The Sinking of the Titanic (1898)
Fourteen years before the ill-fated Titanic hit an iceberg while en route to New York, killing 1,517 people in the icy Atlantic, author Morgan Robertson penned a tragedy-at-sea tale called “Futility, Or The Wreck of the Titan,” in which another supposedly “unsinkable” boat sank after hitting an iceberg.
The similarities are truly creepy, right down to the name of the boat—Titan—but as Titanic scholar Paul Heyer explained in an interview, Robertson was far from a prophet. “He was someone who wrote about maritime affairs,” Heyer said. “He was an experienced seaman, and he saw ships as getting very large and the possible danger that one of these behemoths would hit an iceberg.”
