Another weakness of the Titanic was its rivets.  The hull which was made of steel was superior to the poor quality of wrought iron rivets.  Pure iron is weak but will not be crushed due to impact.  When mixed with 1-2% slag (slag is generally made with silicon, sulfur, aluminum, phosphorus, and other metals) the rivets could take a lot of stress.  Unfortunately the rivets made for the Titanic contained 6-10% slag.  Although this made the rivets stronger, it also made it brittle and more easily crushed.  Although no one knows why the rivets were made out of poor quality without being detected, it is probably because the apprentices, who were taught by their masters only to do tests, were not able to properly tell the state of the rivets.  It is also possible that the director of the Titanic and its sister ship, the Olympic, created too much stress on the iron workers to produce the quota in a limited amount of time.

To simulate the composition of the rivets, we combined clay and pieces of angel hair pasta or linguini (representing the slag).  We made rods and allowed them to dry.  We tested the rods to see which would hold the most weight.  We hypothesized that the angel hair rods would be the strongest since the slag is smaller, creating less weak spots.  This held true in a few cases, however the variables in width of rod, the mixing of the clay, and amount of pasta influenced our results.  We definitely learned that the person who makes the product makes a difference.