Pretty much false advertising
Isambard Kingdom Brunel would have built so fragile as the Titanic
Posted on 04/19/2008 8:00:26 PM PDT by fight_truth_decay
Thank you for the history lesson. I was unable to find any mention of women shipbuilders for that time period; I must not have used the right search parameters or engine.
It had to be a woman driving though to hit the only iceberg in a thousand miles.
Pretty much false advertising
Isambard Kingdom Brunel would have built so fragile as the Titanic
If male shortage was scarce during that time as charts show they were before, being it was an Industrial Revolution, why not use women? Answer me that?
Why not hire women, often poor Irish women, to take a temporary job while the workers went to repair another ship that had come into port. What if those rivets were bad, I would not advertise the problem while I was building the Titanic. Get it back out to sea as fast as possible.
Think out of the box with societal conditions as they were at that time. It is extremely logical to assume while women worked in other segments of industry - mills, mining etc, they could have just as well worked on the building of the biggest ship in the world-for "cheap labor".
Then, again maybe they did not. I am just saying it could have happened.
JP Morgan decided not to voyage at the last minute. You would have thought that with the famous names in First Class he would have wanted to be there to receive the accolades of his peers.
Maybe there was never a need to know whether women worked on the ship. After all it went down..end of story. Not good on the old resume.
Also Women's Suffrage in America is in full swing. Whatever, goes on in Great Britain, stays in Great Britain scenario.
I would assume there was never a need to know.
Just saying...........and I could be wrong. But women had the ability and need to feed their family. Just show me where it says THEY DIDN'T.
That's a pretty weak argument.
But CHILDREN had the ability and need to help feed their families. Just show me where it says THEY DIDN'T.
It was the dumb broads what made them lousy rivets."
Many theories about the sinking have been floated over the years.
I suppose rivets is as good as any but a headline blaming the women riveter's?
I blame a lousy editor for that.
My personal theory favorites are the following:
1)Hydrogen embrittlement and sulfide steel cracking.
Testing of the ship's metal indicates there was a rather high sulfur content of approximately 0.065 to 0.069%. The manganese content was too low (0.47 to 0.52), as manganese will help bind sulfur. This contributed to the brittle nature of the ship.
The Titanic was so brittle that it should never have left port.
There is a point known as the transition temperature, which is the temperature at which steel transitions from a ductile (flexible) state to a brittle state.
A ship made with ductile steel will flex upon collision, whereas brittle steel will break apart like a dropped flower pot.
The transition temperature for the Titanic steel was 40o C or greater. The ocean temperature was -2o C.
In other words, the ship was more than 40o below its ductile temperature, and it was like sailing across the North Atlantic in an eggshell.
2) the faulty expansion joint theory.
Titanic was twice as large as any ship ever built, it's engineers decided (rightly so) that expansion joints would be necessary. The length would cause excessive flexing thus the necessity.
As far as I know it was the first ship designed with them and as with any experimental design it;s hard to get it right the first time.
After the sinking the designers and engineers suspected the rapid sing was due to a problem with the joints.
Her sister ship (Britannic) was quietly redesigned.
(The blueprints do not indicate the change)
Only recently have teams dove on the wreck, they found the joints were indeed very different than Titanic.
Britannic's rapid sinking were not found to be related to faulty expansion joints.
Another interesting fact is Titanic’s hull was constructed of overlapping steel plates held together by iron rivets.
A little known fact is that ships of this type of construction are weakest when they are first launched and actually become stronger as they age.
This phenomenon is due to the fact that the shear strength of the rivets holding her plates tightly against one another at each of the lapped joints is the primary basis of hull integrity of a new ship employing this type of construction.
New steel plates have clean smooth surfaces and remain that way until sea water has the opportunity penetrate the tightly lapped areas held together by rivets.
This water penetration is facilitated by a process known as “capillary attraction” and is aided by the normal flexing of the hull over a period of service in a seaway.
Until this penetration and resultant surface corrosion is allowed to occur, the coefficient of friction between the mated surfaces of overlapping plates is relatively low.
However, once these surfaces become slightly corroded, the coefficient friction is vastly increased and thus inhibits the possibility of plate movement when subjected to lateral stress.
Keeping these thing in mind many things attributed to Titanic's rapid sinking the actual cause however is not in dispute.
It was the tanks of fresh water they had to carry because they didn’t have desalinization and when salt water got in those tanks the ship became too heavy to float.
Photo is of WWII era female riveter, using air impact rivet gun.
The Titanic was riveted the old fashioned way with red hot rivets pounded into drilled holes in the hull. Even Rosie wouldn't have the muscle to manage that task. That required stout Irishmen.
You can see a bunch more examples recently uploaded to Flickr by the LOC. Fluorescent lighting, by the way, was introduced commercially by GE in 1938 and had become quite common in industrial settings by WW2. OSHA didn't come along until 1970.
Your name is ironic considering the speculation you are producing to explain away the headline that is not supported by the article.
There are several errors of fact in your comment above.
First of all, the Titanic was not a built "by Britain's White Star Line," it was built for "America's White Star Line." By the time the Titanic and her sister ships were commissioned and built, the White Star Line had been absorbed (In 1902) into the International Mercantile Marine Co. (IMM), a large American shipping conglomerate, owned by J.P. Morgan, which was incorporated in New York.
Secondly, you don't just read between the lines when the question asked in the headline is not even addressed in the body of the article. . . nor even hinted at. Do the research. The building of the Titanic is one of the most heavily researched ships ever built. The fact is that the pay records of the company that built the Titanic, Harland and Wolff, are still extant. In fact, Harland and Wolff Heavy Industries is still in business. Those records are accessible to researchers who might care to examine them and IF women were hired to work on building the Titanic or her sister ships, it would be a well known fact.
The following is my speculation: if, as you say, there were a shortage of the skilled riveters during the building of the Titanic, it would have meant that the skilled men who were hired to rivet were worked harder and longer and may have been more likely to say "good enough" before moving on to the next rivet when the first was not really completed properly.
I read a report saying that neither the owners or the builders of the Titanic made the "unsinkable" claim, it was purely created by the press.
“Under the pressure to get these ships up, they ramped up the riveters, found materials from additional suppliers, and some was not of quality,”
So let’s see. Aside from the speed demon captain and publicity-seeking sidekick, we’ve got 1) more riveters, and 2) crappy rivets.
Yea, must have been the women!
You are asking us to prove a negative. However, the employment records of Harland and Wolff are available... they indicate the name, position, and pay grade of everyone who worked for the company... the names of a woman riveter would stick out like a sore thumb. The work to make you go away is too great to bother with.
Your reply seems somewhat combative to my thanking you for information. What’s going on?
Not if they were temporary which they were while the other ship pulled the manpower. But I can be completely wrong. ;)
Thanks
Weak is all I got. ;)
Sorry, was not jut addressing you in total; but had been swimming (floundering) up stream for some time now, was not used to a compliment without strings. Wow, and thought I was batting a 0- ;)
Sort of like the Big Dig.
Crap blog post.
Photo is of WWII era female riveter, using air impact rivet gun.
Yes, that was covered early on..it was just a “stock photo” of a Rosie the Riveter even though was before her time, and yes was an aircraft..It was just a question for debate.
Thanks..
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