FAMOUS MESSAGES
A handful of signals were written down as they arrived, and the paper survived. What was actually sent, and what it changed.
Titanic, April 1912
The Titanic struck ice late on 14 April 1912 and went down at about twenty past two the next morning. Her two wireless operators, Jack Phillips and Harold Bride, were Marconi Company employees rather than White Star crew. On a passenger liner the wireless room was a commercial concession, and its main business was not navigation or safety — it was sending passengers' private telegrams ashore at a shilling a word.
That arrangement matters, because the backlog of paid traffic is what filled the air that evening. Earlier in the night the operator on the nearby Californian had broken in to pass an ice report. Phillips, deep in a pile of passenger messages he was working through the Cape Race shore station in Newfoundland, told him to keep off the frequency. The Californian's operator — she carried only one — shut his set down a short while later and went to bed. When the rockets went up he was asleep, and there was nobody on the headphones. That single fact did more to change maritime radio than anything else about the disaster.
After the collision Phillips began sending CQD, the Marconi company's own distress call, with the ship's callsign MGY. SOS had been the international standard since 1908, but Marconi operators were slow to let the old call go, and Bride's later account has him suggesting they try the new signal as well — it might, he said, be their last chance to use it. The traffic that night went out as both, alternating, for something over two hours, along with position corrections as the navigators revised their estimate.
The Cunard liner Carpathia, roughly fifty-odd miles off, had one operator, Harold Cottam, who happened still to be at his set with the headphones on when he should have turned in. He took the call, woke his captain, and Arthur Rostron drove the ship north at a speed she was not built for, dodging ice in the dark. She arrived after the Titanic had gone and lifted roughly seven hundred survivors out of the boats.
The consequences were immediate and are still in force. The United States legislated within months, requiring licensed operators and enough of them to keep a continuous watch on larger passenger vessels. The international safety-of-life-at-sea convention drawn up in 1914 pushed continuous listening watch wider still. The habit of silent periods — every station on the distress frequency shutting up for three minutes twice an hour so that a weak call could be heard through the traffic — grew out of the same reckoning, and held for the next eighty years. The history page covers how that discipline fitted into the rest of maritime practice.
The BBC personal messages
From 1940 the BBC's French service closed its evening bulletin with a run of messages personnels: short, flat, faintly surreal sentences read one after another with no explanation. Most of them were genuinely meaningless. A few were pre-arranged signals to one particular Resistance circuit, and the nonsense around them was the camouflage — an intercepting service could hear every word and still not know which sentence mattered or who it was for.
The method was chosen for a hard technical reason. A clandestine operator who transmits can be found. German direction-finding units worked through occupied towns with vehicle-mounted loops and portable sets, and could narrow down a working transmitter in a matter of minutes; the life expectancy of a wireless operator in occupied France was measured in weeks. A receiver, by contrast, gives almost nothing away. A circuit that took its orders from an ordinary domestic wireless tuned to London could be commanded without ever keying a transmitter and exposing itself.
The best known of these messages used the opening of Verlaine's Chanson d'automne. The first lines, about the long sobs of autumn violins, were broadcast at the start of June 1944 as a warning that the invasion was close. The answering lines, about a heart wounded by a monotonous languor, went out on the evening of 5 June: the signal to act. German signals intelligence had worked out that the couplet meant something and sent a warning up the chain. It reached the Fifteenth Army in the Pas-de-Calais, which stood to; no corresponding alert reached the divisions actually facing the Normandy beaches. Accounts differ on which networks the lines were intended for and on how seriously the warning was taken, but the broadcasts and the Fifteenth Army's alert are both on the record.
Bismarck, May 1941
Radio silence is a discipline because breaking it is expensive. After sinking HMS Hood on 24 May 1941 the Bismarck, damaged and trailing fuel oil, shook off her shadowers in poor visibility and was — briefly — genuinely lost. On the 25th Admiral Lütjens transmitted a long signal back to Germany, apparently still believing he was being tracked and that there was nothing left to give away. British stations took direction-finding bearings on it.
The bearings were good. The plotting was not. Worked up aboard the flagship, they put the Bismarck on a northerly course, and the Home Fleet steamed away from her while she ran south-east for the French coast and the protection of shore-based aircraft. The better part of a day was lost before the mistake was understood. A Catalina flying boat found her again on the 26th, a torpedo strike jammed her rudder, and she was sunk on the morning of the 27th. Her last signals reported a ship that could no longer be steered and a crew that would fight to the end.
Worth setting beside it, for economy rather than consequence: at Pearl Harbor on the morning of 7 December 1941 the first alarm went out from the naval air station as a short plain-language dispatch, reporting an air raid on Pearl Harbor and ending with the words this is not drill. No cipher, no preamble worth the name, no attempt at composition. It is remembered for exactly that.
The last commercial Morse
Maritime Morse did not fade out so much as get switched off on a timetable. Satellite and automated systems — the Global Maritime Distress and Safety System — took over the job of listening for ships in trouble, and coast stations closed their Morse watches through the 1990s. The French station at Ouessant signed off in 1997 with a line that has been quoted ever since: a call to all stations, describing what followed as its last cry before eternal silence. The international requirement to guard 500 kHz by ear lapsed at the start of February 1999.
In the United States the last commercial Morse traffic was handled on 12 July 1999, from the California coast-station circuits that had carried the callsigns KPH and KFS for most of the century. The closing transmission ended with Samuel Morse's first public telegraph message, sent from Washington to Baltimore in 1844 — What hath God wrought — and then the prosign SK, end of contact. It is difficult to improve on as an ending: the first sentence ever sent down a wire, keyed one last time a hundred and fifty-five years later, followed by the one character that means the conversation is finished.
The station did not stay quiet for long. A preservation society keeps the old transmitters and receivers working and puts them back on the air every 12 July, on the anniversary, for a night of traffic that nobody needs and a good many people copy anyway. The characters they send are the ones listed on the prosigns page, and you can key any of them yourself on the station front page or feed them to the translator to hear how they sounded arriving.