A number of headlines today will surprise those who thought an iceberg sank the Titanic. ‘Low-grade rivets sank Titanic, claim scientists’, says one example.

What Jennifer Hooper McCarty and Timothy Foecke are actually claiming is that duff rivets used to hold bits of the ship together meant it sinking faster than it should have done. If the Titanic’s builder had used better materials, they argue, it would have stayed afloat longer after hitting the ’berg, allowing rescuers to arrive.

In their new book McCarty and Foecke say that builder Harland and Wolff used iron rather than steel rivets for key sections of the bow and stern. The bow is where the iceberg hit and Foecke tells the New York Times that damage “ends close to where the rivets transition from iron to steel”.

Foecke also says the iron used was not rivet quality, based on documents from Harland and Wolff and from analysis of rivets recovered from the wreck.

He should know what he’s talking about; Foecke is a researcher at the US National Institute for Standards and Technology. He’s been looking at the Titanic rivets for over a decade now.

Back in 1998 he produced an initial report on the rivet problem. Here’s an extract from the press release:

Foecke performed metallurgical and mechanical analyses on steel and rivet samples recovered from the Titanic’s hull. His examinations revealed that the wrought iron in the rivets contained three times today’s allowable amount of slag (the glassy residue left behind after the smelting of ore), making it less ductile and more brittle than it should have been. This finding provides strong evidence that Titanic’s collision with the iceberg caused the rivet heads to break off, popped the fasteners from their holes and allowed water to rush in between the separated hull plates.

Photographs of Titanic’s sister ship, the RMS Olympic, back up the rivet failure theory. Taken after the Olympic collided with another vessel in 1911, the photos clearly show dozens of vacant holes in the hull where rivets once sat.

The NY Times says Harland and Wolff have rubbished the claims.

A former employee of the company, David Livingstone, told the Independent:

All sorts of conspiracy theories come up and unfortunately the people who hold them will never change their minds. All we can ask is that the people proposing these theories show us the evidence and present it to be examined by their peers. If it is verified, so be it. But that is not the case here.

The Titanic went down on April 14th in 1912. Just made public by the BBC is this amazing audio recording of an account of the sinking by Charles Lightoller, the most senior officer to survive.

Image top: detail from eyewitness sketch of the sinking by Jack Thayer / NOAA (click for full image)

Image lower: ‘The nature of the injury sustained by the Titanic’ / NOAA