Indeed, nothing about the Titanic's accident, failure, and sinking should have been beyond imagination in prospect.
It was well known that icebergs were likely to be encountered on the North Atlantic sea-lanes, especially in the month of April, when the Titanic sailed. A collision with an iceberg was thus a credible accident scenario. One form such a collision could take was a grazing, in which case the ship's hull could be gashed open, or its rivets sheared off. Either way, water would be let into the bow, reducing its buoyancy. As water continued to flow in and the bow dipped farther down, the bulkheads -- which only went so high, a fatal design flaw -- would be overtopped. The bow would then continue to sink lower, raising the stern. If the stern were raised out of the water, a condition for which the structure was not designed, then the ship could break in two, and its sinking would shortly follow. It certainly was an easy calculation to make to determine that the number of people in distress would far outnumber the capacity of the lifeboats.
This failure scenario, which is now what is believed likely to have happened in fact, should have been the basis for obviating faulty design decisions. However, whether due to ignorance, overconfidence, or rationalization, neither the design of the Titanic nor its operation seems to have been modified or adjusted to ensure that the credible scenario did not play out in actuality.
Everyone involved -- from designers to owners to crew to passengers -- seems to have expected success more than feared failure, perhaps owing to the generally infrequent occurrence of ships hitting icebergs on transatlantic crossings.
But success is a fickle guide, and we should always want to balance our hopes for success with a proper acknowledgment that failures can and do occur. Failures, after all, provide the lessons and wisdom to foresee even beyond the hypothetical wherein a newly proposed design, plan, or policy is likely to go awry. An overreliance on past successes, as was the case with the Costa Concordia, can be a sure blueprint for future failures.
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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.
On April 21, NASA launched a novel project, putting into orbit three satellites that employ an off-the-shelf commercial smartphone as the control system.
The legacy endpoint devices that control our critical infrastructure (utility systems, water treatment plants, military networks, industrial control systems, etc.) are some of the most vulnerable devices on the Internet.
In a switched-capacitor filter, capacitors and switches take the place of resistors and accurately reproduce the characteristics of continuous-time Bessel, Butterworth, and elliptical filters.
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For industrial control applications, or even a simple assembly line, that machine can go almost 24/7 without a break. But what happens when the task is a little more complex? That’s where the “smart” machine would come in. The smart machine is one that has some simple (or complex in some cases) processing capability to be able to adapt to changing conditions. Such machines are suited for a host of applications, including automotive, aerospace, defense, medical, computers and electronics, telecommunications, consumer goods, and so on. This radio show will show what’s possible with smart machines, and what tradeoffs need to be made to implement such a solution.
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