What were the three things that lead to the Titanic's demise?

Question

The first person to answer this gets ten points. If you answer the bonus question right after the person to get the three things right you will get the ten points. Makes sense? List three things first get ten points. Answer bonus question with three things get ten points if person ahead gets three things without bonus.

The Bonus question is:

Who was the only person to die on the Mayflower and what makes it so ironic?

Good luck and give extra detail.

Answer 1

Another thing that led (not "lead") to the Titanic's destruction recently came to light.  It seems that the shipyards used substandard iron for the rivets on the vessel.  It wasn't that they were cheap, but that they were contracted to build several monster ships in a limited space of time, so they used what materials they were able to get their hands on.  But the fact remains, the rivets were substandard.  Samples that have been pulled up from the wreck show large concentrations of slag in the rivets, which means they were of poor quality.  Naturally, sadly (and in my estimation inexcusably after such a long time has passed), the company denies using substandard materials in any part of the construction--even though company documents have been found that corroborate that lower-quality steel was being used.

Answer 2

You're asking for THE three things that led to the sinking?  That's a pretty tough thing to do, given the many things have been suggested as being important.  Clearly you have three things in mind, but I doubt that you would be able to come up with a consensus among scholars of the event as to THE three things that caused the sinking.  There are issues with the construction of the ship, the handling of the ship, etc.  Also, I'm assuming here that you're talking about just the sinking itself, and not the reasons for the great loss of life, e.g., not enough lifeboats.

At any rate, given those caveats, I'll give it a shot.

1.  Sailing through a known ice field at high speed and without adequate lookouts.  If the ship had been moving more slowly and/or if there had been adequate lookouts to give sufficient warning, the collision would likely not have occurred.  The two following problems would have been moot had it not been for the collision itself.

2.  The bulkheads for the sixteen watertight compartments did not extend far enough above the normal waterline.  The Titanic was designed to stay afloat with as many as four of the sixteen compartments flooded. The problem is that, because the bulkheads were not high enough, as the compartments filled and the ship settled in the water, the bulkheads were overtopped, allowing flooding of neighboring compartments.  Once enough compartments were flooded, the ship was doomed.  We see this explained by the ship's designer in the movie.

3.  The main expansion joint, which ran across the center of the ship, and was designed to minimize stresses on the ship as it rolled and pitched in the ocean, actually fatally weakened the ship. This reason is dependent to a certain extent on the previous reason.  As the ship settled by the bow, the stern rose out of the water.  The usual assumption was that the stern rose so far out of the water that the ship broke in two, because of all that unsupported ship sticking up in the air.  This is also depicted in the movie.  A more recent theory suggests that the ship could have cracked down the middle, though without breaking completely in two, because of the expansion joint, even with only a small part of the stern out of the water, and at a fairly shallow angle.  The combination of points two and three worked together to doom the ship.

Bonus:  The only passenger to die on the Mayflower was James Chilton.  What was ironic about this was that the ship was already sitting in Cape Cod harbor, with the passengers waiting to disembark.  So, he'd made it all the way across the stormy Atlantic only to die within sight of the shore.

Addendum:  Ah, after reading your additional comments I see that I was correct in my assumption.  You do have three specific things in mind.  So, since many credible suggestions have been put forward as explanations for the sinking, this becomes merely a guessing game to see if we can come up with the three things that YOU think are THE three things.  And if Chilton dying on the Mayflower in Cape Cod harbor isn't the ironic thing you were going for, I wait with baited breath to see what you think it was.

Answer 3

ship was not built to with stand a collision with an ice berg

could receive no help from nearby ships after it began taking on water

the iceberg that was to cause the demise of the ship didn't appear to be as large as it was. the crew thinking it could get by the small iceberg didn't take into account that it could have been much larger underwater.

Answer 4

Poor structural design, poor navigation and poor execution of the evacuation process.

Structural: The ship was basically designed like an ice cube tray, and when the front compartments filled up, it simply spilled over into the next.

Navigation: The ships captain took a route farther to the north then originally planned, to try to save some time. This caused the ship to cross into the path of a lot of icebergs. Most of these icebergs were small, but the one that struck the ship was not.

Evacuation: The ships employees were sending out the life boats at half capacity, due to a fear that the life boats would tilt or sink. As a result, roughly 1/3 of the passangers were stranded on the ship with no life boat.

I remember after the movie came out, I was very interested in the Titanic, and this is what I remember from my research.