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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."
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.
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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 isn't clear to me that KAL-007 was a genuine navigational error. Marconi's RDF was good enough to do precision-bombing and instrument-only landing in the 1940s. It is entirely possible that navigational aids 40 years later were indeed inferior, but even if true that's not through a lack of capability but a lack of wit. I'm not inclined to believe the conspiracy theories that the pilot was paid by the CIA to trigger the USSR defenses (the CIA haven't been competent in anything else, so there's no reason to believe they'd be able to accomplish such a task). Nonetheless, staggering errors of judgement were made by the pilot, even given all the other staggering errors of judgement that had led to pathetically sub-standard navigational aids.
Ultimately, however, this is true of most other disasters - be it the R101, the Titanic, the current global economic meltdown, Fukoshima or any others you might care to name. The problem can almost always be traced to a string of errors, stupidities and absurdities, ALL of which had been known to be errors, stupidities and absurdities AT THE TIME. In other words, gross negligence -- usually, but not always, accompanied by bean-counting. The disasters do NOT lead to solutions, the solutions already existed. The disasters lead merely to the accountants being ordered to loosen the purse-strings. At least for that week.
(The recent sinking of a cruise ship with loss of life has led to the discovery that modern passenger ships also lack sufficient lifeboats - and are also horribly unstable once they start shipping water, leading to half the lifeboats they do have being unusable. This is a repeat of the situation leading up to the Titanic. It exists not because people don't know how to build lifeboats or count passengers, but because decisions are made according to profit margins and not according to rational examination of cause-and-effect.)
History does not repeat itself, but accountants do. You can't avoid making decisions based on some economic philosophy, but it is self-evident to anyone but the determinedly blind that none of the economic philosophies out there are very good at risk management.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Two years after the Titanic, there was another incident had a far greater influence on improvements in radios: The First World War.
Hypothermia killed most people in the water within minutes, so that would've been a bad idea to risk.
The ship sank in about 2 hours - for a lot of that time (about a half hour) they didn't really "get it" (which is obviously a huge problem as well), and for about the last hour, the ship was tilting far enough that rescue may very well have been impossible. If I were the captain of a mid-size steamer, I'd be very reluctant to be anywhere near an ocean liner whose stern was literally coming out of the water. In any case, even if the Californian had rushed directly to aid, it would have still taken almost an hour to get there (the Californian topped out at about 22km/h, and the Titanic was about 19km away). By that time, it would have been so clear that the Titanic was going down that the (much shorter and half-as-long) Californian wouldn't want to be taken down with it. Any assistance would not have been a direct ship-to-ship transfer, and they would have been stuck with ferrying boats around, which they only had an hour to do, or having people jump in and swim, which would have killed hundreds of people anyway due to the cold and the distance. Had they decided to ferry the lifeboats back and forth, they would have needed to either get the boats back up to the deck, or send a thousand people down on ladders one-by-one. And then repeat it all on the other ship.
There's no question that more people would have survived, but it would have been more like a 50-50 or even a 60-40 split instead of the 32-68 split it was (save-lost). It still would have been a calamity of unthinkable magnitude.
Bottom line, the Titanic needed more boats, and more urgency about using them. Everything else would have helped, but not enough.
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
I understand that you have a meta-complaint and/or political viewpoint that suffuses your worldview, thus everything gets translated through that filter. Granted.
But:
First you say that the CAPTAIN ignored the warning. Then you say the OWNERS should have gone to prison for "insisting" on him sailing at night in icy waters.
Is there proof or merely inference that the owners directly ordered the captain to make this call? You might say that "capitalist" motives caused the captain/owners to make bad judgement calls, but to then hyperbolize that into a blanket indictment against free-market capitalism seems at the very least specious.
I know that my mere questioning of your point has already probably painted me as a 'crony capitalist' and thus you've probably stopped reading. But your logic escapes me; by that same token Midas' story was also a criticism of 'free market capitalism' long before such was even formulated as an holistic concept.
Doesn't it ipso-facto follow from your assertion that people in socialist, monarchist, or other (non free-market) economic systems are contrariwise immune to the all the sorts of motivations that could make a captain of a huge ocean liner make errors in judgement? (If it logically was the "fault" of free-market capitalism, removing it from the situation would have made the accident impossible.)
-Styopa