Boiler Explosion Tragedy at Grover Factory

A tiny, invisible crack in a piece of metal killed 58 people. It was March 1905

at the Grover shoe factory in Massachusetts. They needed to do maintenance on their new boiler,

so they fired up the old backup. The chief engineer, David Rockwell, was nervous about

it, but everything seemed fine. The boiler had been inspected,

it was running at a safe pressure, and Rockwell was even seen relaxing in his chair just

moments before it all went wrong. At 7:50 AM, the old boiler exploded. The cause was a

tiny crack, hidden between two overlapping steel plates, that had slowly

grown over years of heating and cooling. The blast was so powerful it launched one end of the boiler