Titanic artefacts exhibition

I dont like to put too much info in the one post it is difficult to read.
The steel arctic D was not available in Titanics time but Grade E was which gave you an impact resistance of 27 joules at -40 degr. cent. Also normal Grade D was available which gave you an impact resistance of 47 joules at 0 degr. cent.
It is all a matter of costs I am afraid. Cheapest is GradeA thenB thenD thenE then ArcticD.
I was a Principal Officer in GovUK Dept. of Transport, I was not allowed to give out this sort of information to the public. I was bought and paid for even till five years after retirement. I still cannot advise for the defence against the Crown even though otherwise a free agent.

regards
jimmy

There was a documentary on one of the "Discovery" channels a few months ago . the Titanic was one of the earliest ships that Harland's build using a machine rivets , I believe this was the pneumatic hammer so familiar during the night in Dry Docks in the 1960's . The documentary explained that the rivets used by the gangs with these large guns , which I believe may have been multi-headed was a different grade iron in the rivets that were hand finished . The hand finished ones were " Softer " ( I know that isn't Tensile strength JimmyS , but softer is a general description ) . The machines were too large to get inside the first Fifty feet of the ship from the bows . This meant that the sharp end was inherently weaker that the rest . The impact caused these weaker rivets to shear at the head and the rest went like a guy undoing a zip fastener . I would hesitate to say that the weakness in these was a FAULT , the machine rivets were an improvement , so I will leave that to others to debate . The machine shown was about the size of an office desk and hung from a crane , so I would estimate that about twenty feet of clear space was needed to man handle it , that is why I believe it wwas a multi head device .

Basic rivet steel used in all ships has a yeild stress of 250 newtons per square millimetre ie 250N/mm*2. It is always required to operate under the yeild point or the rivets leak.
For a hand driven rivet we would allow a maximum of 90 N/mm*2 shear stress.
For a power driven rivet we would allow a maximum of110 N/mm*2 shear stress.
The power driven rivet joint is about 20% stronger than the hand driven. If there is a further difference in material the increase can be greater.
The rivet steel is subject to the same material problems with temperature as the plate steel.As temperature reduces the impact strength of the rivet reduces.
Both the factors laid out by John and Rob are without a doubt bearing on the disaster.

regards
jimmy

well lads, i bow to your superior knowledge regarding rivets, steel, temperature etc. and john your description of the exhibition was excellent, but from what i can remember of the cause of the sinking,
it was either captain smith or one of his officers who assumed that the ship was unsinkable and said full speed ahead despite warnings of iceburgs. the sinking was a forseeable disaster and i believe there were a lot of empty or half empty lifeboats. all in all it was a tragedy that should not have happened.
what really annoys me is that cunard ships get so much publicity. whenever you open a book its always pictures of the queens or th aquitania, mauritania, olympic etc. end of whinge alf

I took the following from the archives of the New York Times . I wrongly assumed that there were two grades of Iron Rivets used , and thought that Iron Rivets were dated even for 1911 , but looked to these notes . The Iron Rivets were hand gunned in the stern and Bow sections , and the steel rivets , as described by jimmyS were used midships , I note that the salvages examples had 3x the normal slag content as contemporary rivet samples taken from the Brooklyn Bridge . I think that this increases the differential of the impact strength immensly , and thus makes the Bow a real weak spot

The builder’s own archives, two scientists say, harbor evidence of a deadly mix of low quality rivets and lofty ambition as the builder labored to construct the three biggest ships in the world at once — the Titanic and two sisters, the Olympic and the Britannic.

For a decade, the scientists have argued that the storied liner went down fast after hitting an iceberg because the ship’s builder used substandard rivets that popped their heads and let tons of icy seawater rush in. More than 1,500 people died.

When the safety of the rivets was first questioned 10 years ago, the builder ignored the accusation and said it did not have an archivist who could address the issue.

Now, historians say new evidence uncovered in the archive of the builder, Harland and Wolff, in Belfast, Northern Ireland, settles the argument and finally solves the riddle of one of the most famous sinkings of all time. The company says the findings are deeply flawed.

Each of the great ships under construction required three million rivets that acted like glue to hold everything together. In a new book, the scientists say the shortages peaked during the Titanic’s construction.

“The board was in crisis mode,” one of the authors, Jennifer Hooper McCarty, who studied the archives, said in an interview. “It was constant stress. Every meeting it was, ‘There’s problems with the rivets and we need to hire more people.’ ”

Apart from the archives, the team gleaned clues from 48 rivets recovered from the hulk of the Titanic, modern tests and computer simulations. They also compared metal from the Titanic with other metals from the same era, and looked at documentation about what engineers and shipbuilders of that era considered state of the art.

The scientists say the troubles began when its ambitious building plans forced Harland and Wolff to reach beyond its usual suppliers of rivet iron and include smaller forges, as disclosed in company and British government papers. Small forges tended to have less skill and experience.

Adding to the problem, in buying iron for the Titanic’s rivets, the company ordered No. 3 bar, known as “best” — not No. 4, known as “best-best,” the scientists found. Shipbuilders of the day typically used No. 4 iron for anchors, chains and rivets, they discovered.

So the liner, whose name was meant to be synonymous with opulence, in at least one instance relied on cheaper materials.

Many of the rivets studied by the scientists — recovered from the Titanic’s resting place two miles down in the North Atlantic by divers over two decades — were found to be riddled with high concentrations of slag. A glassy residue of smelting, slag can make rivets brittle and prone to fracture.

“Some material the company bought was not rivet quality,” said the other author of the book, Timothy Foecke of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, a federal agency in Gaithersburg, Md.

The company also faced shortages of skilled riveters, the archives showed. Dr. McCarty said that for a half year, from late 1911 to April 1912, when the Titanic set sail, the company’s board discussed the problem at every meeting. For instance, on Oct. 28, 1911, Lord William Pirrie, the company’s chairman, expressed concern over the lack of riveters and called for new hiring efforts.

In their research, the scientists, who are metallurgists, found that good riveting took great skill. The iron had to be heated to a precise cherry red color and beaten by the right combination of hammer blows. Mediocre work could hide problems.

“Hand riveting was tricky,” said Dr. McCarty, whose doctoral thesis at Johns Hopkins University analyzed the Titanic’s rivets.

Steel beckoned as a solution. Shipbuilders of the day were moving from iron to steel rivets, which were stronger. And machines could install them, improving workmanship.

The rival Cunard line, the scientists found, had switched to steel rivets years before, using them, for instance, throughout the Lusitania.

The scientists discovered that Harland and Wolff also used steel rivets — but only on the Titanic’s central hull, where stresses were expected to be greatest. Iron rivets were chosen for the stern and bow.

And the bow, as fate would have it, is where the iceberg struck. Studies of the wreck show that six seams opened up in the ship’s bow plates. And the damage, Dr. Foecke noted, “ends close to where the rivets transition from iron to steel.”

The scientists argue that better rivets would have probably kept the Titanic afloat long enough for rescuers to arrive before the icy plunge, saving hundreds of lives.

The researchers make their case, and detail their archive findings, in “What Really Sank the Titanic” (Citadel Press).

Reactions run from anger to admiration. James Alexander Carlisle, whose grandfather was a Titanic riveter, has bluntly denounced the rivet theory on his Web site. “No way!” Mr. Carlisle writes.

For its part, Harland and Wolff, after its long silence, now rejects the charge. “There was nothing wrong with the materials,” Joris Minne, a company spokesman, said last week. Mr. Minne noted that one of the sister ships, the Olympic, sailed without incident for 24 years, until retirement. (The Britannic sank in 1916 after hitting a mine.)

David Livingstone, a former Harland and Wolff official, called the book’s main points misleading. Mr. Livingstone said big shipyards often had to scramble. On a recent job, he noted, Harland and Wolff had to look to Romania to find welders.

Mr. Livingstone also called the slag evidence painfully circumstantial, saying no real proof linked the hull opening to bad rivets. “It’s only waffle,” he said of the team’s arguments.

But a naval historian praised the book as solving a mystery that has baffled investigators for nearly a century.

“It’s fascinating,” said Tim Trower, who reviews books for the Titanic Historical Society, a private group in Indian Orchard, Mass. “This puts in the final nail in the arguments and explains why the incident was so dramatically bad.”

The Titanic had every conceivable luxury: cafes, squash courts, a swimming pool, Turkish baths, a barbershop and three libraries. Its owners also bragged about its safety. In a brochure, the White Star Line described the ship as “designed to be unsinkable.”

On her inaugural voyage, on the night of April 14, 1912, the ship hit the iceberg around 11:40 p.m. and sank in a little more than two and a half hours. Most everyone assumed the iceberg had torn a huge gash in the starboard hull.

The discovery in 1985 of the Titanic wreck began many new inquiries. In 1996, an expedition found, beneath obscuring mud, not a large gash but six narrow slits where bow plates appeared to have parted. Naval experts suspected that rivets had popped along the seams, letting seawater rush in under high pressure.

A specialist in metal fracture, Dr. Foecke got involved in 1997, analyzing two salvaged rivets. He was astonished to find about three times more slag than occurs in modern wrought iron.

In early 1998, he and a team of marine forensic experts announced their rivet findings, calling them tentative.

Dr. Foecke, in addition to working at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, also taught and lectured part time at Johns Hopkins. There he met Dr. McCarty, who got hooked on the riddle, as did her thesis adviser.

The team acquired rivets from salvors who pulled up hundreds of artifacts from the sunken liner. The scientists also collected old iron of the era — including some from the Brooklyn Bridge — to make comparisons. The new work seemed only to bolster the bad-rivet theory.

The characteristic of an iron rivet is when you etch it you see pockets of slag. When you etch a steel rivet you do not see this.
We would expect a good quality rivet steel to be twice the strength of a iron rivet. I knew there had been some problems with the analysis of rivets but I did not think they were iron rivets.
Interesting to note there was no great gashes along the hull and it was rivet seams that popped. I know that prior to Titanic sailing Board Of Trade sports was carried out and during this every bilge would have been sucked and tested. I would have expected her bilge pumps to handle popped seams. She had plenty of steam and large up and down pumps which will suck the backside out of a ship. It all makes you wonder.
The files for Titanic are intact and with GovUK Consultative Marine Registry. It is closed indefinately no one can see it. Why,why why!!!

regards
jimmy

Might be fraught with red faces . If the Rivet evidence is in H&W records now it must have been there then . Did H.M. Government want to avoid international lawsuits . Without looking it up , I think there was a U.S.Senate enquiry that White Star tried to avoid by shipping the surviving crew home as fast as possible . Now I looked it up that is what the documentary evidence on the T.V,. was saying , but before making a statement here , I wanted to check that not only was it Iron that it was not Best-Best grade 4 . There is a research paper on it , but I am not sure if it was public domain .


Always taken an interest in it ever since I joined my first Union Castle Ship in Southampton and walked past the huge memorial to the Engine Room Officers and men , all who Perished mostly at their posts until the ship went down . Always had a keen interest where the escape hatch from each compartment was situated , and how you open watertight doors locally .

But I know the second mate stays awake all night , I was on Ferries , Hic !!!! Hic !!!

Fellas, thanks for all that info I found it fascinating and a great explanation as why a ship thought to be unsinkable went down so quickly. I will pass this on to my ocean sailing mate.

On my first visit to the exhibition I noticed a story board about Violet Jessop though it was brief and only mentioned a few comments made by her after the rescue. I wrote to the senior curator of Melbourne museum to ask if more could be included about her as she was an exceptional case being the only crew member to have served on all three White Star liners, Titanic, Olympic and Britanic, survived the sinking of Titanic and Britanic and on the Olympic when hit by the HM Hawke.
I recieved no reply, nothing unusual in that as many do not bother, but on my second visit to the exhibition last week I observed that her story board ahs been removed. Also even though there are a number of rivets from her on display no mention is made of the report n the qualitynof them which is considered to have contributed to her demise.

From Yesterday's Daily Telegraph ( UK _)

InThe truth about the sinking of the Titanic
Louise Patten, whose grandfather was the only surviving officer on the Titanic, reveals the truth about how it sank.

By Peter Stanford
Published: 11:00PM BST 21 Sep 2010
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Louise Patten, whose grandfather was the only surviving officer on Titanic, has revealed the truth about its sinking Photo: JEFF GILBERT
All families have their secrets, but usually about things that don’t matter to anybody else. Not in the case of Louise Patten, though – or The Lady Patten to give her her full title, the wife of former Tory Education minister, Lord (John) Patten, though her own career as one of the first women board directors of a FTSE 100 company, and as a successful author of financial thrillers, means that she has plenty of achievements in her own right.
As a teenager in the 1960s, Patten was let in on a secret by her beloved grandmother, which, if revealed, she was warned, would result in two things. The first was awful – it would destroy the good name of her dead grandfather, Charles Lightoller, awarded the DSC with Bar in the First World War, and a hero again for his part in the evacuation of Dunkirk in 1940. But the second would change history, overturning the authorised version of one of the world’s greatest disasters, the sinking of the Titanic with the loss of 1517 lives in April 1912.

The tension between these two outcomes goes some way to explaining why, for 40 years, Patten kept quiet, not even, she reveals with a girlish chuckle from underneath the fringe of her striking black bob, telling her husband what she knew. What did he say when she finally did? 'I think it was “Good God”.’ Now, though, 56-year-old Patten has finally decided to come clean with the rest of the world in her latest novel, Good as Gold.
But can there really be anything new to say, almost 100 years on, about the Titanic? 'My grandfather was the Second Officer on the Titanic,’ Patten explains. 'He was in his cabin when it struck the iceberg. Afterwards, he refused a direct order to go in a lifeboat, but by a fluke he was saved.’
Astonishingly, he jumped into the ocean as the boat sank, was being sucked down into the depths - but was then carried back to the surface by the force of an explosion beneath the waves and was rescued by a passing lifeboat.
As the senior surviving officer, he was asked at both official inquiries into the sinking [by the US Senate and the British Board of Trade] whether he had had any conversation after the collision with the Captain or the First Officer, William Murdoch, who had been in charge at the time. In other words, did he know exactly what had happened? And both times he said no. But he was lying.’
What then did he know that he wasn’t telling? 'After the collision,’ Patten goes on, 'my grandfather went down with the Captain and Murdoch to Murdoch’s cabin to get the firearms in case there were riots when loading the lifeboats. That is when they told him what had happened. Instead of steering Titanic safely round to the left of the iceberg, once it had been spotted dead ahead, the steersman, Robert Hitchins, had panicked and turned it the wrong way.’
At first glance it sounds extraordinary that anyone – much less the man put in charge of the wheel on the maiden voyage of what was then the world’s most expensive ocean liner – could have made such a schoolboy error. But, Patten explains, requisitioning knives, napkins and even the breadbasket on the table of the London hotel where we meet for breakfast to give a practical demonstration of what she means, there was a very particular technical reason for this otherwise incredible error.
'Titanic was launched at a time when the world was moving from sailing ships to steam ships. My grandfather, like the other senior officers on Titanic, had started out on sailing ships. And on sailing ships, they steered by what is known as “Tiller Orders” which means that if you want to go one way, you push the tiller the other way. [So if you want to go left, you push right.] It sounds counter-intuitive now, but that is what Tiller Orders were. Whereas with “Rudder Orders’ which is what steam ships used, it is like driving a car. You steer the way you want to go. It gets more confusing because, even though Titanic was a steam ship, at that time on the North Atlantic they were still using Tiller Orders. Therefore Murdoch gave the command in Tiller Orders but Hitchins, in a panic, reverted to the Rudder Orders he had been trained in. They only had four minutes to change course and by the time Murdoch spotted Hitchins’ mistake and then tried to rectify it, it was too late.’
Patten’s grandfather – who later set up his own marine-repair business at Richmond-on-Thames and is commemorated to this day by a blue plaque where the boatyard used to stand – shared with his wife, Sylvia, a second and potentially even more damning secret. If the steersman Hitchins had made a human error, Bruce Ismay, chairman of the White Star Line, owners of the Titanic, and another survivor of the sinking, gave a lethal order.
'Titanic had hit the iceberg at her most vulnerable point,’ explains Patten, 'but she could probably, my grandfather estimated, have gone on floating for a long time. But Ismay went up on the bridge and didn’t want his massive investment to sit in the middle of the Atlantic either sinking slowly, or being tugged in to port. Not great publicity! So he told the Captain to go Slow Ahead. Titanic was meant to be unsinkable.’
Cue more demonstrations with napkins and cutlery. 'Am I boring you?’ she asks, as she arranges them. On the contrary, I am gripped by the feeling of getting inside history and Patten has clearly checked her grandfather’s account lines up with all the other evidence gathered over the decades. 'If Titanic had stood still,’ she demonstrates, 'she would have survived at least until the rescue ship came and no one need have died, but when they drove her 'Slow Ahead’, the pressure of the sea coming through her damaged hull forced the water over the bulkheads and flooded sequentially one watertight compartment after another – and that was why she sank so fast.’
It is an extraordinary claim that, after all the inquiries, films, books and, more recently, pinpointing of the wreck on the bottom of the Atlantic, the unlikely figure of a highly respected but apparently unconnected businesswoman in London rather than some Titanic obsessive holds the key to the mystery of what happened on that fateful night. Why, though, I puzzle, would Patten’s grandfather, who sounds like a thoroughly honest and brave man, have lied and carried on lying? 'Because,’ she explains, 'when he was on the rescue ship, Bruce Ismay pointed out to my grandfather that if he told the truth, the White Star Line would be judged negligent and its limited liability insurance would be invalid. Ismay pretty much said that the whole company would go bust and everyone would lose their jobs. There was a code of honour among men like my grandfather in those days. So he lied to protect others’ jobs.’
But why didn’t her grandmother speak up after her husband’s death in 1952? 'She was worried about showing this heroic figure to be a liar. And my mother, who also knew the secret and was even uncomfortable with Granny having told me, felt even more strongly about it. She hero-worshipped my grandfather.’
So there this secret sat, locked in a family circle from which Patten is now the only survivor. 'I have an older sister but she was away at boarding school most of the time. Because I was ill as a teenager, I spent a lot of more time at home with my grandmother’.
Why speak up now? 'Well everyone else is dead, but’ – she pauses, clearly still in two minds about what she has done – 'I can still hear my mother’s voice saying my grandfather must be remembered as a hero’.
This is the sort of tale that most writers would have tackled years ago, and treated as a non-fiction, best of all a memoir. So why work it in to a novel? 'Because I write thrillers,’ Patten replies crisply, and makes me think what an effective chairman of the board she must be. 'I started planning a thriller about a family with secrets, about a private banking dynasty involved with shipping, and then I suddenly thought I have this massive family secret myself and it is about shipping.’
After all those years of silence, could it really have been that straightforward? 'Well, not really. This sounds mad, I know, but once I started thinking about it, I felt as if I owed it to the world to share the secret. If I died tomorrow and then it would die with me.’
Good as Gold by Louise Patten (Quercus Publishing Plc £20) is available for £18.00 plus £1.25 post and packing from Telegraph Books, please call 0844 871 1515 or go to books.telegraph.co.uk