How did Titanic Sink? | The Complete Physics

Cheers Sabin Mathew

[johndonovan]

his calculations were NOT wrong. he calculated it exactly. 4 compartments. anything else you sink. he was spot on in the design and how it worked!

[insurecti]

I can't start to imagine how much effort went into making this video, Sabin. Excelent job!

[pavelslama]

4:14 One minor error - the steam turbine and its central propeller could not be put into reverse, it could only run forwards or not at all

[gizmonicman]

Edward Wilding, an engineer at Harland and Wolff, calculated that the total area of the hull open to the sea was approximately 12 square feet. If there had been the huge gashes in the hull shown in some films and animations, the ship would have sunk much more quickly than it did.

[RobbyHouseIV]

First Officer Murdock did not throw RMS Titanic's engines into reverse as part of his iceberg avoidance maneuvers. Judging by the short distance between ship and berg upon discovery of the iceberg he simply cut the steam to the reciprocating engines while allowing the ship's inertia to help port around the iceberg. As the wheelhouse telegraphs didn't directly control the engines like modern day bridge controls he likely knew there wasn't enough time to execute a crashstop order. Aside from steering, all helm orders regarding adjustments in speed, etc. required crew members below to make manual changes to the ship's propulsion system which, depending on crew alertness, entailed a turn around time of varying lengths. Plus doing so would eventually negate rudder control buy reversing the waterflow passing over the rudder thus causing the opposite effect of the rudder's hard over position.

It's important to understand that the rivets used below the waterline was necessarily lower in quality due to the inability of using Harland & Wolff's hydraulic rivet machine at the angles involved in the varying contours along the ship's bow and stern areas. Rivets along this section of the hull had to be driven in by a two man riveting team. The steel alloy, incorrectly referred to as wrought iron, was actually steel with a low carbon composition. The higher the carbon content in steel, the stronger the steel however, it is much harder to work with. Only with hydraulic riveting can high quality high carbon rivets be rivetted into place. Softer, low carbon steel rivets that can more easily be hand riveted between two hull plates were used along the curvy areas of the ship's hull below the waterline where the hydraulic riveter couldn't be used. Had higher quality steel been used along these sections of the ship's hull a two man riveting team simply could not achieve the seal between two plates before the rivet cooled.

Even today there aren't many ships that utilize a double hull system with an outer and inner skin holding back ingress from entering the hull. Such a double hull configuration only covers the bottom. Such double membrane systems have caused destabilizing lists due to uneven flooding caused by the ingress of water along the extreme edges of the vessel. We only have to look at the modern cruise ship Costa Concordia to see such a system wasn't used. Upon collision with underwater rock formations there was just one layer of hull that was punctured, not two.

[petruioangagiu]

Wow, this is really interesting, I am a 13 year old kid who loves these type of videos. Because of this video, I now start to be more passionate about the history, and its really awesome. Thank you!

[Chris-vkzw]

The breakup happened between funnels 2 & 3, not 3 & 4 like the movie suggests. The maximum angle should be around 22-23 degrees instead of 45. James Cameron even admitted his movie got it wrong. By the way, 6 compartments were breached, although barely. It was right on the edge of boiler room 5, and water did enter. The Captain's name was E. J. Smith (Edward John Smith). The Titanic's main designer was Alexander Carlisle, and Thomas Andrews took over for his uncle in the late stages of the design process. As far as speed, Captain Smith followed Maritime protocol. It states that a ship is to slow down in conditions of fog or dangerous weather. The ship is only to be stopped if an obstacle is spotted. The weather was absolutely clear. Smith also took the Southern Transatlantic Route to try to avoid ice fields altogether. It's a longer route, but icebergs tend not to appear on that route because icebergs usually melt completely before entering that lane. One of the debates about the head-on collision is the secondary recoil force, that it could cause structural failure with the ripple. No ship at that time was designed to hit an indestructible barrier, especially a 46, 000+ ton ship. When you say "turned left", the correct naval command is hard -a-starboard, which at the time meant "hard left".

[Welv]

This is 1000 better that any Bright Side video, lol

[mikedicenso]

Quite a few mistakes or omissions here. Let me address a few of them:

*Titanic's designer:* Thomas Andrews wasn't the only designer of the Olympic-class ships, and he wasn't even originally in charge of the project. That honor fell to The Right Honorable Alexander Carlisle with Andrews and another naval architect, Edward Wilding, as his junior assistants. Andrews eventually took over about three years into the project and two years into the first two ships' construction after Carlisle retired in June 1910.

*Titanic's Captain's Ideas:* Captain Smith was certainly a very smart and experienced man, but much of what he did was in consultation with Thomas Andrews who, along with several other Harland and Wolff shipyard employees who went on the maiden voyager as part of builder's "Guarantee Group".

*Terminology:* The "driver" of a ship is a helmsman, and the wheel used to steer the ship was in a special room on the bridge called the "wheelhouse". The helmsman that night was a man by the name of Robert Hitchens, who was one of seven quartermasters of the ship, and he would've been the one to carry out First Officer William Murdoch's "Hard a' starboard" order to avoid the iceberg. The wheelhouse itself was kept separate so that low-light conditions and comfortable temperatures maintained for the helmsman while providing him windows to view through the windows of the gangway shelter, but the windows usually had blinds drawn and the helmsman relied on the compass bearing and orders from the officers. When in port, the wheel in the gangway shelter would be used along with the order telegraphs.

*Left out crucial flaw of Titanic's engines:* Titanic and her two sisters' single turbine engine did indeed make use of triple expansion engines' exhaust steam, but there was no provision for the turbine engine to work in reverse. When the engines were ordered Full-astern and then Stop, the center propeller would not have functioned, and thus there would've been no direct flow of water from it over the propeller which in turn would reduce its effectiveness slightly.

*Titanic's steel quality:* Actual tests with samples taken from the wreck show that the steel on Titanic was actually fairly good for the day and the use of best-best quality rivets were used in the area where the ice would've scraped along the hull. Further tests shows that even using modern steel would not have made much difference as the forces acting in the collision were simply too overwhelming.

*Titanic and ice warnings:* The two wireless operators were not White Star Line employees, they were working for the Marconi Wireless Company and wireless was still a big novelty, mostly provided on ships for passengers to send messages or receive them for a fee. Ship-to-ship navigation messages were more of a courtesy rather than a requirement. Captain Smith did not ignore the ice messages he did get, steering Titanic on a course that added 200 nautical miles to the journey in order to avoid ice. Unfortunately, this wasn't far enough and the day before the sinking, the wireless set broke down. But rather than switch to the lower-power backup set as Marconi policy dictated, the two operators spent over 6 hours fixing the main set, and then had to deal with a backlog of message traffic. Some of the last ice warnings on the day of the sinking were lost in this backlog and never reached the bridge.

[nelsonnwachukwu]

I’m now satisfied with the true process of how the Titanic sank; that the crew did everything possible to keep it from sinking.
The creator of this videos is very talented at explaining engineering concepts. Great job!

We need more videos. Thanks:)

[putnik]

I appreciate your work really much, Head on collision is accurate.

[jayfizzle]

Made no sense to me..Why didn't the water tight bulkheads go all the way up to the ceiling why were they constructed like an ice tray where the water could spill over into the next one instead of just being isolated to the damaged areas??

[EngineeredBricks]

The amount of life boats used was in fact legal, as they could go back for more people after transfer. Legal amount 16, they used 20

[MrKotBonifacy]

5:34 - so, nice try, mister, but at liquid nitrogen temperature most steels would shatter like glass, and even at much higher temperatures "normal steel" becomes brittle, as Antarctic explorers learned the hard way - pull a heavy sledge (loaded with equipment and provisions) too hard, and the steel hook to which said sledge was taatched would just snap.
What's the purpose/ goal of using temperature of -196°C (-320°F) to "illustrate" (illustrate, my foot...) behaviour of steel at mere -4°C/ 25°F?

So thanks, but no, thanks. Looks like another channel to be added to "don't recommend channel" list...

[HERO-mhrr]

make a video about the costa concordia when it struck a rock tearing a 53-meter or 174 foot gash flooding three of her seven watertight compartments and it would only stay afloat with 2 compartments flooded.

[AtlasFlames]

4:52 Don’t forget, there was a small breach in the coal bunker of Boiler room No.5, which fulled up slow but steady over the course of the sinking. (Coal bunkers were never designed to be watertight)

[Chitranjbarman]

The quality of the animation can only be surpassed by the narration. Thanks for your efforts.

[subman]

13:52 if you do the math, he will find that you are wrong here as well. Titanic is said to have had lifeboats for only half passengers however, this number was for a sold out titanic which the ship was not sold out. The number of lifeboats was sufficient to evacuate every single passenger as well as 100 crew members. Unfortunately, the officers lowered lifeboats have full.

[TheExxl]

it was actually more logical to hit the iceberg head on to reduce the damage by only the front

[MidKnightKid]

@6:50, what a great demonstration. It sank EXACTLY like the titanic