by Stephanie Shu

Created on: April 12, 2009   Last Updated: April 13, 2009

The unthinkable sinking of the Titanic was a combination of bad luck and poor construction. The design of the ship was not only just crafted by fate, but also crafted by the hands of human engineers. Built to dwarf every other ship ever built, the Titanic was nearly 900 feet long, towered 25 stories high, and tipped the scales with a weight of 46,000 tons.

The causes of the infamous failure of the Titanic are small and intertwined - some reasonable and others unimaginable. For one, a boat this gigantic had a rudder slightly too small for its size. Though a large rudder would have created excess drag in the water, the Titanic's rudder was a bit off in proportion.

On April 14, 1912, the Titanic failed to turn on time and collided with the side of an iceberg, damaging 300 feet of the ship's length. This accident flooded six of the sixteen watertight compartments. Ironically, it is because of these watertight compartments that the Titanic sank. The issue with those rooms were that they only held out water horizontally, not vertically, so the water seeped into the upper levels and spread up from there. Scientists have discovered that the Carpathia, a nearby steamer, would have had enough time to rescue everyone if there had not been any watertight seals at all. If the incoming ocean were allowed to spread itself evenly among the rooms, Titanic would have remained level, taking about six hours to sink instead of three.

Also, the material used to build the boat was a poorly crafted steel, snapping into pieces when put under pressure. Expensive, safer, and more high quality steel bends underweight, but stays in one piece, unlike the material on the Titanic. Modern steel would have to be exposed to -60 degrees Celsius to break like the metal on the ship. The temperature endured by the Titanic, however, can be pinpointed around 25 to 35 degrees Celsius.

Most ships are designed to handle mishaps such as this, but the engineers who built the Titanic were too confident that it could not be sunk. Shockingly, history shows that there were only twenty lifeboats onboard, able to house just barely half of the total population 2,200. 1,495 passengers perished, though, because, in the panic, the lifeboats were released before hitting maximum capacity.

Contrary to common belief, Titanic was not, in fact, traveling at full steam (21 knots) during the collision in order to try and make the headlines, nor were all of its boilers lit. As for the iceberg warnings the captain received - he did pay heed to them by taking the longer southern Atlantic sea route in an attempt to steer clear of obstacles. The killer iceberg was a stroke of misfortune and the undersized rudder was a human error. The two things worked hand in hand in sinking the "unsinkable" Titanic.

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