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."

Comments

Re:Sea?

[Sir_Sri]

In a way they were though. British shipping was the *the* shipping around the world. When you moved thousand upon thousands of people by ships (think modern airplanes) people care very much that they're safe, that was after all, how people emigrated by the hundreds of thousands. The "RMS" part was Royal mail ship, as in they expected any ship with RMS in its name to meet government standards for how quickly it got to destinations and got things loaded for the royal mail service. These were all really big deals before aircraft and modern radio communications got the job done mostly better.

I'll grant you that the navy, especially at this point the Royal Navy, which was larger than the next two largest navies combined (and those were france and germany) and operated over the whole world, all the time cared very much about communication. But even as the article points out, they had the technology on the ship at this point. What they needed was to understand how to use that effectively.

The Titanic highlighted what *could* have been done, given the technology (including technology on the ship) if there had been systems and procedures in place. Which is much like aircraft, if someone breaks into a cockpit and crashes a plane, everyone wonders why we don't have reinforced cockpits, why we have gps on aircraft etc etc, because an airliner landing at the wrong airport, or an airliner crashing due to bad weather that could be dealt with by automated systems very much drives adoptoin. . Ocean liners that carried thousands people, vital food supplies and the masses of the public (rich and poor) were very much in the consciousness of people wondering about moving overseas or having their families from europe follow them. The military, the royal navy in particular, had functioned for 300 years without radio, and had systems and procedures in place to act on their own initiative without orders from London, and to act in the best interest of the crown. But the titanic highlights what was, at the time, all of the things that could have been done with what they knew then, but weren't using effectively. They didn't try (and fail) to build the ship as unsinkable, or with a radio because they didn't vaguely appreciate that these were good things. They just didn't understand quite how to use them at that point. The navy got its lessons at Tsushima and Jutland, the army its lessons in the boer war.

Re:advances come with tragedies

[amck]

The KAL-007 tragedy is unlikely to have been pilot error.

Pilots are in many countries rewarded for saving the airline money: prinicipally by picking good routes and saving fuel (about the only performance incentive available to pilots). This was true of JAL at the time.
A practice had developed of "accidentally" traversing USSR, etc. airspace, taking a shortcut to save fuel.
JAL 747 pilots had developed a reputation for doing this.

It was believed that the US had spotted this trend, and was using it to sneak reconnaissance flights over the area by piggy-backing them on commercial "flight routes" and timetables: flying ELINT aircraft with commercial tags.

The Russians now believed that JAL-007 was really a US elint aircraft. They screamed blue murder over the airwaves, warning the flight that they would shoot. JAL-007 had its radio turned off, so that it could claim it was "accidentally" in Russian airspace, and so missed the warnings.

Hence the tragedy.

A lot of this kind of subterfuge happened during the cold war.