In 1898, 14 years before the Titanic sank, Morgan Robertson wrote a book about a ship called the "Titan" that crashed into an iceberg and sank.

The book is Futility or The Wreck of the Titan. In addition to having the same outcome (crashing into an iceberg and sinking, the fictional "Titan" and the real-life "Titanic" had other bizarre similarities. They were both over 800 feet long. They both were known as "unsinkable". They both sunk in the North Atlantic. They both didn't have enough lifeboats. They both had 3000 passengers.
There's some big differences too. Most importantly, more people survived from the real Titanic than from the Titan.

found this really cool tell me what you think

Well why did the "Titan" sink in the book? How did it hit the iceberg? If they hit for different reasons (like heavy fog as opposed to a caption who didn't know how icebergs worked) then it is cool but you can't really blame people for not taking too much notice.

Maybe the book was inspired by news of the Titanic being built (since it would have taken a long time to build) or the name of the Titanic was inspired by the book.

Regardless of how much of a coincidence this actually was, it is still pretty cool.

it might be just a coincidence that he was just writing this or possibly some sort of warning?
this would bring alot of assumptions up from probobly most of the planet i wouldnt be one to beleive in fiction but you never know it could of been one of those weird things like a genuine prediction have you ever seen the video of someone on a phone at a premier of one of the old movie stars i forget the name it was one of the first anyway

More likely coincidence than not.

"Titan" is a word that is generally used to indicate a deific sort of stature. In the case of ships, it would be a pretty evident and cool way of saying that something was "really big". Thus, if you have a really big ship, there's only so many things you could call it, and "Titan" is one of them. And for marketing purposes, "Titan" is a pretty good thing to name a ship. As for declaring the ship unsinkable, that's generally a well founded assumption with things that size, though it turns out to not hold as true for large ships as it does for cities or other great constructions.

Being over 800 feet long, having 3000 passengers, and not having enough lifeboats while considered unsinkable are all very related quantities. Assuming the book was holding a pretense of being reasonable, it turns out the first two values are pretty good estimates of what you could actually make in that time period, as evidenced by the Titanic itself. As for not having enough lifeboats, that can be reasonably justified by whatever reasons the actual Titanic did not have enough lifeboats.

I'd blame it mostly on the Law of Large Numbers: which correlates to that if something is possible, it'll inevitably happen eventually. The only oddity is how quickly the description of the possibility became actuality, but seeing as it was a more or less singular event it falls under the Law of Large Numbers as well: freak accidents are possible, and will happen eventually.

I would write a poem of a bird hitting my window and it happens.


A ship can sink, stories about ships did exist before the titanic, you know.

Having the power to make birds hit your window by writing poetry is a pretty useless superpower depending on how fast you can write.

I think that what is coolest about this is how accurate the writer was in the limits and possibilities of a ship that size.

It's not odd at all. Like suo said, Titan is a pretty logical name to pick for something of large size. I would sincerely hope any boat I got on would be labelled as unsinkable by the owner, rather than the significantly less reassuring label of weak-hulled floating graveyard. A ship that is unsinkable would naturally not need any lifeboats. And you can pretty safely guess approximate passenger sizes if you decide on ship specifications and know just a little about ships. And luxury passenger ships travelled more often between Europe and North America during those times, so the Atlantic was the logical choice.

And labelling a ship as unsinkable for the sake of storyplot seems anti-climactic if you sunk it by torpedoing it, large storms are both avoidable and easy to mitigate damage to the ship by the most basically qualified captain, and being sunk because of hitting a shallow area implies that the coast is nearby. To make the ship sinking seem truly terrifying, you need it to take place in the middle of the ocean, which limits possibilities. Engine failure doesn't sound catastrophic enough, and anything technical suffers from the same problem of not being urgent sounding short of the ship blowing up. So you have to turn to nature, and low and behold, iceburgs have been posing problems to ships off the coast of Canada for decades. Bam, iceburg sinks unsinkable ship that doesn't have enough lifeboats because of human hubris in a classic man v. nature plot. Not exactly a long stretch to make for any author trying to make their fiction story believable.

As you guys are saying all these coincidences are far from inconceivable individually, but when combined it is a pretty cool and unusual story. I know the books details sort of link together but the ship could still have hit a very pointy rock in the middle of the ocean since the readers probably wouldn't care how illogical it was that a rock would be high enough in the middle of an ocean.

There have been gajillions of books written since the dawn of time. It's inevitable that some fictional stories will come true. It stands to reason that a fairly famous event will be one of them.

Just thought was cool