Geoff's Techno Blog

oh well. I lost it.
I had saved, I thought the draft of the wonderful Titanic posting, but it disappeared. I use a program called Semagic, and saving a draft does not keep it. :-( Meanwhile I have been fighting with MythTV to replace the broken DVD player. I bought a cheap TV card with remote control, and as you can guess, it's supported, but does not work. :-(

I can get it to play DVDs, play files from my file server, and WATCH TV, but I can't listen to it. I think it may be related to same problem I had with using VLC to stream video and audio from my TV card in the other computer, they use the same video chip driver. Oh and the remote control does not work either, which is really annoying because the company that made the card, AVerMedia, has not changed the protocol or drivers since 1998.

On to the Titanic. When the Titanic sailed, there were two radio companies. Each sold a service, not a product. If you wanted a radio on your ship, you provided a space for the equipment and operators and fed them. They had no shipboard duties, where not sailors and unlike anyone else on board under the rule of the captain. Their only responsibility was to the company they worked for. If they were fired for any reason, they were completely out of the business because the competition would not hire them either.

One company was the English company Marconi. Marconi sold to everyone who wanted radios except Italy. Due to the treatment of Macroni himself, he was considered a quack at best or a charlatan at worst, he went to England where they funded him. The other company was the German company TeleFunken. In those days radios used spark transmitters so a signal on one "wavelength" was wide enough that anyone nearby would hear them. So it would be easy for a Marconi ship's operator to send messages to and a TeleFunken ship and vice versa. Competition was fierce and each company forbade, on penalty of being fired, their operators from communicating with the operators of the other company.

Each company had it's own codes and rules. The codes were not to hide messages, they were to make sending messages shorter. Western Union had it's own codes, 73 (best wishes) and 88 (love and kisses) are still in use today by amateur radio operators. Marconi had their own codes, which may or may not have been known by a TeleFunken operator. I expect the experienced ones knew them for entertainment purposes. They could not send a message to a Marconi ship, but they could copy the messages (hear them) if they wanted to.

Marconi's codes began with the letters C and Q. Their general call was just the letters "CQ", repeated usually three times and followed by the callsign of the station that wanted to call, the letters "DE" (French for from), and their callsign usually repeated three times. I don't know when it started, but the end of a transmission equivalent to the voice word "over" is the letter "K". Marconi also assigned special codes based on their order of use, CQA, being the most often used. The code for HELP, was "CQD". If you were calling for help, you would send CQD, if you were asking someone if they needed help, you would send "CQD?".

I have never read or heard what code TeleFunken used, but I'm sure they had their own codes. because of this problem an international standard distress call, the letters "SOS" run together, to distinguish it from being part of a word, was agreed to. The Titanic was NOT the first ship to use it.

When the Titanic struck the iceberg, the nearest ship was the Californian, a TeleFunken ship. Unfortunately, the Titanic was a Marconi ship. The radio operator did not answer the call, nor did he notify the Captain. To do either would have meant being fired at thrown off the ship with no way home at first landfall. There is much speculation about what happened, but when he claimed that the Titanic ignored his warning, it is unlikely he sent it.

The Californian had stopped for the night, and he might have assumed the Titanic had done so too. If they had, he probably did turn off the radio and go to bed, because there would have been no way for him to get through. Or he may of heard the distress call "CQD" which was sent first, and decided it was a Marconi matter, no concern of his and gone to sleep, or just sat their enjoying the drama. There is no way of knowing. All we know is that he did not answer the call and did not relay the message to the Captain.

In any case he was not legally obligated to do anything, and had a great deal to loose if he did.

The official story was a whitewash, as neither company wanted to be held responsible for the death of so many people. Change was slow in coming. In 1914, a private radio company opened for business in Germany. They bought franchises from both TeleFunken and Marconi. So now, you could send a message from one company to the other. You still could not go directly ship to ship, but you could have a message relayed to the company in Germany and then to the other ship. Of course, each "hop" from ship to ship and the relaying from one desk to the other in Germany cost you money. But it was better and faster than sending a message to your office and having them relay it.

Later, U.S. law and then international treaties were signed that required all ships to render aid to ships in distress, no matter what flag they flew and what radio company they used. These laws are still in effect to this day. They were even followed by the British and Germans in World War II, but not by the U.S. There was a German U boat that sunk a British ship in WWII and instead of leaving the survivors to perish in shark filled waters, declared a three mile neutral zone around the spot, and had other U-Boats join it to rescue the survivors. This worked until a U.S. airplane flew overhead and was given the order to sink the U-Boat. They only slightly damaged it, but the bomb killed many English sailors and passengers on the U-Boats decks and nearby lifeboats.

The reason I mention it is that IMHO, the Internet is heading the way of the Marconi/TeleFunken "wars". To reach a computer or application, you will have to pay every service provider along the way. I'd say more, but I think you can figure it out..........

Geoff.

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