From Today I Found Out.

In 1898, American author Morgan Robertson published a novella titled Futility, which tells the story of the Titan, a British ocean liner described as the largest, fastest, and most luxurious in the world. On its maiden voyage across the North Atlantic, the Titan accidentally collides with an iceberg. Though the ship is designed to survive a head-on collision, the iceberg instead strikes a glancing blow, allowing several watertight compartments to flood at once and causing the Titan to rapidly capsize and sink. Tragically, the ship does not carry enough lifeboats for all aboard, and only 13 of her passengers and crew survive the sinking.

If this story seems strangely familiar to you, then you are not alone, for Futility – later renamed The Wreck of the Titan – has become infamous for predicting the real-life 1912 sinking of RMS Titanic. But this was far from the first time that nautical life imitated art, for just five years before, an even more gruesome tragedy was predicted with eerie accuracy by none other than the master of the macabre himself – Edgar Allen Poe. This is the story of one of the strangest coincidences in all of modern literature.

Author: Gilles Messier
Editor: Daven Hiskey
Host: Simon Whistler
Producer: Pacience Hiskey