"What Really Sank the Titanic: New Forensic Discoveries Solve One of History's Deadliest Mysteries"
by Jennifer Hooper McCarty and Tim Foecke
Myth: Titanic is rusting faster because of human influences, and bacteria are eating the ship.
Myth: The steel of the hull "shattered like glass" during the impact with the iceberg.
Myth: A coal bunker fire weakened one of Titanic's bulkheads and played a role in the sinking.
"What Really Sank the Titanic: New Forensic Discoveries" is the first, hands-on forensic investigation into the details of
the collision between the ship and the iceberg, how the ship was damaged, and how she eventually
sank. The authors have nearly ten years experience working directly with recovered steel and wrought
iron from the wreck, including mechanical testing, microscopy, and extensive computer modeling of
these and contemporary materials, as well as exhaustive historical research on the ship’s
construction, and Edwardian-era best practices and quality control of the materials that made
up Titanic. The result is the most likely scenario to explain what happened that moonless
night in April of 1912.
"It turns out there is much more to the Titanic story than ice and
hubris: Foecke and McCarty lay out a fascinating trail of historical
forensics that explains how a grazing blow on a flat-calm night could
scuttle a compartmentalized leviathan so very quickly. "What Really Sank
the Titanic" is not only for buffs of the liner's first and last voyage,
but for any reader who wants to learn about the foundation of cold iron
on which our technology stands, and sometimes falls."
- James R. Chiles, Author, Inviting Disaster: Lessons from the Edge of
Technology (HarperCollins, 2002)