RMS Titanic Sinking (1912)
The Titanic struck an iceberg that produced six narrow openings totaling only 12-13 square feet of hull damage. Because the ship's watertight compartments were not capped at the top, water filled successive compartments as the bow sank, eventually flooding more compartments than the buoyancy design could tolerate. The ship sank in under three hours, killing over 1,500 people.
Immediate international outrage led to the first International Convention for Safety of Life at Sea (SOLAS) in 1914, establishing requirements for lifeboats, emergency procedures, and radio communications.
The disaster established the principle that hull compartmentalization alone cannot guarantee buoyancy—a limitation the Rochester superhydrophobic design directly addresses by maintaining flotation independent of structural integrity.
The Titanic demonstrated that traditional compartment-based buoyancy fails once enough sections flood. Superhydrophobic tubes offer a fundamentally different approach: buoyancy from trapped air that persists regardless of external damage.