Possible Key to Titanic’s Doom

Since I was a child I have always been interested in the Titanic and its tragic story. I think I first became aware of Titanic watching the old 1953 movie "Titanic," starring Clifton Webb, Barbara Stanwyck and a very young Robert Wagner (who I thought at the time was VERY hot). Since then, I have read countless books on the ship's sinking, including survivor accounts. After Robert Ballard discovered the wreck in 1985, the first installment of artifacts from Titanic were brought into Norfolk and unloaded at the Waterside slip. Since an attorney friend of mine was representing the salvagor, I got to go and see some of the materials and had the members of the underwater team autograph my copies of "A Night to Remember" and "The Night Lives ON" by Walter Lord. Later, many of the items were dislayed at Norfolk's Maritime Museum, including a large section of the hull, and my son and youngest daughter wentt ot he exhibition.

Because of this long time interest, I found today's news of a new theory of why the ship's hull may have failed in the collision with the iceberg interesting. The theory seems to make sense and would eplain why the glancing blow to the ship caused such a long area of flooding. Here are story highlights:

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Researchers have discovered that the builder of the Titanic struggled for years to obtain enough good rivets and riveters and ultimately settled on faulty materials that doomed the ship, which sank 96 years ago Tuesday. The builder’s own archives, two scientists say, harbor evidence of a deadly mix of low quality rivets and lofty ambition as the builder labored to construct the three biggest ships in the world at once — the Titanic and two sisters, the Olympic and the Britannic. For a decade, the scientists have argued that the storied 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. More than 1,500 people died.

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Now, historians say new evidence uncovered in the archive of the builder, Harland and Wolff, in Belfast, Northern Ireland, settles the argument and finally solves the riddle of one of the most famous sinkings of all time. The company says the findings are deeply flawed. Apart from the archives, the team gleaned clues from 48 rivets recovered from the hulk of the Titanic, modern tests and computer simulations. They also compared metal from the Titanic with other metals from the same era, and looked at documentation about what engineers and shipbuilders of that era considered state of the art.

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Many of the rivets studied by the scientists — recovered from the Titanic’s resting place two miles down in the North Atlantic by divers over two decades — were found to be riddled with high concentrations of slag. A glassy residue of smelting, slag can make rivets brittle and prone to fracture. “Some material the company bought was not rivet quality,” said the other author of the book, Timothy Foecke of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, a federal agency in Gaithersburg, Md.

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For its part, Harland and Wolff, after its long silence, now rejects the charge. “There was nothing wrong with the materials,” Joris Minne, a company spokesman, said last week. Mr. Minne noted that one of the sister ships, the Olympic, sailed without incident for 24 years, until retirement. (The Britannic sank in 1916 after hitting a mine.) “It’s fascinating,” said Tim Trower, who reviews books for the Titanic Historical Society, a private group in Indian Orchard, Mass. “This puts in the final nail in the arguments and explains why the incident was so dramatically bad.”

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The Titanic had every conceivable luxury: cafes, squash courts, a swimming pool, Turkish baths, a barbershop and three libraries. Its owners also bragged about its safety. In a brochure, the White Star Line described the ship as “designed to be unsinkable.”