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 and that better rivets would have probably kept the Titanic afloat long enough for rescuers to have arrived before the icy plunge, 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 rivets brittle and prone to fracture. To test whether this extra slag weakened the rivets scientists commissioned a blacksmith to make rivets to the same specifications that were used to join 1in steel plates such as those in the hull of the Titanic. When the plates were bent in the laboratory, the rivet heads popped off at loads of about 4,000kg. With the right slag content, they should have lasted until a load of about 9,000kg. 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 as well."
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There are a lot of reasons why the Titanic sank. Mainly, it was the iceberg. There were a lot of reasons why so many people perished. Mainly it was the cold water and the fact there was not enough lifeboats. Please, let the dead rest in peace.
It was the Iceberg. (Score:1)