Author Topic: live steaming of telegraphic distress messages April 15, 1912  (Read 785 times)

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Offline franksolich

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Oh my.

I find this utterly fascinating, entrancing, compelling, and listened to it all the way through from start to finish, from just before the RMS Titanic struck an iceberg clear until the telegraph room was waist deep in water and the two operators, 25 and 23 years old respectively, were ordered by the captain to abandon ship and save themselves.

It's all telegraphic dit-dot-dash stuff.

The state of communications was rather shaky, and it's apparent that some ships got some messages and other ships got other messages, but no single ship got all messages.  Not even the lighthouse at Cape Race, Newfoundland.  So there's a lot of cross-talk and repetitions.

The youtube thing opens with the telegrapher relaying personal messages to people in New York City; messages that couldn't be sent during the day-time and had to wait until it was not so busy at night.

And then at 1:46 on the youtube screen, a telegram is cut off and the first CQD sent.  "CQD" was the "SOS" of 1912.

And then it goes clear to the end, when the ship broke in half and went under.

I dunno if this would be interesting for most people, as it's all just telegraphic strokes, no spoken words, but as mentioned earlier, I've listened to the whole thing, and more than once.  Being a deaf person, I guess the fact that the sounds "don't make sense" doesn't bother me as much as it probably would bother hearing people.  After all, much of what I "hear" is garbled and indecipherable sounds anyway.  I'm used to it.

It could be just my imagination, but it seems to me one can "hear" differences in the style and speed of the telegraphists, including being able to differentiate between the two on the Titanic.  And also one catches the "mood," from calm urgency to near panic to confusion.

https://youtu.be/FxRN2nP_9dA
« Last Edit: April 11, 2018, 04:04:20 AM by franksolich »
apres moi, le deluge