The humble rivet may be small, but is has a lot to answer for—including, quite possibly, the sinking of the Titanic. Rivets have been in widespread use for thousands of years but, because engineers now depend on them to secure boats, bridges, aircraft, and other more complex constructions, their reliability has become paramount.
Rivet holes have been found in Egyptian spearheads dating back to the Naqada culture of between 4400 and 3000 B.C.E. Archeologists have also uncovered many Bronze Age swords and daggers with rivet holes where the handles would have been. The rivets themselves were essentially short rods of metal, which metalworkers hammered into a pre-drilled hole on one side and deformed on the other to hold them in place. Today, a wide variety of rivets exist, as do specialized tools for installing them.
The extensive use of rivets in modern engineering and architecture has, inevitably, increased the likelihood
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