Weak Rivets May Have Sped Sinking of Titanic 296
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."
Titanic (2007) (Score:5, Funny)
If only it had gone down faster.
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Ahem, unless there's been another Titanic film of exactly the same length made since, I believe you're referring to the 1997 Titanic [wikipedia.org]. Don't feel too bad though, it's only the highest grossing film of all time...
Re:Titanic (2007) (Score:4, Funny)
'It would have been cheaper to lower the Atlantic'
What a cast-iron star that man was :)
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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?
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It's still perfectly current English.
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The sinking of the Titanic may not seem relevant after nearly a century, but it is still a fascinating study on preventable catastrophes and engineering processes. The technology involved may change, but people do not.
Compare the Titanic to the Challenger shuttle. Replace faulty rivets with faulty O-rings. Compare the hubris of Harland and Wolff ("unsinkable") to NASA management ("the probability of failure is necessarily less than 1 in 10,000") Both were high-pressure, high-publ
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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.
Re:How is this new information? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:How is this new information? (Score:5, Funny)
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?
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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!!!
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.
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.
Re:How is this new information? (Score:5, Informative)
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Obviously not much wrong with the rivets then?
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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.
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Many Merchant vessels used during WWII are also believed to have been lost in the Atlantic because of the same low grade steel used to speed construction. During the way, at least it was a
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.
Yeah (Score:2)
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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
It was terrorism (Score:2, Funny)
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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.
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)
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Yeah, and I bet the Queen of England was in it too...
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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.
I hate to be the one to have to tell you this, but I drew the short straw...
We actually changed the station to The Food Channel and you were watching Emeril. Sorry, we were hoping for the outcome to be strangely confusing, not strangely enlightening as it were.
Also, that wasn't LSD; we sold you pieces of notebook paper that had accidentally been left underneath a leaking car battery.
Not just the real thing (Score:2)
What is the fascination with the Titanic? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:What is the fascination with the Titanic? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Hubris (Score:2)
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As for the Dona Paz, I can only guess that the rich and famous of the Titanic combined with the hubris of it's builders has made it more famous than the Don
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MV Joola capsized near Gambia in 2002, with 2002, killing at least 1863 people.
And there there is MV Dona Paz. After a collision (and subsequent fire) in the Philippines in 1987 it sank, officially killing 1565 people (titanic was 1517), but the true number is likely way over 4000.
Of course those are forgotten as soon as the media has another "trag
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)
It killed off the old money elite. (Score:2)
Global warming (Score:2, Funny)
Look on the bright side... (Score:4, Funny)
Why is the ship-builder hesitating to claim such progress?
Normalcy in the first half of 1900's (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
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.
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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.
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Titanic was real? (Score:2)
Just kidding... but I wonder how long it will be until this is a common reaction?
It would have sank even with perfect rivets! (Score:5, Informative)
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One would expect that with stronger rivets the hole would have been smaller, in which case the pumps would have been able to keep up. Icebergs don't just punch nice round holes in the steel plate...
A.
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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.
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Weren't the first survivors picked up by another ship roughly two hours after the Titanic sank ?
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.
Breaking news on slashdot just in... (Score:2)
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.
It's news because this is the 95th anniversary (Score:2)
Obsession... (Score:2)
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Which one? Pick one!
The might-have-beens (Score:3, Interesting)
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 [marconigraph.com]
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.
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As any fule kno, the Catholics are the terrorists in Belfast :P
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Who knows, had it been built to spec, perhaps the ship would had fared better in the clash.
Re:Who caes about rivets... (Score:4, Funny)
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Carmakers don't claim their cars are un-totallable.
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Testing materials, etc (Score:2)
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Here you can read thier definitive history
why try to assign blame now? (Score:2)
aother great British fuck up .. (Score:2)
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 [wikipedia.org]
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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
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br? Then again the African Queen sunk so maybe not so much.
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Yes, but they were substandard even for the rivets of the time. They've even found documentation stating such.
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Hence the word SPED
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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