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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.
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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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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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.
Two years after the Titanic, there was another incident had a far greater influence on improvements in radios: The First World War.
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.
The ship was designed to carry enough lifeboats for everyone, but the company didn't fit them because regulations didn't require it. If I remember correctly, the Titanic was the first big ship to sink where the passengers did stand a decent chance of survival in lifeboats precisely because of radio; if you'd sunk twenty years earlier the odds of being picked up by another ship were small even if you had enough lifeboats because the other ships would have no idea of where you were.
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
It's easy. The market is self-correcting. The passengers who drowned on the Titanic would naturally take their business elsewhere to another company who did provide enough lifeboats.