Life In 19x19

Washing stones today, had an idle thought:

Any Go set on the Titanic ?

( ...what's the odds ? Almost 100% certainty: cards, chess, checkers, backgammon, crosswords;
... Scrabble not yet published until 1938 )
Ocean water may dissolve shell stones and wooden boards over time,
but slate should last much longer ( order of thousands of years ? )
James Cameron-like divers may find a Go set some day...

...what's the odds ? Almost 100% certainty: cards, chess, checkers, backgammon, crosswords;

Well, draughts rather than checkers, perhaps, as it was a British ship. But otherwise, the thinking seems right - a posh ship would have everything.

However, the Titanic sailed in 1912 and the first populist books (by Smith in 1908, de Havilland in 1910 and Cheshire [self published] in 1911) had only just appeared (previous works were in obscure academic journals). They didn't seem to have much of an impact - unlike the mahjong craze a little later. And books were one thing - getting equipment quite another. The first UK sets seem to belong to the early 1920s, and even then go didn't become the "it" game - all that London managed was a tiny club in a tea-house. So I'd make the odds on the very low side.

I'm also unsure about crosswords. At least in the form that we know them, I think they were a little after Titanic. And while I suspect it had jigsaws, even these did not become truly popular until the Great Depression.

On behalf of our Northern Ireland brethren let me mention that the Iitanic Museum in Belfast is very well worth a visit, as of course is all of Ireland. And, for the record, I've never had a rainy day there! Wet days, of course, in the home of Guinness, Murphys, Jameson and Bushmills - but never rainy ones.

Thanks, John.

( Anything made of paper -- newspapers, books, journals, card board games, maps, currencies, passports, photos -- probably wouldn't have survived 100+ years of ocean water, unless miraculously vacuum sealed... )

I think it was kind of overcast when I visited the Guinness museum and the National Library (?) ( with a James Joyce exhibit ).