For over a century, radio has played tunes to the march of human history, setting the background music for our lives. As we listen to news and traffic reports punctuated with the latest hits while driving, how many of us reflect upon the invention that revolutionised communication? There's more to radio than songs presented by vivacious RJs.
Did you know, for instance, that radio signals played a vital role in the rescue of over 700 passengers of the ill-fated Titanic, enabling quick communication with nearby ships? In those days, carrier pigeons were the prevalent mode of communicating at sea. Without radio, it would have taken days for distress messages to reach, and there would have been no survivors of the Titanic.
A few days after the Titanic sank on April 15, 1912, a cheering crowd gathered in New York City to hail the man credited as the savior of the ship's survivors. That man, Guglielmo Marconi, was already known worldwide as the celebrity inventor whose wireless technology was able to send messages across entire oceans.
Marconi didn't invent the idea of wireless technology or figure everything out by himself. But he earned his "father of radio" title by making the first commercially successful technology that could send wireless telegrams across hundreds of miles between coastal stations and ships such as the Titanic. Two of his Marconi Company operators working in the Titanic's radio room — known as a Marconi Wireless room — sent out distress signals soon after the ship's fateful collision with an iceberg.
"You can find newspaper cartoons where Marconi is portrayed as Poseidon lifting lifeboats out of the water," said Aaron Toscano, assistant professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and author of "Marconi's Wireless and the Rhetoric of a New Technology" (Springer, 2012). "One thing newspaper articles said was that Marconi saved these people — they would have frozen to death if it wasn't for the wireless [messages] getting hold of another ship to come."
The crowd of both men and women gathered at the New York Electrical Society on April 18, 1912, began cheering and applauding as soon as Marconi appeared in the large auditorium, according to a New York Times article on the event. People cheered again when the chairman of the lecture board read a congratulatory telegram to Marconi that praised "the splendid work your system has done in saving human life in disasters on the sea"— a message from fellow inventor Thomas Edison.
Contributed by:- Shri.Mitul Kansal ,kansalmitul@gmail.com.