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real life lore simple math mistakes have
caused massive
engineering catastrophes in the past and
they probably will
again because humans are fantastic at
making mistakes
in 1983 a simple conversion error led to
an airplane with 69 passengers on board
to run out of fuel while 30 000 feet
high in the sky
in 2004 a nasa probe returning back to
earth from space
crashed into the deserts of utah without
ever deploying its parachute because a
team of engineers
installed a pair of parts backwards
simple mathematical mistakes sometimes
have catastrophic consequences
and in this video we're going to be
talking about one of the worst instances
and it happened
nearly 400 years ago in sweden back then
sweden was a lot different than the
sweden we know and love today
17th century sweden was a european great
power
practically dominated the entire baltic
sea and was one of the most militaristic
empires that the world has ever
seen in the 1620s the swedish empire was
actively fighting two wars
simultaneously against the
polish-lithuanian commonwealth in poland
naturally and against the imperial
catholic forces of the holy roman empire
in germany
and sweden's naval situation looked
pretty grim the poles were defeating the
swedish navy in nearly every battle in
the baltic and worse the catholic forces
from the empire
had invaded denmark and were poised to
take control of the danish straits
potentially blocking and confining the
swedish navy into the baltic sea
sweden clearly needed a powerful navy
with big ships to secure her interests
and so in 1626 they came up with an idea
in 1626 the swedish king gustavus
adolphus was leading the swedish army in
poland
sweden was winning the battle on land
but like i mentioned previously they
were losing pretty badly on the seas
up until this point the swedish navy was
utilizing pretty small warships with
only a single gun deck that were more
prioritized for ramming and boarding
enemy ships than blowing them up with
cannons
gustavus adolphus decided that he wanted
to dramatically upgrade
the navy in order to meet the challenges
of the time so he ordered the
construction of five brand new
larger warships that would be the first
in the swedish navy to contain
two gun decks and the first of these to
be constructed
the vasa was intended to severely
overcompensate for the swedish navy's
embarrassing string of defeats
because it was going to be built to be
the most powerful warship
anywhere in the world so that nothing
else could come close to challenging it
while the vasa was initially designed to
hold 36 bronze cannons divided between
24 pounder guns on the lower deck
and smaller 12 pounders on the upper
deck the king demanded that the number
be doubled up to 72
cannons and that they all were the
larger 24 pounder guns
this armament would have given the vasa
the highest firepower of any ship in the
world at the time
capable of blasting a metal wall that
weighed nearly 900 pounds
out of a single side straight at
whatever enemy was unfortunate enough to
come across its path
this massive amount of firepower coming
from a relatively small ship is
pretty goofy historically because the
uss constitution
an american frigate that fought against
the british in the war of 1812
nearly two centuries later possessed an
almost identical level of firepower
but was also almost 700 tons heavier
but the king was impatient while
fighting an act of war that he was
losing at sea
and so he kept on demanding that the
construction of the world's most
powerful ship be hastened
so rather than building a brand new ship
from scratch that could actually safely
fit
72 heavy 24-pounder cannons aboard
they had to cut some corners and decided
to cram all 72 of them in a ship that
was only designed for half of that
amount instead
these cannons were also all made out of
bronze which is more dense than iron
and it was also beautifully decorated by
roughly 500 sculptures
depicting the king's family and figures
from roman mythology
and swedish history and some of which
were huge and over 10
feet tall the swedish empire was
effectively building the early 17th
century's version of the death star and
just like the death star
it came complete with one really stupid
flaw
in this case it was just a simple matter
of physics though rather than an obvious
exhaust port
but it also took way less enemies to
destroy it
the upper gun deck of the vasa was
initially supposed to house just 18
12 pounder cannons but due to the king's
commands
that number was increased to 36 of the
larger 24 pounder cannons without
significantly changing the design
structure of the ship itself
throw in a bunch of heavy wooden
sculptures to the upper gun deck as well
and the vasa was all set to become
dangerously unstable with a rollover
risk of an 800 horsepower jeep wrangler
to further complicate things the
shipbuilder that the swedes had hired to
build the thing
was some dutch guy named henrik who had
a pretty shoddy resume because there's
absolutely
zero historical evidence that he had
ever actually built a ship with two or
more gun decks ever before in his life
so
he only sort of knew what he was doing
modern archaeologists have also found
evidence that separate teams involved in
the construction of the ship were using
different systems of measurement a
classic mistake
one team working on one side of the ship
was using the swedish foot in 12 inches
while another team working on the other
side of the ship was using the amsterdam
foot in 11 inches nobody noticed this
discrepancy during the hurried
construction under wartime pressure
and as a result the vasa's mass was
distributed asymmetrically
and was heavier over on the port side
further the headroom in the decks
themselves was built higher than
necessary for crewmen at the time
who on average were only five feet and
five and a half inches tall
the weight of the decks themselves the
design errors while constructing the
whole
along with the heavier weight of the
bigger guns than initially designed for
as well as the increased weight from
bringing along 1000 big 24 pound
cannonballs
and their accompanying gunpowder meant
that the ship's center of gravity when
launched and fully armed would be
dangerously high
in the ship's upper area in other words
the vasa was critically unstable and
many of the officers on board
knew it when conducting a test to prove
its stability just prior to launching an
officer made 30 men
run up and down the deck to see how well
it could handle it
it didn't handle well at all and after
just three runs the officer ordered a
halt out of fear of making the boat
capsize if they continued any further
there are letters from a swedish admiral
present where he wrote about how he
wished the king was there to see how
unready it was and not off at war
demanding that the ship be launched
anyway
in the end the political pressure to
launch the ship was just too great and
nobody was brave enough to challenge the
king and so on the 10th of august 1628
after two long years of construction the
vasa was ordered out of stockholm port
on her maiden voyage to take up her
position as the new flagship of the
swedish navy
and within just one nautical mile of
this maiden journey
it would already be completely destroyed
a crowd of thousands gathered in
stockholm to watch the most powerful
ship
ever built sail off on her first journey
the ship's gun ports were left open to
fire off a salute as they left the
harbor
and within minutes the first signs of
trouble appeared
a sudden gust of wind just a little
stronger than a breeze was strong enough
to tip vasa over significantly on her
port's side
because of her high center of gravity
but this was thankfully able to be
reversed by the crew
however shortly afterwards a second and
slightly more powerful gust of wind
tipped the ship over again
and this time it dipped far enough over
that the lower gun deck with the open
gun ports
slipped just beneath the water line and
it was all over from there
water rushed in and the greatest ship
ever built that took
two years to build took probably just a
few minutes to sink
in the full view of thousands of shocked
and disappointed swedes
it was effectively the equivalent of the
challenger disaster in the 17th century
and a catastrophe for the swedish king
had the gun ports been closed it's
possible that vasa wouldn't have sunk
almost immediately right after it began
to sail but the flaws in her design and
engineering were so apparent
that the ship never would have lasted
for long anyway the wind would have
destroyed the ship sooner or later
simply because of the laws of physics
that the shipbuilders just didn't quite
completely understand
while the vasa was a catastrophe for
sweden in the 17th century
it would end up becoming a triumph for
sweden over 300 years later
in the 20th in the 1960s technology had
finally progressed far enough to where
the swedish
government could pull the vasa out from
beneath the depths where it was 95
still intact even after all that time
and rather than pressing the ship back
into the service of the swedish navy of
the 1960s
they decided that it would probably end
up being more useful in a museum
and so they drug it here to the vasa
museum in stockholm
where you can go today and gawk at the
aftermath of one of the greatest
engineering disasters
of all time when dealing with
complicated problems like constructing a
ship it's easier than you think to make
mistakes
kings engineers governments myself and
everyone else are all prone to making
easy errors that can create
problems both big and small luckily
though
you and i both have a resource today
that the shipbuilders and
engineers of the 17th century didn't the
internet
it's easy to look up things you're
curious about on places like wikipedia
but
honestly when i was researching this
video i visited the wikipedia page on
center of mass and the equations there
may as well
have been written in a foreign language
i hated
math growing up in high school and i've
always struggled learning about it when
i have to just read about it on a piece
of paper or on a screen
without anyone there to help guide me
through the steps and i'm
certain that i'm not alone there but
thankfully there is
a perfect alternative to learning about
math and science for people like you or
me
who might normally be struggling it's
called brilliant and their simple
introductory classes on science
essentials and physics of the everyday
helped me out tremendously with
understanding how the vasa came to sync
400 years ago while also teaching me
even more than i learned about while in
college
there are tons of courses that you can
take on brilliant ranging from beginner
difficulty ones like these
up to more complex subjects like
statistics calculus
computer science and more now an online
course teaching you more than a college
course since something pretty complex
might seem pretty scary
but the main reason why brilliant is so
great is because they take these huge
scary subjects and break them down into
little easy chunks which they teach by
explaining you the fundamentals
so pretty much even if you're the
furthest thing from a math expert
like me you can finally understand these
subjects that you previously looked at
with fear
or maybe even loathing so if you want to
learn the subjects that you hated in
school but you actually enjoy the
process
then brilliant is the best place for you
to go to right now
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