about the Titanic and the notable deaths on board abound.

By the way, notable people were a tiny fraction of the deaths that occurred on the ship. Most of those who died aboard were workers and poor people in the lower decks who were just trying to find a better life in America.

Of the 1,517 people killed in the sinking of the Titanic, 832 were passengers and 685 were crew members. 38% of first-class passengers died, 59% of second-class passengers died, and a staggering 75% of third-class passengers died.

And of the children aboard, TitanicFacts.com says this, quote, of the 109 children traveling on the Titanic, almost half were killed when the ship sank. 53 children in total, end quote. Only one of those children was from first class. The rest were from steerage.

The website goes on to quote survivor Mary Davis Wilburn, a second-class survivor, quote, the dead came up holding children in their arms. The poor people never had a chance, end quote.

As always, the disaster hit the poorest the hardest. It's important to remember that because other than the 1997 movie where Leonardo DiCaprio plays a poor but charming scallywag on the ship, whose girlish good looks, by the way, helped carve my own taste in both men and women, but mostly women, most of the coverage and conspiracy theory about the Titanic centers the wealthy and powerful, like the seven rich people who had booked passage on the Titanic but miraculously never got on.

one of whom was J.P. Morgan. There is a popular conspiracy theory that says that 74-year-old financier J.P. Morgan, who was one of the owners of the Titanic, convinced rival millionaires to take the ship's maiden journey and then canceled his own ticket at the last minute and somehow arranged for the ship to hit that iceberg, sinking it, in order to kill those opposed to his Federal Reserve idea.

The other, more than 1,000 passengers who died, having no idea what the Federal Reserve even was, were necessary collateral damage, I guess. I don't know. That seems like a lot for a 74-year-old man who was not in the best of health. Oh, wait. I know a man who staged a coup at the ripe old age of 75, so I guess stranger things have happened.

Anyway, the point is, there are plenty of conspiracy theories about the Titanic, so it'd be easy to lump Robertson's prescient story in with those and continue to feed the climate of mystery. Or it might be simpler to just dismiss it as a very strange coincidence, if that was Robertson's only time telling the future with his writing.

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At the time of publication, the United States of America and the Empire of Japan were not enemies, but somehow Robertson imagined a future war between the two where Japanese submarines attempt to invade the U.S. mainland at San Francisco, which is a remarkable detail as a West Coast invasion through San Francisco was part of the Japanese plan of attack in 1941.

Although, of course, if Japan were to invade the United States, it stands to reason they would do so via the West Coast, given its proximity to Japan. It's not like it would bother to sail all the way around the Americas to invade via New York, after all.

Another arresting detail of similarity in the book is the title itself, which, according to paperback.com's author page, quote, refers to an ultraviolet searchlight used by the Japanese but invented by the Americans to blind American crews. Some readers have compared the searchlight's effects, blindness, intense heat, and facial burns, to those of the atomic bomb, end quote.

But, of course, the Japanese did not succeed in invading the U.S. through San Francisco. Maybe this was because American submarines were equipped with periscopes, something else Morgan Robertson foretold of. Okay, Japan's lack of success invading the U.S.A. through the West Coast probably had nothing to do with periscopes. I was just looking for a perfect transition to tell you another Morgan Robertson fun fact.

In this case, we are dealing less with the possibility of clairvoyance and more with Robertson maybe just kind of as a smarty-pants creative type with some good ideas. But back before Robertson wrote Futility or his pre-Pearl Harbor attack story Beyond the Spectrum, he had a book published in 1905 that was called The Submarine Destroyer. This early book of Robertson's is notable today among his work because in it, the author described a device known as a periscope.

It is widely believed to be the first mention of such a device anywhere, although engineers Simon Lake and Harold Grubb later were said to have perfected the model used by the U.S. Navy by 1902, a full three years before Robertson's periscope entered the literary consciousness. So, Robertson's claims that he had invented a prototype periscope himself and was refused a patent didn't hold up. ♪

Incidentally, back in 2004, I got a brand new Dell that came with a plastic microphone, and I thought, what if I recorded my thoughts each week, like a running audio blog about what I thought about whatever was going on in the world in my life, and then I put the audio on the internet for people to listen to? In short, I invented the podcast in 2004.

The problem is I didn't do anything with the idea. I didn't actually create a weekly audio blog and upload it. I just thought about it. Others were actually starting to invent and make podcasts around that same time. And then, about 10 years later, Serial came out, and now look where we are. And look where I am. I could have been retired to my own private island off Malta by now if only I had some follow-through.

Oh well, you can't win them all. But hey, here's to you, Mr. Robertson. You still thought of it. And at least you still predicted two major deadly events that made indelible imprints on history, Mr. Robertson. Buck up. But back to Beyond the Spectrum, Robertson's book that predicted Pearl Harbor and the start of American engagement in World War II. Skeptics have a harder time explaining this one away.

While Futility, aka Wreck of the Titan, could be reasonably boiled down to a story that could plausibly have been told by someone with a lot of knowledge and a broad understanding of maritime practices, Beyond the Spectrum would, almost 30 years later, dumbfound those who read it, with its omniscience regarding the devastating attack on U.S. soil by the Japanese. ♪

In spite of the wonder and awe of Robertson's unintentional predictions, artists and writers telling the future isn't as uncommon as you might think. There are many examples of worlds being created with events or scenes or even objects that eventually have come to pass, even though they were mere flights of fancy at the time they were brought to life by the artists who created them.

Robertson may have claimed to invent the periscope in his fiction, but science fiction writers have been inventing technology before the technology was invented for centuries. Mary Shelley was writing about organ transplants in Frankenstein well before they were a thing of reality that saved human lives.

Writer William Gibson famously predicted the Internet long before it came to be, as well as virtual reality. And Jules Verne not only predicted the moon landing, but wrote about the launch from the exact location on which the Kennedy Space Center would be built 100 years later. Though, according to at least one of my listeners, when it comes to the U.S. putting a man on the moon, I have drunk the Kool-Aid.

Mid-century artist Umberto Romano painted Mr. Pinchon and the Settling of Springfield in 1937. But it has people scratching their heads today because, though it was made in the 1930s and depicts the colonization of Massachusetts, which took place in the 1600s, there is a native man in the lower right quadrant of the image that appears to be looking at his iPhone. Yes, iPhone.

Most people look at this painting and assume they just got it wrong and that the thing they have mistaken for an iPhone is...

Something else? But no one has really ever been able to say what exactly the man is looking at. Sure, there is probably a reasonable explanation. Stranger, you know I am a skeptic. But as yet, the image is unexplained. And it does kind of look like he's about to say, hey, colonizer, move. You're blocking the light for this selfie. In any case, there are numerous examples of art that seem to or do predict the future.

Robertson was in some pretty good company. But it does beg the question, are these artists predicting a future beyond even any that they might personally witness, or are their visionary ideas part of a collective cultural evolution? Maybe these artists are so innovative and simultaneously plugged into the pulse of the time in which they have lived that they have planted—that they are planting—seeds for the future.

Science fiction is, after all, only fiction until technology catches up. Maybe it's too grandiose or ethereal to say that these artists created the futures they wrote or painted just by making the art. But then again, maybe it isn't. The creative impulse is powerful. Humans are good at making stuff out of nothing. We make our own people, for crying out loud. If we can procreate, is it such a stretch to think we can manifest a new reality from our minds?

Come on, everything we have came from someone's mind at some point. Cars, lamps, AI, airplanes, Korean barbecue, Minecraft, steamed lobster with drawn butter, coffee. I mean, who decided we should boil the beans and then throw them away and drink the bean water? Visionary. Goddess bless you, coffee thinkers and coffee drinkers.

Maybe the longer an artist creates and the more they hone their skill, the better they get at tapping into new potential realities. Or maybe they tape a banana to a wall which eventually sells at auction for $6.2 million plus fees. Look that up if you want to be really mad and confused. Still, I wonder what else Robertson might have predicted if he had continued his prolific writing streak.

I wonder how he would have felt about the world's reaction to his second Erie portent when it came to pass. I have to wonder because Robertson wouldn't be around to see it.

Robertson's fame began to grow after the Titanic sank, especially after his story was re-released. But at the height of his notoriety, on March 24, 1915, at the age of 53, Morgan was found dead in a hotel room in Atlantic City. The New York Times reported his death, saying, "...he was found standing up with his head lying on the bureau, and he was supposedly there to recover from a nervous breakdown."

When he was found, a bottle of paraldehyde was found nearby. End quote. Paraldehyde was a common sedative, hypnotic, and anticonvulsant medication. It was common enough to be found in cough syrup and was used institutionally all the way up into the 1970s until it was confirmed as a Category 1 human carcinogen and could no longer be considered appropriately safe to use. Yikes.

Anyway, Robertson's initial cause of death was stated as an overdose of peraldehyde, but later a doctor said the writer died from heart disease. And of course, those who are inclined to think such things believe Robertson's death was suicide. But there is no evidence to support that other than the suggestion that he was recovering from a nervous breakdown and the possibility of an intentional overdose, which seems as likely to have been an accident as anything. After all, who dies standing up?

Robertson was buried in Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn in a plot he shares with his wife, Alice. It was an anticlimactic end to a life that seemed to demand something more. ♪

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Could Morgan Robertson see the future? If so, did he see his own solitary demise? Did he know the resonance of his work and its connection to an event that changed the course of history? Had he lived, what other events might he have predicted? Or did Morgan Robertson have an even more awesome power than to be able to see into a crystal ball?

Maybe he was able to write reality into existence. Maybe this sailor-turned-jeweler-turned-writer had a truly unique gift and could bring the future into existence just by writing it down. Or, Occam's razor, maybe the simplest explanation is the right one. Morgan Robertson was a bright, interesting, and creative man who followed the writer's adage and wrote what he knew.

The result was that he created convincing, exciting, plausible, realistic fiction. He was a man who was probably never adequately compensated for the work he did, for its accuracy and its careful construction. Maybe if his work had been read as a cautionary tale rather than a flight of fiction, the powers behind the Titanic might have thought twice about making such a massive ship sail so fast into its own demise.

Some lessons have to be learned firsthand, and then learned again, and again, and oh Lord, again. ♪

I'd like to think we could learn from the art that told us what was coming. I'd like to think that in the future of yet unrealized Pearl Harbor attacks or Titanic wrecks or Handmaid's Tales or Parables of the Sower, that humanity could just shove over to make a little more room on that big door for each other. And then we can stop learning those particular lessons and we can make art about something else.

Let's make art about the limitless positive possibilities we contain within us. Stories of kindness and compassion and love and art. I want you to draw me like one of your French girls.

Next time on Strange and Unexplained, we have a little fun weekend bonus episode for you. You might think emergency trips to the bathroom are the scariest thing about visiting fast food restaurants, but it turns out some fast food joints are haunted by much more than diarrhea-inducing foods.

Strange and Unexplained is a production of Three Goose Entertainment with help from Grab Bag Collab. This episode was written by Eve Kerrigan and me, Daisy Egan, with research by Keely Heise, sound design and engineering by Jeff Devine, music by Epidemic and Blue Dot Sessions. If you have an idea for an episode, head to our website, strangeandunexplainedpod.com and fill out the contact form. I will write back.

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