Monday, March 18All That Matters

Titanic sending its last distress calls before telegraph room gets submerged


Titanic sending its last distress calls before telegraph room gets submerged




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22 Comments

  • AnonyFron

    For anyone else who was wondering:

    >In 1904, the Marconi company suggested the use of “CQD” for a distress signal. Although generally accepted to mean, “Come Quick Danger,” that is not the case. It is a general call, “CQ,” followed by “D,” meaning distress. A strict interpretation would be “All stations, Distress.”

  • MuskyJunction

    The Morse code adds to the eerie-ness of it. It’s all I hear but I’m imagining the sheer chaos and panic on the ship.

  • Quasimdo

    Sounds bad, but as they type out the “we are sinking” message, all I can think of is the commercial “what are you sinking about” from the 90s

  • 1grammarmistake

    It’s kind of cool how the messages seem like something we’d send today because of how direct they are. Goes to show how English has evolved into being more short form and direct over the last century.

    Side note for those that watched the whole thing – what’s with the Titanic calling one of the other callers “Old Man”. Also what’s with titanic asking Asian “what’s wrong with you?

  • variedpageants

    One of the saddest things about this is, there was a ship very close by, but that ship had turned off their radio and stopped listening **because** Titanic was (before hitting the iceberg) blaring telegrams to New York at incredibly high power. It was physically painful to the operator on the other ship so he said fuck it and turned it off.

    That ship also stopped for the night because of the iceberg danger.

    They were so close that they actually saw the distress flairs from titanic. But they thought it was just fireworks (odd to conclude that, but apparently they did).

  • longtimedoper

    Just finished watching the whole thing. Must have been infuriating to be sending out the internationally recognized signals along with your current position from Titanic and being met multiple times with “WHAT’S THE MATTER?” and “DO YOU REQUIRE ASSISTANCE?” and “SHALL I TELL MY CAPTAIN?”. At 1:50 in the morning after having sent distress signals for over an hour and a half, the operators for Titanic have had enough and reply to the Frankfurt with “FOOL. YOU FOOL. STAND BY AND KEEP OUT. KEEP OUT.” The operator breaking from formalities at that point shows the complete desperation.

  • Unbannable6905

    How did this work? Did they have wireless communication back then or where they attached to some kind of telegraphic cable?

  • Cisco800Series

    Very interesting.

    Titanic is using the callsign MGY

    Cape Race is the land based radio station in Newfoundland using the callsign MCE. Titanic would have been sending messages at a steady rate normally, as shown in the two initial ones at the start.

    Interesting that the rate of sending slows down considerably once they start the distress call. This would be to reduce errors.

    CQD means Attention Distress. It was used before SOS. CQ on its own would just mean attention. What the Titanic is actually sending multiple times at the start of the distress is CQD DE MGY

    The Frankfurt is using callsign DFT. THe Mount Temple is using callsign MLQ. Old man is a way to address someone whose name you don’t know, sent as OM. Ypiranga is using callsign DYA

  • Moikepdx

    Wait what?? Position was 41.46 degrees north? As in not even halfway from the equator to the north pole? How is there an iceberg there???

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