Sending messages back and forth to other ships or using the system to contact shipping agents on shore to arrange berthings were important use cases, but not terribly profitable. The Marconi Company was a commercial venture, and as such needed to monetize their service to the greatest extent possible. In practice, though, safety of life at sea was a secondary consideration in including wireless telegraphy into the design of ocean liners. Radio changed all that, and the lifesaving potential of being able to send a distress signal was used by shipping lines to justify the expense of adding a Marconi system to a ship. Before Marconi, once a ship was beyond sight of land, it may as well not have existed. It had only been in business for twelve years at that point, and had only been installing “Marconi Rooms” in ocean liners since 1903. The Wireless Telegraph and Signal Company, popularly known as the Marconi Company after its founder, Guglielmo Marconi, was established mainly to provide wireless telegraphy services to ships at sea. When Titanic‘s keel was laid down in 1909, commercial radio was in its infancy. It’s a controversial plan, of course, but it is technologically intriguing, and it’s worth taking a look at what’s down there and why we should even bother after all these years. And now, more than a century later, there’s an effort afoot to salvage that gear, with an eye toward perhaps restoring it to working condition. The 2.5-mile slow-motion free fall destroyed the structure of the room, but the gear survived relatively intact. The radio room of the Titanic landed on the ocean floor with the bow section of the great vessel. She boasted the latest in propulsion and navigation technology and an innovation that had only recently available: a Marconi wireless room, used both for ship-to-shore and ship-to-ship communications. Few ships have been as unlucky as the RMS Titanic, sinking as she did on the night of Apafter raking across an iceberg on her maiden voyage, and no ship has grabbed as much popular attention as she has.ĭuring her brief life, Titanic was not only the most elegant ship afloat but also the most technologically advanced.

For some reason, of all the ships that have sailed the oceans, it’s the unlucky ones that capture our imagination.

Virtual sailor free