Which ship responded to the titanic

Titanic's wireless distress calls, illustrated in a news item of April 17, The Day Books of Chicago, via Papershake. More than 1, people died in the sinking of the Titanic, but more than survived. Those who did owed their escape to the newest communications technology of the time: wireless telegraphy. It's hard to overstate the advance that wireless represented to ships and, especially, to their occupants.

Before wireless came along, ship-to-ship communications relied on the primitive technologies of the human shout and the explosive flare and the semaphore flag. Human eyes and human ears were required to detect the presence of nearby ships, and human eyes and human ears are notoriously limited in their abilities. Which meant that individual vessels were, for the length of their time at sea, effectively isolated from the rest of the world. For the rest of the world, the only way to know whether a vessel had met distress during its journey was its failure to return to shore.

It was Guglielmo Marconi -- he, later, of radio fame -- who ultimately devised the system that could successfully facilitate communication between moving ships, via coded electromagnetic radio waves passed between dedicated transmitters and receivers. By the time of the Anglo-Boer War of , the British Navy was experimenting with Marconi's system -- the first use of operational wireless telegraphy in the field.

The technology was quickly put to use on commercial ships. Though the range of shipboard wireless devices was limited to miles -- a tiny span in a stretching sea -- the machines allowed nearby ships to talk to each other. Suddenly, finally, they were no longer alone.

When Titanic struck an iceberg in the early morning of April 15, this despite many wirelessly transmitted warnings of icebergs from fellow ships , it happened to be within contact range of twelve other vessels. The short transmissions sent among those ships' wireless operators, staccato bursts of information and emotion, tell the story of Titanic's fate that night: the confusion, the chaos, the panic, the fear.

The abbreviated transcript below, courtesy of the Great Yarmouth Radio Club , serves as a reminder not only of the many lives that were lost in the tragedy that would unfold, but also of the many that were spared. As Britain's postmaster general would later declare , "Those who have been saved, have been saved through one man, Mr. Require immediate assistance. Come at once. We struck an iceberg.

SOS was the first use of the new distress signal. So far, two ships had responded to the Titanic's distress call. Late on in the rescue operation, the Carpathia would be briefly joined by the SS Calfornian, a ship it would later emerge was only five miles from the Titanic during the sinking.

The Carpathia's crew received medals from the survivors for their efforts. Crew members were given bronze medals and officers were handed silver while Captain Rostron received a silver cup and gold medal.

Two years after its daring rescue mission the first World War began. Carpathia was transformed into a troopship, transporting Canadian and American troops into Europe during the war. The American and the British inquiries both praised Captain Rostron for his efforts in the disaster. He continued to command the Carpathia for another year before moving on to command several other ships. He later retired to Southampton and passed away in , aged In , the wreck of the Carpathia was discovered sitting upright in feet of water km west of Fastnet, Ireland.

The wreck is now owned by Premier Exhibitions Inc. By: Irish Post. By: Michael Murphy. By: Gerard Donaghy. By: Conor O'Donoghue. By: Gerard Donaghy - 54 minutes ago. By: Gerard Donaghy - 18 hours ago. By: Gerard Donaghy - 20 hours ago. By: Gerard Donaghy - 14 hours ago. By: Gerard Donaghy - 16 hours ago. Titanic sent the distress signal to multiple ships shortly after midnight on April 15, ; Carpathia arrived on the scene four hours later. Carpathia successfully dodged icebergs in its rescue efforts but ultimately could not evade German torpedoes.

Twelve years into its transatlantic career, and only two years after its heroic rescue of the only survivors of the Titanic disaster, Carpathia was requisitioned by the British government for use as a troopship during World War I.

On July 17, , Carpathia was part of a convoy headed for Boston when it was attacked by a German submarine miles west of Fastnet. For the next 82 years Carpathia remained undisturbed in a watery grave, not unlike Titanic, until its remains were discovered by a team led by author Clive Cussler in feet of water some miles off the east coast of Ireland. The Carpathia is largely intact, upright where it sank 94 years ago in the service of its country.

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