The world’s largest passenger liner, Titanic,
steams through the mid-Atlantic to America.
Over 2200 people are on board.
Iceberg, right ahead!
Then, disaster strikes.
Faster!
She fills rapidly with water and sinks into the icy ocean.
Over 1500 people are left to drown.
But why did so many die?
Was it human error? Or design flaw?
Now, using state-of-the-art forensic analysis
and a groundbreaking experiment,
we reveal a hidden weakness in the most famous ship in history.
Disasters don’t just happen.
They’re a chain of critical events.
Unravel the clues
and countdown those final seconds from disaster.
SECONDS FROM DISASTER S03E01 TITANIC SUBTITLE BY CHOCHANCUUDUC (HDVIETNAM)
Europe. France. Cherebourg.
April 10th, 1912.
It’s the golden age of the ocean liner.
In the last 10 years,
368 vessels have entered service on the Atlantic water flow.
Mauretania, flagship of the Cunard Line,
holds the speed record of 26 knots.
But now, a new kind of ship has entered the market:
The mighty Titanic.
At 269 meters long,
nearly 4 times the length a Boeing 747,
she’s the largest ship ever built,
and is just one of a fleet of 3 new giants.
With her sisters, Olympic and a still-to-be-launched Gigantic,
her owners, the White Star Line, hope to achieve a monopoly on the route
and drive all competitions out of business.
She has taken 3 strenuous years to create, here in Belfast, Ireland.
Put together in exactly the same way of this slightly smaller Olympic,
seen in this 1910 film.
She's robustly built,
ready for a long hard life in the stormy North Atlantic.
2000 sheets have immensely strong and flexible steel plates
covered the ship’s vast frame.
3 millions of steel and wrought-iron rivets hold it together.
8 lives were lost in her construction.
She is equipped with the latest safety features,
including 15 watertight bulkheads
connected by state-of-the-art electrically-controlled doors.
When finally finished,
her designers are so confident in the new ship.
They equipped her with just 20 lifeboats,
only enough for half the passengers and crew aboard.
The press, suggested by the hubris,
doubt her “unsinkable”.
The new ship is capable of 23 knots,
not as fast as the Cunard steamers,
but no ship on Earth can match her the sheer luxury.
For first class passengers, there’s a Grand Staircrase,
state rooms,
even a Turkish bath.
Wealthy newlyweds Mary and Lucian Smith
are returning home in style after their honeymoon.
Mary, pictured here in 1911,
a daughter of an influential congressman.
She’s a few week pregnant,
and can’t wait to get back to her folks.
I had such a lovely honeymoon in Europe,
but I miss my family and friends,
so Lucian booked us the passages back to New York.
Lucian is from Virginia,
and the son of an industrialist.
They paid 60 pounds for the first-class cabin,
equivalent to almost 4000 pounds today.
But like a modern airliner,
much of the profit comes from carrying large number of people at more reasonable prices.
On this her maiden voyage,
Titanic is just 2/3 full
with 1343 passengers aboard.
The cheapest third-class tickets cost 2 pounds one way, about 2 weeks wages for an unskilled worker.
At the helm of this magnificent machine
is the White Star Line’s premier captain,
Edward Smith.
Smith has commanded many White Star maiden voyages,
but this journey is to be his last.
The 62-year-old veteran of the high seas will retire on his return to England
to live with his wife in Hampshire.
Captain, temperature’s still dropping.
April 13th, 1912.
5 pm.
3 days into the voyage,
and the largest moving object ever created by man
is making 21 knots, even though there has been trouble below deck.
Hidden deep in the ship’s belly,
29 vast boilers generate 46000 horsepower.
58 men endlessly shovel coal into 159 furnaces.
Among them is senior fireman Fred Barrett from Liverpool.
He has 10 years experienced in the job,
and his expertise is being put to the test.
A fire has burned in coal bunker W for 12 days.
Barrett has been using the smoldering coal to feed the boilers
and the fire is finally out.
But part of bulkhead 5 could have been woved by the heat.
Given coal for the ship cost almost a hundred million pound in today’s money,
damaging her so soon would be a disaster.
April 14th, 1912.
5 pm.
4 days into the 7-day voyage,
it’s been decided to have bulkhead number 5 examine for damage on her returning turn to Belfast.
In the wireless room, just behind the bridge,
operator John Phillips and his assistant Harold Bride
work a 6-hour shift.
The two men operate the very latest technology,
a Marconi 5 kilowatt wireless.
Phillips sends and receives wealthy passengers’ messages from ship to shore,
via the relay station approximately 725 kilometers away,
in Cape Race, Newfoundland, Canada.
Phillips has also received 3 incoming reports from ships nearby,
all carrying a warning:
there’s ice ahead.
Each message goes to Bride, who takes it to the bridge.
- Would you take this to the bridge, please? - Yeah.
- Excuse me, sir.
- Something on the wireless for you, sir. - Thank you.
Smith has plotted his course with care.
In 1912, two main transatlantic shipping lanes exist.
The Northern track is the shortest,
but in the colder months, due to the threat of drifting ice,
the longer 320 kilometer Southern track is used.
This winter has been the warmest in 30 years,
and more ice has broken off the Arctic shelf than usual.
Even the Southern track is affected,
and Smith commands his course still further South.
Having taken this precaution,
he decides not to slow down.
At her current speed,
Titanic should arrive in New York right on schedule.
8:55pm.
Captain Smith stops at the bridge to check on progress,
then retires to bed.
10 pm.
On the bridge, First Officer Murdoch is now in charge of the ship.
His main concern is ice.
He knows that at this speed,
it can take just over 1.5 kilometers
to turn the ship by 45 degrees.
Above Murdoch’s head, 30 meters up in the crow’s nest,
lookouts Reginald Lee and Fred Fleet
have just started their 2-hour shift.
But they work without binoculars.
In a mix-up at Southampton,
an officer locked them away and left the ship,
with the key.
Tonight, there is no moon, only the stars illuminate the flat calm sea.
10:55 pm.
In the wireless room,
Phillips strains to hear faint messages from Newfoundland
when the operator on the nearby ship S.S. Californian
begins sending another message.
The interruption deafens Phillips.
Even though the messsage is about ice,
he fires back an angry response:
Get off the frequency,
I'm working Cape Race.
11:39 pm.
As Titanic steams ahead,
no one realizes that a tiny flaw in the greatest vessel ever built
will soon play its deadly part in the death of 1500 people.
Titanic, the largest ship ever constructed,
steams through the icy North Atlantic at 21.5 knots.
In the crow’s nest,
lookout Fred Fleet spots something in the darkness.
At first, he’s barely able to make out the dark shape against the horizon.
Then, about 450 meters away,
a vast iceberg looms out of the night.
- Hello. - Iceberg, right ahead!
Iceberg, right ahead, sir!
Fast turn!
Murdoch immediately orders the evasive action.
Faster!
Slowly, the Titanic turns to the left.
Below decks,
crewmen fight to cut power to the engines.
But stopping Titanic at this speed
will take over 800 meters.
It’s already too late.
There’s no way to avoid the massive wall of ice.
Faster, men!
Faster!
At 11:40 pm,
Titanic glances the iceberg on her starboard side.
Ship’s fireman Fred Barrett
witnesses first hand the damage caused by the collision.
I was talking with the second engineer,
this red light came on. So I shout it out.
Shutdown the dampers!
Suddenly, water sprays into the hull.
Water came through the ship’s side!
In another part of the ship, passengers hardly notice the collision.
It didn’t wake me up and afraid me.
In fact, I just went back to sleep.
But the impact wakes and concerns Captain Smith.
11:48 pm.
Captain Smith hurries through the bow of the ship.
As he looks over the gantry,
Smith sees the scale of the damage for the first time.
Reports quickly come in that the entire forward section of Titanic is taking on water.
In just 10 minutes,
the water is 4.5 meters deep.
Twelve midnight.
Smith is back on the bridge.
The ship’s crew give him shocking news:
5 compartments are flooded.
At this rate,
Titanic may have as little as 2 hours left.
In the boiler room,
engineers heroically man the pumps
to try and slow the sinking process.
Get it going!
Smith orders the ship’s officer to prepare the 20 lifeboats,
knowing there are not enough to save everyone on board.
If only there were a ship within 2 hour sailing time,
it could rescue the remaining 1500 passengers and crew.
In the steerage,
ship stewards order sleepy first-class passengers to lifeboats.
Many first-class passengers make their way outside,
most are completely unaware that Titanic has even struck an iceberg.
Mary and Lucian Smith are in the crowd.
There was no commotion, no panic,
no one seemed particularly frightened.
12:14 am.
In the wireless room,
Captain Smith orders Phillips to use the wire to call for help.
He must get someone to come to Titanic’s aid.
Despite the pumps, water now engulfs the mail room.
As time slips away,
Captain Smith makes the hardest decision of his life:
abandon ship.
He also knows he’s expected to go down with his vessel.
Ladies and gentlemen, if we can have women and children only towards the lifeboats…
On deck, officers immediately load the 20 lifeboats with women and children.
These children are not had life jackets on, so we get the life jackets on the children, please.
But many refuse to get in,
unwilling to lose their husbands behind.
12:25 am.
In the wireless room,
Phillips’ desperate efforts finally pay off.
Another steamer, S.S. Carpathia, esponds to his call.
But the ship is 93 kilometers away,
and even at top speed
would take almost 4 hours to reach them.
Where is the vessel that only 2 hours ago, warned them of ice?
Surely, she must hear Titanic’s plea for help.
Titanic is sinking.
As she takes on water,
second and third class passengers
try to find their way up to the lifeboats through the labyrinth of corridors.
Women and children already on deck, climb reluctantly into the lifeboats.
Women and children go to here, thank you.
Then there is a glimmer of hope.
An officer spots a ship just 10 kilometers away.
Could it be the Californian?
If she sees them, she can reach them in less than half an hour.
Smith immediately orders a distressed message by signal light.
12:40 am.
In the boiler room,
crewmen are working the pumps
when a bulkhead gives way without warning.
As passengers make their way along the deck,
the crew lower the first lifeboat into the water.
The lifeboat has a capacity of 65,
but leaves with 37 empty seats.
Lucian begs Mary to go without him.
Below deck, water rushes into the ship.
Hundreds of second and third class passengers
are lost in the maze of corridors,
and clamor, get to the lifeboats.
In the wireless room,
John Phillips and Harold Bride desperately continue to call for rescue,
knowing there’s a ship nearby
which could reach them faster than the Carpathia.
On deck, confusion turns to alarm.
Officers loading women and children into the lifeboats
have to hold back frightened men.
On the bridge, they get no reply from the mystery ship on the horizon.
Is it the Californian?
Why isn’t she responding?
They watch for lonely as her lights vanish into the inky black night.
1:30 am.
1 hour and 30 minutes after the collision,
Titanic claims its first victims.
5 clerks rescuing posts from flooded mail room
drown.
On deck, passengers begin to panic and run for the lifeboats.
Lucian Smith forces his pregnant wife to the crowd
and onto lifeboat 6.
He kissed me goodbye.
And as the boat was being lowered,
he told me to keep my hands in my pocket.
That was cold weather.
That’s last I saw him.
1:45 am.
The crew lower the last lifeboats into the water,
but over 1500 passengers and crew are still onboard Titanic.
As the bow of the ship sinks even deeper into the water,
many run in panic to the stern.
It’s every man, and the remaining women and children for themselves.
2 hours and 45 minutes after impact.
Titanic’s power finally fails
and the lights go out.
Oh my God!
Horrified, Mary Smith watches the seas swallow the ship
and her loved one.
Over 705 survivors drift in the freezing night,
not knowing if they’ll be safe.
At 4:30 am,
S.S. Carpathia finally comes to the rescue of the stranded passengers and crew.
As the survivors climb from the lifeboats onto the small ship,
it quickly becomes evident that there’s been a massive loss of life.
Among the 1500 dead
are Captain Edward Smith,
wireless operator John Phillips
and Mary Smith’s husband Lucian,
who’ll never see his unborn child.
In the following weeks,
the British and the American authorities hold the official inquries,
one in London and one in New York.
They ask over 41000 questions,
but neither come to a firm conclusion about what caused this terrible tragedy.
Nearly a century has passed since the sinking of Titanic,
but it still stands as one of the worst shipping disasters of all time.
The mystery of what happened that night
has captured people’s imagination for generations,
spawning countless books and films.
Today on the Internet,
40 million pages can be found on the subject,
from claims that the ship was not Titanic but her sister Olympic
to suggestions that dark forces were at work.
Finding the truth will require a modern, forensic approach.
By using current-day techniques and computer simulations,
we’ll re-examine the sinking of Titanic
and discover that one tiny detail might have saved hundreds of lives.
Commander Brian Penoyer
is an accident investigator with the U.S. Coast Guard.
Much of his work is classified,
but he’s examined nearly 400 marine incidents to date.
Even so,
he still finds the magnitude of the Titanic disaster: shocking.
The scale of the tragedy, the loss of life are absolutely horrified.
Now, commander Penoyer will re-examine the case
and scrutiny every square of evidence he can find.
He starts at the Library of Congress.
Here, hundreds of documents
recording vivid detail the horror of the night Titanic sank,
the transcript of wireless communications,
testimonies from passengers and crew,
pages of detail technical records.
The early clues to solving the disaster should lie here.
But for Penoyer, years of experience tell him
there must have been a chain of unforeseen events which led to catastrophe.
An accident like this disaster at this scale,
uh, never results from a single cause.
That's kind of an old-fashioned way of looking at things.
Instead, there are number of causes
which have to come together at just the right time, in just the right place.
Modern investigation protocol
demands that Penoyer establish a prevailing weather in sea conditions.
As he examines the record, Penoyer confirms that the ocean was flat calm,
there was no wind, and the moon hadn’t risen.
Next, Penoyer checks the ship’s course.
She was approximately 16 kilometers South of the Southern track,
the safe route of the two most commonly-used routes across the Atlantic.
However, Penoyer finds that floating ice caused by the mild winter that year
had been reported by several vessels in the area.
One ice report stands out more than the others.
A ship called S.S. Californian
had stopped because the conditions were so bad.
Her wireless operator, Cyril Evans,
broadcasts a warning to all ships in the area.
In the days before radar,
wireless was a vital source of weather information for the captain.
But although the message was a warning of ice,
Phillips just cut the other man off.
Commander Penoyer finds it hard to believe.
It’s insane!
Why would he do that?
Is the sinking of Titanic down to one man, Phillips, the wireless operator?
Penoyer contacts Morse code expert and Titanic historian Parks Stephenson.
He uses the 21st century equivalent of the wireless:
the video conference.
He asks Stephenson if there’s a reason for Phillips’ action.
At… at the time, Phillips was actually receiving messages
that had been waiting for Titanic from Cape Race.
Stephenson explains that as Phillips on Titanic struggles to hear the faint messages from Cape Race,
725 kilometers away, Cyril Evans,
the operator on the nearby S.S. Californian, had less sensitive equipment
was unaware the frequency was busy.
As Evans began to send his ice warning to all ships in the area,
Phillips was almost deafened by the sudden broadcast.
Because the Californian was so close to the Titanic,
Californian’s signals have been so loud, and it would have been like blown his eardrums out.
Even so, Phillips’ next move appears to be daming.
He goes back to passengers’ messages
without passing the ice warning to the bridge.
But Parks, with his comprehensive knowledge of the rules of wireless communication,
thinks other wise.
But if you look at the protocols, the responsibility like singularly on Evans’ shoulders.
In 1912, messages meant for the bridge of another ship
had to be prefixed with the letters MSG,
meaning Master Service Ground.
Evans’ message had no such prefix.
So Phillips was justified in ignoring it.
This is the reason that Evans’ warning didn’t reach the bridge of Titanic.
Instead of re-sending the message,
Evans turned off his wireless
and went to bed.
In the end, he failed to deliver the ice warning to Titanic that his captain has ordered him to do.
But even know Evans failed to send this vital ice warning correctly,
it’s still impossible to blame him for the tragedy.
Throughout the day, the ship had received 5 warnings of ice,
but the captain decided to steam on, at 21.5 knots anyway.
Why after all the warnings,
was the Titanic still traveling at normal speed?
Now, Penoyer considers the second major suspect:
the Captain, Edward Smith.
Did Smith make a deadly error
and push the ship too fast in the face of danger?
The record showed that he was an accomplished seaman,
who’d commanded White Star ships for over 24 years.
He’d even captained Titanic’s sister ship, Olympic,
on her maiden voyage 10 months earlier.
Captain Smith, 40 years of experience,
made on the first choice to captain
all White Star’s new ships on their maiden voyages.
Yet after the disaster,
Smith’s actions came on an intense scrutiny.
After all, as the commander of the ship,
he bored ultimate responsibility for what happened that night.
The central allegation is that he was under commercial pressure
in the highly-competitive transatlantic market,
and that he was risking everything to get to America on time.
At noon, the crew would post the distance travelled the previous day
on a notice board for passengers to look at.
On day 1, she covered 621 kilometers.
On day 2, 835.
On day 3, 878.
Not as fast as the Mauretania,
but Titanic is nearly half as big as it, again.
But despite these indications,
Penoyer finds hidden in the records a very different reality.
Captain Smith had actually been braking in Titanic gently.
2 of the ship’s 29 boilers were even inflamed.
Smith wasn’t racing recklessly at all,
the ship was capable of sailing even faster.
Then, comes a turning point in Penoyer’s investigation.
As he sifts through the final arguments of the British inquiry,
something extraordinary comes to light.
Penoyer reads that Smith’s attitude to ice
in fact quite normal for the day.
In 1912, it was common practice to steam into ice fields.
Smith wasn’t racing to New York,
but doing what was considered to be safe.
The idea I suppose was that the ship was in danger, only so long as it was in the ice field.
Therefore, to be safe,
get out of the ice field as quickly as you can.
Edwardian captains
just put their trust in their ship and their own skill to sailing through.
It’s really insane.
That’s like saying: if you’re want to be in a mine field, which really out to do is run.
Commander Penoyer can’t blame Smith,
Phillips or even Evans for the disaster.
So he turns his attention to Titanic’s last line of defense:
the lookouts.
Reginald Lee and Fred Fleet
had a prime position in the crow’s nest,
in what’s considered to be the eyes of the ship.
So why didn’t they see the iceberg, until just 37 seconds before impact?
Penoyer decides a simple low-tech experiment
could shed light on their situation.
He takes a Coast Guard lifeboat across Lake Chesapeake in Maryland
to replicate the conditions the night Titanic sank.
The key factors are the speed of the ship, and the temperature.
At 21.5 knots, the wind’s chill is -7 degrees Celsius.
The men were well-wrapped up,
but surely, their eyes were badly exposed.
As the Coast Guard boat races at similar speed,
Penoyer confirms his suspicions.
The freezing air blasts into his eyes,
affecting his ability to see.
My eyes are already tearing, because of the wind,
that’s a bit harder to find the horizon than I thought it would be.
In low light, the human eye sees only black and white,
making it hard to pick out blue ice against the black sky.
With no waves breaking against the massive object,
it’s unsurprising Fleet and Lee are compromised.
To make things worse,
due to a mix-up in Southampton,
they had no binoculars.
So would binoculars have made a difference?
In 1912, optical technology was reasonably advanced.
A typical pair would have had a magnification of 4 or 5 times
and a field of view of about 4 degrees.
So would they have helped the lookouts?
Actually the binoculars are as useless as you might think.
Unless you know what you’re looking for,
you’ll really don’t know where to point them
and all you see is a black circle.
I don’t think there may have been any difference that night.
In any case, lookouts were trained
not to use them to scan the horizon,
being told instead, to watch with their naked eyes
and only use binoculars to confirm a sighting.
If no evidence that the lookouts were in anyway at fault,
commander Penoyer makes the only conclusion he can.
It’ll be tidy if we could blame a single individual,
but the truth is, there’s really no one that you can point to and say:
This fellow is to blame for this accident.
Penoyer’s attention shifts away from the crew
to the ship and the iceberg.
Now he needs to work out what happened at the actual moment of collision.
This photograph was taken from a ship called CS Minia
that visited the scene of the accident a few days later.
It’s claimed to be of the actual iceberg.
Oceanographers calculate that this giant block
was drifting South at just over 0.5km/h,
crossing Titanic’s path almost at right angle.
As the rule of thumb,
7/8 of an iceberg sinks beneath the waterline.
Using a count of the iceberg was 18 meters high,
Penoyer estimates its weight to be 270000 tons,
6 times that of the ship.
But the impact should have been survivable.
Titanic’s 2.5 centimeter thick steel sheeting,
held together with 3 million rivets,
was not her only defense.
Any 4 of her 16 compartments could fill with water at the same time
and the ship would still sustain and float.
But clearly, that night, something went wrong.
The original investigations concluded that she’d been ripped open,
causing a 90-meter-long tear,
rupturing 5 inner compartments,
1 more than she could stand.
But this scenario has long been contested.
In 1985, explorer Robert Ballard
used a Navy research vessel to find the wreck, 3 kilometers down.
10 years later, a team of scientists revisited the site.
Using sonar to probe through thick mud,
they discover that she seems to be pierced by a series of small holes
and could find no evidence for a large gash.
So was the Titanic split-opened like a sardine can,
or did some other type of damage occur?
To get more information,
Penoyer visits one of the world’s leading authorities on Titanic’s design,
Bill Garzke.
He asks if a 90-meter gash in a side of Titanic
tallies with the sinking time of 2.5 hours.
Garzke says that the mass is straight forward.
For the ship to sink, she needs to take on about 34470 tons of water.
But with the 90-meter gash,
that amount would have flooded in too fast.
That’s a big hole,
and there is no way that based upon the fact that took Titanic 2.5 hours to sink,
that, that was iconic damage.
But there is a second intriguing theory that Garzke could shed light on.
Heroic fireman Fred Barrett, who survived the sinking,
testified that there has been a coal bunker fire by a bulkhead separating compartment 5 and 6.
An hour after the impact with the iceberg,
this very bulkhead suddenly gave way.
Had the bulkhead been weakened by the fire,
leading to the flooding of the 5th compartment and the loss of the ship?
Garzke thinks not.
It’s a, uh, a good theory,
but it doesn’t measure up to what we now know happened to the, uh, ship.
Garzke explains that because crew were already pumping water out of compartment 5,
it must have been bridged before hand.
The ship was beyond opened that point,
it was going to sink.
With the bulkhead theory ruled out,
Penoyer considers another explanation.
Was the ship built from sub-standard materials?
Might the steel hull plates chill to freezing point in the icy water
have been brittle
and cracked on their impact?
Over the years, several samples from the wreck have been recovered,
both the plating and the rivets used to hold it together.
Penoyer decides to see if the samples show any weaknesses.
At NIST, the National Institute of Standards and Technology,
metallurgist Tim Foecke
was lucky enough to examine some of the few pieces of hull in 1998.
What I’m wondering is: is there any problem with the manufacturer
or the conditions of the steel plating on the Titanic?
We’ve run tests
on some Titanic’s steel by ourselves,
slow-bending, in ice water…
Foecke suggested the samples to rigorous mechanical and chemical analysis,
and scanned the surface of test pieces using electron microscopes.
His conclusion was plain,
that steel was reasonable quality for the time
and was not usually brittle, even at low temperatures.
If there was a flaw in the material, it must be somewhere else.
Between each of Titanic’s hull plates was a watertight seam.
Holding the seams in place were 3 million 2.5-centimeter-diameter rivets.
Some of which were installed by machine,
and some by hand.
Foecke explains that during construction,
builders used a massive riveting machine on most of the hull,
installing rivets made from steel.
But they were unable to get this huge device into the front section of Titanic’s hull,
so they had to rivet this section by hand.
They used wrought-iron rivets instead of steel
because they were easier to work by hand.
But wrought iron is not as strong as steel,
a problem the builders were aware of.
To try and compensate for this,
they mixed the substance called “slag” into the molten iron.
The slag forms tiny glass-like particles throughtout the rivets
which can make it stronger.
But the mixture of iron and slag is critical,
use too much slag and the rivet can actually become weaker.
A second scientist at NIST,
Doctor Jennifer Hooper-McCarty,
studied the rivets recovered from the salvage section of Titanic’s hull.
She found the rivets in the Titanic might have been compromised.
An enormous case that slag would help to strengthen it,
however, in the Titanic rivets, they ran areas
and they were large enough
that quite possibly could have weakened the rivets.
So what that means is: use larger of slag could have led to the rivet’s failing,
and could have led to the sinking of Titanic?
It’s possible.
The theory that has never been proved:
the wrought-iron rivets might be the linchpin on which the whole disaster hangs.
If they gave way under the impact,
water would have poured into the broken seams,
which would explain how a glancing blow sank Titanic.
Penoyer decides on a groundbreaking experiment.
He will test the theory
that weakened rivets could have led to a critical failure of Titanic’s hull.
He commissions a foundry in North Yorkshire, England
to manufacture a small section of steel hull to the original design.
Foundry workers heat each rivet to 600 degrees Celsius,
then push them through two 2.5 centimeter steel plates
to create a lap joint.
As the rivets cool,
they pull plates together with tremendous force,
creating the watertight seam, essential for Titanic’s seaworthiness.
The replica from England sits in the stress-testing machine
in Foecke’s Maryland laboratory.
He affectionally doubts it: the mother of all bench vises.
The plan is to mimic the forces exerted on Titanic’s hull as she struck the iceberg
to see if the rivets were the key to the disaster.
Marine investigator Commander Brian Penoyer
and metallurgist Tim Foecke
are attempting to simulate the moment the Titanic struck an iceberg.
They’ve placed a section of replica hull in the machine,
which can mimic the moment of impact.
Yeah, there goes.
You can see the bend starting.
The theory is that as Titanic struck the iceberg,
the rivets in her hull failed
and led to sea water flooding into the ship through ruptured seams.
Foecke calculates from the speed of the collision and the weight of the ship and the iceberg
that each rivet would have been put under at least 14000 pounds of pressure on impact.
See how the rivets hold up here.
If the replica rivets break below 14000 PSI,
Penoyer will know rivet failure was the lightly cause of the loss of the ship.
If not, it’s back to square 1.
At 4000 pounds of pressure, the steel plate begins to flex.
It becomes visible at 5000 pounds.
You can see the plate is bending at the rivet point.
At 6000 pounds, the rivet remains intact.
Wait to come here is just a little rivet is pictorially tragic.
7000 pounds.
Will the rivet snap,
or will it stretch beyond 14000 PSI?
And it’s basically contested that which run out of energy absorption, first.
8000.
9000.
Whoop, there goes.
Oh right, beautiful.
The rivet fails at just under 10000 pounds.
The experiment is a success.
To be absolutely sure it was rivet failure which caused Titanic’s hull to fail,
Penoyer revisits metallurgist Jennifer Hooper-McCarty
to compare his rivets to those salvaged from Titanic.
- OK, so right now, we’re looking at one of the rivets had from the test. - Oh right.
It’s under the microscope here
and we’re looking at the surface where is fractured.
As Hooper-McCarty examines the rivets from Commander Penoyer’s experiment under the electron microscope,
the slag is clearly visible as dark, crystalline forms within the iron.
It’s the areas where the weakness in the iron begins.
Tiny fractures spread from these weaker areas,
until the rivet completely fails.
Crucially, the genuine Titanic rivets shows a very similar pattern.
Now, if we look at what we saw in Titanic,
and I have a picture here,
we see the same thing,
you see a fractured surface where the slag has created a whole wounds,
it’s tracked, and it starts to form a larger hole until the whole head comes off.
There’s only 1 major difference between the two samples.
On the Titanic, the rivets are even worse.
The particles were bigger,
and they initiated the bigger holes, bigger cracks,
and it failed more quickly.
- So that... that’s uh... that’s a conclusive result? - Totally.
By simulating the moment when the vast ship struck the iceberg,
and the story of how Titanic sank can now be told.
The chain of critical events that took place in those final seconds from disaster.
April 14th, 1912.
1 hour and 10 minutes to disaster.
Titanic steams West, at 21.5 knots.
It’s a chilly, moonless night.
In the crow’s nest,
eye-watering conditions and low light levels
hamper the lookouts’ ability to see.
45 minutes to disaster.
Wireless operator John Phillips receives an ice warning from the nearby S.S. Californian.
The message is wrongly formative,
and Phillips doesn’t pass it on the bridge.
30 seconds to disaster.
A huge iceberg looms out of the darkness.
At the moment of collision,
at least 14000 pounds of pressure are put on the rivets holding the hull together.
They’re compromised by too much slag in the wrought-iron mix
and they fail.
Water pours through the ruptured seams and floods 5 compartments,
one too many for the ship to sustain.
Phillips is unable to race the S.S. Californian
since Evans is now asleep.
Even though the Californian is perhaps only 16 kilometers away,
she does not come to the rescue.
2.5 hours after a glancing blow with an iceberg,
the greatest ship ever built was gone,
killing over 1500 men, women and children.
Important lessons were learned from the tragedy.
The U.S. government sets up the North Atlantic ice patrol
to spot for icebergs.
And the law both sides of the Atlantic
was changed to insure that every passenger ship carried enough lifeboats.
Even so, this disaster lives on.
The story of Titanic is famous from many reasons,
a brand new ship,
a fascinating era,
an accident that could have been foreseen
a tragic ending.
Ultimately, the incident shows
that no matter what human kind think they can achieve,
nature should never be underestimated,
or people will pay with their lives.
It’s impossible to go through the record of the sinking of the Titanic,
and beyond moved by the human tragedy that occured.
It’s just a waist,
was an incredible waist.
THANK YOU FOR WATCHING THIS EPISODE AND MY SUBTITLE!