Titanic's Fatal Steel Failure

Steel becomes brittle at freezing temperatures, and that's exactly what doomed the Titanic.

The ship's hull was made with 1912 steel containing high sulfur levels that turned fragile

in the North Atlantic's icy waters. When the iceberg hit, instead of denting

like modern steel would, the brittle metal cracked like glass, opening fatal gashes.

Today's low-sulfur steel would have likely saved those 1,500 lives through simple material

science.