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Original Title: What Really Sank the Titanic: New Forensic Discoveries ASIN B002BTT0MM
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What Really Sank the Titanic Kindle Edition | Pages: 274 pages
Rating: 3.64 | 75 Users | 12 Reviews

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Title:What Really Sank the Titanic
Author:Jennifer Hooper McCarty
Book Format:Kindle Edition
Book Edition:First Edition
Pages:Pages: 274 pages
Published:March 1st 2009 by Kensington Publishing Corp (first published March 1st 2008)
Categories:History. Nonfiction. Science

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As you now know, I'm on a Titanic kick this summer. I really enjoyed Titanic's Last Secrets, and have decided to follow up the theories explored in that book by reading a few more books exploring OTHER theories about what doomed the big boat. McCarty and Foecke developed this book from McCarty's PhD dissertation, which Foecke supervised, exploring the metallurgical stresses of a number of elements on the Titanic. It's a pretty detailed book that dives heavily into the science of metallurgy and ship engineering. It's accessible to the educated reader, but written in a pretty dry science voice (including the lame third person descriptions of the authors actions). The storytelling could be better, but the science is really interesting. Here's my quick summary:

The people making the Titanic used shitty rivets in the bow and stern. These rivets failed when the iceberg hit, and the ship sank extra fast.

Here's a bit more detail for you:

The root of the whole mystery, for those of you, dear readers (Hi Andrew!), not acquainted with the nits being picked in the story of the Titanic, goes to why the ship sank so quickly. It shouldn't have sunk as quickly as it did. There's also the question of how high the ship's stern rose out of the water before the ship broke in half. (The finding at the hearings in 1912 was that the iceberg pierced the side of the ship in six compartments, causing more flooding than the design of the ship could handle, and that the ship broke at a high angle, if at all.)

The book explores two questions. First, it considers the "brittle hull" theory, which came from some forensic tests in the 1990s whose authors argued that the Titanic sunk because its hull was too brittle in freezing temperatures and must have cracked/shattered when it hit the iceberg. This theory depends on two things: first, the iceberg would have had to be strong enough to shatter the iron across six compartments; second, the iron in the front section of the hull would need to have been shitty iron.

McCarty and Foecke reject this theory on two grounds. First, they argue that the evidence given by eyewitnesses precludes a collision with the kind of force necessary to shatter iron plates. The witnesses described scraping sounds and some shaking of the ship, but nothing like the kind of lurching that one would feel if the ship hit, say, an underwater island or something similarly immobile. Second, they explain that the test used to determine the iron's brittleness used both the wrong speed of collision and the wrong type of test. (It's all very technical and I can't explain in any more detail here.) It also relied on a single piece of the ship's hull which had indeed fallen away during the sinking or in the years since, thus making it "self-selected" as a failing piece. Foecke's tests on other bits of the hull reveal that the ship was well within engineering standards of the day, and plenty strong enough to withstand impact without shattering.

The authors dispatch this argument quickly, leaving most of the book to discuss the rivets. McCarthy and Foecke develop a convincing argument that the rivets in the front section of the Titanic were of substandard quality and were probably a significant factor in the fast foundering. They examine witness testimony, use microscopic analysis of samples from the ship, and use laboratory testing of their hypotheses to make their argument. Their points:

* To save money, the bow and stern fifths of the ship were made with wrought iron instead of steel. These sections were riveted by hand using wrought iron rivets. Steel rivets had to be set with a hydraulic machine, which wouldn't fit in the narrow spaces at the bow and stern.
* The regulatory authorities were no longer requiring that batches of wrought iron be tested for quality the way that steel was. Harlan and Wolff purchased their wrought iron rivets in small quantities from foundries all over the U.K., many of which had to step up production to meet orders which thus meant less-experienced iron "puddlers" would be making the iron. Inexperienced puddlers often produced iron vastly weaker than the industry expected.
* Hand-hammered rivets bent at the head, meaning that the rivet was weakest at the junction of the head and the shaft. Because of the vast numbers of rivets being set, inexperienced teams were often put to work earlier than they should have been. The errors they made weren't always detectable to rivet inspectors who followed the teams.
* Rivets are designed to hold against shearing pressure, in which consistent pressure is applied against both plates and the tension goes sideways. When the iceberg hit, the pressure was all against one plate, stressing the rivets in the wrong way.

All of this adds up to the conclusion that when the iceberg hit in the front section of the ship (the wrought iron part), some of these weak rivets failed. When they failed, that added up to 20% more stress to the rivets around them which would then also fail, causing more to fail. What would have been a minor leak, then, "zippered" open along the seams and let WAY too much water into the ship.

McCarthy and Foecke make a convincing case, stopping to dismiss other claims as unfounded or poorly argued. It's an interesting, but dense, read.

Rating Epithetical Books What Really Sank the Titanic
Ratings: 3.64 From 75 Users | 12 Reviews

Assessment Epithetical Books What Really Sank the Titanic
This was way over my head. Kind of boring. It would have been nice to speak to average people.

Being a Titanic buff, I'm intrigued with anything new about the sinking. This book had some interesting tidbits and speculations, but I got kind of lost in all the technological terms and theories. I did learn a few new things, however - some not so savory, like the indiscriminate and heinous pillaging of artifacts that has taken place at the site since it's discovery and the frenetic desire for everyone to make a buck off Titanic - things you don't read or hear about often. Also, despite the

This book looked interesting at first, but the "information" revealed in the book is nothing new at all to people who have studied the Titanic, her sinking, and her wreck. I was extremely disappointed in this book.

Too many technical terms in it for me. I don't know or care the first thing about the iron, other than that the rivets were shitty.

Let me preface this by saying I grew up near a steel town (Pueblo, CO) and thought I knew a decent amount about the process of making steel.Which, to be fair, I did, but I also learned a lot from this book. My youngest son is fascinated by the wreck of the Titanic and has always been curious as to why the ship sank. Well, this book uses modern forensic techniques to analyze the three main scenarios that have arisen as to why the ship sank - (1) A big gash, (2) brittle steel, (3) the rivets

As you now know, I'm on a Titanic kick this summer. I really enjoyed Titanic's Last Secrets, and have decided to follow up the theories explored in that book by reading a few more books exploring OTHER theories about what doomed the big boat. McCarty and Foecke developed this book from McCarty's PhD dissertation, which Foecke supervised, exploring the metallurgical stresses of a number of elements on the Titanic. It's a pretty detailed book that dives heavily into the science of metallurgy and

A little bit technical in places but none the less being a Titanic buff I enjoyed reading this.