Brittle Rivets Might Have Doomed Titanic
Text Reproduced from USA Today

The luxury liner Titanic, the biggest ship of its day, may have gone to its depths because of some of its smallest parts: its rivets.

Researchers say two wrought-iron rivits slavaged from the ship were said to contain high concentrations of slag, which would have made it dangerously brittle. Slag is the residue left over from smelting metallic ores.

"It is strongly suspect they are the reasons for why the ship took on the damage it did," says William Garzke, a navel architect in Arlington, who heads a team of experts in investigating the disaster.

The 46,000-ton RMS Titanic was put together by about 3 million rivits that secured its steel beams and plates. Each rivet was an inch in diameter and 2 to 3 inches long.

If those rivets were unable to hold the plates toether after the ship struck an iceberg in the North Atlantic on April 14, 1912, on its maiden voyage, from England to New York. The iceberg cut six slits in the Titanic's hull and the boat broke apart. It sank in 2.5 miles of water, and 1,523 people died.

The impact was strong enough to shear the heads off the two rivets leading Garzke to suspect the rivets had popped out of place, allowing water to rush in between the seams.

The force was like a 30-foot wave hitting you at 30 mph," he says.

Metallurgical analysis done at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Gaithersburg, MD, shwed that the rivets had a higher slag content than has been found in other ships of that era.

That doesn't necessarily mean Titanic's workmanship was shoddy, Garzke says, "the materials used on the Titanic were the very best available at the time. It;s just that quality control in 1912 isn't what iti is today and the metallurgy of that day isn't what we know it to be now."

George Tulloch, president of RMS Titanic in New York City, the company that is raising parts of the ship, says more rivets need to be studied. The two rivets studied must have been above the water line, he says, because they had heads. All the rivets below the water line were "blind rivits" with smoothed heads.

You might say we've got a suspect, but we need to do more testing," he says. The company plans to retrieve more rivets in August and have them tested in September.