“The Titanic was made of steel, presumably to resist corrosion (i mean. thats why boats are made of steel i assume)”
Nope! You freely confess you don’t know much about boats, so I’ll just go ahead and let you know that even nice modern alloys of steel generally do not fare so well against The Ocean without constant maintenance!
Even in the shallows, the metabolic activity of oceanic microorganisms is nontrivial! From the Wiki page on Corrosion:
Accelerated low-water corrosion (ALWC) is a particularly aggressive form of MIC that affects steel piles in seawater near the low water tide mark. It is characterized by an orange sludge, which smells of hydrogen sulfide when treated with acid. Corrosion rates can be very high and design corrosion allowances can soon be exceeded leading to premature failure of the steel pile. Piles that have been coated and have cathodic protection installed at the time of construction are not susceptible to ALWC. For unprotected piles, sacrificial anodes can be installed locally to the affected areas to inhibit the corrosion or a complete retrofitted sacrificial anode system can be installed. Affected areas can also be treated using cathodic protection, using either sacrificial anodes or applying current to an inert anode to produce a calcareous deposit, which will help shield the metal from further attack.
Wood, by comparison, has been known since antiquity to be highly water resistant, so long as it is adequately sealed and maintained. Not to say that they never degrade, but. Trees don’t grow in The Sea. They’re an ephemeral food source. Wood-metabolism in The Sea is a rare thing, especially compared to Metal-metabolism.
So why build a ship out of Steel?
Well. It’s very strong. Much stronger than Wood.
Large-scale availability of Steel enabled ship designs with displacements never seen before in maritime history. The upper limit on boat design, after all, is the ability for the craft to hold the structural integrity of its inner volume against the crushing weight of the water it displaces. The name Titanic was chosen precisely because of the positively titanic proportions of the vessel.
We are spoiled, a bit, in our modern age, by the floating islands of Freight which have made global commerce so cheap, and globalization possible; those Shipping Container Ships which, in their quiet humble task of trucking tennis shoes and rubber ducks across the seas, dwarf even the mightiest warships of the naval empires of days of yore.
Nobody had built a boat this big out of a material this strong before. They couldn’t possibly know what the limits of the craft were with certainty. It was an experiment on a grand scale, and we learned much from it, at no small cost.
But, no. Steel does not resist the sea better than Wood. Never has. The More You Know!
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