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Marconi's Luck on a Tragic Anniversary Titanic's radio room. Note pneumatic message tubes top right center. � By Michael L. Martel, US Tech Web Editor You never know where technology is going to go. A friend telephones me from Maine, or from Europe, and I have a small gadget in my hand that, in addition to being able to take photos or pick up e-mail, allows me to talk to him in real time. April 14, the day before Income Tax Day, was the 95th anniversary of the White Star Liner Titanic's collision with an iceberg in the north Atlantic on its maiden voyage to New York, and the resultant loss of more than 1500 lives in the icy waters hundreds of miles from the nearest land. The facts surrounding the sinking are well known, so much so that they have become the stuff of popular folklore and films. Yet, the number of lives lost would have most certainly been far greater without the help of the ship's new 5 kilowatt Marconi Wireless Radio (just invented 11 years earlier), which had a transmitting range of 500 miles. Ironically, as the Titanic sank, a ship actually visible in the distance — the Californian — might have been able to come to the rescue had its wireless operator not turned off his set and gone to bed 15 minutes before the Titanic's operator began transmitting distress signals. The Californian was, supposedly, trapped in an ice field and the captain had decided not to get underway again until daylight. So instead, the distant Cunard liner Carpathia heard the calls and began steaming northward, and rescued the Titanic's survivors in lifeboats the next morning. Indeed, a number of ships were converging on the Titanic's position as a result of the wireless distress call, but none were close enough to save her people the night she sank. Marconi's Dogged Efforts The fact that there was even a wireless radio aboard at was a matter of great good luck. The dogged efforts of Guglielmo Marconi to understand radio and develop a practical communications device based on them has much to do with it. He was, in some ways, working completely blind, and pursuing dead-end paths in his efforts, since some key assumptions on his part about Hertzian waves were entirely false. Ray Minichiello, P.E., (W1BC), Chairman of The Guglielmo Marconi Foundation, U.S.A., & The U.S. National Marconi Museum, maintains that, remarkably, putting wireless radios aboard ships initially had nothing to do with safety, but for passenger communications, and were intended to be a profit center for Marconi and his company. He required that the operators, onboard ship, be employees of his company as well; no one else was allowed to use the sets. At the time, most of the wireless communications from ships in the area were being handled by the Marconi shore station in Cape Race, Newfoundland. "Communication by wireless had just emerged. It was a scant 17 years after Guglielmo Marconi discovered an application for Hertzian waves, and only 15 years following the formation of the "Marconi's Wireless Company, Ltd." he writes. "The installation of wireless on oceangoing vessels began in the early 1900s but the initial intent was profit from transmission and receipt of messages, mainly commercial, to compete with the already well-established overland wire services. Thus, the Titanic, as with other ocean liners, was equipped with a Marconi wireless system primarily for handling of message traffic for revenue. The responsibility of the wireless operator was transmitting and receiving messages known as `MarconiGrams'. These included stock exchange quotations, business, and private communications, and news services. Wireless for signaling distress was incidental. The multitude of ships in categories other than passenger-carrying had no reason to be equipped with wireless. This was the sentiment of the period. The implication of wireless as a means of safety at sea was remote." Tremendous Energy Bursts Early wireless had many problems, and it is a wonder that portable wireless systems found their way to ships at all. Part of the problem was Marconi's long-standing belief that longer wavelength waves would travel greater distances, when in fact quite the opposite is true. His transmitters on the eastern seaboard operated on tens of thousands of watts, sending tremendous amounts of energy into the sky with each burst, even creating a blue glow around the sharp corners of neighboring houses at night, the local residents reporting that the bursts coming from the signal transmitting station sounding like small thunderclaps with the forming of each blue spark. These fascinating details are outlined in Erik Larson's book Thunderstruck (Three Rivers Press, NY, 2006). Towering antenna poles and wires strung between them constituted the massive antenna complexes that Marconi had constructed, and all this to be faintly heard at a receiver across the Atlantic. Marconi worked out these problems over time, but he still did not have an effective means of tuning his transmission wavelengths. As Minichiello writes, "To begin with, the generated signal of the spark transmitter was blunt and broad. The spectrum it occupied was today's entire broadcast band and then some. The lopsided theory of the period demanded brute force power for the wireless signal to reach the point of reception. The receiver aboard the Titanic utilized a magnetic detector, and a galena crystal receiver, each having a poor selectivity characteristic. Selectivity as a specification for receivers and bandwidth for transmitters were yet to be an established criterion. Hence, in close proximity operation of stations, whoever hit the air first, occupied most of the spectrum, thus denying stations within close distance the ability to communicate with others, unless a tuned circuit, such as a wave trap, was employed at the receiver to minimize the interfering signal." This may be why the Californian, floating somewhere nearby, may never have heard Titanic's distress call. "The precise frequency of the Titanic and the Californian transmitters at the time of the incident is not known. Nevertheless, whatever the separation, poor receiver selectivity and the closeness of the two vessels (about ten miles apart) allowed but one transmitter operation. Aboard the Californian, the wireless operator Cyril Evans turned on his wireless to dispose of his routine traffic. But being only ten miles from the Titanic, the operator on duty on the Titanic advised Evans to "shut up", as he was interfering with traffic to Cape Race, Newfoundland. Evans complied. Being the lone wireless operator on the Californian and having worked a long day, Evans retired for the night. Two tall radio masts stretched long-wave antenna wires. The Californian, within sight of the Titanic, found itself in the same ice field earlier in the evening at 11:00 p.m. Wisely, Captain Arthur Rostron of the Californian ordered his ship to a complete halt, intending to wend his way out at daybreak. The Titanic struck the iceberg at 11:40 p.m., less than a minute following the sighting of the iceberg by the lookout. But the "CQD", (General Call Distress) was not initiated until 12:15 a.m., 35 minutes later. In The Radio Legacy of the R.M.S. Titanic, by Dwight A. Johnson, KI5WI, Johnson tells us that "The electrical generators and radio equipment on board the Titanic were the best available at the time. The wireless equipment was "powered by a 5 kilowatt motor generator, and backed up by an emergency generator and batteries, the ship's radio had a guaranteed range of 250 miles under any weather conditions, and could usually maintain communications over 400 miles. The antenna system for this radio equipment can be prominently seen in most of the clear photographs of the ship. It consisted of four wires strung between two masts, the forward one located about 1/4 of the way back from the bow of the ship, and the other being near the stern. The height of the antenna was 205 feet above water level. The antenna was fed by four individual wire feed lines, which appear to emerge from the radio room in front of the first of the four large stacks, or "funnels" of the ship. The feed points appear to be located approximately 1/3 back from the leading end of the antenna." The senior wireless operator was John "Jack" Phillips, age 25, and the junior operator was 21-year-old Harold Bride. The radio transmitter was of the "spark" type, and the radio operator used a telegraph key to transmit a "Continental" version of code, which is slightly different from the American "Morse" code. The ship's radio actually required two separate rooms, one for the receiver, and one for the transmitter, to keep the loud buzzing of the transmitter from interfering with the receiver. A Marconi wireless shore station in Newfoundland. The operators on the Titanic were required to work six hours on and six hours off. Even at the cost of 12s. 6d for ten words and 9d. for each additional word, the passengers lined up (at least the wealthy passengers) to send a message home via this newfangled service. The remuneration for operators, from the evidence given by Marconi, started at $4 to $10 to $12 US per week with board and lodging. It was no problem to fill these positions as the rate of pay was considerably more than that of their land-based colleagues, Johnson reports. The sinking of the Titanic made headlines around the world, and newspapers were screaming the news of the disaster well before the Carpathia arrived in New York carrying the survivors that had been picked up from the lifeboats. Guglielmo Marconi arrived in New York City a few days earlier on the Lusitania, and promptly went to the dock to greet the arriving Titanic survivors and to interrogate his employee Harold Bride, the wireless operator who had survived (his colleague, Jack Phillips, senior wireless operator on Titanic, had not). It was but a few days later the survivors of the Titanic presented Marconi a solid gold medal, in gratitude for Marconi's wireless installation on board the Titanic, which had been credited with saving their lives.