Quote:
Originally Posted by Bikeridr
There has been numerous documentaries and "theories" about the Titanic sinking.
As mentioned, the owners wanted the "Blue Ribbon" and pushed the captain to achieve this. The captain, in his turn lain a course too far north as he wanted to avoid the Gulf Stream. Needless to say, that is "suicide" in April as there is a significant risk of ice bergs at that time of the year.
On the other hand, the impact itself was not, and should not be, fatal for the ship as such. However, in order to save cost, the building yard had used plates and nails of poorer quality steel than specified. This led to a brittler steel in cold water, which, when on impact, made the nails to snap and the hull plates to crack like glass.
Had there been used high tensile construction steel, the plates (according to theory) should only had been deformed or "bent", and not crushed like glass.
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The Titanic could not have obtained the Blue Ribband (or Ribbon as it sometimes called). The Cunard ships Mauretania and Lusitania were a good 3 knots faster than the White Star line ships Olympic and Titanic.. The White Star line opted instead for size and grandeur rather than speed.
What does seem likely is that Bruce Ismay, the Chairman of the White Star Line, who was on the Titanic, pressured the Titanic to make a faster journey to get the record for the fastest crossing on a MAIDEN voyage, which had been held by the Titanic's sister, the Olympic. We know from witnesses that, although the ship was scheduled to dock in New York on Wednesday morning, she would actually have arrived Tuesday evening...in time for the evening papers: "We did good with the Olympic...look what we did with the Titanic."
The Titanic's Captain did not try to avoid the Gulf Stream by being too far north. In fact, she was perfectly on track. There were two courses that ship captains took; a northern one when there no ice bergs, and a southern one when there were bergs. The Titanic was on the southern one.
Look for a book called "Titanic - Speed Safety and Sacrifice" by George Behe. Its not an ebook, but it is worth buying.
All this stuff about saving costs on the steel plates is guff. Harland and Wolff, the builders, had no reason to scrimp on savings, and analysis of the steel recovered from the ocean floor showed that it was still quite good, if a little inferior by today's standards. This has been taken by some commentators to mean it was "poor." Maybe it was. But poor by 'todays' standards. But what do people expect to happen when 46ooo tons of steel meets half a million tons of ice?