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What Really Sank the Titanic? A Materials Science Investigation
Why did the Titanic, the luxury ocean liner that was supposed to be unsinkable, plunge to the ocean floor less than three hours after impact with an iceberg? Hull steel that became brittle at low temperatures-like those found in the ocean on the night of April 14, 1912-is sometimes considered the metallurgical culprit. But a new book looks at something much smaller than the large sheets of steel covering the ship's hull. It studies the button-like rivets that held those sheets together.
In What Really Sank the Titanic, materials scientists Jennifer Hooper McCarty and Tim Foecke examine the results of metallurgical analysis on a sampling of rivets from the ship's hull, which show that the rivets were of inconsistent quality and often used substandard materials.
But that's giving away the ending.
Hooper McCarty and Foecke's book is more than a report on a single scientific study. It's an investigation into a nearly century-old mystery and the culmination of years of research.
The book travels from the shipyards of Belfast, Ireland, where the Tiianic was built in the early 1900s, to the underwater exploration of the ship and its artifacts in the 1980s to the metal testing laboratories of...