What Really Sank the Titanic

[blueprofessor]

Fascinating discovery...

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/15/sc...in&oref=slogin




Best regards.

[CameronBornAndBred]

Interesting article. I never really knew about the other two ships. Only the RMS Olympic survived to the scrap yard, the Britannic also sank. The Olympic ran over another ship, however, and killed 7 people. Way to go Captains!

The Olympic actually ran over two ships, but one was on purpose. It was a German U-Boat, and was the only warship sunk by a merchant vessel in WW1.

[BD80]

The cold water (there were icebergs) would only have made the flawed rivets more brittle.

Interesting theory. It would be interesting to see what the plans called for in terms of number of rivets and the anticipated holding forces to be achieved.

If I recall, the Britannic is still divable near Greece (a trimix and lengthy decompression stops are needed) so rivets could be "sampled" to see what was being used. Shouldn't be too hard to see if the rivets met the specifications for the design.