As the biggest and finest ship of its day, RMS Titanic measured 882 feet, 9 inches long with a maximum breadth of 92 feet, 6 inches and a total height from the base of the keel to the top of the bridge of 104 feet. Its pinnacle, a four-wire Marconi 500 kHz antenna suspended between the ship’s two masts, standing a full 250 feet above the sea, served the world’s most powerful communications equipment, which had a guaranteed working range of 250 feet miles and a nighttime range of up to 2000 miles.
In the radio room, two wireless operators, Jack Philips, aged twenty-five, and his twenty-two-year-old deputy, Harold Bride, kept up a brisk traffic of communications that included both navigational messages and telegrams for passengers that were sent and received as the elegant vessel continued its maiden voyage across the frigid North Atlantic.
At about 11:40 PM on April 14, however, as the ship was cruising about 370 miles south-southeast of the coast of Newfoundland, she struck an iceberg and everything changed. The surviving messages covering the next two hours left behind a dramatic real-time record of what
The operators remained at their posts even after the captain released them from their duties, and they continued to transmit distress signals until three minutes before the ship foundered. Just before they fled, Bride’s final message reported water flooding into the wheelhouse. He was later pulled from the icy waves just in time to save his life. But Phillips perished and his body was never recovered. He subsequently came under criticism when it was revealed that before the collision another radio operator of the approaching ice field, but Phillips had responded, “Shut up! I am working Cape Race!”
The sinking resulted in the loss of 1595 passengers and crew. Only 745 were saved in part because the ship carried only enough lifeboats for half of those aboard and they were reserved mostly for women and children. The newspapers told how the wealthiest passenger, Col. Archibald Gracie, also went down with the vessel but he later surfaced and was rescued.
Over the years some of the telegrams from the Titanic have fetched high prices at auction. One of the most famous, saying, “…are you steaming toward us?” sold for $110,000 at Christie’s.
A collection of the Titanic messages, translated from Morse code, has been dramatized on stage.
