Slashdot Mirror
How the Sinking of the Titanic Sparked a Century of Radio Improvements
joshuarrrr writes "When the RMS Titanic scraped an iceberg on the night of 14 April 1912, its wireless operators began sending distress calls on one of the world's most advanced radios: a 5-kilowatt rotary spark transmitter that on a clear night could send signals from the middle of the Atlantic to New York City or London. What the radio operators lacked, however, were international protocols for wireless communications at sea. At the time, US law only required ships to have one operator on board, and he was usually employed by the wireless companies, not the ship itself. On the 100th anniversary of the Titanic, IEEE Spectrum looks at how the tragedy accelerated the improvement of communications at sea."
Most of New York was asleep and the listeners were in disbelief. Thats how it hit the newstands the following morning.
Fact of the matter is only one vessel was in those treacherous waters as many sailors avoided the ice field.
http://saveie6.com/
If I see another story about the Titanic, I'm going to crack my skull open with the largest block of ice I can find.
After all, if not for government regulations, the ship would naturally have had enough lifeboats and surely the others would have responded to radio and rockets on their own.
If only those mean governments had not interfered with the free market, then Astor would have saved us from the Great Depression.
And that would prevent World War 2. Or super-intelligent time-traveling cockroaches. One of the two.
I still hear Nickelback and Katy Perry on the radio.
...a century of sensational journalism and bad movies.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
People never do anything until someone gets hurt. Despite people predicting these sort of dangers, no one could actually get the government to step in and enforce communication standards until someone died from it. I'm sure there are similar examples throughout history, when cars first came to be on the road for example. Or various accidents at factories around the world.
It's an interesting bit of human nature, people are lazy, and if they can avoid doing something they usually will.
In a bit of shameless internet panhandling, I accept Litecoin Donations at Lbd2oH9QsthD1GfuUXPyka12YxvWJYnBVf
Not really sure how the sea part, nor the titanic part is relevant.
I'd say the bulk of the advances in radio were military, and general commercial use of radio. Ships benefited too, but I really don't see them as being the real cause for innovation.
Standardisation though, yeah, I'll give them that. Accidents tend to lead to that. Good thing too.
It sounds more to me like various powers used this as an excuse to exercise greater controls. Never waste a good crisis, right?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
I believe same with KAL-007 after the airliner was downed by a Soviet fighter when it strayed into USSR airspace. After that, much GPS technology was developed for non-military uses to prevent such a bad navigation error.
I think this article about Titanic, though not news for nerds being 100 years late but radio communications is a nerdy topic (unlike Zimmerman articles). With exception of getting overloaded by Titanic articles.
mfwright@batnet.com
They improvements TFA describes are the technique of handling collisions by having both sides back off for a randomly chosen period of time, and then send another ship, right?
All the "information" is in a timeline. Ugh. At least it's a pretty nifty HTML5 one.
I was about to spout my mouth off, but figured I'd read the article before I made a fool out of myself. But the article didn't have anything, so here goes.
The Titanic was near another ship - the Californian could have made it in time before the ship sank, but the radio operator went to bed. In those days, there was no requirement for 24/7 manning of the radio station, which was the single largest thing to come out of the sinking (in terms of radio). It's hard to fault them for it, though, since radio was still pretty new. The next-closest ship that did hear them (the Carpathia) hauled ass, at great risk, and got there a few hours after the sinking. Radio, as a technology, worked. Again, since this was the event that basically defined radio as a serious method for emergency communications, it's hard to fault people for not realizing it in advance.
Part of the rules for the calling frequency (500 KHz) was that everybody would stop talking for a few minutes every half-hour, so people could hear if there was a station in distress that was far away, or running out of power, and being swamped out by local traffic. Not an issue for the Titanic, but still a good idea.
All in all, the radio stuff is interesting, but what the Titanic needed were more lifeboats and a more serious response by the crew and passengers. Even if the Californian had made it there while the ship was still afloat, there were thousands of people on that ship, no way to get them off, and freezing cold water so they couldn't just jump in and be pulled out.
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
Two years after the Titanic, there was another incident had a far greater influence on improvements in radios: The First World War.
`On the 100th anniversary of the Titanic, IEEE Spectrum looks at how the tragedy accelerated the improvement of communications at sea"'
At least one ship heard the SOS and failed to respond, the main improvements in the aftermath of the tragedy is it became compulsory to respond to a distress signal.
AccountKiller
nor that the spark gap generator on the titanic (and its sisters) produced a fairly unique, "almost musical tone", and that help was on the way shortly after the signals were sent (and those signals were greatly delayed due to mostly arrogance) ...
lets bend this into a tech story about radio!
And not a lesson in sea time disaster management.
Incidentally, the Titanic was carrying more lifeboats than the regulations required at the time.
The root cause of the Titanic disaster was, in fact, free market capitalism. (The people who down-mod things they disagree with, instead of responding to them, may now proceed as usual.)
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Umm.... what has US law got to do with this? It's a British ship, running under British command and registered in Britain. At the time, Britain was the unquestioned master of the world's oceans. The appropriate regulatory authority would have been the British 'Board of Trade'...
..including a list of all messages sent to and from the ship here
A pity I can't correct my own post.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Part of the rules for the calling frequency (500 KHz) was that everybody would stop talking for a few minutes every half-hour, so people could hear if there was a station in distress that was far away, or running out of power, and being swamped out by local traffic. Not an issue for the Titanic, but still a good idea.
To be sure, but Silent Periods (15 to 18 minutes, and 45 to 48 minutes, past the hour, every hour) were installed as a result of the Titanic disaster, not before, as part of the Safety Of Life At Sea (SOLAS) treaty series. One of the conclusions drawn from Titanic was that there was no universally agreed-upon prioritization of wireless traffic, and the SOLAS treaties established one.
There was a SOLAS treaty of 1914, but World War I kept it from being ratified in most (if not all) countries and, though many countries implemented parts of the agreement piecemeal, the first ratifiable treaty wasn't signed until 1929. (Even then, the US did not ratify the treaty until 1936 -- with the Titanic disaster now ancient history, the depression gave a certain political party the opportunity to complain about onerous, burdensome government regulation taking jobs from otherwise employed sailors, and that treaty supporters were dupes of foreign powers trying to take the jobs of hard-working Americans by modifying the "free market" in their favor. Reading the political arguments of the time, and the reports of the congressional hearings, in the old newspaper microfilms is quite depressing -- and cynicism-inducing.)
It's the 100th anniversary, or thereabouts.
Cameron just capitalized on it.
Very few non-military ships are capable of working anywhere in the world in all seasons. Some sailing ships are, nuclear icebreakers can. Any cruise liner has a maximum safe working map which varies from season to season, and then there are further restrictions like don't keep steaming at night where there is ice. By the time of the Titanic all these things were well known and understood. What seems to have happened, quite simply, is that for commercial reasons the owners instructed the captain to exceed the safe working envelope of the Titanic. There may have been contributory factors, like the question of whether the helm orders were the right way round (because steam practice was the reverse of sail practice). The failure of the wireless operator (thanks for the correction above) to recognise the seriousness of the warning from the Californian was a serious, and stupid, dereliction of ordinary duty of care, but the fact is that if one experienced captain thought it best to stop, another could have done so without the warning.
In short, it was a multicausal accident, but almost all the causes were well known.
I'm not sure of the relevance of Jutland. As far as I can see the principal lesson of Jutland was "Don't mix old and new ships in your battle fleets", and that had been amply demonstrated in earlier WW1 engagements.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
It is so good to know that no communist, no socialist, no dictator has ever, ever, ever made a bad decision.
No brain, no pain.
It's very easy from our keyboards and couches in 2012 to say "why didn't they understand how critical radio was??!?!?!?!" but let's understand that the captain and senior crew were long-serving officers, and the naval tradition in England wasn't one to quickly adapt novelty.
Ships had been sailing the high seas for centuries. The nominal state was that once a ship left land, and barring a rare meeting at sea, ships were ALONE. Thus the remarkable powers attributed legally to captains. They were truly worlds unto themselves.
Further, people generally didn't have telephones - unless you were in person, you generally corresponded by letter. People were used to not being 'connected'.
Wireless tech was only perhaps 15 years old in 1912, and extremely novel in shipboard service. It would be like skype today - although we live in such an interconnected world we really can't comprehend how naturally people accepted being alone/disconnected.
As I type this at 44, having grown up when you actually had to talk into phones connected to the wall and otherwise not being connected at all...I wonder if my generation is perhaps one of the last that will understand what it's like to have the 'natural state of things' being disconnected (in the US). I know teenagers today certainly couldn't comprehend it.
-Styopa
No one could have imagine terrorists flying airplanes into buildings, so there was no defense in place beforehand.
Enjoy.
One of the under-appreciated technologies to result from the Titanic disaster was the development of the auto alarm: An automatic receiver that continuously monitored the calling frequency (500 kHz) for a specific alarm signal to be sent by ships in distress.
Prior to this time, an operator trained in Morse code reception was required to be on duty or, failing that, a "wireless watcher," a deck officer trained to listen for the distinctive three-dits-three-dahs-three-dits of the SOS call. However, the wireless watcher system had obvious flaws (e.g., other duties of the deck officer taking him away from the receiver), and so an automatic system was desired. The trick was doing it with 1920s technology.
It was decided early on in the development of the auto alarm that having a detector able to correctly decode "SOS" with sufficient sensitivity and selectivity (i.e., without false detections during a night of reception of multiple simultaneous and possibly interfering signals, lightning crashes, etc.), and at different rates and fidelity (recall that the SOS signal would be sent by hand, by a person likely to be under high stress) was beyond the technology of the day. Instead, a second, simpler, signal was invented -- a signal specifically for detection by the auto alarm. This signal was defined to be a series of four or more dashes, each four seconds long, with a space of one second between them. (Clocks provided in the radio rooms were required to have a sweep second hand, and a pattern of 4 on, 1 off dashes was printed around the circumference of the clock to aid the timing of the operator.) Alarm bells were placed over the bunks of both the Radio Officer and the ship's Master.
When the radio officer went off watch, he turned the auto alarm on. Should an auto alarm signal be received, the bells would go off (not unlike a fire bell and, a foot over your head, very impressive at 2 AM, I can assure you), and the operator would then climb off of the ceiling, go to the radio room, turn off the auto alarm, and monitor 500 kHz to see what's going on.
In an actual emergency, the radio officer on the ship in distress actually sends the auto alarm signal first, then sends the SOS signal. (The SOS signal, by the way, is sent as a single character, with no spaces between the letters -- di-di-dit-dah-dah-dah-di-di-dit, not di-di-dit-space-dah-dah-dah-space-di-di-dit.) This mp3 file, of an actual disaster (the fire on the MS Prinsendam, PJTA, in 1980), has this clearly audible: The recording starts with a long series of auto alarm tones, followed by the SOS call at about the 2:30 mark.
Those of us with a logical bent would find the design of these auto alarms to be a study in stone-knives-and-bear-skins analog computing. This document gives one some idea of the requirements. It would be a good task for an engineering student project.
. . . but consider just one, the SS Flying Enterprise, that sank in 1952 in the North Atlantic. While a freighter, it carried ten passengers, and spent 13 days listing from 45 to 60 degrees to port -- a list that would surely have prevented any lifeboats from being launched -- before finally going down.
There are many other examples -- the Yorktown comes to mind, although naval vessels should probably be a separate discussion -- but the point is that it doesn't take much of a list to render lifeboats unlaunchable: Fifteen degrees will do.
Just for fun, check out "RMS Titanic, 1909- 1912 (Olympic Class), Owners Workshop Manual" by Haynes.
http://www.amazon.com/RMS-Titanic-Manual-1909-1912-Workshop/dp/076034079X
Can Samzenpus be brib... be tasked with commissioning a review?