The humble rivet may be small, but is has a lot to answer for—including, quite possibly, the sinking of the Titanic. Rivets have been in widespread use for thousands of years but, because engineers now depend on them to secure boats, bridges, aircraft, and other more complex constructions, their reliability has become paramount.
Rivet holes have been found in Egyptian spearheads dating back to the Naqada culture of between 4400 and 3000 B.C.E. Archeologists have also uncovered many Bronze Age swords and daggers with rivet holes where the handles would have been. The rivets themselves were essentially short rods of metal, which metalworkers hammered into a pre-drilled hole on one side and deformed on the other to hold them in place. Today, a wide variety of rivets exist, as do specialized tools for installing them.
The extensive use of rivets in modern engineering and architecture has, inevitably, increased the likelihood of the odd one or two coming unstuck. Materials scientists have blamed rivets for RMS Titanic's infamous descent in 1912, killing over 1,500 people.
Jennifer McCarty and Timothy Foecke carried out an in-depth study of the sunken wreckand concluded that shoddy workmanship had sent her to the ocean floor. More specifically, a large proportion of the three million rivets driven into the ship were made with substandard iron when, McCarty and Foecke claim, they should have been made from steel. The weaker iron rivets used at the front of the Titanic, where it struck the iceberg, were unable to withstand the stress of an impact, as the steel rivets used in the body might have done.
