No fault of the builder? I'm agreeing with Deltic1989 the ship was poorly designed and the work was even poorer.
You disagree? then come back with why is wasn't build badly, i dare you
Absolutely not the fault of the builder. Titanic was a well-built, well-designed, safe ship. The point that so many people fail to grasp is that the accident that sank Titanic was a one-in-a-billion freak event that was totally unforeseeable.
The Olympic class ships were built to tried and tested design principles and actually incorporated safety features far in excess of what anyone imagined would ever actually be required, hence the propensity of the press at the time to use the work "unsinkable". (It is worth saying at this point that the neither the builders nor the owners ever used that term in relation to Olympic or Titanic, although the Shipbuilder magazine did describe Olympic as practically unsinkable). The worst damage anyone imagined could be sustained to a liner was collision damage at the intersection point between two watertight compartments, thus flooding both compartments. This is exactly what happened to Olympic when she collided with the Hawke and she survived the accident easily. The flooding of two compartments, even two at the extreme bow or stern end is not enough to pull the hull down sufficiently to allow water to pour over the next bulkhead and flood the next compartment. So based on what was known at the time, the bulkhead design was sound. Post-Titanic disaster we might know different but they didnt know that in 1910. Even if that had been considered at the time, the chances of a ship sustaining damage to five watertight compartments was (and still is) infinitesimally small. You simply cannot design a ship to survive a set of circumstances that have never occurred before and are not readily imaginable. It should also be understood that there are many ships at sea today that have fewer anti-flooding measures than Titanic. Even by todays standards Titanics design is pretty sound.
It has sometimes been alleged that longitudinal watertight bulkheads should have been incorporated in the design rather than just transverse bulkheads. The problem with longitudinal bulkheads is they do not allow the ship to flood evenly across its beam, which means that once the hull is breached the vessel immediately takes on a severe list. This creates two problems. Firstly it drags apertures such as open portholes and engine room outlets beneath the waterline and thus increases the rate of flooding. Secondly it makes evacuation of the ship extremely difficult because the lifeboats on the upper side of the ship cannot be launched and those on the lower side of the ship cannot be loaded because gravity causes them to swing out too far from the side of the ship. Longitudinal bulkheads were not often used on passenger ships but the Cunarders Lusitania and Mauretania had them because they were part-funded and part-specified by the Admiralty on the condition that they could be used as Armed Merchant Cruisers in the event of war. In any case they played no part in preventing Lusitania from sinking after a single torpedo shot.
As for the ship being badly built there is no evidence for this at all. Harland & Wolff built literally hundreds of ships and have at no time been known as a shoddy builder. Quite the opposite in fact. The Titanics hull did not fail structurally in any way that is indicative of poor workmanship or materials. Where there has been structural failure it has simply been down to the quality of materials that were available at the time. These imperfections in the quality of the steel would have applied equally to any ship from any builder of the era. It is worth noting that when Olympic collided with Hawke she snapped off the warships armoured battering ram hardly the sort of feat one would associate with a poorly constructed ship.
Much rubbish has been spouted about the quality of the steel used in the rivets that were used to joint the hull plates of Titanic. The story put forward by a TV documentary a few years ago was that Harland & Wolff cut corners and saved money by using inferior quality steel for these rivets. Its a pity the good scientific research into the metallic structure of the rivets was marred by appalling historical research into Harland & Wolff. Yes, the rivets did contain imperfections, and yes, it was the failure of the rivets that caused Titanic to flood but their use had nothing to do with cost cutting that is a laughable suggestion. Harland & Wolff used that steel because it is what they had always used and it had always performed perfectly adequately. So why use anything else? And indeed those same rivets served perfectly well in Olympics hull for her entire career and in the hulls of hundreds of other ships without incident or failure. They just happened to end up as the weak link in a single freak accident.
I described the idea of Harland & Wolff cost-cutting as laughable. Heres the reason why: all the ships built by H&W for White Star Line (up until the Doric of 1922 IIRC) were built on a cost plus basis. That means that rather than having to squeeze a profit margin out of the overall cost of the ship H&W could build the ship to the exact specification of the customer then add an agreed profit onto the final price. It is an arrangement that, if anything, would incentivize the builder towards being lavish rather than cost cutting. The idea that they deliberately chose inferior steel to save money is clearly ludicrous.
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I persomally find it hard to believe that a floating iceberg was able to make a riveted plate buckle.
It is more feasible than it seems. Icebergs have a huge mass and the crystalline structure of ice is such that enourmous pressure can be exerted onto a very small surface area.
