When the Titanic sunk beneath the ocean it took the lives of over 1,500 people and also gave rise to a new, upgraded regime of safety regulations regarding ocean vessels, particularly when it came to lifeboats. The Titanic did have enough life jackets for everyone on board, at 3,560. But given oceanic weather conditions and the cold temperature of much of Earth’s oceans (the Titanic hit an iceberg, remember), life jackets wouldn’t have been enough, anyway.
At the time the Titanic launched in 1912 there were a couple of prevailing pieces of legislation that determined the quantity of lifeboats on board a ship: the Merchant Shipping Act of 1894 and the Merchant Shipping Act of 1906. In total, as the Library of Congress explains, these two acts outlined lifeboat numbers based on ship weight, with 10,000 tons being the maximum (equaling 16 lifeboats for 990 people). The Titanic weighed over 46,000 tons, however, and no one thought to equip it with more lifeboats.
Both the U.K.’s Titanic Wreck Commissioner and a U.S. Senate Investigation came to a very common-sense conclusion: The quantity of lifeboats should be based on the number of passengers, not the weight of a ship. Lifeboat safety drills also became mandatory following the sinking of the Titanic, as did rules regarding onboard radios. While this seems like a no-brainer, we could argue that if the Titanic didn’t sink, it might’ve taken another, subsequent disaster to yield the same results.
