Fourteen years before the RMS Titanic hit an iceberg and sank in the Atlantic Ocean on April 15th 1912, a man named Morgan Robertson wrote a novella called Futility. The fictitious story was about the world’s largest ocean liner – called ‘Titan’ and believed to be ‘unsinkable’ – that hit an iceberg one April night and sank in the Atlantic. Like the Titanic, Titan lacked enough lifeboats for every passenger on board and, like the Titanic, most of her passengers died in the disaster.

Robertson wrote the novella in part as a condemnation of mankind’s hubris – of our ever-increasing belief in our invincibility. At a time when technological advances were all the rage, this opinion was not a particularly popular one. But, given the events that occurred 14 years later, it seems that perhaps it was, unfortunately, the right one.