Translated material
Rescue points
One hundred years ago, the first universal distress signal appeared
Exactly one hundred years have passed since the day when the Berlin International Convention came into force, according to which the SOS radiotelegraph signal was adopted as an international distress signal at sea: three dots - three dashes - three dots. This combination of dots and dashes, the simplest for the human ear, has saved hundreds of thousands of human lives at sea during its use. It was from July 1, 1908, 48 times a day, twice every hour (from the 15th to the 18th and from the 45th to the 48th minutes), that there were three minutes of silence on the air at sea. The transmission of all messages during these minutes was prohibited, and ship and coastal radio operators on all seas and oceans switched to a frequency of 500 Hz to receive a distress signal.Invented in the late 19th century, radio (then called wireless telegraphy) first used Morse code, a system originally developed for land-based wire telegraphy. When radio stations began to appear on ships, there was a need to standardize communications, but cooperation was hampered by national languages and rivalries between competing radio companies such as Marconi, Telefunken, etc.
Radio stations of countries that have signed the Berlin Convention have undertaken to receive distress signals from ships as a matter of priority. With the introduction of a single distress signal, all other signals were abolished, in particular the CQ established by Marconi Co for ships equipped with its radiotelegraph equipment, to which ship radio operators added the letter D, with which the English word danger begins. Radio operators deciphered the abbreviation CQD as Come Quick, Danger. Representatives of the USA and Great Britain at the Berlin conference, which brought together sailors and radio specialists from the Old and New Worlds, sharply objected to the already familiar CQ and CQD signals, since they were also used by coastal telegraphers in case of accidents and accidents on the railways.
At first, the new distress signal had no letter equivalent, but in the then accepted international English version of Morse code, this combination of dots and dashes forms the meaningless word SOS. And although the signal was invented and adopted in Germany, there are only English translations of the pseudo-abbreviation SOS in the world. The most common version of the interpretation of the three letters of the Latin alphabet sounds like Save Our Souls (save our souls), although there were other decoding options: Save Our Ship (save our ship), Survivors On Ship (survivors on the ship).
The first ship to send an SOS signal was the transatlantic liner Slavonia, which sank on reefs near the Azores on its way from New York to Trieste on June 10, 1909. The signal was heard by other ships, and all passengers and crew were rescued. However, the Titanic, which sank in 1912, transmitted both signals - SOS and the outdated CQD, which radio operators used for many years.
With the spread of voice radio communications, radio operators began to use a new distress signal along with Morse code. Since 1927, the word Mayday, repeated three times, has been used as a distress signal, which is unmistakably perceived by the human ear even with the poorest hearing. Mayday comes from an English translation of the French expression M'aide (help me). The history of this signal says that French port stevedores addressed each other politely.
In the 90s of the last century, the world switched to a new distress signaling system GMDSS (Global Maritime Distress Safety System), and SOS left the seas and oceans. But it was precisely this distress signal that broke through the boundaries of the scope of its initially official use and went into autonomous voyage, turning into a separate sociocultural symbol that took on a life of its own. SOS burst into everyday human communication, into literature, into poetry.