The Science Museum storage facility has a piece of the wreckage from a de Havilland Comet aircraft - recovered from the Mediterranean near Elba (One of the 3 aircraft that disintegrated through decompression in flight in the early 1950s)
What is special about this item is that engineers were able to identify the reason for the failures - the windows and other panels had square corners and the expansion/shrinking that an aircraft experiences in flight with different pressure caused stress cracks at the corners of the apertures (they can be seen in the photograph)
This discovery is the reason why windows, doors and other panels on today's aircraft fuselages are rounded - reducing the stresses.
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