[CW] Titanic Centenerary

[Radio K0HB]

This is an excerpt from the National Geographic April 2012 edition's
article on this subject:

by Hampton Sides:

"A few years before the disaster, Gugliemo Marconi built a permanent
wireless station on a desolate, wind-battered spit south of St. John's,
called Cape Race. Locals claim that the first person to receive the
distress signal from the sinking ship was Jim Myrick, a 14-year-old
apprentice at the station who went on to a career with the Marconi Company.
Initially, the transmisison came in as a standard emergency code, CQD. But
then Cape Race received a new signal, seldom used before: SOS.

"One morning at Cape Race, amid the carcasses of old Marconi machines and
crystal receivers, I met David Myrick, Jim's great-nephew, a marine radio
operator and the last of a proud line of antique communicators. David said
his uncle never spoke about the night the /Titanic/ sank until he was a
frail old man. By that point, Jim had lost his hearing so completely that
the only way the family could converse with him was through Morse
code--manipulating a smoke detector to produce the high-pitched dots and
dashes. 'A Marconi man to the end,' David said. 'He thought in Morse
code--hell, he dreamed in it.'

"My mind raced with thoughts of signals bouncing in the ionosphere--**the
propagation of radio waves, the cry of ages submerged in time."

*73, de Hans, K0HB*
*"Just a boy and his radio"*
--
Sea stories at --------> http://k0hb.wordpress.com
Superstition trails ---> http://oldslowhans.wordpress.com
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