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.
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.
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?
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)
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
Incidentally, the Titanic was carrying more lifeboats than the regulations required at the time.
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.
Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist
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."
..including a list of all messages sent to and from the ship here
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.)
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.