Editorial Reviews:
On the starry night of April 14, 1912, at the dawn of a century charged with human ingenuity and hope, the largest and most advanced passenger ship in the world struck an iceberg and sank to the bottom of the frigid North Atlantic. In the decades that followed, despite numerous official inquiries and the eventual discovery of the wreck itself, key questions have gone unanswered: Why did the double-bottomed, 46,000-ton RMS Titanic, built above and beyond the most exacting specifications, sink in less than three hours? Was the iceberg alone responsible for the tragedy? Or did other factors contribute to the collision's deadly toll? A conclusive explanation has not been given--until now. With the same methodology used by forensic scientists in crime-scene investigations, researchers Jennifer Hooper McCarty and Tim Foecke applied new tools to the century-old mystery. By analyzing step by step how the ship was designed and constructed, what vulnerabilities were overlooked, and how this marvel of modern engineering may have been a disaster waiting to happen, they build a compelling new scenario. We are vividly taken into a bygone era, when luxury ocean travel and ruthless business competition fueled ever mightier ship construction projects built by Belfast shipyard workers, some mere children, laboring in unsafe, exhausting conditions. With Britain, the shipbuilders, and an entire industry caught up in a mad dash to build the greatest vessel ever, shocking lapses went unnoticed. Using modern microscopic techniques, the authors reveal those failures and show how they doomed the lives of at least 1,500 of the Titanic's passengers and crew. Grippingly written, What Really Sank the Titanic is illustrated with fascinating period photographs and modern scientific evidence. It includes little-known Titanic facts and lore, colorful portraits of the ship's designers, builders, and crew, eyewitness accounts, and a dramatic timeline of the ship's last hours. In an age when forensics can catch killers, this book does what no other book has before: fingers the culprit in one of the greatest tragedies ever.
Customer Reviews:
Displaying 1 to 5 of 18 total reviews (Page 1 of 4):
 A first-rate book!
Having spent a major part of my life in the maritime area, ships and sailors are my strong suit when it comes to reading. Add a dash of mystery to the tale and I'm hooked! Small wonder then that I had trouble putting this book down.
For starters, the authors bring a great deal of education and background in metallurgy, failure analysis, metal fractures, etc., to support their view of what brought the mighty "unsinkable" Titanic down. It was a ship built with state of the art technology for that era. Carrying passengers of considerable renown when it sailed, it was the sinking heard around the world, and the source of endless speculation as to what could possibly have caused such a calamity. The book is well organized by the authors, beginning with the building of the ship, then the facts of the voyage itself, followed by their reasoned analysis of the unlikely cause of the sinking--the quality of the tiny rivets installed in the ship's massive hull. David vs. Goliath replayed in a new arena!
In spite of their findings, there are those who will continue to ponder over the cause. Perhaps that is as it should be--endless speculation often follows inexplicable human catastrophes in our journey on this planet. This is a first-rate book!  All we need is another book guessing why the ship sank!!!!!!!
I agree with what the author says about why the ship sank, but none of this is really new.
I think the iceberg did more damage than they realized it did, as for Brittle steel, this is another theory from people who have all of the sudden become experts because they saw James Camerons Movie....... A detailed, scientific analysis of the actual sinking
What Really Sank the Titanic: New Forensic Discoveries
OK, right off the bat I must admit that I am a (now retired) mechanical engineer, so I'm not afraid of a little metallurgy. I have also been something of a "Titanic nut" since I began diving on shipwrecks in the early 1970's (Titanic is, after all, the ultimate shipwreck). All that said, this is a very readable book that keeps the technobabble to an absolute minimum. It is written in an easy style that presents the necessary technical background like the differences between iron, wrought iron and steel and how they are made in only 12 pages, with pictures. The authors use simple, everyday analogies to help the reader understand the concepts being explained and they also introduce many interesting sidebar items. Their theory is that sub-par (even for 1912) rivets in the hull are main cause of the sinking. They relate the labor conditions of the early 1900's and the testimony of the survivors with the known details of both the construction and the current condition of Titanic in a very convincing manner. Unless you are so hopelessly non-mechanical that filling your cars gas tank is a technological challenge, you will find this book to be a very good read. Nifty history/science lesson and analysis for Titanc enthusiats
A well researched and presented theory on what contributed to the Titanic's infamous demise. While it often gets bogged down in the minutiae of science, the book still manages to captivate Titanic-philes and conspiracy theorists, alike.
The more I learn about the behind-the-scenes world of Harland & Wolff, the more this hypothesis makes perfect sense. Plus...maybe Thomas Andrews wasn't the tragic hero he's been made out to be...interesting.
Certainly worthy of a place on your bookshelf for maritime collectors. A very interesting read by obviously respectful Titanic admirers.  Grandstanding, posing as history and science....
"What Really Sank the Titanic" is yet another book where the authors attempt to attach themselves to the Titanic story by offering "new discoveries" into the disaster that have little if any substance to them.
The first stumbling block in the authors' arguments is that they ask the readers to accept that out of the 3,085,000 rivets used to construct the Titanic, the 48 which they analyzed constitute a sufficiently large sample group on which to base their conclusions. More critically, none of the rivets they used demonstrably come from the damaged section of the bow, making their "conclusions" nothing more than "inferrences."
Most devastating of all is that the authors themselves show that the location of the most extensive and critical damage done to the Titanic in the collision with the iceberg--the openings in Cargo Hold 2 and Boiler Rooms 6 and 5--occured in the part of the hull which was hydraulically riveted using steel rivets, rather than in the section of the bow where allegedly "substandard" rivets were driven by allegedly "second-rate" riveters.
Further, their assertion that the shipyard, Harland and Wolff, used "second-rate" work crews in an effort to complete the Olympic and Titanic on time betrays an utter lack of understanding of the shipbuilding industry in Belfast in the early 20th Century, as well as of the business relationship that existed between the shipyard and the White Star Line.
The hypothesis--and it is nothing more than that--presented by McCarthy and Foecke is of passing interest, but it is far from proven, and lacks any real lasting historical value. It provides no new insight into the disaster itself, instead being more of a curiosity than anything else. More Customer Reviews:
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