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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."
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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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Indeed, the Californian sent a warning before the collision and the Titanic's captain ignored it.
(emphasis mine)
Not quite. Actually, the Titanic's radio operator ignored it, as well as a previous warning by the Mesaba , being busy transmitting/receiving the passengers' private messenges.
..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.)
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.)
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