On This Day In History: Courageous And Heroic Radio Rescue At Sea – On Jan 23, 1909

AncientPages.com - On January 23, 1909, a telegraphed distress call came in from the captain of the ocean liner RMS Republic, which in dense fog, collided with an Italian ship," Florida," and began to sink.

The nearby Nantucket station relaid the telegraph signal, and a British Royal Navy ship steamed to help the victims.

SS Republic - White Star Line

SS Republic - White Star Line. Public Domain

The great lifesaving value of Guglielmo Marconi's new technology was first evident today.

The radio operator sent out a distress signal. The station in Wellfleet received the call and alerted other ships in the vicinity. By the following day, "every liner and every cargo boat equipped with wireless that happened to be within a 300-mile radius" was on the scene.

Both the colliding ships were seriously damaged, but the RMS Baltic evacuated people who survived the initial crash without incident.

Almost all the passengers were rescued.

It took eighty-three boatloads to ferry the more than 1,500 passengers and crew of the "Republic" to the "Baltic." Never before had so many people been transferred on the high seas without a single loss of life.

By Sunday morning, two more rescue ships arrived and tried to tow the "Republic," but the boat was apparently lost.

Marconi became a famous hero. He won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1909. He later worked on developing shortwave wireless communication, the foundation of nearly all modern long-distance radio.

An even more famous case was the wireless-aided rescue in 1912 of over 700 survivors of the Titanic disaster.

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