Causes of Engineering Disasters:

"Not even God himself could sink this ship" are the infamous lines of Billy Zane in the movie Titanic. Boy, was he wrong. We learned very early on in this course, that overconfidence in the engineering field can be the cause of mammoth catastrophes. Capitan Smith himself proclaimed that he would never get in a maritime accident."The unsinkable ship" they called it. You can't blame them, at the beginning of the twentieth-century people were in awe of the emergence of new technology. Since the ship was unsinkable, they put very little importance lifeboats; only supplying her with 20, which was not enough for everyone on the luxury liner.

Another cause of engineering failure we spoke about was material failure. Because of all of the pressure put on these companies to finish the Titanic, they had to "settle" in a way, not making the rivets with "the best material of its time", as advertised. Three million rivets were used to hold this ship together. The rivets collected from the Titanic indicated that some of them were in fact made of a sub-standard iron; which had a higher sulfur rate than what it was supposed to have. Making it more brittle, and this is even before we add the below zero temperature water. 

Sometimes we think we're taking shortcuts, which in fact we are... but not to where we think we're heading, but rather to disaster.