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CQD SOS Titanic


By Jan Hybertz Gøricke

The story about the loss of Titanic is also a story about intense communication at sea – and the great need for regulation of it.


Heaps on the Working Table
On Sunday the 14th of April 1912 the rate of work in the spark gap on board the transatlantic liner RMS Titanic was unusually high. The ship’s powerful high-tech radio-telegraph installation from the Marconi Wireless Company had been out of order for a day and a half so 25-year-old chief telegraph operator John "Jack" Phillips and his colleague 21-year-old assistant telegraph operator Harold Bride were working at high pressure to send the heap of telegrams that had piled up. During the 36 hours that passed from the departure from Southampton to the ship collided with an iceberg, the passengers sent and received about 250 telegrams via "the wireless".

Ice Warnings
In the rush of work telegrams from other ships arrived currently. Several of them contained ice warnings addressed to the captain of Titanic. Ice warnings were not within the jurisdiction of international law which may explain an ice warning from SS Californian was never received. The rather sloppy way of approach by the telegraph operator on SS Californian was probably the reason why the telegraph operator on board Titanic rejected the approach on the grounds that he was busy transmitting to Cap Race coastal radio station in Newfoundland. Cap Race was at this time within the reach of Titanic and the chief telegraph operator wanted to use the opportunity to forward the many commercial telegrams from the passengers. Cape Race re-forwarded telegrams from ships in the Atlantic to New York.

CQD – and SOS
Despite the ice warning RMS Titanic collided with an iceberg in the night of 14th April around 23.40 hrs. 35 minutes later Titanic sent out its "CQD" and shortly afterwards also the international distress signal "SOS" that had been valid since 1906. CQD was not an official international distress signal, but had since 1904 been used by all telegraph operators of the Marconi Wireless Company which was international leading - and domineering.

Thanks to "the Wireless"
During the next two hours the two brave telegraph operators of Titanic continued to send distress signals to the surrounding ships. The closest ship was actually the above-mentioned SS Californian, but its solitary telegraph operator had closed down the radio which was not in conflict with existing rules. As the telegraph operator had previously tried to communicate to Titanic, the ship was surrounded by ice and had stopped completely for the night.

However, on RMS Carpathia the telegraph operator was still at his post when Titanic sought support at about 00.20 hrs. Barely two hours after Titanic had disappeared underneath the surface of the sea, Carpathia arrived saving 705 people from the ice-cold sea – thanks to "the wireless". If Californian’s radio had been on, and if they had received the distress signals, the ship would have been able to get there quite a while before Titanic went down, and many more – perhaps all – passengers could have been saved.

More Rigorous Legislation
A few months after the catastrophe, the second international radio conference was held in London. As it has been seen both before and after the loss of Titanic, catastrophes at sea are often contributory to scrutiny and tightening-up of existing rules.

It was, however, also a question of international legislation as a whole having to mature within the still budding field of radio-telegraphy at sea. The most important decisions to prevent ship accidents stated that in future first-class ships should keep constant watch so that the nearest ships could quickly come to the rescue, all ships with radio installations were now obliged to record all radio-telegraphic messages, and new frequencies were introduced for broadcasting of e.g. weather reports. In 1914, an ice patrol service was organized in the North Atlantic.

At the London conference it was once again maintained that "SOS"was the international distress signal as it had been decided in 1906. The choice of SOS as international distress signal was first and foremost due to the fact that the signal is unmistakable – three dots, three dashes, three dots. That "SOS" should be an abbreviation of "Save Our Souls" or "Save Our Ship" is a myth.

The last Dot and Dash
After 1912 international legislation on radio-telegraphy at sea was continuously revised concurrently with the development of technology and the size of ship traffic. Today radio-telegraphed distress signals at sea are a thing of the past. On 31st January 1999, Lyngby Radio listened for the last time for signals on the distress frequency 500 kHz which has now been replaced by the satellite-based global maritime distress and security system (GMDSS) whereas they are still listening on medium wave and VHF.


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