Legends and myths regarding RMS Titanic
At the time the "Titanic" sank, the 1 May 1912 issue of "The Popular Magazine", an American pulp magazine, was on the news stands. It contained the short story "The White Ghost of Disaster," which described the collision of an ocean liner with an iceberg in the Atlantic Ocean, the sinking of the vessel, and the fate of the passengers. The story, by Mayn Clew Garnett (the pseudonym of sea-story author T. Jenkins Hains), created a minor sensation. In 1898, fourteen years prior to the "Titanic" disaster,
Morgan Robertson wrote a book called "Futility, or the Wreck of the Titan". This story features an enormous British passenger liner called the "Titan", which, deemed to be unsinkable, carries insufficient lifeboats. On a voyage in the month of April, the "Titan" hits an iceberg and sinks in the North Atlantic with the loss of almost everyone on board. There are some similarities between the fictional sinking of the "Titan" and the real-life sinking of the RMS "Titanic".
RMS Titanic in popular culture
Although not strictly about "Titanic", a number of other drama films were produced around this time that may have been inspired by the disaster. In October 1912 the Danish film company Nordisk released "Et Drama på Havet" ("A Drama at Sea") in which a ship at sea catches fire and sinks, while passengers fight to board lifeboats. It was released in the United States as "The Great Ocean Disaster" or "Peril of Fire". The same company produced a follow-up film in December 1913, which was also released in the US. Titled "Atlantis", it was based on a novel of the same name by Gerhart Hauptmann and culminated with a depiction of a sinking liner. It was the longest and most ambitious Danish film to date, taking up eight reels and costing a then-huge sum of $60,000. It was filmed aboard a real liner, the SS "C.F. Tietgen", chartered especially for the filming with 500 people aboard. The sinking scene was filmed in the North Sea. The "Tietgen" sank for real five years later when she was torpedoed by a German U-boat. A British film company planned to go one better by building and sinking a replica liner, and in 1914 the real-life scuppering of a large vessel took place for the Vitagraph picture "Lost in Mid-Ocean".