The Electrical Telegraph and the First Real Time Tragedy: The Sinking of the Titanic

This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people. And to hear and search for the Our American Stories podcast, go to the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. A little-known fact about the Titanic is that it was actually owned
by an American.
JP Morgan. Up next, a story about this infamous ship through the eyes of two men who often don’t come up in discussions about the ship: the ship’s wireless operators. William Hazelgrove will tell the story. But to start us off, here’s a reading from Titanic survivor Jack Thayer’s autobiography. Let’s get into the story.

Those were ordinary days, and into them had crept only gradually the telephone, the talking machine, the automobile, the airplane, due to have soon such a stimulating yet devastating effect upon civilization. The morning paper had the headlines no larger than half an inch in height. These days were peaceful. It seems to me that the disaster about to occur was the event which not only made the world rub its eyes and awake, but woke it with a start, keeping it moving at a rapidly accelerating pace ever since, with less peace, satisfaction, and happiness in my mind. The world of today awoke April fifteenth, nineteen twelve, and…

The night Carpathia came into New York, it’s thundering, its lightning. Rains coming down, the dock in New York Harbor is just mob or people, thousands of people who don’t know if their husband, wives, daughters have made it or not. And they see this ship emerging out of the darkness, brilliantly lit up, and it’s met in the harbor by all these reporters on boats. These reporters literally start throwing guybulets of money onto the deck of Carpathia, telling the passengers, “Jump off, we’ll pick you out of the water, and we’ll pay you whatever you want for your story, anything you want for your story.” And when the harbor pilot comes on, they all try and jump on board too, and they literally get punched and thrown off because this is the scoop of the century. And Carpathia pulls up, and of course, Guglielmo Marconi is at the head of the crowd to get on Carpathia when she pulls in, which has his wireless operator Harold Bride on board. Everybody wanted to talk to him because he’s the surviving wireless operator. Marconi was a fascinating guy. Guglielmo Marconi was from Italy, and he had a lit of quasi-interest in science, but he really had more of an entrepreneur’s bent. He actually started some experiments in his attic of his parents’ home. He had a cathode ray, and in the cathode ray were iron filings. So when he sat on an electric signal, the iron filings jumped into the middle of a sort of glass bar in the middle of the cathode rays. So this meant that action had occurred from this electrical signal. So the question was, well, how far could this go? So he had a friend take a gun and go off a long distance, and he shot off a signal, and when his friend received the signal, he shot off his gun. So he developed this technology that the others had been developing, but he sort of takes it one step further, and he gives a science experiment. And basically, they have a transmitter and a receiver, and the receiver is in a box that things, and so they’re in this theater. All these people are there, and so basically, Marconi would walk around the theater with this box. You know, somebody’s manning the transmitter, and so they’d send off the wireless telegraphy signal. It would hit the box, and it would date, and everybody kept looking for wires. You know, where are the wires connecting this box to this transmitter? And Marconi just kept walking around with it, sort of like a most awaiter, presenting this new technology wireless. So then he started to think, “You know, I wonder if this would work on water.” That’s really what you need. You need these ships to be in contact, because up to then, ships would just disappear. Nobody knew what happened to him. So everybody’s like, “No, no, no, no, no, it won’t work because the Earth is curved, the radio waves would just bounce off in the space. There’s no way to work.” So he went through these all these experiments on the English Channel, and basically, you know, he erected towers or blown down. He ended up using a kite to sort of get up an antenna aloft, but he was able to transmit a signal across the English Channel. So they thought, “Well, why not the ocean?” And again, everybody’s like, “There’s no way this is going to work.” And they didn’t understand the time. Wireless can only go about five hundred miles during the daylight hours, but at night, on a cold, clear night like April fourteenth, nineteen twelve, where it was just brilliantly clear, these signals could bounce on and on up to two thousand miles. So when Marconi proved this, this was amazing to people. This was just groundbreaking because now a ship in the Middle Atlantic Ocean could tell the world what was going on. And by the way, that’s what makes Titanic so unique. One of the things is that it’s the first real-time disaster.

Yeah.

So Marconi’s waiting to die, and aboard Carpathia, Harold Cottam, who was the wireless man on Carpathia, literally keels over from exhaustion. So they say to Harold Bride, who survives under a lifeboat feeder, partly frostbitten. They say, “Look, well, you know, you’ve been through hell and back, but can you take over the wireless? You only one knows Morse code,” so he does. The first telegram he does is from Guglielmo Marconi. He says to him, “Don’t say a word. Don’t say a word to anybody. I’ve arranged for you to tell your story to The New York Times for a thousand dollars, which is like twenty thousand today.” And he doesn’t. And Carpathia pulls up, and he’s literally one of the first people to get on. He’s a rock star by today’s standards. Everybody knows who this guy is. So the c’s part four when he walks on board, and he goes right to the wireless room where Harold Bride is still working, still send me messages, and he says to him, “Your work is done.” He has him taken off the ship and taken to a waiting car. Then he’s taken to the Strand Hood How, where these reporters are there, and then he sits down and tells them what happened on Titanic and gives them the story, basically, of the century.

I was standing by Phillips, telling him to go to bed, when the captain put his head in the cabinet: “He struck an iceberg.”

And you’re listening to William Hazelgrove tell the story of the first real-time disaster in the world. When we come back, more of this remarkable story here on Our American Stories. Folks, if you love the stories we tell about this great country, and especially the stories of America’s rich past, know that all of our stories about American history—from war to innovation, culture, and faith—are brought to us by the great folks at Hillsdale College, a place where students study all the things that are beautiful in life and all the things that are good in life. And if you can’t get to Hillsdale, Hillsdale will come to you with their free and terrific online courses. Go to Hillsdale.edu to learn more. And we return to Our American Stories and our story on the sinking of the RMS Titanic through the eyes of her wireless operators, Harold Bride and Jack Phillips. When we last left off, William Hazelgrove was telling us about the night the Titanic’s rescue ship, the Carpathia, sailed into New York Harbor, and a little bit about the man who invented the technology that helped save some of the Titanic’s passengers, Guglielmo Marconi. You’ll be hearing excerpts of Harold Bride’s interview with The New…

York Times throughout this piece. Let’s return to the story. Begin at the beginning.

I was born at Nunhead, England, twenty-two years ago, and joined the Marconi Forces last July. I first worked on the Hoverford and then Tania. I joined the Titanic at Belfast with Jack Phillips.

Jack Phillips and Harold Bride were two working-class US from England, and they both worked on different ships and ended up on Titanic. Actually, for Jack Phillips, it was really a sort of promotion. He was really leading the team there, if you will.

I didn’t have much to do on that Titanic except relieve Phillips from midnight until some time in the morning when he woke up on the night of the accident. I was not sending, but was asleep. I was due to be up to relieve Phillips earlier than usual.

These guys are sort of like the computer nerds of today. It is a young man’s game at this point. Nobody understands Morse code except these operators. It sounds like static, and it’s amazing they can decipher this. But they do, and they’re able to travel. It’s exciting for them to be on this big ship, and they really are on the cutting edge of technology of their time. Ability to send a wireless message through the atmosphere, it’s just amazing, and it’s going to change everything. And what’s interesting is this: they are pretty much isolated from the ship. The wireless operators slept in their room. They ate there. They had no contact with the crew, and by the read, the room was called the silent room because had to be insulated against several things. One was noise coming in, but two, they were using direct current. We use alternating current, so we didn’t electrocute ourselves. Direct current, you step it way up, especially if you’ve got a broadcast out shoot out these signals across the Atlantic. The key would literally crack very loudly, so they had to also muffle that.

And that reminds me that hadn’t been for a lucky thing, we would have never been able to send any call for help.

So before it taking hits the iceberg, believe it or not, their wireless set was broken. You know, the day of April fourteenth, we…

Know something was wrong on Sunday, and Phillips and I worked for seven hours to find it. We found a burned-out Secretary at last and repaired it just a few hours before the iceberg was struck. And they…

Had all these messages piled up. Wireless was really for passengers. Harold Bride, Jack Phillips did not work for White Star. They worked for Marconi. And that’s really how Marconi made his money, because you could go send a telegram now from Titanic, and Titanic had the most powerful wireless set you could put on a ship, so you could send a telegram back to New York saying, “Hey, Jim, I’m in the middle of the Atlantic on Titanic. I’m in a great time, meet you for lunch.” Also, what they could do is they could take information from a shore station where the information would be beamed out or shot out to Titanic. And then they had big printing presses, and Titanic had its own newspaper, so then Titanic would create a newspaper so they’re rich could sit and have their coffee and croissants and read about, say, the Chicago Cubs or whatever. This was amazing to people, and it was a pretty sophisticated system. I mean, they had pneumatic tubes. Stewards would take the messages to the room. They’ve come out with a message, but it was laborious to send them, and so they would just pile up. You know, there’s a lot of passengers, so these guys are going hard at it when a ship named the Californian is approaching pretty close. They’re maybe ten to twelve miles away, and they’ve got some messages for titan. And so what happens is while Jack Phillips is the head operator, is trying to get through these messages, this operator breaks in, and it’s sort of like getting your car with the radio turned up. If these boats are on top of each other, then, you know, it’s very loud to the operator. And so he breaks in and blows Jack Phillips’ ears off with this message saying, “Hey, I’ve got some messages for you, some ice warnings,” and Phillips retorts.

He felt shut up. “I’m working Cape Race!”

And so this operator—there’s only one operator in Californian, which again, it’s ten to twelve miles away—says, “You know, it’s been a long day,” and he turns his set off, which is gonna have implications down the line that are amazing. So now, as Titanic steaming towards this iceberg. Yes, ice warnings have come in. Yes, they’ve been taken up to the bridge. Had they been acted on? No, a couple of them. We’re stuck onto a bulletin board. So at this moment, as they’re plunging through the North Atlantic at twenty-four knots, Jack Phillips and Harold Bride are just working it, trying to get passing your messages out. It’s bitterly cold, and Lookout Fleet is up in the crow’s nest looking for icebergs. Also, it’s incredibly calm. The North Atlantic is usually not this calmp, but it’s a mill pile. It’s like glass. So the stars are all reflecting off the water too, so you have a million speckled stars against this cold night. It’s so cold that there’s sort of these ice particles floating around the deck lights, which is very much evidence that you’re entering into an ice field. Because those icebergs turn it’s sort of super cold, they just sort of bring the temperature down around them. So they’re up there, they’re freezing. They see the iceberg, they call down, and they reverse the engine. They crank it over the wheel over to the left, and Titanic takes a very, very long time of return. When she finally does, they feel like they missed her. But they stop the ship. Captain Smith, who’s in his stateroom, comes bursting out. “What happened?” The water tight doors are closed. Now. The watertight doors are the reason the Titanic is called unsinkable. What are they? They’re these big steel doors that take every bulkhead and seal it off. Now, in theory, if a bullheads sealed off, the water could only come in. So far with Titanic, the bulkheads only go up to E-deck. That means that this water coming in is going to fill up the first compartment and then go up and over into the second compartment. It be like if you’re sitting in your living room and you left the windows open in the bedroom next to your living room, and your bedroom fills up with water and it comes over the top into your living room where you’re sitting. Or think of a weight thrown into the front of a canoe, just pulling it down. Well, that’s what the water does now. Even still, Titanic can float with four compartments flooded, but five compartments flooded. So now the weight of the water—thirty-nine thousand tons rushing in—is overcoming the ship’s buoyancy, and so at this point, Titanic is doomed, though for most people there’s no evidence of it. This is a monster ship. People are still serving drinks, food still being served, everything’s going along like nothing’s wrong. Also, there is no PA; there is no public address system, and there’s been no lifeboat drills. So you have these lifeboats ninety feet up, and they’ve never worked together as to ever lower them, mostly though people don’t know. So how to the third-class steerish famously in the bottom of the ship find out? Maybe somebody yells down the hallway. Most of them don’t speak English anyway, and by the way, they’re down in this labyrinth of a ship, I have no idea how to get up there. So it’s all against them right away. And famously, in the movie, we all see the block doorways, passages, and we think, “Oh, how evil.” Actually, that wasn’t evil. That’s the way it was then. It was expected a white star to separate the classes. So yes, doors were block against the third class coming up and bamming into the first class, dressed and probably ten-thousand-dollars dinner clothes going to dinner. And so you had that kind of money with people who literally own just the clothes on their back down in steerage, coming to America for a better life.

And you’re listening to William Hazelgrove tell the remarkable story of the sinking of the Titanic through what we would consider now to be tech geeks: the two wireless operators who were working with the cutting-edge technology of its time. Technology they could have saved the Titanic and in the end preserved the story of the Titanic and saved lives. When we come back, more of this storytelling again from the wireless technicians’ point of view here on Our American Stories. And we return to Our American Stories and our story on the sinking of the RMS Titanic through the eyes of her wireless operators, Harold Bride and Jack Phillips. When we last left off, the Titanic had struck an iceberg and was slowly sinking into the Atlantic Ocean. The water temperature at the time: twenty-seven degrees, and her Captain, E. J. Smith, was now forced to reckon with how exactly he was going to save the twenty-two hundred and forty people on board. Here again is William Hazelgrove.