The recent grounding of the cruise ship Costa Concordia is a tragic reminder that even a vessel equipped with the latest instruments of technology is not guaranteed safe passage through threatening waters. The human element, embodied in this case in the ship captain's decision to sail dangerously close to shore (something reported to have been a not unheard of practice with cruise ships), can always negate technological prowess. Images of the ship resting on its side like a beached white whale showed how vulnerable even something so gigantic can be to the unintended consequences of human nature.
But we seem never to learn; the incident off the Italian coast occurred almost exactly 100 years after an even more tragic marine disaster.
On April 10, 1912, the innovatively designed ocean liner Titanic was heralded as an "unsinkable" success even before the ship left the dock. As we all know, it sank on its maiden voyage. But now, a century later, let us engage in a thought experiment.
Let us assume that the Titanic did not have the bad luck of being in the same place at the same time as a giant North Atlantic iceberg. Had the ship not had its unfortunate encounter, it might have reached New York safely, and the success of its design would have been "proven." The more times the Titanic crossed and recrossed the ocean, the more confident the ship's captain, owner, and potential passengers would have become in its extraordinary seaworthiness.
Competing steamship companies would likely have wanted to emulate the Titanic's success, but they would also have wanted to make distinguishing changes that they believed would be improvements, whether for technical, economic, or commercial advantage. Larger, faster, and more opulent ocean liners would then likely have been designed and built. To make them more competitive financially, the newer ships would have been made with thinner hulls and carried fewer lifeboats. After all, the design of their new ship was based on the unsinkable, unsunk, and thus eminently successful Titanic.
But as we know from its colossal failure to reach New York, even the Titanic could not withstand its collision with an iceberg -- a fatal flaw in the ship's design. All subsequent ocean liners whose design was closely based on the supposedly successful Titanic would likely also have had the same latent flaws as their paragon.
In fact, because of the overconfidence in the ship's success, the inevitable use of thinner steel in their hulls would have made the derivative ships even more vulnerable, and the fewer lifeboats would have made any accident at sea potentially more tragic. Chances are, one of these "improved" ships would eventually have had the bad luck of being in the same place at the same time as a fateful iceberg. Only then might the folly of thinner hulls and fewer lifeboats, not to mention a fatally flawed bulkhead design, have become incontrovertibly evident.
Successful change comes, not from emulating success and trying to better it, but from learning from and anticipating failure, whether actually experienced or hypothetically imagined.
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Great point Jack. The company I retired from (GE) required FMEA work on all programs, new and for products getting nothing but a "face-lift". The thought being--"if you touch it, make it better". We engineers screemend and moaned due to the time it generally took to perform a good FMEA, but in the end, we produced a better product for the effort. I notice that there are those times that UL ( Underwriters' Laboratories ) require a FMEA also, which I think is very interesting. Bob Jackson, PE
It's worth noting that a new book, "Creating Innovators: The Making of Young People Who Will Change the World" cites the willingness to take calculated risks and the willingness to learn from failure as two of the keys to developing innovative minds.
Excellent post Vimal. You are right on the money. In my previous industry, we were doing FMEA (failure modes and effects analysis) on major projects for about the last 10 years. Some of this was required by our customers. Unfortunately, industry in general does not seem to be that specific.
Well explained..! past performance does not gaurantee future success and performance. Had Napolean been an engineer he would have definitely procliamined "Complacency is not found in the dictionary of the engineer". By anticipating failure engineering design will repay the faith of the stakeholders.
vimal, your post hits the nail on the head. This is an interesting story. It also reminds me of the slogan of the equities industry, "...past performance is not an guarntee of future performance...", or something like that.
Successful change comes, not from emulating success and trying to better it, but from learning from and anticipating failure, whether actually experienced or hypothetically imagined. This should be the underlying aspect of every design. Petroski as usual at his best ..!
Indeed! Many years ago, when we were first trying out fiber optic networks on our plant control system, our technicians noticed that many nodes would go offline at random. Standard practice of swapping parts and reterminating connectors didn't seem to help.
So I went out to the site armed with a function generator for sending pulses of variable duty cycles, and an oscilloscope. I knew from having looked inside that the fiber-optic converters had no processors of any sort inside. The plant was filled with all sorts of people. There were construction projects going on, system demand was high, and stress levels were going through the roof.
I found a quiet corner, grabbed one of the units, and tested it. Sure enough the pulses from a loop-back cable were distorted to the edge what should have been readable. I then grabbed another unit with the similar serial numbers and production run from working stock and I tried it out. The pulses were clean.
I looked inside the units and discovered that some units had a DC blocking capacitor in series with the data connection with one tenth the value of the working units. The problem units had serial numbers indicating a production run at the same time as the good units. My best guess is that someone had probably mixed these values in a parts bin.
I explained this to my boss and he promptly declared that we were going to use a different brand. So instead of a few hours to correct the problem boards, we ended up spending many more weeks with another product that also gave us significant headaches of a different sort. From that point we were very reticent to use fiber optic cable systems even though we knew theoretically it should have worked very well for us.
That was a case of not learning the right lessons from failure.
@kenish: You can find a fairly detailed metallurgical report on the sinking of the Titanic here. If you're not a metallurgist, you may want to skip directly to the conclusions.
You're right that the steel was brittle at cold temperatures; in fact, it would have even been brittle at room temperature. The ductile-to-brittle transition temperature was between 100 and 140°F, compared to about 10°F for comparable modern steels.
The issue was not the carbon content, so much as high levels of sulfur combined with low levels of manganese. However, the author of the report concludes that nobody at the time would have known this was a problem.
The ductile-to-brittle transition in steels was not well understood until after World War II, when a large number of U.S. merchant marine vessels sank as a result of low temperature brittleness.
@williamlweaver- The O-rings on the Challenger were fully tested and the temperature range was known. Concerns and objections to launching in conditions outside of spec were ignored or overridden. But, Titanic and Challenger have many parallels in both the technical and human aspects.
Rivets recovered from the Titanic have a higher than normal carbon content. I don't recall if this was by mistake, or to save money. I'm a EE but I believe that the high carbon would make the rivets brittle in cold temperatures.
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