Radio’s uses first demonstrated at sea
» MARCONI moved to successfully exploit his innovation. His Wireless Telegraph and Signal Company had opened a radio factory in Chelmsford by 1898. Several changes of name, and later, ownership, would follow, but it would be responsible for some of the most important advances in radio and, later, television.
He was an extremely canny businessman, and one of his shrewdest early moves was to hire out radio equipment and operators to shipping lines. If you wanted radio on your ship, you had to use Marconi’s firm.
The early days of radio were inextricably linked with maritime communication. It was at sea that its uses would be most dramatically demonstrated.
For young men from modest backgrounds, becoming a Marconi radio operator offered a glamorous and exciting career. These men, though they worked in ones and twos, formed a strong brotherhood, always addressing one another in Morse as ‘OM’ – old man – even though many were very young indeed.
Soon, the press would carry stories of passengers saved from disaster by the radio summoning help from other ships.
One of the earliest and most newsworthy was the sinking of the White Star liner RMS Republic off the coast of Massachusetts in 1909. Newsworthy because she was known as the ‘millionaire ship’ on account of her luxurious facilities and her popularity with wealthy passengers.
She collided with another ship in thick fog, but radio operator Jack Binns’ distress message summoned ships to rescue all 1,500 passengers and crew before she went down.
Most famous of all was the loss of the Titanic in April 1912 when radio operators Jack Phillips and Harold Bride sent out messages which summoned the captain and crew of the liner Carpathia to make a superhuman attempt to speed to the scene. Phillips died in the disaster, but it was noted that even as his cabin was filling with water he was using the Morse key as calmly as ever.
Without radio, all on Titanic would have been lost.
Carpathia rescued 705 survivors, including Harold Bride, who had been swept into the water and survived on a boat that was slowly sinking. Despite his injuries, and frostbitten feet, he later joined Carpathia’s radio operator Harold Cottam, the man who had alerted his captain to Titanic’s distress call, in the radio room. The pair spent hours sending messages to survivors’ families. They already knew one another, and were good friends. At the time of the disaster, Harold Bride was 22 years old, Cottam just 21.
Ironically, Marconi himself had been offered a passage on Titanic
but had preferred to travel on another ship instead. He had crossed the Atlantic on the Lusitania a few days previously.
The loss of the Titanic would be instrumental in persuading many more ship owners to use Mr Marconi’s new invention.
By then, the value of maritime radio had been proven in other ways. In 1910 Dr Hawley Harvey Crippen, suspected of murdering his wife in London, was travelling to the USA in disguise when the captain of the ship telegraphed the British authorities saying he suspected one of his passengers was the wanted man. Chief Inspector Dew of Scotland Yard took a fast ship across the Atlantic and made his arrest.