It is also worth pointing out, prior to modern navigation techniques and radar, tended to have a Crow's Nest at the top of the ship to act as a lookout position, since a person in that nest could see farther than a person on the deck of the ship (could see further over the curve). If the Earth was flat, there would be no reason for a Crow's Nest, as a person on the deck would be able to see just as far as the person in the Crow's Nest.
Indeed, this is quite true, and the role of the Crow’s Nest and the lookouts became particularly important with the development of steamships which were faster. And rather than becoming obsolete after the
Titanic disaster, since it would still be years before RADAR was readily available to commercial ships for collision avoidance, efforts were made to improve visibility for lookouts. As an example, the three great liners built by Hamburg-Amerika Line just before World War I, the
Imperator, Vaterland and
Bismarck* (not to be confused with the battleship of the same name) were equipped with the most powerful searchlights available at the time, starting with the
Imperator, which entered into service shortly after the
Titanic disaster and which was larger than
Titanic.
This is also why the navigation bridges and conning towers of battleships, cruisers and destroyers were elevated, particularly in American ships (which tended to give American ships a high center of gravity and thus a tendency to roll quite a bit, which resulted in increased amounts of seasickness among American sailors vs. their counterparts from other countries. Historically, the bridges of battleships were open to afford maximum visibility, although the
Iowa class battleships were modified while under construction to feature an enclosed bridge for increased comfort. An armored conning tower provided protection from enemy gunfire on the Iowa class. The British stuck with open bridges a bit longer, and these might have been safer during battle than the enclosed bridges on American ships, since there were no windows to shoot out, but the safest option was the enclosed conning tower with periscopes combined with multiple helm control and engine telegraph locations throughout the ship on the
Iowa class and other American ships, which ensured that the ship could be controlled from a number of locations even if she took a direct hit on the bridge.
* The German liners
Imperator,
Vaterland and
Bismarck were seized as reparations after WW I becoming, respectively, the Cunard Line RMS
Berengaria, replacing the sunken
Lusitania, the United States Lines SS
Leviathan, and the White Star Line RMS
Majestic, replacing the sunken
Brittanic, the third member of the
Olympic Class, which never entered passenger service but was used as a hospital ship until she was sunk in the Mediterranean. Thus the tragedy was that of those three beautiful ships, only one, the
Olympic, had a full career. The
Olympic and the
Mauretania, which held the Blue Riband until at least the late 1920s, were retired and scrapped in the 1930s, which is a shame as
Mauretania was fast enough to have been usable as a troop ship along the lines of RMS
Queen Mary and RMS
Queen Elizabeth, as were the three German liners, while amazingly, the much loved RMS
Aquitania, the last four stack liner in service, managed to survive WWII and was used for repatriation “austerity” services after the end of WWII, not being retired until 1947 or 1948 (in her final year of service, she was quite decrepit, and at one point a deckplate gave way causing a piano to crash through to the deck below).
