1912

Titanic

Thomas Andrews (1837–1912)

Think about the world’s famous engineering failures: Apollo 13, the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, Fukushima, and so on. The Titanic is the most famous of all. It had been claimed to be unsinkable, yet it sank on its maiden voyage. Media hype, new technology, the death toll, and famous passengers propelled Titanic to the top.

The obvious question is: How does an unsinkable ship sink? What did naval architect Thomas Andrews, as well as the engineers who assisted him, do wrong?

The RMS Titanic was 883 feet (269 meters) long and 92 feet (28 meters) wide. So imagine that we made a big bathtub with those dimensions and put it in the water. It would float just fine. Now we shoot a hole in the side of the bathtub with a cannon. Water will pour in though the hole and eventually the bathtub will sink. A good bilge pump solves the problem. If it can pump faster than the water comes in, then the bathtub can float indefinitely even with a hole in its side.

The engineers of the Titanic came up with the following scheme to make an unsinkable ship: They turned their boat into a series of 16 compartments by adding 15 sealable bulkheads. They also had a bilge pump system that could move approximately 4 million pounds (1.7 million kg) of water per hour. The idea was that if the Titanic sprung a leak, one compartment would flood. The bilge pumps would easily handle the water. But even if the pumps failed, one flooded compartment was fine. The ship was in fact unsinkable if that happened.

The problem is that when the Titanic sideswiped its iceberg, it compromised six compartments. Far more water came in than the pumps could handle. Six compartments started filling. Unfortunately, the bulkhead walls did not extend to the top of the hull. So when the water in one compartment reached the top of its bulkhead, the water spilled over into the next compartment. Thus the unsinkable ship filled with water.

In retrospect, there are a number of things that the engineers might have done to solve this problem. But apparently they never considered the possibility that one accident could breach six compartments. The Titanic sank in the North Atlantic Ocean on April 15, 1912 due to that failure of imagination.

SEE ALSO Hindenburg (1937), Tacoma Narrows Bridge (1940), Apollo 13 (1970), Fukushima Disaster (2011).

RMS Titanic departing Southampton, April 10, 1912.