TITANIC THEORY IS TESTED WITH YORKSHIRE HELP


Wrought iron specialist makes duplicates of suspect rivets used in doomed ship's construction for TV programme
Chris Benfield - 18 September 2006

FOR nearly 100 years, the blame for the sinking of the Titanic has been split between the iceberg and the man who sailed into it. But tomorrow night, a television documentary made with the help of a Yorkshire blacksmith will argue that faulty workmanship was another factor.

If some of the three million rivets holding the vast ship together had been stronger, the ship might have stayed afloat long enough for a full rescue operation, according to an episode in the series Seconds From Disaster, which will be screened on the National Geographic digital channel at 9 pm tomorrow.

When the ship was built by Harland & Wolff, in Belfast, between 1909 and 1911, it was pulled together mainly with steel rivets, fitted by machine. But the machine was cumbersome and parts of the hull were finished with old-fashioned iron rivets, which are easier to work by hand.

National Geographic found experts in ship construction who were surprised at the damage caused by a glancing blow against an iceberg and metallurgists who suggest that the iron rivets would have torn too easily – especially if they were contaminated with slag.

The programme makers got duplicates of the suspect rivets made by the last British specialist in wrought iron, 57-year-old Chris Topp, who runs forges at Tholthorpe, near York, and Carlton Husthwaite, near Thirsk.

He said yesterday: "I don't know much about the theory the programme is exploring. Personally, I would have thought that running a liner into an iceberg at 27 knots would have been enough to do the damage. I just told them how I would make the rivets – gave them the specifications in metallurgical terms – and they checked against what had been used at the time and said okay."

The programme includes a stress experiment which apparently shows that the iron rivets would have failed where steel would have held.

More than 1,500 of the Titanic's 2,223 passengers died when the ship sank on her way to New York, on her maiden voyage, in 1912, two hours and 40 minutes after hitting an iceberg. The wreck was discovered in 1985 and the ship's construction, and the way it broke up, have since been explored in detail. The sinking stunned the world because technologists had come to think that steel ships were equal to anything the natural world could test them with.

Six years before the Titanic disaster, the captain of a similar ship, Edward J Smith, told reporters: "I cannot conceive of any vital disaster happening to this vessel. Modern shipbuilding has gone beyond that."

And the White Star Line boasted in its promotional material: "The science of shipbuilding… has now reached to a degree of perfection in its highest form which has put wind and water almost to defiance. It has not only robbed the sea of its terrors, but has imposed upon its unstable surface comforts and even luxuries of travel surpassing anything on land."

Because of this confidence, the Titanic had enough lifeboats for only half its passengers and crew.