![]() ![]() At the time, more than 2200 passengers and crew were aboard the Titanic for her maiden voyage to the United States. Titanic collided with a massive iceberg and sank in less than three hours. This maiden voyage was marketed as the ultimate luxury trip and thus was poised to make a lot of money.Causes and Effects of the Rapid Sinking of the Titanic This would have weakened the steel in the hull, which ultimately caused the downfall.īut if the ship was on fire, why did the company not cancel the trip? This area is where the coal for the ship’s engines was stored.Įngineers believe that the coal was actually on fire long before the ship failed. Researchers who came across a trove of photos from the construction of the ship noticed an interesting large black mark stretching 30 feet along the hull suspiciously close to the area where the iceberg pierced the ship. Some more evidence has recently come to light on how the Captain’s and his employer’s motives might have contributed to the tragedy. It was huge yet hidden, creating a lot of damage without initially appearing capable of doing so.Īlthough the iceberg is a convenient reason for why the Titanic sank while other ships did not, it does not explain the story in full. The black swan event of a giant iceberg could not easily be avoided. The rigid structure and giant size were enough to puncture the improperly engineered ship and to cause it to sink. Thus, the giant iceberg was mostly below the water, with a small chunk visible to the captain. Salty frozen water is not just large, but also hard and heavy, with the majority of its volume resting below the waterline. Water expands when it freezes, due to its molecules forming a lattice-like structure. The chemical properties of water easily explain this phenomenon. It just wasn’t your everyday event that a giant iceberg would ironically appear out of nowhere and sink a 25-ton ship. Everyone was making boats like the Titanic. It is easy to claim that no one was really to blame for the sinking of the ship. This accelerated the process of each compartment filling, and while was not the sole cause, it was the nail in the coffin for the Titanic. Once the first compartment was completely filled, the water spilled over the wall into the next compartment. It started to lean forward and to the right, meaning that the vertical walls protecting the other compartments were approaching 45-degree angles. This meant if the water did not go above that line, then the ship would be able to stay afloat.īut, since the iceberg had damaged the starboard side so drastically, as water began to rush into the compartments, the ship began to pitch. There were large walls called bulkheads that separated each of the compartments, but they only went 10 feet above the waterline. The engineers’ mistake was in the structure of the compartments. As you might guess, this turned out to not be true as 6 of the compartments flooded which ultimately caused the demise of the ship. The compartments were “watertight”, meaning if water got in, they would hold it all in and not allow the water to fill the other sections. Another engineering failure of the Titanic were its malfunctioning safety measures.Īlthough the makers of the ship implemented 16 watertight compartments in the hull of the ship to keep it afloat, they did not work as designed. The cold temperatures exacerbated the brittle quality of the metal so that when the large ship and the iceberg made contact, the iceberg punched a hole right through the steel. Although brittle steel appears strong, when impacted, it shatters instead of deforming. In this process, sulfur and phosphorus interact with the structure of the steel, making it more brittle. The steel that was used in the hull of the Titanic was most likely created in an acid lined open-hearth furnace. First, the steel used for the Titanic was not capable of withstanding the cold arctic water of the Atlantic which made it susceptible to damage. Although at the time, the materials and structure of the ship were considered state of the art, they had significant problems. One cannot contemplate the cause of the sinking of the Titanic, without considering its massive engineering failures. I argue that it was more than ignorance and the hand of God that led to the tragedy which killed 1500 passengers – it was the panic and greed of Captain Smith and the White Star Line Corporation. Attributing the sinking of the Titanic to engineering failures and force majeure wrongly perpetuates a narrative that no one was to blame for significant wrongdoing. ![]()
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