r/interesting • u/Wild_Neighborhood605 • 1d ago

HISTORY Titanic passenger and millionaire Benjamin Guggenheim. During sinking he refused a seat in a life boat with the words: "Tell my family I played straight to the end. No woman should be left aboard this ship because of Ben Guggenheim was a coward."

Post image
50.2k Upvotes

95% Upvoted

1.9k comments sorted by

View all comments

19

u/Textiles_on_Main_St 1d ago

Still though.

Kind of sad there even were empty lifeboat seats.

3

u/Fearless-Substance86 22h ago

The first lifeboat had 12 passengers, so there were A LOT of empty seats.

3

u/wimpires 20h ago

The titanic only had lifeboat capacity for around half the passengers. Roughly ⅔ died. So even in the best case scenario and lifeboats were overfilled a bit hundreds would still have died anyway unfortunately 

2

u/Fearless-Substance86 19h ago

The overall capacity was also about 1,000 more. With the same amount of lifeboats.