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."

Comments

How is this new information?

[Taelron]

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.

Re:How is this new information?

[Kredal]

Tag "oldnews"

The article states that the rivets were first talked about in 1998, but the shipbuilder disagreed. Since then, more people have looked at the rivets, and they have all said the same thing. Rivets were bad, they failed under pressure, and the ship sank. The only reason this is "news" is because they found corroborating evidence in the shipbuilder's old documents.

Re:How is this new information?

[Tsu Dho Nimh]

During 1912-13 the Olympic returned to Harland & Wolff for six months safety rebuilding. The double bottom was extended up the sides to the waterline, full height bulkheads were fitted, as were additional lifeboats.

Re:How is this new information?

[A nonymous Coward]

The Titanic had the extra bad luck of (1) hitting an iceberg which put extra stress on the rivets, (2) doing so in cold water which made the metal weaker, and (3) scraping the entire length of the hull against said iceberg. I don't know how Olympic was hit, but even if it was a sideways scrape, no ship can exert anywhere near the same sideways pressure as a big iceberg. The Olympic was also hit in a harbor where she could get back to help prety quickly. Titanic didn't sink immediately.

Re:How is this new information?

[mce]

Yes, but how many of the watertight compartments were damaged/flooded and which ones? Titanic had too many compartments damaged to stay afloat and the fact that these were all at the same end of the ship didn't exactly help either (tilting her up to the point where the water could overflow the bulkheads). My guess is Olymopic had less damaged/flooded compartments. That, plus the fact that Olympic was partly rebuilt after the Titanic disaster had exposed certain design defects in the class.

Re:How is this new information?

[A nonymous Coward]

The problem with the Titanic's watertight bulkheads, as I understand it, is that they were between the firerooms and only went up to the tops of firerooms; as the bow compartments took on water, it overflowed into the next compartment back, which accelerated the flow, and the second compartment overflowed into the third compartment, and so on until the ship went down by the bow.

But also remember that the very idea of water tight compartments was new. Sailing ships, for instance, were pretty much one big compartment. My old navy ship, USS Midway CV-41, was built in WW II, and I vaguely remember being told it had 4000 water tight compartments. Warships in 1912 had more compartmentation than commercial ships, but they were still pretty primitive. Not only do (and did) warships have more compartmentation than commercial ships, 1912 was still early in the game.

Old news?

[RuBLed]

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)

26 April 1999

[wombatmobile]

"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

Re:Titanic (2007)

[Rhapsody Scarlet]

Ahem, unless there's been another Titanic film of exactly the same length made since, I believe you're referring to the 1997 Titanic. Don't feel too bad though, it's only the highest grossing film of all time...

Denial

[Alioth]

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.

It would have sank even with perfect rivets!

[threaded]

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.

Re:super ridiculous analysis and conclusion

[mihalis]

So... you didn't actually read the article, did you?

Let's see : one particular ship only? No

No other ship had iron rivets? No

Iron rivets didn't fail elsewhere? No

Nobody noticed in 90 years? No

Ok that's enough.

As the article makes perfectly clear, iron rivets were already known to be more prone to failure if not made and inserted just right. Secondly steel rivets were already in use elsewhere and ... in the parts of the Titanic that the builders thought needed the strongest rivets. Thirdly the rivet theory is pretty old. This story points out new corroborating evidence from the builders own paperwork (e.g. they didn't buy the best grade iron for these rivets). All in all I recommend reading TFA.

Re:What is the fascination with the Titanic?

[Animedude]

The combination of glamour and a huge catastrophe definitely helped creating this incredible fascination. Because they eyes of the world were on that ship, the catastrophe is far more well-known than e.g. the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff, where over 9000 died. As for a larger civilian ship sinking, look up the Dona Paz (sunk 1987).

wikipedia is your friend.

[way2trivial]

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)