I found something on Wikipedia about the Titanic. Meet David Blair:

David Blair (or Davy)(1875 - 19??) was a British merchant seaman with the White Star Line, who had reassigned him from the RMS Titanic just before its maiden voyage. Due to his hasty departure, he accidentally kept a key to a storage locker believed to contain binoculars intended for use by the crow’s nest lookout.

When Blair left the Titanic on 9 April 1912 he took with him the key to the Crow’s nest locker, presumably by accident. This is believed to be a reason why there were no binoculars available with the crew during the voyage. According to other versions, the binoculars were not in the locker, but were left behind in his cabin, or he took them along with him when he left the ship, as they were his personal set of binoculars. The absence of binoculars being a factor in the sinking of the Titanic, became a point of investigation in the subsequent inquiries into the sinking.

The lookouts at the time of the collision Frederick Fleet and Reginald Lee maintained during the inquiries that they were informed they were to have no binoculars during the voyage. Fleet, when asked by a commission of inquiry composed of members of the United States Congress whether or not they would have seen the iceberg from farther away, replied that he would have seen it “a bit sooner”. When asked “How much sooner?”, he responded: “Well, enough to get out of the way.” According to legal expert Gary Slapper, though, Blair’s “forgetfulness wasn’t a material reason for the disaster” as there were other intervening causes.