Was The Titanic Destroyed By A German Submarine?

reply to post by ignorant_ape


All very good points, I agree.

blocula the whole attempt of testing Titanic's steel is in the preperation of the test sample. Yes Titanic has been under the ocean for a long period of time, and yes the iron was badly corroded. The corrosion is removed to expose the underlying fresh steel. I'll post you a link ok,..if your not going to read it at least scroll down and look at the pretty picture to show you the excellent condition of the test sample.

Causes and Effects of the Rapid Sinking of the Titanic

Also before i forget i'm sure people on this thread would be interested to see your evidence of the U-17's fantastic operational range of over 6700nm.

reply to post by blocula


I have read the steel selected was appropriate for the application. All engineering solutions involve economics, and to have an affordable solution, the engineers have to select a steel taking cost into consideration. I have also read the quality of the rivets was good, that it was a false charge the rivets were substandard. I have not tried to verify the information yet.
At the time, the British had the best steel technology in the world. Actually, it is still one of their specialties.

reply to post by stumason


Woodrow Wilson had such a nasty personality that Congress never wanted to give him anything he asked for. It was Vice President Marshall who changed Senate rules, and persuaded the Senate to go to war. Wilson stayed out of the war when public opinion was against the war. He asked the Senate to go to war once public opinion shifted.

reply to post by Matt1951


The steel of Edwardian times is noway comparable in quality to modern steel. The open hearth process back then produces a steel which contains far too many inclusion impurities compared to today's high carbon steel. It was brittle and had very poor elasticity. Ductile metal bends to a degree on impact. There was no budget to build the Titanic, the workforce were free to use the finest materials available at that time, however the open hearth process produces Wrought iron ( an iron alloy with a very low carbon content, in comparison to steel, and has fibrous inclusions, known as slag).

reply to post by FLaKK


Flakk,

Interesting article.

It isn't easy to find non-speculative articles regarding the steel quality of the Titanic. So I started to search for articles regarding the Olympic, Titanic's twin sister. Since they were both built at the same time, since Olympic has had a few accidents until she retired, there had to be mentions of the steel quality somewhere. And there is.

The Titanic Historical Society has an interesting one that contradicts the "brittle" steel theory.

Not only was the steel of both ships high quality with good elastic properties but they were tried and tested at the time and were compared to "battleship quality"...

Also interesting to mention is the "cost plus arrangement" regarding both ships, meaning that there was no budget. Best quality first.

Olympic and Titanic were built using Siemens-Martin formula steel plating throughout the shell and upper works.

This steel was high quality with good elastic properties, ideal for conventional riveting as well as the modern method (in 1912) of hydraulic riveting. Each plate was milled and rolled to exact tolerances and presented a huge material cost to both yard and ship owner.

The excellent properties of this steel and resistance to corrosion made it the natural choice for the new sisters.

Yard workers at the time referred to this steel as "battleship quality." I had several conversations with retired shipbuilders at Harland and Wolff and they confirm this.

White Star was Harland and Wolff's best customer and they undertook to build Olympic and Titanic on the same basis as before, cost-plus. The ships were the largest in the world and would require numerous calculations as to the strength of hull required at this size. Much of the ships' arrangement was tried and tested basic shipbuilding design -- just larger with greater added strength.

Also very interesting:

In the mid-90s Tom McCluskie, Administration Manager, Harland & Wolff, Technical Services Ltd. in Belfast, Northern Ireland commented on the quality of steel used with Titanic: Titanic, as with all ships built for the White Star Line by Harland & Wolff was built on a "cost-plus" basis; the finest materials available were used in construction since they had no limitations on their budget.

And it gets even more interesting:

Her sister Olympic that collided with the cruiser Hawke on September 11, 1911 (see images of damage) proved the strength of her shell plates. Not only that accident but during the First World War, she ran over and sank an enemy submarine and near the end of her career rammed the Nantucket lightship, sinking it. Olympic was built in 1910-11, lived to a ripe old age when she was finally scrapped in 1936. Brittle steel? Hardly.

So the steel was crap ??

Finally, here is an interesting choice of words from M McCluskie...talking about the Lusitania which had been supposed to be built with better quality steel...

She was hit by a torpedo and sunk in less than half an hour while Titanic lived for 2 1/2 hours!

The rivets were questionable. They were heated to be put in place but it is mentioned as a theory only...

I think -- and this is just a theory -- the rivets were heated so they could be riveted into place by hand or by hydraulic riveter. The steel would have to be capable of easy heating, malleable, and perhaps weaker by design. Is this the Achilles' heel of the Titanic? So much time is spent looking at the steel but I think these 3 million mild steel rivets might hold the secret.

www.titanic1.org...


If this is true, I think it is, and as it has been mentioned here a few times on this thread, what about a hole in the ship's hull ??

From the iceberg? Unlikely.

reply to post by SonoftheSun


Well compared to modern high carbon steels used in modern ship building, yes Titanic's steel was inferior. I know what your saying so we need to question the results of the test sample, was it representative of the hull plating as a whole?. I will need to dig out the source of my previous reading on a possible 'bad batch' of steel used in the rolling and forming process of the Titanic's plates. The open hearth process doesn't really produce Iron of a consistant quality. Tensile strength, Impact resistance, Elasticity varies with varying degrees of contaminant inclusions (slag).

From a 2008 scientific study on the damage and analysis on the metal of the Titanic from the materials today website.

Snippet:

Titanic was built between 1911 and 1912. She was constructed of thousands of one inch-thick mild steel plates and two million steel and wrought iron rivets and equipped with the latest technology. She was designed to be ‘virtually unsinkable’, designed to stay afloat with four of 16 watertight compartments open to the sea.

The first phase of the wreck's analysis involved the scientific research performed in association with the expeditions to the wreck. As she sank, Titanic broke in half and the two pieces settled in 12 600 feet of water, approximately half a mile apart. The bow section is buried in the seabed mud, hiding the damage the ship sustained. Using sub-surface sonar, the iceberg damage has been mapped as a series of thin slits spanning the first six compartments. In addition, an array of steel samples from the hull and 48 rivets and fragments have been recovered for study.

The data collected point to two possible failure routes - cracking of the hull plates or failure of the riveted seams. However, the fact that the hull was not severely deformed, as evidenced by the sonar images and reported by the survivor Fireman Barrett, implies a fairly low energy failure. A suggestion of brittle fracture of the steel plates at ice brine temperatures was made by two groups in Canada in 1991 based on Charpy tests of a hull plate fragment. However, slow bend testing, a more likely applicable strain rate, of four hull plate samples showed average toughness of 55 MPa-m1/2 at 0°C, quite reasonable for this application. If it was not brittle steel, were the riveted seams strong enough?

Titanic's hull was triple riveted within the central 3/5ths length using mild steel rivets, and double riveted using wrought iron in the bow and stern. This was done to assure strength in the center, where the maximum wave flex stresses were assumed to be located. Analysis of the steel rivets has shown good strength, but the wrought iron rivets contained an average of three times more slag than optimal levels. In addition, the slag was in large pieces. Both of these facts point to fabrication by inexperienced tradesman, as wrought iron was made by hand at the time. Finite element models of rivets made from sub-standard materials show that they were already loaded near their ultimate strength when installed. The source of this poor quality material became clearer when the Harland and Wolff meeting minutes were examined, and it was seen that pressure to finish Titanic caused the company to order wrought iron that was one level below that generally specified for rivets and they had to use suppliers previously uncertified for this application.

Titanic experienced a glancing impact with an iceberg roughly ten times her size along her starboard bow, described by survivors as ‘slight’ and ‘a rumble’; a fairly minor impact. The collision opened six compartments to the sea, and she sank in two and a half hours. In the area of the hull where most of the damage is contained, the seams consist of double rows of wrought iron rivets. Our supposition is that if the iron rivets had been of high average quality, or if the designers had opted for triple rows of rivets or to use steel instead of iron, then fewer compartments would have flooded. If it had been five compartments, with the Carpathia only six hours away, she would have stayed afloat long enough for most people to have been rescued. If four compartments had flooded, she might have even limped into Halifax. We do not suggest that the ship would not have sustained significant damage in the collision if she had been built differently, but rather she would have sunk more slowly. And with the shortage of lifeboats, the time she spent afloat made all the difference in the tragedy.

Full details of this analysis, as well as other myth debunking, and a description of the ultimate fate of the wreck site can be found in What Really Sank The Titanic - New Forensic Discoveries (Citadel 2008).

The opinions expressed herein are not necessarily those of NIST or the US Government

This article is featured in:
Mechanical properties • Metals and alloys

source: www.materialstoday.com...

World War I torpedo specifications from resource searches:


World War I Torpedoes

The standard explosive charge was 60% TNT and 40% hexanitrodiphenylamine in blocks. This had first been developed by the Germans in 1907 and was very resistant to shock. This explosive was about 7% more powerful than 100% TNT.

For this purpose, the U-boat's weapon was the locomotive torpedo. Originally developed in the late 1860s by the Englishman Robert Whitehead at labs in the Adriatic, and first used in combat in the 1870s, Whitehead torpedoes had been perfected for active service in the mid-1890s. Their range and size had improved steadily since. Propelled by compressed air, stabilized by gyroscopic mechanisms, packing 200 lbs of TNT in its deadly warhead, the WWI period Schwartzkopff torpedo was a high-tech weapon of its day. Although a large percentage of German torpedoes early in the War were duds, those that did ignite proved their potency. Lightly built merchant ships could be crippled or sunk with one hit, though sometimes a U-boat would have to surface and finish off a slow-sinking victim by shelling it at the waterline with the sub's deck gun. As the war dragged on, torpedo accuracy and reliability improved with practice.
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The charge was rated as 7 times more powerful than TNT alone and the Schwartzkopff torpedo was packed with 200 lbs of TNT.

Hardly a pop in noise and not in line with the slight bump felt by the passengers. Actually the passengers stated the opposite. Slight noise and grinding sound and no mass hysteria at the time. The props stopping was more disturbing than the initial incident.

Originally posted by stumason
reply to post by blocula

 

Prove it...

The only boat that could even have made the trip (and that would be at the extreme end of it's operational range) wasn't even launched.

Come up with another boat and you might have a starting point. As of this moment, you haven't even left the blocks in proving this wild theory.

From England to NY City is around 3,321 miles and the Titanic sank about 2 thirds of the way to its destination,NY City.So the Titanic sank about 2,214 miles out to sea...

And the U-17 had a range of 6,700 miles...

From coastal North Western Germany,to where the Titanic sank,is around 2,500...

So a round trip for that German Submarine,would have been around 5,000 miles...

Which is "nowhere near" the extreme limits of its operational range...

The U-17 was "publicly launched" ,meaning a lot of people were told about it,4 days after the Titanic sank.If the U-17 ws sent out to sea a couple of weeks earlier and i think it was,it would have been a "secret mission" and the German Military "would not have advertised it"...

Just like the USA Military did not advertise when it first flew the B-1 Bomber,the public found out about that airplane much later...

Found another U-17. This one laid down in April 1915, completed 30 September 1915, and commissioned 6 October 1915. Apparently also a small coastal submarine.

SM U-17

reply to post by blocula


blocula your not using the technical information correctly. The 6700nm quoted is a theoretical limit for using the least amount of gasoline fuel possible. The figure quoted is 6700/8 sf... what's that? well it's a theoretical range of 6700 nautical miles at a speed of 8 knots! (Surface speed) sf. In practice i could paddle faster crossing the Atlantic in a bathtub.

That figure 6700, drastically drops as you open up your engines and go faster because your using more fuel. How long would it take to set off from Germany and cross the Atlantic to Titanic's last reported position in your tiny coastal U boat doing 8 knots? LOL

At normal surface cruising speed of around 14 knots your looking at quote: 1000nm range limit based on fuel consumption. 1000/14 sf. unquote, from (U-boats Destroyed: The Effect of Anti-submarine Warfare 1914-1918 Robert M Grant).

reply to post by dcmb1409


Thank-you for a very interesting article. It lends substantiation to the position the steel was ok. One remaining question was the rivets.
What the article misses is the impact of large hole in the starboard bow of the ship. As the bow was buried, older theories were that either a series of small slits, or rivet failure, had to cause the sinking.
ocean.nationalgeographic.com...
It looks as if a large hole was punched through the one inch thick sheet metal. Note the metal attached to the left edge of the hole. It appears to be flowing outwards. Also note the metal plates separated from the row of rivets at the top of the hole, the rivets did not fail.

The metal along the left edge of the hole is melted. Whatever created the hole had a lot of pressure (separated the riveted seam at the top edge of the hole) and had a lot of temperature. Which rules out ice puncture, or boiler explosion (not enough heat).

Originally posted by Matt1951
reply to post by stumason

 

Woodrow Wilson had such a nasty personality that Congress never wanted to give him anything he asked for. It was Vice President Marshall who changed Senate rules, and persuaded the Senate to go to war. Wilson stayed out of the war when public opinion was against the war. He asked the Senate to go to war once public opinion shifted.

The Senators and Politicians and World Leaders are the ones who sway public opinion by fabricating false realities,knowing all the while that we are sheep easily herded into just about any direction they decide for us to go and they also are fully aware that it is our Perceptions Of Reality,Not Reality,that guides us...

Originally posted by blocula
reply to post by buddhasystem

 

Submarines have been around for a long time and since 1850,they have been developing at a dizzying rate...

a) this does not make true a quite false statement from you, that Japan decimated the Russian Navy back in 1905 using submarines

b) in early 1912, there were still very few subs and not much operational experience. Of course, you would go as far as to suggest that the German Government had a "black program" which included fully functional, long range deadly subs in 1912. Since there is ZERO evidence of that, it's appropriate to relegate this to category of mental masturbation.

c) Speed of Titanic: she was moving twice as fast as the max speed of U-17, which of course wasn't even launched on that date. So you need to add another fantastical claim to your list -- that the Germans actually had secret means of submarine propulsion, allowing them to travel twice as fast as stock model -- in actual battle that has to be even more.

reply to post by buddhasystem


I actually think blocula has used the 6700nm/8 figure from the selected technical table from this link>

technical date Imperial German U boats

This makes the U boat in question NOT the U-17, but a type of U boat constructed for the Austro-Hungarian Navy of the U-10 class: - the SMU-17.

Not much data on uboat.net there, so i checked wiki

SM U-17

U-10 class submarine

note: range 1500nm/5 (That's 1500nm at a surface speed of 5 knots.)

So the SM U boats were constructed for the Austrio-Hungarian Navy much later still than the German U -17

U-17

reply to post by FLaKK


This is not the boat I was referring to. Look for the German U-17.

reply to post by buddhasystem


yes it's the bottom link on my previous post

reply to post by FLaKK


Yes. I can only infer that these two subs were way different.