I was watching one of those interminable “Titanic” documentaries, and the latest theory of the sinking us that the collision with the iceberg cracked the (brittle) hull plates, causing the massive leaks that sank the ship. Recently, someone found some rivets that came from the batch used to construct the ship, and subjected them to metallurgical testing-the tests found that the rivets were of very low-quality steel, and very weak.
My question: knowing that the White Star Line (controlled by J.P. Morgan) was a notoriously cheap outfit, is there any evidence that they pressured the shipbuilder (Harland & Wolf) to go cheap on the materials? Granted, steelmaking was not a refined science in 1909, and there was considerable variation from batch to batch. Would the Tiatanic have survived if her builders had used the best quality steel (rivets and plates) available in 1909? Did the official board of inquiry (held after the sinking) ever touch on this?
Incidentally, the White Star Line went into a big decline after WW1, and eventually merged with Cunard (its old rival)-was it a poorly run busines? Or was the failure the result of the big decline in immigration to N. America 9that began after the war)?
Undergraduate Engineering Review:
From The Minerals, Metals & Materials Society’s JOM article: The Steel and Conclusions:
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I think the issue is rivet quality. A ‘‘Must Read’’ before continuing thread:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/15/science/15titanic.html
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From what I’ve heard, the rivets were more of a factor than the plates.
Interesting question, to which I take the liberty of adding a related one: One of the issues with the Titanic were their waterproof compartments. The ship had regular watertight steel walls running across the hull regularly to divide the ship in a number of compartments along its length. The idea was that if there was a leak, only a limited number of compartments would be flooded, allowing the ship to remain afloat.
The problem was that the watertight divides didn’t go all the way up - because the iceberg tore up the hull over an extended length, several compartments were flooded at once, and the ship went down so deep that the water reached the end of the divides and spilled over to the next compartment, going on all the way to the rear.
I understand that these watertight compartments were not state of the art in 1912 and ships were not required or expected to have them, but still to me this seems like a major, and obvious, engineering flaw. How was that seen at the time - did people accuse the designers of the ship of having had a good idea but then executing it poorly or only half-heartedly?
It was not considered acceptable for passengers on a liner to have to ascend and descend stairs in order to get past a bulkhead. Also, passenger liners have large open areas that are unsuited to watertight bulkheads. Below decks in the non-passenger areas such inconveniences were not an issue, so the bulkheads were in place there. The issue was addressed in ‘Lord Mersey’s report’:
Page through the photo set in the NY Times article, which includes pics and descriptions of the iron rivets, black-smithed test rivets and test joints under stress. http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2008/04/14/science/041308Titanic_11.html
Important highlight: Don’t miss the part of the article I posted earlier that notes that plate separation (gashes) happens to end right where higher quality steel rivets started to be used in place of the iron ones on the bow.
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Note that Titanic’s sister ship the Brittanic had better bulkheads and still sank.
(though a lot more survived)
Brian