Myths About the Titanic

Myth:There was a cursed Egyptian mummy being carried in the Titanic's cargo hold.
The mummy's curse tale was made up by a couple of Englishmen by the names of William Stead and Douglas Murray, and later connected to the Titanic due to Stead telling the story to fellow passengers while sailing on the Titanic. Stead went down with the ship, but a survivor who had heard the tale went on to retell it in a newspaper interview, and so the myth was born. But the Titanic's cargo manifest has been carefully looked over, and there are no signs of any mummy(it was really just the coffin lid) having been carried aboard the ship. In fact, the mummy's case purported to have gone down with the ship has always remained in the British Museum, even to this day.

Myth:The White Star Line never described the Titanic as being "unsinkable."
It had been reported in multiple publications of the time that experts had described the Titanic as at least "practically" unsinkable(although the "practically" part has been popularly ignored by the public), but had White Star Line ever described the ship as such? Apparently they did, as seen in a promotional flyer for the Titanic and Olympic, which was discovered by The Titanic Commutator in 1993. The flyer read that, "as far as it is possible to do, these two wonderful vessels are designed to be unsinkable."

Myth:A man by the name of Frank Tower survived not only the Titanic's sinking, but also that of the Empress of Ireland and the Lusitania
Frank "Lucky" or "Lucks" Tower was supposedly a Fireman aboard the Titanic, but the problem is that the official crew signing-on list doesn't show anyone by that name, or any name even close to that, as having been aboard the ship. The same can be said for the Empress of Ireland and the Lusitania. On the other hand, there is evidence that a woman by the name of Violet Jessop actually did survive the Titanic's sinking, as well as the Britannic's sinking and a major collision involving the Olympic(Titanic's sister ships).

Myth:Titanic was the first ship to use the SOS signal.
The SOS distress call was relatively new when sent from the Titanic, but had still already been in usage for a few years by that time. CQD was the most popular distress call among the British at the time, and it was British wireless operators who were stationed aboard the Titanic. An international conference had established SOS as the standard distress signal, but the signal was ignored for the most part by British operators. Titanic undoubtedly helped to popularize the usage of the SOS signal, but was not the first ship to use it. An interesting side note is that SOS isn't an abbreviation for anything, such as "Save Our Ship," but rather was chosen simply for its ease of transmission.

As for the other two statements mentioned in the overview, they are true. The Titanic was the largest passenger steamship in the world for a short time, but was outdone just a month later with the launch of the Imperator. And since the Titanic was designed to stay afloat if the first four or any other two watertight compartments were flooded, it's very unlikely that a head-on collision with the iceberg would've sunken the ship. In reality, the Titanic didn't turn sharply enough to avoid the iceberg altogether, causing the first five compartments to get ripped open along the side.

My other Titanic articles:
A Brief History of the Titanic
Interesting Facts About the Titanic