Who believes that the steel's high sulphur content made the ship's hull more brittle and therefore caused more damage? Being more brittle, the steel would tend to snap rather than just distort and be pushed in.

Due to the inferiority of the steel back then as compared to now, the cold indeed made it very brittle. The massive pressure exerted on it, by the iceberg though, I believe may have done quite a bit of damage even with steel today. That was quite a bit of pressure on the hull plates.


AJ

THANK YOU! I read something on this one time, but I couldn't remember the whole thing. I was trying to tell ppl about it but they wouldn't listen. yes I agree. the combination of cold and the brittle hull plates made her extremely sensitive, which in turn caused much more damage than normal. my dad said they took a peice of steel from the Titanic to do a littl expirament. they wanted to see the hull plate quality, so they took it (or a peice just like it. I can't remember) and took a 6-pound sledgehammer to it and it shattered like glass. I think it was a replica peice and they like soaked it in salt water for like a week or something and when they did then she shattered as if she had been a peice of glass

Even IF the sulphur content weekend the steel, which it may well have done, the Titanics hull was still only one inch thick, the ice-berg would still have penetrated it, she would still have sank.

one inch is kinda pathetic compared to what ships have today.

then again, they didn't expect hitting an iceberg of its size or any ice berg at all. Can't really blame them.

Indeed, and ships now adays have 2 or 3 layers, each layer maybe 1 inch thick in its self, but its progress and we take safety more seriously now. Lot of that is to do with lessons learned from the flawed Titanic.

exactly. a lot of the saftey precautions and feature that we have now are based from what the Titanic didn't have. Bell, u r right that since it was only an ich thick the berg still would've penetrated and we would be in the same position as we are right now. she still would've sunk

also another contribution to the sinking is the fire on April 10th that weakened and water tight bolt seals...that and the fact that the steel was brittle both would make i certain that the Titanic would have sunk in the event of a wreak or collosion with an ice berg....so in fact either way the titanic would have sunk when she hit....



you jump, i jump"--Leo di Caprio(as Jack Dawson in Titanic-1997)

Have any of you ever read "Ghosts of the Titanic" by Charles Pellegrino?

He states that the ship hit the iceberg with the force equal to lifting the Washington Monument like 10 times, and therefore, the subject of high sulphur is irrelevant because nothing could have stood up to that force, (not even modern titanium).

He also states that the visible iceberg damage (what is believed to be iceberg damage) looks not like shattered hullplates but long opened seams within the plates as well as a few punctures as if made by rocks in the ice.

He even stated that he saw one puncture about as big as a coffee mug that looked like someone hit the hull with a bazooka.

More relevant than sulphur content is the standards and guidlines in 1912 of metalogy. Iron silicate slag, or “slag” for short, is a substance that is a by-product of the process used to make wrought iron. It does not help to make the steel stronger; rather, it seems to help the iron keep a certain solid shape and structure. Slag seems to work much the same way as hairspray does on people’s hair. The hairspray helps to keep their hair in place, but it does not make the hair any stronger than it already is. It only helps to help their hair stay in a certain style. The same goes for slag: It only helps to help the iron retain a certain structure. However, the slag in the Titanic rivets were problematic in two ways. Firstly, there was an overabundance in slag in the rivets; they contained more than three times the amount of slag that normal, present-day, wrought iron would contain in its composition. While normal wrought iron contains about two to three percent of slag in its overall composition, the Titanic rivets were found to contain an average of 9.3 percent slag, plus or minus approximately 0.3 percent. Try reading:
http://members.aol.com/Slickric96/TEssay.html
or
http://www.baylor.edu/pr/news.php?action=story&story=34742