Titanic Tidbits

News and info ..................

Rivets Implicated in 'Titanic' Disaster.

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Timothy Foecke of the U.S. National Institute of Standards and

Technology February 10 reported that brittle rivets in the hull of the

Titanic ocean liner might have contributed to the ship's sinking after

colliding with an iceberg off the coast of Newfoundland, Canada, in

1912. Foecke said that a microscopic analysis of wrought-iron rivets

recovered from the British ship's wreckage found that they contained an

unusually high amount of slag. Excessive slag, a byproduct of the

smelting process, could weaken wrought iron.

Paul K. Matthias of Polaris Imaging Inc. in 1996 had used sonar to find

six openings in the Titanic's hull that appeared to be located on the

boundaries between metal plates fastened together by rivets. The

discovery drew researchers' attention to the rivets as a potential

source of weakness in the hull.