safety valves, an officer is shouting, “Women and  children first.” He's acutely aware that there  

aren't enough lifeboats for everyone. A woman  looking radiant in her dinner dress clings onto  

her weeping child as they are guided onto a boat.  Her husband stoically nods in their direction.  

When they are out of sight, he just stares into  the distance. He knows that's where he's heading,  

into the freezing cold waters of the  North Atlantic Ocean. Another passenger,  

a complete stranger, hands him a Camel filterless  cigarette. “Do you think we will make it?” he  

says. The husband doesn't reply. He just keeps  looking forward, transfixed on the dark. With  

great violence, the ship suddenly tilts. A giant  wave sweeps many passengers into the ocean. 

Can this man survive, even though he won't make it  onto a lifeboat? What were a person's chances of  

survival in that frigid ocean? Today you're going  to find out, and you might just be surprised. 

Ok, so the ship hit that iceberg at about 11.40  pm. As you already know because you've watched  

the movie 15 times, it didn't just sink in the  blink of an eye. In fact, for the first hour,  

the majority of the 2,224 people on board  had no idea just over 1,500 of them were  

about to have a date with Davy Jones' Locker. The ship was letting in water from the beginning,  

but the flooding was incremental and slow  at first. It took about 40 minutes for the  

loading of the first lifeboats to happen, boats  that were filled with only women and children.  

This was somewhat problematic since some of  the boats hit the water only partially filled  

because not enough women and kids could be  put in them. When lifeboat number 7 rowed  

away from the sinking ship at about 12.45, only  28 passengers out of a possible 65 were on it. 

It wasn't until about 1.20 am when the  flooding got much worse. That's about  

the time the ship tilted more and those onboard  really understood the gravity of the situation.  

It's when couples said their  tearful goodbyes and when the  

guy in our intro saw his beloved child  for the last time... Well, if he died,  

we'll come back to him soon. We hope you  have your fingers crossed for this dude.

And just in case you're wondering, it wasn't as  if all the women and children were spared that  

appointment with the freezing cold ocean.  Of the 412 adult women on board, 108 died.  

Of the 112 kids on board, 56 died. That's a 75  percent and 50 percent survival rate respectively,  

which isn't bad going at all. The men did  have it worse. Of the 1680 guys on the ship,  

1357 ended up with an unwanted sea burial. That's  only a 19 percent survival rate. Add that up and  

you get 1,521 deaths. Some sources say 1,503  died. Others say 1,517 died. Let's just agree  

the number of deaths was in the early 1500s. Titanic the movie wanted to encourage you to  

be angry because it portrayed a scenario in which  wealthier people had a greater chance of survival.  

This was a British-run ship. Still today that  country judges you by the strength of your accent  

and then puts you into a class bracket, and back  then people were a lot more obsessed with class.  

Titanic the movie got it right in some ways. The  wealthy did fair better than the poor, although  

that bit where the third-class plebs are locked  behind doors down below is totally fictional.

Let's break this down, something  we'll call class mortality rates.

If you were a rich woman, you almost had it made.  Of the 141 women who'd bought first-class tickets  

only four bit the dust. That was a 97 percent  survival rate. One posh kid died, so that sucked  

for him. Of the 171 men in first-class, 105 died.  Get this though. Of the 179 women in third-class,  

91 died. 55 out of 80 kids who were staying  in the crappy part of the ship were killed.  

391 out of 450 of the men in third-class died.

In terms of betting, if you were a woman without  much cash you were an odds-on favorite to die.  

In all, only one-quarter of third-class folks  survived when 62 percent of first-class folks  

survived. It also turned out that Americans had  a better chance of survival percentage-wise than  

Brits, and it was those two nationalities  that made up the bulk of the passengers.

We can conclude, being a working-class family from  Wolverhampton was not the ideal demographic for  

sailing around icebergs in those days. To give you  an example, let's look at the Sage family who was  

emigrating from Britain to the land of the free.  Mr. Sage and Mrs. Sage bordered the Titanic in  

England with third-class tickets and nine kids  in tow. None of them made it to America. The  

Andersson family from Sweden also had third-class  tickets, and all seven of them perished. As did  

the English Goodwins, also a family of seven, and  another family looking for a new start in the USA.

Ok, so let's get back to our stoic man  who's just bid farewell to his wife and kid.

Not too long after he smoked that cigarette the  ship tilted 30 to 45 degrees. The cacophony was  

absolutely deafening because the ship was coming  apart in the water. The lights were still partly  

on, but then there was flickering followed by  darkness. The people in lifeboats looked on in  

shock at the shadow of the behemoth sinking into  the depths like a slain sea monster from a Greek  

myth. The crashing, the screaming, the surreal  image, it was almost unbearable to look at. 

Onboard some people were being thrown  down the now heavily tilted ship.  

Some of them were literally pulverized  after being smashed against fixed objects;  

others flew through the air like ants in  a hurricane. As the ship pointed skywards,  

those who'd managed to cling together in  groups fell en masse hundreds of feet.

Some of those people ended up in the  icy water and believe it or not a few  

of them were still in one piece.  Others weren't so lucky. They were  

cast into the sea only to be whacked by  all the debris that came from the ship,  

stuff like giant pieces of timber and bits of  beds. The theory is, some of the debris went  

down but being buoyant it came back up with  a vengeance and hit the ill-starred swimmers.

Maybe that was better than dying  slowly in the freezing water.

To say those survivors were cold  would be an understatement. One of  

them later said the feeling was like  being pierced by a thousand knives.  

The temperature was about 28 °F (−2 °C), which  didn't give people much chance of surviving.

People did survive, though. One of those people  later said all he could hear was a terrible  

moaning sound, a situation he described as  being “horrifying, mysterious, supernatural.”  

Some of the folks in the lifeboats, not so far  away, said they felt hopeless as they peered  

into the darkness and listened to the poor  souls whose moans were carried by the fog.

The situation was dire, to say the least.  You see, water is very dense. In fact,  

it's over 800 times more dense than air. That  might not mean much to you, but it will if you  

ever find yourself immersed in very cold water.  What it means is that in the water you cool down  

a lot faster than you do when outside in the open.  In fact, the chilling is about 25 times faster.

Let's say you weren't one of the passengers  that swallowed a load of water on impact  

and so your lungs didn't drown. You'd still be  breathing very heavily, and your teeth would be  

chattering as if they were powered by a generator.  You'd also have the most horrific headache. The  

reason is nerves. They send a message to  your good old brain and your brain thinks,  

hmm, this guy's head is freezing, I better  send some warm blood up there. Your brain is  

now your enemy, because the warm blood causes  swelling, and you get that terrible headache.

Ok, so why do people shiver  and why do their teeth chatter? 

The reason is shivering activates muscles  to get moving and this warms up tissue in  

your body. Shivering is good for you.  As for those mad chattering teeth,  

that's because all the muscles moving causes  the jaw to spasm. If your teeth ever start  

chattering and you're not cold at all, you best  go see your doctor asap, or a psychiatrist.

Back to our man in the ocean. He's now been  in the water a few minutes and is fortunate  

enough to find some flotsam to grab hold  of in the shape of a rather well-designed  

cabinet. He's hyperventilating due to the  shock, and that's not so good for him.  

Too much of that can release too much air from the  blood and that can lead to reduced blood acidity.  

The upshot of that can be fainting, which  is not great when you are in the water.

But our guy, he's one of those strong,  silent types and he aint gonna let a bit  

of hyperventilation bother him. Plus, he's  got that cabinet to hold onto. The problem  

is, he's now shivering so much he almost looks  like he's about to have a seizure. As we said,  

shivering is your friend in times of  coldness, but it's a different matter  

when you are in the ocean or perhaps stuck  on a mountain top. That's because in those  

situations you really need your muscles to work  for you. Our guy is shaking around on his cabinet,  

and that's really not ideal. He needs his  muscles working fine. He needs his strength,  

but because of all that moving around  at times he almost loses his grip.

He's strong, but he's no Wim Hoff, aka, the  Iceman. Not the contract killer guy, but the Dutch  

guy that's trained his body to withstand extremely  cold temperatures. Because our survivor is not  

trained like that, his brain is in a kind of fight  or flight mode. As you likely know, a bit of this  

is good for you, but too many stress hormones  firing up that amygdala in your brain is not good. 

All this stress has caused our gracious man to  have some internal problems. For one, his arteries  

have shrunk and so his heart isn't getting the  blood it needs. That means his starved heart is  

pumping like crazy. Meanwhile, that selfish brain  of his is portioning out blood to only the most  

vital organs, including it. What that means is  all those less important parts of his body aren't  

getting as much blood, and some parts are going  numb. When those parts get really cold, they no  

longer work so well, and when the bloodless parts  get super cold the extremities can get frostbite. 

Suffice to say, our survivor has cold toes. Now  he's been in the water for about ten minutes and  

basically, he can't feel his feet. His greatest  risk right now isn't hypothermia although you'd  

think it would be. The biggest problem is the  fact that when his legs and arms get too numb,  

he won't be able to either cling to that  cabinet or even swim. This is known as “cold  

incapacitation” and it is likely the reason most  of those water-bound Titanic passengers died. Most  

people in that water were slightly incapacitated  after only two minutes, but after 15 minutes they  

were virtually paralyzed. In terms of drowning,  this usually gets you before hypothermia does.

That's not happened yet, though. What's  also a stroke of luck is even though his  

heart is working overtime he hasn't had a  heart attack due to the narrowing of blood  

vessels. It's just good fortune that the  star of today's show is as fit as a fiddle.  

To survive in freezing cold water, strength,  conditioning, and a healthy ticker are required.

Even so, his body temperature is  not what it used to be an hour ago.  

His regular 98.6°F (37°C) has been  reduced, and if it goes below 90,  

he can say goodbye to consciousness, which  again is not great when you are in the water.

Still, people aren't all the same, and  so while some of those moaners kicked  

the bucket after only 15 minutes, twenty  minutes have passed and our guy is still  

holding onto that cabinet – albeit he's now  turned a shade of blue and is not sure if he  

has legs any longer. Lucky for him most of  his upper half is on that floating debris.

At around the 25-minute mark, he's moved  from stage one of hyperthermia to stage two.  

The first stage includes what we've already  talked about, but now things get worse.  

We should say here that some people are just  amazing. The record for surviving a body  

temperature drop in the water was someone who was  once pulled out and lived to tell the tale even  

though their body temperature went down to 13.0  °C (55.4 °F). That shouldn't happen, but it did.

He's now feeling kind of tired  and he's even stopped shivering,  

but that's actually a really bad thing even  though he feels better. He's losing his mind,  

and though he's able to hold onto his raft,  he's kind of drifting in and out of reality.  

Part of him is in the water and the other part  is having a picnic with his dear wife and kid  

on an atypical English summer's  day when it actually didn't rain.

He's tripping out because his brain cells  aren't getting the oxygen they need.  

This can also work out in his favor since when  cold the brain doesn't need as much oxygen. What  

that means is he could go into cardiac arrest  but his brain would still be functioning.  

That person we just mentioned who holds the  record for having the lowest body temperature  

and surviving actually went into cardiac  arrest and survived 40 minutes in an air pocket  

before being pulled out of the water. Since  her brain was in chill mode and working,  

she was revived and later ended  up telling her story on CNN.

Ok, so he's in stage two hypothermia  and things aren't looking good at all,  

but then a lifeboat approaches and it brings  him out of his reverie about that picnic. He  

can hardly be excited given his body is so numb,  but he can hold on. He's not out of the water yet,  

though, both literally and figuratively, because  there's a chance he might die from Post Rescue  

Collapse. This happens to about 20 percent of  people who've suffered some serious hypothermia  

after being in cold water. A person can be  dragged out of the water and go into shock,  

or they might suffer a serious heart arrhythmia,  or their blood pressure might dangerously drop.

That doesn't happen, and our man became  one of 14 people pulled from the water.  

Those lifeboats could have  actually saved a lot more people,  

most of them in fact if they  had been on the scene earlier.

He certainly was a resilient guy,  because the rescue took 30 minutes  

and by that time almost all the moaning in  the water had stopped. Believe it or not,  

after an hour when hundreds of dead  bodies were seen floating in the water,  

four other men were found. Three survived  and one died from Post Rescue Collapse.

Our guy was fine. He went  on to write a book called,  

“Why I'm never going on vacation  again” and he even stopped smoking.

Now you need to watch, “50 Insane Facts  About Titanic You Didn't Know.” Or,  

have a look at, “Why Is Titanic  Still at the Bottom of the Ocean?”