9. The Sultana sunk after its poorly designed and cheaply made boilers exploded, sending over a thousand people to drown in the Mississippi River
The Sultana was a steamboat, constructed in 1863 to service the cotton trade as a transport vessel along the Mississippi River. Designed with a capacity of 376 passengers, the boat was frequently requisitioned and overloaded to transport soldiers during the American Civil War. On April 27, 1865, in the aftermath of the assassination of President Lincoln, Lt. Col Hatch was desperate to repatriate Union PoWs in case hostilities resumed. Offering Captain Mason $4 per enlisted man and $10 per officer, the Sultana was carrying 2,155 passengers when three of the vessel’s four boilers exploded. Sinking near Memphis, the incident killed 1,192 of those aboard.
Although the official cause of the disaster was mismanagement exacerbated by overcrowding, recent investigations into the Sultana have revealed substantial engineering faults underpinning the event. The boilers were constructed from sub-standard metal, Charcoal Hammered No. 1, which became brittle after prolonged exposure to heat. Meanwhile, the design of the boiler’s tubes was insufficient to process the muddy sediment from the Mississippi River. Shortly after the Sultana, two more steamboats on the Lower Mississippi with similar boilers exploded, resulting in the widespread recall of the systems.