They commissioned a blacksmith to make rivets according to the 1912 specifications, of 4- and 3-bar quality. In their book, Timothy Foecke and co-author Jennifer Hooper McCarty say many of 48 rivets taken from the seabed show they contained slag. It appears that the yard, unable to find all the best-quality rivets needed, made of so-called No 4 bar, eventually settled on some rivets of No 3 bar, which is considered inferior because of greater levels of impurities, notably of slag. Most of the cracks that opened after its collision with the iceberg were in the iron-riveted forward part of the hull. Theories about shoddy rivets popping prematurely after the ship struck an iceberg have been around for years officials at Harland & Wolff have consistently dismissed them.īut this time the authors, both metallurgists, say they have found fresh evidence from archives in London and from the shipyard as well as from analysing rivets from the wreck.īy the first part of the last century, other shipyards had mostly already switched to all-steel rivets.Īlthough steel was used for the central sections of hull of the Titanic, the design called for iron rivets for bow and aft sections. Unable to find all the good-quality iron rivets it needed, it eventually resorted to buying batches of lower-quality iron. The authors of a book, What Really Sank the Titanic, claim the shipyard over-reached in attempting to build three new liners at once for the White Star Line: the famously opulent Titanic, which sank with the loss of 1500 lives 96 years ago this week the Olympic and the Britannic. The Titanic might have gone down more slowly and more of its passengers could have been rescued if the shipyard that built it, Harland & Wolff in Northern Ireland, had not skimped on the quality of the rivets holding its hull sections together, say US researchers.

Rivets popping as silo falls