The unsinkable claim came from an article about the Olympic class liners (of which Titanic was #2) in the Shipbuilder magazine prior to her launch where they described her watertight compartment design making her practically unsinkable, much as the media do today, the press got hold of this and decided to omit the "practically" part.
She was sinkable, of course, but nobody envisaged a collision serious enough to damage her enough to send her down hence the untruth stuck.
300ft of damage is another myth, such an opening in her hull would have sank her in minutes, not nearly three hours, whilst the iceberg indeed scraped along 300ft of her hull. Edward Wilding - who was the chief naval architect for Harland and Wolff testified at the enquiry into the sinking that the iceberg only opened an area of roughly 12sq feet which caused a relatively slow initial rate of flooding, as the ship sank lower the rate increased as water reached open portholes, anchor chain openings and open gangway doors, once the forecastle dipped under the rate increases again as water is now entering from above deck as well as below.
The iceberg didn't cut or tear the ships side, it merely caused seams between the hull plates to open, the water pressure at the depth the damage occurred then forced seawater through these open seams causing the flooding.
Titanic was planned to have a full speed run on the day after she sank and the crew were lighting the remainder of her 29 boilers (as not all were in use at the time of the collision) ready for the speed run the following day.
There was no record the Titanic could beat, she wasn't fast enough to attain the Blue Ribband nor ran in enough to match her sister ship Olympic. Also,she was taking a longer and more southerly course (to avoid ice ironically) and as I say above, she wasn't using all of her boilers for the first part of the voyage as the engineers bedded in the engines.
The Titanic was in actual fact an American owned but British registered and operated vessel.
Factual evidence proves the Belfast rumour mill to be wrong though, it is a cast iron fact that if you journey to the White Swan Hotel in Alnwick, Northumberland you'll find all of Olympics first class interior trim and panelling along with fireplaces and staircases which were taken from the ship when it was scrapped in the 1930's, all these pieces have its ship yard number "400" stamped on them because that's the ship they were made for, Titanic was yard number 401 and artefacts raised from the Titanic wreck site have that number - 401 - also.
The switch conspiracy is utterly disproved by factual evidence you can plainly see to this day.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Swan_Hotel,_Alnwick
The show was interesting but ultimately flogging a dead horse imo, she was designed to float with upto four compartments open to the sea, she was holed in six and there's evidence that boiler room 4 (7th compartment) was flooding early in the sinking, its probable that the bulkhead between the 5th and 6th compartment failed as the ship sank but a bulkhead failing in a sinking scenario is nothing unusual, nor was a coal powered ship having a bunker fire anything out of the ordinary.
The Titanic was a well designed and well built ship of her time, she suffered an almost unique accident - side swiping an iceberg- it is argued by some that had Captain Smith actually been on the bridge when the iceberg was first spotted he would have allowed the ship to hit the berg head on, she was designed to withstand such an impact (which is why the highest bulkhead in the ship was the forward "collision bulkhead" for this very event) and a golden rule of the sea is to never expose your broadside to danger as by definition your exposing a larger area of the hull to potential damage increasing the risk of flooding which any ships master would want to avoid at any cost, that said, human nature would surely suggest he'd have tried to avoid ramming his company's flagship into an iceberg on her maiden voyage, especially with the chairman of the line on board!!
He would have known such a head on impact would have caused massive damage and killed many crew and passengers who were berthed in the front of the ship, plus, of course, like many of the time, he believed the ship practically unsinkable. I think it unlikely in truth he'd have done anything other than the actions of First Officer Murdoch who tried to avoid a collision.
Ultimately, Channel 4 or whoever will continue to spout theories about the Titanic disaster, she ultimately sank because she hit an iceberg but her watertight bulkheads only went as high as E deck (about 14ft above the waterline) in the engineering areas of the ship, as the weight of the water in the bow pulled her down the compartments overflowed much like filling an ice cube tray from one end.
The fire theory imo is a Red Herring, her die was cast, she was holed enough to sink regardless of the fire and any damage it caused.
Had the bulkheads been higher or not supposedly affected by fire it's still highly unlikely she could have floated long enough for rescue to arrive ,as I alluded to earlier, failing bulkheads are common in sinkings, taller bulkheads just hold back more weight of water and are therefore more likely to fail and then you add to this the fact that she ultimately sank having broken in half due to the sheer weight of floodwater in her bows and the huge weight of her stern being lifted out of the water. She snapped in two under conditions of hull stress that she simply wasn't designed to withstand,whilst higher bulkheads may have slowed the rate of flooding she'd have still broken her back and sunk, as she did.
Apologies for the wall of text but if you check my profile you'll see I have more than a passing interest in this old tub.
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