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Weak Rivets May Have Sped Sinking of Titanic
Pickens writes "Metallurgists studying the hulk of the Titanic argue that the liner went down fast after hitting an iceberg because the ship's builder used substandard rivets that popped their heads and let tons of icy seawater rush in. They say that better rivets would have probably kept the Titanic afloat long enough for rescuers to have arrived, saving hundreds of lives. The team collected clues from 48 Titanic rivets and found many riddled with high concentrations of slag, a glassy residue of smelting that can make iron brittle. To test whether this extra slag weakened the rivets, scientists commissioned a blacksmith to make rivets to the same specifications as those used to join steel plates in the hull of the Titanic. When the plates were bent in the laboratory, the rivet heads popped off at loads of about 4,000 kg. With the right slag content they should have held up to about 9,000 kg. Even a few failures because of flawed metal would have been sufficient to unzip entire seams, because as faulty rivets popped, more stress would have been placed on the good ones, causing them to break in turn. The shipbuilder, which is still in existence, denies it all."
You mean it was the terrorists?
Running time: 194 min.
If only it had gone down faster.
Since the mid-90's there have been tons of BBC and Discovery Science and History channel specials on the Titanic and they ALL said the same thing, the shipyard used substandard metals in the rivett's to cut back on the cost of building the ship. And these same history shows all said the same thing, to much slag found in the rivets causing them to be extremely week and would pop with minimal, for its size, force.
...riveting.
I had seen this early last year on one of those National Geographic "investigations" regarding the possible causes of Titanic's sinking. They arrived at the same conclusion, weak rivets on bow and stern.
I havent read this in TFA but the show said that the reason a weaker rivet was used on the bow and stern is because their riveting machine cant access those parts correctly, thus the need to use manual riveting which uses weaker rivets. ( human force machine force)
I remember in a Discovery Channel special about the Titanic they mentioned that the plates were torn apart at the seams rather than gashed through by the ice. The amount of force with which the ship hit the ice was low enough that it should not have ruptured.
So many years later, I wonder if it is worth it to hold the shipmaker accountable for the tragic loss of life. The stowaways in the galley climbing the railing at the bow shouting their claims to the throne of the earth were all taken under, and though they found love in the last hours of the Titanic, I can't help but wonder what sort of lives such rapscallions would have lived had they landed in New York City. Instead, at the bottom of the sea is the blue gem, shining brightly in the ghostly beams of the research submarines, so far away from the hands which let it fall to the seafloor in remembrance of the short, brilliant, flash of love in those few hours whose imprint upon Rose lasted her whole life.
I saw that program on the Discovery channel too last year. Wow, slashdot, really on the cutting edge of tech news.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
let it go already
who cares about this ship anymore anyway? housewifes?
"Given the microstructure that we've seen, our best guess is that the rivets failed before the steel plates cracked, and the seams between plates simply opened up," Weihs says.
-- Johns Hopkins University Gazette, 26 April 1999
Those damn terrorists attacked the titanic by planting an ice burg in the middle of the ocean. Solution? Attack Iran.
Trying to install linux on my microwave, but keep getting a kernel panic...
... And here was me thinking that was just a nationalist myth. You mean the Belfast shipbuilders really did say that stuff about the Pope when they put 'em in?
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
Now...if we can start second-guessing some more disasters, we can really get the lawsuits going.
THL phish sticks
Boats are not designed to be driven into large icebergs. The captain was under too much pressure to make this the fastest crossing.
Except in the version I saw the Titanic looked like a giant hot dog running aground in a sea of ketchup. Also, LSD was involved.
Should have used self-sealing stem bolts...
I also had complaints about how riveting the movie was not.
Why do people find the Titanic so fascinating? I still see documentaries come up every now and then. There were worse tragedies and boat disasters than the Titanic. Is it because it was a ship mainly for the rich that they said was unsinkable but did? For all the Titanic buffs, build a bridge and get over it... or will that have cracks too? Oh the humanity.
Analytic & algebraic topology of locally Euclidean meterization of infinitely differentiable Riemmanian manifold
Well, with global warming, we solved the iceberg problem anyway.
If not for the weak rivets, we wouldn't have gotten to see Leonardo DiCaprio drown.
Why is the ship-builder hesitating to claim such progress?
My grandfather, who was a Marine in WWII, told me all sorts of stories of how the Navy's ships back then were pretty rickety. Reason being, aside from cheap labor, was that the assembly crews would have races in building the ships. The quality went down with the speed, like anything hand-crafted, and I'm not surprised to hear the same thing about the Titanic. While the Titanic was made by completely unlike laborers, they were probably/most likely under the same kind of stress that one normally expects when facing rushed work.
I think the more important mystery is How are the Titanic's shipbuilders still in business??!?
I find it interesting that after so many years, and so much evidence, that the company still strenuously denies any wrongdoing. It's not like they can be sued this long after the fact; indeed it's like a vestigial remaining piece of the very arrogance that doomed the Titanic in the first place.
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Yes, the slag grains in the steel were too large. And yes, the steel of the plates was also not that great.
But that was almost 100 years in the past!
In case you did not notice, there have been a few improvements, since then. They wouldn't even refill my horses at the gas station!
Guess why they needed a blacksmith to recreate that steel? Because the cheapest and worst steel you can buy today surpasses the quality of everything they had back then. By far.
All in all, the rivets are just part of the cause, though. Not the cause of the sinking, but the cause of the many deaths (even though this is not the largest desaster at sea, contrary to common belief.)
The protection against water rushing through the hull was inadequate. They did not have binoculars as the guy who had the key to the locker was replaced in the last instant. They followed standard procedure against icebergs back then: Full speed to get out there fast (yes, that is fact). Their radio operator cussed at the only operator on the nearest ship prior to the accident, prompting the other one to go to bed. They only had white flares on board, red ones being the ones for emergencies, white for celebrations. Other ships _saw_ the flares and assumed it was a party. They did not have enough boats and life-vests. And, and, and.
All in all, this is a huge story of arrogance and the fact that, all in all, we are pretty powerless if a large thing decides to hit us.
But, and let me stress this, this is not news!
So can we please not hear this 'story' again and again?
Thanks.
</vent>
You mean the Titanic was real? I thought it was just a fairy tale parents told their kids to make sure they would do quality work when they grew up. Next you'll be telling me Apollo 13 was a real spaceship!
Just kidding... but I wonder how long it will be until this is a common reaction?
It was yet another example of how technology makes us feel invincible, then we see it fail spectacularly
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If we can't forgive and forget the grudges, we are doomed to keep fighting over the same grudges for thousands of years. Bad idea.
--- Often in error; never in doubt!
"Weak Rivets May Have Sped Sinking of Titanic"
I always thought it was hitting an ICEBERG that sunk the Titanic..
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Even if the rivets had been perfect it would still have sunk. The design was such that once a big enough hole was made, i.e. weren't enough pumps to keep the water level down, the water filled to above the bulkheads and swamped the next cell, and onto the next. It was a poor design when faced with the accident it had. IIRC the ships designer was on board and once he was told the size of the hole he was able to tell the captain how long it would take to sink.
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What a load of total crap.
"and the lesson to be learned from this: don't trust an Irishman to do anything right"
...
It was designed by an Englishman and built by a British company in what was still part of the British Empire
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Star_Line
davecb5620@gmail.com
Dumbass the Titanic was built in Norn' Ireland
This senseless tragedy would have been avoided had only Humphrey Bogart been brought on as shipright.
Wait for it...
He could have yelled "Plate it again Sam! at the catch and rivet boys.
Sank you. Sank you all very much.
Well to be honest we really don't know exactly what happened. All we can do is throw out ideas and see if they are accepted or proven wrong. No one can stand up in a court of law and declare they know for sure all the variables in this problem. We have a wrecked ship that has fallen apart after nearly a hundred years at the bottom of an ocean. How is that evidence? Sure it might yield some clues but it doesn't tell us how fast the ship was traveling when it hit or how big the iceberg really was let alone its shape and such.
Don't bother trying to blame either the builders or the owners of the ship. If anything it was the industry as a whole and the countries they were based in that all through their actions and inaction lead up to this disaster. Unfortunately this was a disaster that needed to happen in order to effect change. Countries wanted their industry to be the biggest and best and definitely looked the other way.
Just like rules and regulations made going by boat safer the same had to be applied to trains and airplanes. Unfortunately government moves very slowly compared to technology. Now they react a bit faster, look at all the angst people here had at mention of the FAA possibly interfering with Spaceship One and its successors.
Besides, I wonder how long before someone does file suit to reclaim all that money which belongs "rightfully" to someone who isn't alive... but would do wonders for the law firms bottom line. I wonder who will stoop so low as to file it.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Ok, So forgive me for thinking that this story is typical of slashdot and 96 years late, But EVERY Titanic documentary i have watch has mentioned the rivet theory.... how is this news? how is this "news for nerds" and how is this "stuff that matters"? I Wish SLASHDOT WOULD HOST RELEVANT NEWS AND TOPICS. Rather than this 96 year old regurgitated rubbish. this puts even the major newspapers and "nightly news shows" to shame.... And makes me wonder when ill next visit slashdot... hopefully not too soon.
Yeah, but there's way more money in keeping the grievences rolling.
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
The lack of lifeboats, the "woman & children first" and "rich people first" attitudes around that resource, the freezing cold of the water that killed within half an hour anybody floating in it, and the fact that the first ship to arrive arrived hours later 'cause the nearest ship wasn't paying attention to its radio.
Another hour or two on the surface would have just delayed the inevitable, but there was still nowhere else for the people to go.
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-- Joe
Some people romanticize the idle rich of the 1800s, who did nothing but travel around with an army of servants to carry their steamer trunks around, that were filled with clothes that they'd use to dress up and go to dinner parties. And the Titanic was the newest fanciest liner when it was built, and it had societies elite on board. Think of a disaster on a similar scale striking the Oscars, and how that would be covered in the news.
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The big thing here though is this "unzipping" thing I've seen quoted.
I'm interested if anyone knows about maritime riveting and can correct me because in aviation we not only use rivets of a standard design specification (predominantly) to reduce dissimilar metal corrosion but also they are riveted in set patterns that mean should one rivet fail then the resulting weakness and is to a greater degree minimised by the placement of other rivets. For example the most simple battle damage repair would be two sheets overlapping with a double row of staggered rivets at set distances (I forget the exact inches) - and that's a patch repair!
Unzipping, to me, implies that the metal was riveted in straight lines which would seem like an engineering faux pas of the highest order.
A thistle is a fat salad for an ass's mouth...
The Titanic has struck a BF iceberg in mid-Atlantic and sunk with a substantial number of casualties.
.. it says here.
Rivets are already being lined up to take the blame.
Also in the news: The scores are in for Piltdown man's final test series
and why experts now think the walls of Jericho fell down as a result of poor quality mortar.
But first today's big story on how Global Warming brought an end to the Roman Empire.
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It's news because this is the 95th anniversary of the sinking. I only know that because I worked W0S, the Titanic memorial amateur radio station over the weekend.
Too lazy to create a sig...
Im sorry... when did your country of origin lead an industrial revolution?
So Titanic met the spec, and the spec wasn't good enough. That happens all too often.
But that was almost 100 years in the past!
Yes, but they were substandard even for the rivets of the time. They've even found documentation stating such.
I don't read AC A human right
Well, cars do goes through safety testing, etc. If a vehicle manufacturer was found to have used high-grade products on the safety tests, and shit-grade products on the consumer product, a lawsuit wouldn't be all that unlikely.
it lists 4 with a higher deathcount,
the greatest of which both triples titanic and was in the last 20 years
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_disasters_by_death_toll
4,300 - 4,500 - Doña Paz, (Philippines, 1987)(Estimates vary because of overloading and unmanifested passengers, only 21 survived [3][4][5])
3,920 - Jiangya ship explosion off Shanghai, (China, 1948)
1,863 - MV Joola (Senegal, 2002)
1,547 - Sultana (Mississippi River, 1865)
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Does anyone still care? It's over, let it go.
What is with the obsession with the Titanic? I don't get it, it was really interesting when I was in the 3rd grade but 16 years, a few bad books I was forced to read and one HORRIBLE movie later I just don't see why people continue to resurrect this little piece of history.
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--A wise old fart named SC0RN
They still make those?
It's not like anyone can sue over it all these years later.
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Do you really think that Titanic passengers died because they chose not to retreat to lifeboats? You might want to look into finding some of those citations for your theory, as it has some merit but breaks down in the details.
The rivet story is not about lifeboats. There were not enough lifeboats and nothing in the ship's design or construction would have changed that, barring a design that called for more lifeboats (but that wouldn't have fit in with common practice of the time). The rivet story is about keeping some part of the ship above water long enough for help to arrive before the people who were deprived of a lifeboat died of hypothermia, fatigue, and/or drowning.
Very true. I think people should just move on and let some of us have honest political careers.
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USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
The Olympic, five hundred miles off, make perhaps twenty-four knots in a pinch.
There were very few vessels that could match her speed. Carpathia, sixty miles off, could be pushed to fifteen - a nightmare four hour run through the arctic ice fields.
The North Atlantic is a mighty big ocean. Titanic had other problems.
The 24 hour radio watch was not standard. Titanic had a 500 KHz 5 KW Marconi spark-gap transmitter with a nominal range of 250 nm. She had far greater reach at night - but much would depend on the relative orientation of antennas and so on.
The best you could hope for in a receiver would be a very early vacuum tube design.
But operation burnt through your stock of tubes very quickly.
The Marconi Wireless Installation in R.M.S. Titanic
Titanic's watertight compartments did not reach full height, as one flooded over, the next would begin to fill.
She was going down by the head, not on the level, which meant that evacuation was going to become progressively more difficult and dangerous.
It was a sloppy business from the start.
Titanic's crew poorly trained - if trained at all - in the use of her new and more efficient davits.
Maybe a new investigation into the rivets could be worked into the plot of this movie.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=vD4OnHCRd_4
Isn't this funny that this came out right after the 96th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic. I wonder what will be released on the 100th in 4 years?
Do you do reenactments? How does that work? One guy broadcasts SOS and nobody listens to him for one hour?
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
on the Titanic?
You may be entitled to financial compensation.
Call the law offices of Dewey, Cheatem, and Howe for a free financial consultation.
Call Now!
The metal used on the titanic would not even be good enough to make chain link fences out of today.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
What were the names of the companies involved and how can the families of people that were on the voyage sue them.
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No, physics determined that the iceberg would strike the bow, since it was moving forward.
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... come back and mod this troll down Jack!
PS. My wife gets mad when I replay this scene and imply that Kate Winslet is actually prying his fingers up, not holding on to him.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
My future mother-in-law was telling me one day how her great-grandfather had moved to Belfast from Scotland to get a job helping build the Titanic.
He was sometimes mocked for his part in building the legendarily failed ship, so he would point out that he was in fact an electrician, and the lights were still on when it sank.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
thanks Slashdot for the story
Why is it that people who use SI (outside of the US anyway) insist on quoting forces in kilograms? Europeans get all over us Americans about using 'imperial' units, ... but at least we don't go around say things like the rivets broke at force of 3200 slugs! Geez.
Who owns the sea ice?
... a desert country.... like Iran.... shepherd a huge iceberg down from the artic and bring it home?
There's been talk before of bringing icebergs to parched countries - relatively little of the ice would melt on the voyage down, and you could "process" the ice at the destination. Sure, it could be tough to tow it, but that just takes a bit of naval power and technology.
Can some country..... say,
One iceberg may not matter so much, but if one country did it, wouldn't all the parched countries get in line and start doing it?
How would that affect global climate?
No, the Apollo space capsule was built by North American Aviation.... The LEM was built by Grumman, and it WAS a real spaceship. http://myweb.accessus.net/~090/as13tow.html
I read a cool book, "Why Things Break" by Mark Eberhardt, in which he specifically mentions the Titanic disaster. The short version: Plates made for the Titanic in open-hearth furnaces in Scotland contained extra sulpher, which increases iron's brittleness. At the low temperatures of the North Atlantic the energy transferred in collision (which would have ruptured only a few feet and couple of watertight compartments in a warmer environment) was enough to make the rupture "run", thus causing a larger leak. Perhaps the same can be said for the rivets; they were not "substandard" by the standards of the day, but were not sufficient for the untested conditions they were exposed to. The books' entire section on embrittlement is fascinating.
"The mind works quicker than you think!"
I wonder how many other ships were 'hit' by icebergs? ;)
The ship on the first ride with the richest people in the world sunk by iceberg? don't be ridiculous...
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My book is very different from the CSI/Forensic book on the sinking, as it focusses on a ship ("The Californian") that was nearby and reputedly saw the Titanic's distress rockets. 24 hour wireless watch was not mandatory, and the operator had gone to sleep for the night. The watch officers kept a patient watch of the other ship, observing her rockets going off at intervals, and sending messages down to their snoozy captain in his cabin below the bridge. Apart from a few cursory questions, the captain went back to sleep and was not roused until well after the disaster, when the wireless operator was also awakened.
Meanwhile, on the Titanic, a ship was seen off the port bow, and distress rockets were sent up. Watching the other ship through binoculars, the officers on the doomed liner noticed no response and the effort to communicate with the other ship was given up.
The Californian tried to help the next day, but it was too late and she resumed her passage to Boston. On arrival there, the Captain, Stanley Lord, gave a highly over-exaggerated story of his rescue attempt, but there were was mention of rockets, until a couple of indignant crew members told their stories to the press and relatives on-shore. The cat was out of the bag, and both US and UK inquiries in 1912 declared that the Californian had seen the Titanic and had ignored her calls for help. Lord denied this to his dying day, always believing that there were two ships in the area that night; one seen by the Titanic, and the other by the Californian. Re-appraisals in 1965, 1968 and 1990-92 have only served to muddy the waters.
My ebook discusses the confusing testimony and how it altered over time; why did Lord and his officers' attempt to disguise the truth of the matter?; why did one of the Californian's watch officers declare that the ship he saw was steaming away, at a time when the Titanic was stopped, and why did he lie about the rockets?; why did the other officers give blatantly untruthful accounts under oath?; why did authors in recent years use dishonest tactics to exonerate Lord by suppression of evidence and legal practises?; and, the ultimate question- could Captain Lord have saved any of the 1500 victims at all? The answer may surprise you.
See my website at http://www.paullee.com/book_details.php for more details.
My web domain.
That, and a f**king great big iceberg!
That may have contributed.
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You mean to tell me that someone spent all this time and money to research rivets? Let me be the one of many that say "WHO GIVES A CRAP!". The titanic sunk decades ago, the tragedy has passed. Sure its interesting to delve into the past and dig deeper but isn't our future in need of a bit more focus? Rivets.... wtf.
This information is nowhere near being "news". As another reader stated, it has been know for several years. I saw the same documentary that was mentioned.
Wait -- the builders of the Titanic are still in business? They must've had more powerful friends than Bear Stearns...
Geeks like to think that they can ignore politics, you can leave politics alone, but politics won't leave you alone.-rms
I'm guessing the true story was probably far worse because of the low operating temperatures of the rivets at the time. Common steels/irons exhibit a transition to brittle failure (depending on many things including alloying and impurity levels), and given the description of how dirty this iron was it is very likely that the energy required to pop the heads off of the rivets in sub-32F water would mean that the real failure loads could have been far lower than the 4000kg recorded -- perhaps a factor of 2, and nothing I've found online so far indicates whether they did the testing at temperature or not.