Rivets — a brief history
Cast iron is too brittle to be reliably riveted, so it wasn’t until structures began to be made in steel that riveting became common. From 1810, for more than a century, boilers, locomotives, ships, and steel-framed buildings (such as the earliest skyscrapers) were made from pieces of steel fastened together with rivets. The rivets weren’t especially strong, having to be made of low-carbon steel that could be shaped into rivets without cracking, but were permanent and cheap. To get a joint of greater strength, more rivets were used.
Holes in the steel to be joined were drilled, the rivet was heated red-hot, the hot rivet was inserted into the holes, and the head of the rivet would be formed using a pneumatic riveting gun whose shaped end acted as a die. The metal was more easily deformed by the pounding of the die if it was very hot. As it cooled, the rivet would contract and tightly grip the components being joined. The staccato sound of riveters was the ever-present background noise of shipyards, large construction sites, and loco works.
From about 1930, electric welding began to replace riveting in shipbuilding. Rivets were still being used in steel-framed buildings as late as 1960 because of some earlier failures in welded-steel construction, although it had been shown as early as 1926 that welded-steel structures required only about 90 per cent of the steel that a riveted structure needed.
Concerns about earthquakes resulted in steel-framed buildings being built in both Wellington and Napier, as well as in other New Zealand cities. The first riveted-steel structure was the Public Trust Building on Wellington’s Lambton Quay, whose plans were rumoured to have been hurriedly revised after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. Napier’s Market Reserve Building was completed soon after the city’s 1931 earthquake, and, shortly after that, the last riveted structure in New Zealand, the Tower building at 60 Customhouse Quay, Wellington was built.
Aluminium is much more difficult to weld than steel, so aircraft, made of aluminium because it is lighter, were of riveted construction until adhesives began to be used at the end of last century. There are some examples of steel aircraft, such as the USSR’s very highly regarded MiG-25 ‘Foxbat’ interceptor and reconnaissance aircraft (top speed Mach 2.83) of the 1970s. These were mostly welded together rather than riveted. US experts, who examined an example that had been landed in Japan by a defecting pilot in 1976, were apparently unable to work out how the welding had been carried out.