Home   Glossary  

 

 

 

Commercial service and SOS distress call

Fill in all the gaps, then press "Check" to check your answers.

By 1912, when Francis A. Collins' The Wireless Man was published, all the major passenger liners were equipped with radio . In the opening chapter of this book, Across the Atlantic, Collins reviewed how radio now kept vessels on transatlantic voyages in nearly constant communication with shore and each other. Initially large passenger liners were the primary commercial ocean-going vessels to install radio transmitters. But in the 1913 edition of Marconi's annual The Yearbook of Wireless Telegraphy and Telephony, Wireless Telegraphy and the Mercantile Marine promoted the money-saving benefits of for smaller ships, proclaiming that "Wireless telegraphy is now recognized as an essential part of the equipment of ocean-going passenger vessels, and, to a rapidly extent, of cargo vessels and smaller craft." The 1916 edition of Brown's Signaling noted that "Any book dealing with signaling in general is incomplete without a reference to telegraphy which, for mercantile signaling, offers so many over other methods of signaling" in its The Quenched Spark System section, which featured a shipboard installation by Siemens. The General Information covered the basics for operating a Marconi shipboard radio installation, in part noting that "Nothing is more irritating than to find, when the point of a pencil suddenly breaks, that there are no sharpened pencils in ."
In 1905, the distinctive Morse code character string ...---... (SOS) was adopted by Germany for signifying . (A German-language account of the adoption of the April 1, 1905 regulations appeared in the issue of Elektrotechnische Zeitschrift: Regelung der Funkentelegraphie im Deutschen Reich). In 1906, SOS was adopted at the Berlin Radiotelegraphic Convention as the official international standard for distress , although Marconi operators in particular were slow to conform -- G. E. Turnbull's Distress Signaling, from the 1913 edition of the The Yearbook of Wireless Telegraphy and Telephony, noted that the Marconi companies had adopted "C.Q.D." as a distress signal in 1904, only to have it supplanted by the international ratification of "SOS" later.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hosted by uCoz