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Weak Rivets May Have Sped Sinking of Titanic
Posted by
kdawson
on Tue Apr 15, 2008 02:50 AM
from the no-relation dept.
from the no-relation dept.
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."
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Titanic (2007) (Score:5, Funny)
If only it had gone down faster.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
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Re:Titanic (2007) (Score:4, Funny)
'It would have been cheaper to lower the Atlantic'
What a cast-iron star that man was :)
Parent
Re:Titanic (2007) (Score:4, Funny)
Ah, one of the two highlights of the movie.
The other, of course, was Leonardo Di Caprio freezing to death.
Back to the topic at hand, though: I remember a documentary I saw right about the time Titanic came out, which listed faulty screws as a possible cause of the disaster. So what's exactly new here?
Parent
How is this new information? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:How is this new information? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Re:How is this new information? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:How is this new information? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:How is this new information? (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:How is this new information? (Score:5, Interesting)
If the rivets were such inferior quality why did the Olympic sail without problems (including being rammed by the cruiser HMS Hawke) for 24 years?
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Perhaps the Titanic had one faulty batch of rivets which just happened to be in the wrong place. Perhaps the shipbuilders thought they could save a bit of money.
Re:How is this new information? (Score:5, Insightful)
Step 2: Crap that was expensive.
Step 3: Cut costs when building the Titanic.
Step 4: Profit
oh and... hit by a mine? I can easily explain how the Britannic went down...... it was hit by a freaking mine!!!
Parent
Re:How is this new information? (Score:5, Insightful)
But the damage might of been survivable if a number of features had worked or been used. It was noted that a number of doors couldn't be sealed. Damage to two watertight compartments I can understand, maybe even three, but a couple more compartments remaining water tight might of made a huge difference. Another thing noted was that the nurses aboard had opened most of the portholes to ventilate the wards. If those had been closed, it would have slowed things as well.
Still, they did manage to get everyone off the ship, though there were casualties from boats launched without authorization that got hit by the propellors.
I do like your steps 1-4, they do make sense. Note: The Iceberg might of been the primary cause of the loss of the titanic, but I'll view it like a car and crash safety standards - sure, a crash isn't normal operating procedure, but safety in a crash is a required design measure for cars. Sturdy rivets not only increase the life of the ship, they also help it survive damage - whether that allows the ship to be saved like the USS Cole, or simply keeps it above water long enough to be evacuated.
Parent
Re:How is this new information? (Score:5, Insightful)
Perhaps precisely because it sailed without problems ? That is, it never ran into situation where the strength of the rivets might be tested.
It's similar to how most people who don't use seatbelts don't die in traffick accidents. It's a risk-increasing factor, not an automatic death sentence. It only becomes the latter when an accident happens.
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Re:How is this new information? (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:How is this new information? (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Parent
Old news? (Score:4, Informative)
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 saw a special on Discovery about this (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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Re:I saw a special on Discovery about this (Score:4, Insightful)
Incidentally, I feel the same way about the current trend to snob companies that can be traced back to the days of slavery, and connections in the trade of. Especially when the connection is that a Bank bought out the assets of a failing bank back in the day, that had in the past bought out a bank that merged with a company that made loans for the purchase of slaves(not to mention homes, farm equipment, etc...). The final bank didn't even exist until after the civil war. Yes, slavery is and was wrong, but after a certain point we need to let it go.
Parent
26 April 1999 (Score:5, Informative)
"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. [jhu.edu]
-- Johns Hopkins University Gazette, 26 April 1999
So it _was_ the rivets... (Score:3, Interesting)
Madness I say. (Score:3, Funny)
Now...if we can start second-guessing some more disasters, we can really get the lawsuits going.
I also saw a special on Discovery about this... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I also saw a special on Discovery about this... (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Yeah, and I bet the Queen of England was in it too...
What is the fascination with the Titanic? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:What is the fascination with the Titanic? (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:What is the fascination with the Titanic? (Score:5, Insightful)
1. Schadenfraude: the immense hubris of the builders and operators of the Titanic were key factors in the loss of the ship. Stories where supreme arrogance is dealt a blow by nature are always fascinating to people.
2. A grand supposedly unsinkable ship sinking on her first voyage.
3. This accident prompted a sea change (pun intended) in maritime safety practices.
From an accident investigation standpoint, it is also the classic demonstrator of the accident chain. Many maritime and aviation accidents consist of a long chain of direct events that occur over a considerable period of time, and if any of the links been broken, the accident wouldn't have occurred.
Parent
wikipedia is your friend. (Score:3, Informative)
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 [wikipedia.org]
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)
Look on the bright side... (Score:4, Funny)
Why is the ship-builder hesitating to claim such progress?
Denial (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Denial - When do we forgive & forget? (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Denial (Score:5, Interesting)
Jen didn't know if all of the rivets were made of poorer-quality iron. She only had 48 to test (they're expensive to retrieve). I have no idea how those rivets were distributed about the ship. A statistician might be able to tell you how confident you can be with 48 sample out of population of hundreds of thousands. However, IIRC every single rivet tested was of the poorer quality.
I believe the rivets were pulled out of the Titanic itself. Even if they were gathered from the ocean floor around the wreck, I think it's highly unlikely that someone happened to dump bad rivets from the early 1900s in the middle of the North Atlantic right where the Titanic sunk.
Both Jen's grad-school research and TFA mention higher quality iron being used in ship rivets normally. While it was more difficult to test for slag in rivets 100 years ago, they were very good at knowing how to make better (read: stronger) iron, because ultimately you can just test the iron to failure and see how strong it was. Jen looked at iron from other structures built around the same time as the Titanic and they were definitely of a higher quality (I think TFA mentioned the Brooklyn Bridge).
Finally, slag doesn't grow in iron because they sit on the ocean for 100 years. These rivets are roughly an inch in diameter, and Jen cut them in half and looked inside them. There was corrosion on the outside, sure, but the impurities that are at issue here are embedded in the rivets. IIRC, slag is almost a glassy substance. It has different mechanical properties than iron, leading to stress concentrations in the iron surrounding chunks of it. These stress concentrations result in the iron failing under less overall stress than it would have otherwise.
Parent
It would have sank even with perfect rivets! (Score:5, Informative)
it would not have changed the casualty count (Score:3, Interesting)
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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Like anything, it might of made quite a bit of difference. Given a couple hours a dedicated crew might of been able to start fashioning crude lifeboats out of the very fixtures and boat superstructures. They might of been able to get some patches in(ala USS Cole) that delayed or even stopped the sinking.
Maritime riveting (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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As any fule kno, the Catholics are the terrorists in Belfast :P
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Re:It was terrorism (Score:5, Funny)
All the more reason to attack them now, if they get their hands on ice making technology we are sunk! Better use nukes to make sure we melt any secret bergs they have hidden in the desert.
Parent
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Re:Who caes about rivets... (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re:super ridiculous analysis and conclusion (Score:4, Informative)
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
Parent
Re:Normalcy in the first half of 1900's (Score:5, Interesting)
I wonder how many of those ships made in the early supply of Britain survived more than a couple crossings before soaking up a torpedo? Need to find some statistics on how many ships simply sank due to defect vs attack.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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 a