Today, we talk about two ships. One sank, the other
didn't. The University of Houston's College of
Engineering presents this series about the machines
that make our civilization run, and the people
whose ingenuity created them.
Both the
Titanic and the Great
Eastern, in their day, qualified as the
largest ships ever made, and they're two of the
best known as well. The Great Eastern,
launched in 1858, was almost 700 feet long. The
Titanic, launched 53 years later, was
almost 900 feet long. And each suffered the same
kind of accident soon after it was put to sea.
Isambard Kingdom Brunel, who designed the
Great Eastern, was the greatest artist
ever to work in iron. He was remarkably thorough,
and the Great Eastern reflected that
care. It was to be a passenger liner, and no cost
was spared in making it safe. It had a double hull.
It was honeycombed with bulkheads that created
almost 50 water-tight compartments.
The Great Eastern was actually
overdesigned and inefficient, but it still provided
transatlantic service for two years. Then, in 1862,
it struck an uncharted rock in Long Island Sound
that tore an 83-foot-long, 9-foot-wide, gash in its
hull. The inner hull held, and it safely steamed on
into New York Harbor.
The Titanic
was another matter. Transatlantic service had
become a big lucrative business. Bit by bit, safety
standards yielded to commercial pressures. The
Titanic's hull boasted a double
bottom, but it had only a single wall on the sides.
It boasted 15 sections that could be sealed off at
the throw of a switch, but its bulkheads were
riddled with access doors to improve luxury
service. It didn't have enough lifeboats. But the
luxurious beauty of the ship was seductive. Why was
it thought to be so safe? Historian Walter Lord
says, "The appearance of safety was mistaken for
safety itself."
When the Titanic gently grazed a North
Atlantic iceberg in 1912, it suffered nothing like
the continuous gash in the side of the Great
Eastern. Rather, its plates appear to have
been randomly punctured and sprung over a 250-foot
length. But that was enough to put it under water within 2 hours and 40
minutes.
We might lay part of the blame for the
Titanic accident on the success of the
Great Eastern. By 1912, past successes
had bred a very relaxed attitude toward safety.
Maybe a parallel should be drawn in the loss of the
space shuttle Challenger. NASA's
safety record had been unreasonably good up to that
point. We forgot how dangerous rocket launches
really are. The Titanic and the
Challenger remind us that we engineers
have to mix a little fear in with our excitement
when we design things.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
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