The Titanic and the Radio Act of 1912

THE TITANIC AND THE RADIO ACT OF 1912

Unsinkable

On 10 April 1912 one of the largest and most luxurious ocean liners ever built sailed for New York from England. 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 captain, believing his ship impervious to the dangers of nature, sped through an ice field, an ice field through which other ships would have proceeded with extreme caution. On 15 April the Titanic struck an iceberg and began taking on water.

Distress Signals

Jack Phillips, one of the wireless operators on the Titanic, immediately began broadcasting distress signals and the ship's position. Tragically, most ships, including those closest to the Titanic, employed only one operator; when that man was away from his station, no one monitored the wireless. By sheer coincidence, Harold Cottam, the operator of the Carpathia, had returned to his station to complete a "time rush" (in which two ships check the agreement of their clocks). The Carpathia was fifty-eight miles away, and it took three and a half hours to get to the site of the disaster, by which time the Titanic was gone. The Carpathia rescued seven hundred people, mostly women and children, who had made it into the insufficient number of lifeboats. More than fifteen hundred others died, including the wireless operator Jack Phillips, who remained at his station as the ship went down. The California was less than twenty miles away, but its wireless operator was asleep.

A WARNING FOR LUSITANIA PASSENGERS

On the morning that the British-owned passenger liner the Lusitania was set to sail from New York harbor, readers of several New York dailies found startling advertisements in their newspapers. The Imperial Germany Embassy had taken out full-page notices warning travelers that they boarded the Lusitania at their own risk.

In early 1915 the German navy had declared that all ships entering British territorial waters would be fired upon. Even unarmed passenger ships sailing the North Atlantic were at risk from German submarines, or U-boats. President Wilson found this an intolerable situation and vigorously defended freedom of the seas for neutral nations.

Several days after the Lusitania left New York, when the ship was just twenty miles off the British coast, a torpedo struck it and it sank like a stone, thanks in part to its illicit cargo of weapons. Of the 1,924 people aboard, 1,198 drowned, including 114 of 188 Americans. Despite obvious illegal aid to Britain by a supposedly neutral nation, the sinking of the Lusitania helped shift American public opinion toward war.

Source:

Robert I). Schulzinger, American Diplomacy in the Twentieth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984).

Confusion

Shortly after the initial distress message from the Titanic, wireless stations all along the East Coast of North America clogged the air with traffic. The Marconi Company complained about the interference, and out of this congestion finally emerged the false news that the Titanic was moving safely toward Halifax. In the aftermath of the tragedy many people hoped the perpetrator of what they thought was a hoax would be caught and executed. One calmer explanation is that a message from the steamship Asian, "Towing oil tank to Halifax," was mistaken for a message about the Titanic passengers. Still, the press and government officials took this incident as an incentive to begin more-systematic regulation of the airwaves.

The Radio Act of 1912

In the aftermath of the disaster new regulations for shipboard wireless were proposed in Congress. The bill required that the wireless be manned at all times and that auxiliary power be available in the event of engine failure. It also called for implementation of a strict protocol for receiving distress signals; each ship radio had to have a range of at least one hundred miles. The Radio Act of 1912 also began to purge the airwaves of all the amateurs who had confused official operators on the night of 15 April. Operators had to be licensed and adhere to certain band widths, and large portions of the spectrum would be set aside for the navy. Amateurs could listen to any transmissions but could not broadcast over them. They could only transmit on the shortest waves, considered useless.

Sarnoff Writes Himself a Hero's Role

David Sarnoff, a crack wireless operator for the Marconi Company atop Wanamaker's Department Store in New York City in 1912, went on to become chairman of the powerful Radio Corporation of America. He claimed to have heard the signal of the Titanic, given the information to the press, and alerted other possible rescue ships. How he learned of the disaster is not known, but he did rush to his station and spent a long vigil in contact with the Carpathia, getting the survivors' names to frenzied families and friends of the passengers assembling at Wanamaker's. He stayed at his post for seventy-two hours. Both Sarnoff and his boss Marconi were lionized for their roles in the Titanic disaster, and in two days the Marconi Company's stock zoomed from $55 to $255.

Sources:

Susan Douglas, Inventing American Broadcasting, 1899-1922 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987);

Carl Dreher, Sarnoff: An American Success (New York: Quadrangle, 1977).