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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."
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.
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.
"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
As any fule kno, the Catholics are the terrorists in Belfast :P
One swallow does not a fellatrix make
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.
we'll never let go! Not until it freezes to death, at any rate..
which is totally what she said
And I thought that it was loose lips that sunk ships.
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 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.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Elementary, my dear Peeet: there was founded and reasonable assumption that monstrous iceberg (and captain too bold and stubborn to avoid it) was the only, and only needed culprit. None pointed a finger at the ship builder. Well, perhaps a little bit at "naive and idealistic" naval architects who "dared to insult the forces of nature" and deservingly failed, not unlike in the myth of Icarus.
Who knows, had it been built to spec, perhaps the ship would had fared better in the clash.
I often wonder why any car makers are still in business considering how many of their products fail spectacularly when driven into trees, stone walls, large pieces of concrete, and other vehicles.
I'm not going to change your sheets again, Mr. Hastings.
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!
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.
threadeds blog
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
... 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.
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
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.
"But remember, most lynch mobs aren't this nice." (H.Simpson)
-- Joe
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...
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
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.
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.
Discussions of metallurgy and engineering seem quite apropos for "news for nerds" to me.
Too many comments here about how things aren't really "nerdy" enough because it doesn't fit someone's particular ideal of what is nerdy. You aren't the final arbiter on what is or isn't news for nerds.
Don't like the articles being posted here, go to the firehose and mod them down or stop reading.