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Ninety-six years ago, on April 14, 1912, the supposedly unsinkable Titanic hit an iceberg in the Atlantic Ocean and went straight to the bottom of the sea. A study of the disaster and a new book, What Really Sank the Titanic by Jennifer Hooper McCarty and Timothy Foecke argues that substandard rivets used in the ship's construction was a main cause for its sinking.
Rivets?
While exploring the wreck, the expedition did not find a large gash, but rather narrow slits where the metal plates of the hull had split apart. This stood in contrast to what was previously suspected to be the cause of the wreck. Examining the iron rivets from the wreck,
McCarty and Foecke found high levels of slag, a byproduct of smelting. Slag, under pressure, can make iron brittle, and therefore weak.
The authors also noted that at the time the Titanic
was built, there weren't a whole lot of skilled riveters around so the work was substandard work. Approximately three million rivets were used in the
Titanic, which measured 882 feet 9 inches long and displaced 52,310 tons. At the same time, riveters were making the transition to steel rivets, which are much stronger than iron, but they were used only in the central hull, where stress was expected to be the greatest. Of course, the Titanic took its blow to the front, where the rivets were the weakest.
Had the rivets been stronger, some have speculated, rescue boats could have arrived in time to rescue passengers.
More than 1,500 people died in the shipwreck.
