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"Wavescan" is a weekly program for long distance radio hobbyists produced by Dr. Adrian M. Peterson, Coordinator of International Relations for Adventist World Radio. AWR carries the program over many of its stations (including shortwave). Adrian Peterson is a highly regarded DXer and radio historian, and often includes features on radio history in his program. We are reproducing those features below, with Dr. Peterson's permission and assistance.


Wavescan N543, July 21, 2019

Titanic Events: The Intervening Years

In our program today, we come to an update on subsequent events associated with the tragedy of the the Titanic. It was on Sunday, April 14, 1912 that the majestic passenger liner RMS Titanic struck an iceberg in the Northern Atlantic, and a few hours later it broke in two and sank to the ocean floor more than two miles down. At this depth, the water pressure is more than 1 ton per square inch.

Since this heart-rending monumental disaster that took place over a century ago, more than 50 movie films have been made portraying the loss of what was at the time the world’s largest ocean going passenger vessel. Some of these movies attempted to portray this now historic event quite accurately, while others have stylized and romanticized what took place with very little attention to the actual historic reality.

The first movie about the Titanic was filmed, edited, copied and released exactly one month after the actual disaster itself. This rapidly produced film of just 10 minutes duration featured the popular 22 year old film star Dorothy Gibson, who herself survived the Titanic tragedy. In this movie film, Saved from the Titanic, Dorothy Gibson played herself, and she was dressed in the same clothing that she wore at the time of the sinking of the Titanic.

A highly fictionalized version of the sinking of the Titanic was produced in Germany during WW II in 1942. Their version was filmed on board the German passenger liner SS Cap Arcona, which was subsequently sunk by the Royal Air Force three years later with the death of 5,000 people. The 1958 American film, A Night to Remember, is considered to be the most accurate and authentic version that has ever been produced.

The RMS Titanic, with the RMS standing for Royal Mail Steamer, was in itself a floating Post Office. At the time of the sinking it contained 7 million items of postal mail sorted into 3423 mail bags, bound for the United States.

A few envelopes and postcards have surfaced over the years that show a rubber stamping of the ship name Titanic, and the postage cancellation stating Transatlantic Post Office. These surviving postal items were taken ashore from the Titanic at Cherbourg in France, and at Queenstown in Ireland, before the Titanic continued its fateful voyage across the Atlantic.

In 2012, many countries issued commemorative postage stamps honoring the centenary of the ship’s sinking, including the countries that were most closely connected with the event; England, France, Ireland, Canada and the United States. These stamps generally feature an artistic rendering in color of the ship itself, and its sinking.

Over the years, several suggestions have been made for raising the Titanic, some quite strange. For example, one suggestion was to fill the Titanic wreck with ping-pong balls and thus float it to the surface, a method that has actually been successfully used to refloat vessels in shallow water. However ping-pong balls would be crushed at a depth of a hundred feet or more, so they would be totally impracticable for this purpose. Other crazy suggestions were to inject it with 180,000 tons of vaseline, or to encase it with half a million tons of liquid nitrogen to freeze it into an iceberg that would float to the surface.

Over the years, several underwater attempts were made to relocate the wreck of the Titanic. However, it was not discovered until 1985, on Sunday, September 1, when Robert Ballard with his deep-sea vehicle Argo found the debris field, and then the two main sections of the broken Titanic, one third of a mile apart. Since then, a score or more of expeditions have visited the area, and viewed and photographed the Titanic.

A total of nearly 6,000 artifacts have been retrieved from the Titanic, including a large 17 ton section of the hull known as the Big Piece, which is now on display in Las Vegas, Nevada. There are many different Titanic Museums installed in many different countries, some of which are described as the World’s Largest, each in its own way, such as both Pigeon Forge and Branson in the United States, and in Belfast, Northern Ireland.

A scaled down model of the Titanic was constructed by a 10 year old boy, Brynjar Karl Birgisson, in Iceland. It took Bryniar 70 hours to assemble 56,000 Lego pieces into a 26 feet long model of the Titanic that stands 5 feet tall.

This now 15 year old boy, who suffers from autism, accompanied the huge Titanic model as it was brought by plane to the United States in three large sections. It is currently on display in the Titanic Museum at Pigeon Forge in Tennessee.

A multitude of amateur radio stations have been granted special event callsigns to honor the Titanic, and they are active usually around April, the actual date for the historic sinking. Among these callsigns are:

W0S Branson and W1MGY Cape Cod, in the United States; GB100MGY Southampton and M0RSE, which looks like MORSE, in England; VI4MGY and VK5MGY in Australia; and 9HOB8 on board the tourist ship Azamara Journey above the site of the wrecked Titanic in the North Atlantic.

Then too, callsign GB2MGY has been in use at the very location where the Titanic was built, in the Harland and Wolff shipyards at Queen’s Island in Northern Ireland. Queen’s Island, with its 208 acres, was formed by dredging the nearby ocean areas in the mid-1800s.

A claim by Gordon Cosgrove in London that he received in 1936 a 24 year old time-delayed SOS in Morse Code from MGY aboard the Titanic is considered to be an amateur radio prank.

Among several other similar projects, a new Titanic, just a little larger than the original Titanic, is currently under construction in China. Australian businessman Clive Palmer is funding this mammoth project, which is expected to be completed in the year 2022.

We could guess that the radio callsign for the new Titanic 2 will be similar to the original. Titanic 1 in 1912 operated under the wireless callsign MGY, and maybe the radio callsign for the new Australian version of Titanic 2 could be VMGY, or perhaps VHMGY.

In two weeks time we wrap up our series of topics on the Titanic tragedy with the story of their Wireless Cabin.