Titanic and the Radio

Introduction:

In the early morning hours of 15 April 1912, a high-pitched musical tone sang out for hundreds of miles across the North Atlantic in a desperate plea for help. The White Star liner R.M.S. Titanic had struck an iceberg, and her 5-kW Marconi installation was signaling her death knell. The Royal Mail Ship TITANIC was the final grand dream of the Gilded Age. It was premeditated to be the utmost achievement of an era of prosperity, confidence and propriety. Although no one knew it, the world was about to change drastically.

So would the transmitters which at that time were called spark-gap machines. It was developed mainly for ship-to-shore and ship-to-ship communication.This was a way of communicating between two points; however, it was not public radio broadcasting as we know it today, thanks to the influence of the Titanic.

There would have been more information on the Titanic and her Radio messages but unfortunately, the Titanics’ radio log book went down with the vessel, so by making use of the resources that I have access to I will do my best to provide the findings of my research in a clear and understandable manner.

The Titanic:

On 10 April 1912 one of the largest and most luxurious ocean liners ever built sailed for New York from England. At the time of her launch, the Titanic symbolized the epitome of technological achievement. She was, without doubt, one of man's noblest and most marvelous creations, and the largest moving object mankind had ever created. Built at a time when ocean liners were regarded as the most supreme of man's makings, the Titanic, captained by Edward John Smith, represented the "state of the art" in terms of engineering and artistic achievement. She was the pride of an era, a time of great expectations and wonderful technological mastery, as well as a time of immigration to the New World in hopes of a better life.

Full of prominent people whose pictures filled the newspapers in stories of this maiden voyage, the Titanic represented all the arrogance of technology and wealth.

The Radio (1912):

During the 1860s, Scottish physicist, James Clerk Maxwell predicted the existence of radio waves and in 1886, German physicist, Heinrich Rudolph Hertz demonstrated that fast variations of electric current. Then in 1866, Mahlon Loomis, an American dentist, successfully demonstrated wireless telegraphy. Finally Guglielmo Marconi, an Italian inventor, proved the feasibility of radio communication. By 1899 he flashed the first wireless signal across the English Channel and two years later received the letter "S", telegraphed from England to Newfoundland. This was the first successful transatlantic radiotelegraph message in 1902.

It all started with the discovery of radio waves, electromagnetic waves that have the capacity to transmit music, speech and other data invisibly through the