Samuel Halpern author page

Samuel Halpern biography

Samuel Halpern is a systems engineer, technologist and maritime researcher whose work focuses particularly on RMS Titanic. His professional and research interests include steamships, sailing vessels, naval architecture and celestial and coastal navigation. He has written more than 25 articles about Titanic and is a member of the Titanic Historical Society and the Titanic International Society.

Halpern is the principal author of Report into the Loss of the SS Titanic: A Centennial Reappraisal, first published by The History Press in 2011 and issued in a new edition in 2016. Written with a team of Titanic researchers, the book re-examines the disaster using evidence from the British and American inquiries, survivor testimony, navigational records and information that became available following the discovery of the wreck in 1985.

With maritime historian Mark Chirnside, Halpern wrote The Sting of the Hawke: Collision in the Solent, published in 2015. The book examines the 1911 collision between RMS Olympic and the Royal Navy cruiser HMS Hawke, reconstructing the movements of the two vessels and the circumstances surrounding the accident.

His later books include Strangers on the Horizon: Titanic and Californian – A Forensic Approach, published in 2019, which analyses the positions and movements of Titanic, Californian and other ships on the night of the disaster. He also contributed to Titanic: Solving the Mysteries.

In 2022, Halpern published Titanic – An Enigma in Time, an investigation of the chronology of Titanic’s final voyage, and Prelude to an Allision: Titanic’s Fatal Encounter Revisited, which examines the events and navigational decisions leading up to the collision with the iceberg.