I Saw The Marker

The marker was in very nice condition. The only persons that seem to know this story are civil war historians. This tragedy was the catalyst for the forming of the United States first ever collaborative engineering consulting team with the common aim to eliminate or significantly reduce the chances of these types of industrial events from occurring. This work eventually led to the field of Reliability Engineering (R.E.). R.E. was given a burst at the dawn of atomic energy munitions development, technical advances in aviation, maritime including submarine, and space industry. It is a field of work that is alive and well today and still growing. Though the Sultana incident was tragic, I do receive comfort knowing that as a result of so many losses on that dreadful day, that industrial advances and dramatic step-change improvements in safety can be directly connected to this incident. This incident occurred just after President Lincoln's assassination thus one of the reasons why this story was nothing more than a little footnote in national news at the time and likely the chief reason why so few are familiar with the Sultana incident. One final thought. While it is true that it was Human Factor (too many people allowed onboard) and not engineering design that was responsible for the large numbers of life lost, the fact remains that boilers at that time in history were a very problematic source of energy and the cause of thousands of industrial accidents and loss of lives. The Sultana incident was instrumental in helping garner the right attention sooner than later on how to better make, operate, and service boilers. This led to an ever-faster pace for U.S. industrial advances.

Dec 26, 2015 at 10:01am PST by sultana