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One trait of human nature is that we tend to embellish notable achievements by associating them with important people and momentous events. If we can't pin down exactly when a new invention was first used, we often tie that usage to an event of some historical significance (such as a war or the aftermath of a disaster). So it is with the Titanic tragedy and the adoption of 'SOS' as a universal distress signal. The sinking of the Titanic was certainly one of the more momentous events of the twentieth century, and one of the enduring images of Titanic mythology is that of the senior wireless operator, Jack Phillips, hunched over his telegraph key, desperately tapping out distress signals until the very last moment. Even after released from duty by his captain, Phillips remained at his post and continued to transmit without regard for his personal safety, stopping only when the Titanic's power finally failed and he could send no more. By then it was too late: All the lifeboats were long gone, and the Titanic was only minutes away from her final plunge into the sea. Phillips did not survive. Naturally, then, we want to imbue the death of Jack Phillips and the loss of Titanic with some extra significance, and one of the manifestations of that desire is the origination of the claim that the Titanic was the first ship to use SOS as a distress call. That claim is an erroneous one, however — a chimera passed along by writer after writer who accepted it as true: In 1912, one might have said that if marine wireless communication was no longer in its infancy, it certainly wasn't very far into adolescence. Rival wireless companies from different countries often refused to relay each other's messages (except for emergency situations), and international standards for such important matters as ship identification and distress signals had not been enacted. A 1906 International Conference on Wireless Communication at Sea held in Berlin attempted to sort out some of these issues, including the standardization of the call letters to be used by ships in distress. At the time, British wireless operators generally used the call letters CQD as a distress signal: CQ representing the general call for other ships in the area (i.e., seek you), with a D added at the end to signify danger (followed by the latitude and longitude of the ship in distress). The Germans disliked this method and countered by proposing SOE, but this offering was rejected because the final E (represented by a single dot in Morse code) could too easily be lost in transmission. The solution the conference finally settled upon was the signal SOS, its dot-dot-dot-dash-dash-dash-dot-dot-dot forming a distinctive pattern that even novice wireless operators could easily recognize and transmit. Contrary to persistent belief, the letters SOS were chosen simply due their ease of transmission, not because they represented save our ship, save our souls, or any other phrase. As an account of the time noted, The combination of letters have no especial significance except that they are easy to sound and click out strong and easily read. (In any case, an international conference held in Berlin and featuring representatives of several different European nations was unlikely to have opted for a distress call that abbreviated a phrase significant only to English-speaking mariners.) Great Britain and several other nations had voted to adopt the Berlin conference's proposals by 1908, but wireless operators on British ships largely ignored them. Thus when the Titanic struck an iceberg and started to sink in April 1912, Jack Phillips began transmitting the older CQD distress signal to other ships in the area. According to Harold Bride, the Titanic's junior wireless operator, it was not until he jokingly suggested Send SOS; it's the new call, and this may be your last chance to send it! that Phillips began to intersperse SOS with the traditional CQD call. Although SOS may have been a new call to British wireless operators in 1912 because they had not previously been using it, SOS was far from new in an overall sense — it had been proposed, adopted, and used by other ships years before the Titanic sank. An article published in the New York Times in February 1910, more than two years prior to the Titanic disaster, detailed the origins and uses of SOS as a distress call, and in the pages of that newspaper one can find several examples of ships' employing the SOS call that antedate the 14 April 1912 sinking of the Titanic. On 11 August 1909, the steamship Arapahoe, plying a route between New York and Jacksonville, Florida (by way of Charleston), broke a shaft and began drifting off the North Carolina coast. Help was summoned via an SOS call: On 4 February 1910, the steamer Kentucky, set to sail around Cape Horn from New York to Tacoma, Washington, ran into heavy weather outside the Virginia Capes and began to leak badly, faster than the pumps could control. An SOS call summoned the Alamo, which proceeded at top speed to the Kentucky's location and managed to take off all that ship's passengers and crew members before the leaking vessel sank: On 13 May 1911, the liner Merida collided with the steamship Admiral Farragut in fog off Cape Charles, Virginia, and sank. Passengers and crew took to lifeboats and were picked up by the Hamilton, which arrived in response to the Merida's SOS transmission: On 30 July 1911, the Canadian Navy cruiser Niobe ran ashore in heavy fog and gale while rounding Nova Scotia's Cape Sable on her way back to Halifax and began wiring an SOS distress call: On 28 August 1911, the steamer Lexington was caught in a hurricane off the Carolina coast, its wireless wrecked by the storm, but the ship's 16-year-old radio operator bravely climbed the ship's rigging to send an SOS and summon help: On 3 December 1911, the U.S. naval collier Sterling collided with the coal steamer Dorothy off the coast of Virginia. The Sterling's captain ordered the summoning of aid with an SOS call but managed to safely run his ship ashore just west of Cape Henry: On 9 April 1912, a fire broke out in the hold of the coastwise liner Ontario while the ship was en route from Baltimore to Boston in heavy seas, but the crew stuck to their posts and battled the flames until the ship was safely beached on the Long Island coast near Montauk. The Ontario's passengers were never in any real danger, though, because numerous tugs and cutters summoned by the ship's SOS call were standing by to ferry them off the burning vessel: The Titanic's sinking may have marked the turning point after which everyone (including the British) finally adopted SOS as the primary distress call of the seas, but it was by no means the occasion of the first SOS in history: Ships had been using the SOS distress signal for at least three years prior to the Titanic's fateful voyage in April 1912.
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