The Olympic was the first to be built, and as the line’s namesake, it was considered the lead ship. Its maiden trip was widely heralded, and its first few voyages were unqualified successes. But on just its fifth voyage, the vessel ran into serious trouble. Titanic Disaster: New Theory Fingers Coal Fire – Geological Society of America. 11 November 2014. Retrieved 3 January 2017. Don Lynch and Ken Marschall (1992). Titanic: An Illustrated History. Hyperion. pp.136, 139. ISBN 1562829181. The Break Up". The History Channel. Archived from the original on 3 November 2008 . Retrieved 11 November 2008.

The RNC is partnering with the Republican Jewish Coalition and Rumble — a virulently antisemitic platform — for the third GOP debate".

The British White Star Line had stiff competition in England and across the globe. Locally, it had a fierce rivalry with the Cunard Steamship Company, Ltd., which in 1906–07 had sent on its maiden voyage the world’s then-largest passenger ships, the Lusitania and the Mauretania. The hull number painted on the ship was 401, the same as its yard number at Harland and Wolff, and its Board of Trade number was 131,428. Yet even if one of its numbers had read “NO POPE,” there weren’t any Catholic workers at Harland and Wolff for it to upset. The company had driven its Catholic employees away in the late 1800s, and “by the twentieth century, Harland and Wolff had a reputation for only employing Protestants,” writes Annie Caulfield in Irish Blood, English Heart, Ulster Fry. The conspiracy theory claims that some person or people found the Olympic too severely damaged to be profitable, and so at some point switched it with the Titanic to purposefully ditch the damaged ship, reap the insurance money and, it seems, kill a bunch of people in the process.

Were there a conspiracy, one would expect that the insurance policy would have been changed to cover the entire value of the ship,” Chirnside writes. “As it was, White Star could only expect to recoup two-thirds of the ship’s value.” People seem to love a good insurance fraud story, so maybe it’s unsurprising that this conspiracy theory is one of the Titanic’s most popular. This one posits that someone switched the Titanic with another White Star Line ship, the R.M.S. Olympic. But as Paul Burns, vice president and curator for the Titanic Museum Attractions in Missouri and Tennessee, points out, “it just doesn’t make any sense.” The Olympic and Titanic being built side-by-side. Library of Congress/Corbis/VCG via Getty Images // Getty Images

Titanic researchers Steve Hall and Bruce Beveridge have published a book on the subject, Titanic or Olympic: Which Ship Sank?They’ve also helped to write other books of Titanic history, including Titanic: The Ship Magnificent. The two take the porthole argument straight on. Halpern, Samuel; Weeks, Charles (2011). "Description of the Damage to the Ship". In Halpern, Samuel (ed.). Report into the Loss of the SS Titanic : A Centennial Reappraisal. Stroud, UK: The History Press. ISBN 978-0-7524-6210-3.

A fire began in one of Titanic 's coal bunkers approximately 10 days prior to the ship's departure, and continued to burn for several days into the voyage. [24] [25] Fires occurred frequently on board steamships due to spontaneous combustion of the coal. [26] The fires had to be extinguished with fire hoses, by moving the coal on top to another bunker and by removing the burning coal and feeding it into the furnace. [27] This event has led some authors to theorize that the fire exacerbated the effects of the iceberg collision, by reducing the structural integrity of the hull and a critical bulkhead. [28] [29] That’s not all. It “is simply impossible to pass off a one-year-old ship for a new one,” Chirnside says, pointing to a number of small differences between the two, including “additional steel plates that were fitted to the bedplates of Olympic’s engines,” added in 1911, and still there in further inspections in the 20s and 30s. When the Titanic was investigated by the British board of trade, no such plates were found. Rather, the White Star Line swapped ships for the voyage from Southampton to New York, and the ship billed as the top-of-the-line Titanic was actually an older ship: the Olympic. What’s more, the conspiracy theory suggests, the entire crash was an insurance scam gone wrong. J.P. Morgan and the Heyday of Big Shipsa b Bruce Beveridge and Steve Hall (2004). Olympic & Titanic: The Truth Behind the Conspiracy. Infinity Publishing. ISBN 978-0-7414-1949-1. Titanic sank due to enormous uncontrollable fire, not iceberg, claim experts – The Independent. 3 January 2016. Retrieved 3 January 2016.

a b Daugherty, Greg. "Seven Famous People Who Missed the Titanic". Smithsonian . Retrieved 8 January 2018. OK, this one is actually about the 1997 Titanic movie—and it’s a fan theory—but still. There is a theory on the internet that Leonardo DiCaprio’s character in Titanic and his character in The Great Gatsby are the same person. Interesting, well-presented story of what might have actually happened - with the known facts that support this theory. Yes, it would be instructive for the viewer to see the actual documentation instead of admittedly guesswork scenes that reenact private conversations, but not many documentaries present such documents - they'd be pretty dry if they did. Nope. The late Titanic historian Walter Lord wrote that he received letters from people in Ireland relaying this “NO POPE” story beginning in the mid-1950s. Yet as Burns pointed out in his 1986 book, The Night Lives On, there was no such number attached to the Titanic.

One of the controversial [5] [6] and elaborate theories surrounding the sinking of the Titanic was advanced by Robin Gardiner in his book Titanic: The Ship That Never Sank? (1998). [7] Gardiner draws on several events and coincidences that occurred in the months, days, and hours leading up to the sinking of the Titanic, and concludes that the ship that sank was in fact Titanic 's sister ship Olympic, disguised as Titanic, as an insurance scam by its owners, the International Mercantile Marine Group, controlled by American financier J.P. Morgan that had acquired the White Star Line in 1902. The Titanic made a turn by rotating one-third of the way from the bow, which caused her rudder to hard over and crushed her starboard side into an iceberg. This would have caused the ship to flood, capsize, and sink within minutes, damaging the starboard side of the hull and potentially the superstructure. [4]