In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle reads Morgan Robertson’s prophetic novel The Wreck of the Titan
What connects the invention of the periscope to the sinking of the Titanic? Nothing specifically technical or naval: it’s a literary link, of sorts. The man who claimed to have invented the periscope also wrote a short novel which uncannily predicted the sinking of the Titanic some fourteen years before that ship’s ill-fated voyage.