Visit theallusionist.org/sos to listen to this episode and find out more about the topics therein.
This is the Allusionist, in which I, Helen Zaltzman, receive language's message in a bottle but it's probably too late to do anything about it now, right, the time a message in a bottle takes to get there? I'll lob it back in the sea, maybe a crab can deal with it.
In today’s show: three letters, nine sounds, or one Abba song. Or one Rihanna song. SOS.
By the way, if you’re curious about how this show is made - how DOES the magic happen?? - then you can get tantalising glimpses of what goes on behind the scenes if you become a patron at patreon.com/allusionist, for as little as $2 a month. And you’re helping to fund your independent creator friend that lives in your brain.
Just to warn you, there are a couple of category B swears in this episode.
On with the show.
HZ: If you’ve been listening to my podcasts for a while, you’ll have encountered Zaltzman’s first rule of etymology: it’s almost never an acronym. Especially if the word is pre-20th century.
Another rule - maybe Zaltzman’s fourth or fifth? I haven’t written them all out - is that if people say a term originated on a ship, it quite possibly did not. There’s overlap in these rules - ‘posh’ does not stand for “port out, starboard home”; ‘shit’ doesn’t stand for “Ship High In Transit”. Backronym McBacronymface, more like.
The term SOS did originate for maritime reasons. And people will tell you it stands for ‘Save Our Ship’ or ‘Save Our Souls’. However, I am Suspicious Of Such. Seems Obviously Spurious. Smells Of Shit.
But before we get onto what it means, why does SOS exist? It is a Morse code signal - • • • ▬ ▬ ▬ • • • three short, three long, three short. Morse Code reduces all letters and numbers to a combination of two characters: short or long, dit or da, dot or dash. This system of communication was developed through the 19th century, but it wasn’t in use on ships until the 1890s.
CHRISTIAN OSTERSEHLTE: My name is Christian Ostersehlte. I'm working as a maritime archivist in the German Maritime Museum, the National Maritime Museum in Bremerhaven, and also the historical archivist of a German shipyard group.
HZ: Before telegraphy, ships had limited means of communication, such as flags.
CHRISTIAN OSTERSEHLTE: But flag signals you could only see when ships are passing nearby and exchanging some information. But a sailing ship - imagine that, a wooden sailing ship in the vast ocean had no means of communication if something was going on. When a ship was getting in distress at sea and no other ships were nearby, they were lonely and only dependent on luck or fortune. And many sailing ships vanished without any trace. This was commonplace in the sailing ship age. Later also, but a much smaller number. And this was absolutely tragic, and the tragic toll of trade and maritime commerce: ships vanishing without trace.
HZ: Ships would be limited to sending signals that were audible or visible to other people within range.
PAUL TYREMAN: It would be things like flags, or firing off a cannon at regular intervals, or a gun, to make a sound. After rockets were invented, you would get flares.
HZ: Here’s Paul Tyreman, the learning facilitator for science at PK Porthcurno, the museum of global telecommunications in Cornwall.
PAUL TYREMAN: People still use flares now, to signal distress at sea, and you can fire up a rocket at regular intervals; and the thing with the flare is it helps people find you as well from a distance. The very earliest days with flags and just making a noise, obviously people had to be close enough to see it. The flares make you visible from further away. But then with the invention of radio, you could send signals much, much further, and people who couldn't even see you would know that you were in trouble.
CHRISTIAN OSTERSEHLTE: The installation of wireless was the chance that ships in distress could communicate their situation and that other ships not in sight but in the vicinity could get it and could assist. This revolution in maritime communication occurred at the end of the 19th century, when wireless was invented and quickly recognised as a very important tool of maritime communications.
HZ: In 1897, the Italian engineer Guglielmo Marconi got the British patent for wireless, and the same year founded his Wireless Telegraph and Signal Company, and pretty quickly, he and rival companies installed wireless apparatus on sea vessels, so ships could communicate even if they weren’t in visual range, or it was, y’know, foggy.
CHRISTIAN OSTERSEHLTE: But what was important to agree upon a certain signal, internationally agreed, which was instantly to be identified as a distress signal. Because if the ship is getting into distress, things have to be proceeded as quick as possible. And you had to agree upon a very distinctive sign to be recognised and to be agreed upon. This was a political process among the notable shipping nations of those times. And at first they had a sign which was provisionally agreed upon: CQD.
HZ: CQD, in Morse code: ▬ • ▬ • ▬ ▬ • ▬ ▬ • •
PAUL TYREMAN: CQ was a signal for all stations. So it was a little bit like old TV police shows, they would say "Calling all cars!" CQ was like a ship's equivalent of calling all cars.
HZ: The CQ is, supposedly, from the French ‘sécu’, an abbreviation for ‘sécurité’. CQ was a call asking operators to listen up. It was used so much that it didn’t really have the urgency that a distress call needs. So to specify that the call was a distress call, they added a letter to make CQD.
PAUL TYREMAN: D stood for for ‘distress’.
HZ: Well that’s easy to remember. CQD is nonetheless backronymmed as ‘Come Quick, Danger’. Which does work as a mnemonic, to be fair to whoever came up with it.
In 1904 the Marconi Company had declared CQD as their preferred distress signal - but not everybody was on board. There was not yet an international agreement for one consistent signal. At the various different maritime communication conferences around that time, a few different signals were being considered. The US Navy wanted NC. The Italians were using SSSDDD.
PAUL TYREMAN: Which is going to take a bit longer to key out. That was suggested in 1903, but it wasn't widely adopted. And then 1906, they discussed CQD, along with the idea of SOE, which came from Germany.
HZ: There were a lot of options to have to remember, and in an emergency, you really don’t want to suffer from decision freeze.
PAUL TYREMAN: I think it may have partly come about because there were different companies that supplied radio systems to ships and each one had its own way of doing things. So, but like VHS and Betamax, I suppose, but much more dangerous if you get it wrong.
HZ: Right. If you buy someone a Betamax instead of a VHS, probably not going to lead to hundreds of people drowning.
PAUL TYREMAN: That's right, yeah.
HZ: Germany enshrined SOS into national telecommunication regulations in 1905, then in 1906 hosted the first International Telegraph Convention, where despite reluctance from the Marconi Company and a few countries including, typically, Britain, they established an international standard distress signal. Germany was in favour of SOE, which was Morse coded as • • • ▬ ▬ ▬ • and the concern was that last solo dot, that meant E, would get lost. And you don’t want your distress signal to be confusible with, I dunno, a signal that just means “Fancy a cuppa?” or “Could you pick up my dry cleaning if you go ashore?”
So they replaced the • - the E - with • • • - S. SOS!
PAUL TYREMAN: Three dots, three dashes, three dots. It's fairly easy to remember, it's easy to key, and it's difficult to confuse with other things.
CHRISTIAN OSTERSEHLTE: Maritime communication, especially in distress case, has to be distinctive, clear, and not subject to misunderstanding.
HZ: The main misunderstanding with SOS is that it stands for ‘Save Our Souls’ or ‘Save Our Ship’ or ‘Send Out Succour’. As if when your ship was sinking, your emergency message would be ‘send out succour’, cmon.
PAUL TYREMAN: It wasn't introduced because it meant anything.
HZ: Break people’s hearts why don’t you, Paul. The letters SOS aren’t really the point at all. That sequence of Morse code could actually be interpreted as other combinations of letters, such as IJS (‘I’m Just Saying (that my ship’s in trouble)’), or VTB (‘Very Troubled Boat!’), or SMB (‘Seriously, My Boat!’). When you receive the signal • • • ▬ ▬ ▬ • • • the message is: it’s an emergency, and you don’t stand around reverse-interpreting a phrase those letters could stand for. It’s just a practical code.
PAUL TYREMAN: SOS is easy to remember and key, but difficult to do accidentally.
CHRISTIAN OSTERSEHLTE: We have in German a saying, "A better thing is the enemy of good thing.” These are not theoretical academic discussions. These are pragmatical discussions. What is the best in day-to-day practise? This is the general approach to those things.
HZ: Also, an internationally agreed emergency signal needs to work across all the languages, all the writing systems, all phonetic systems - which “Save our souls” doesn’t, SOS doesn’t, but the long ▬ and short • do.
CHRISTIAN OSTERSEHLTE: It is independent from the language. Shipping was an international thing, and to be split up in different languages would have been very problematic, and, at that time, they knew they had to agree upon one internationally agreed sign, all alike, for all was obligatory, SOS. It has to be unified and standard. Otherwise it wouldn't have worked. If the Russians would have had their own sign, the Germans or the French, or each maritime nation would have invented their own radio sign, it wouldn't have worked. It would have been fatal. Because on the scene of a maritime disaster, ships of different nations arrive. And so you had to work with an internationally agreed sign. And so they did. And so it worked.
HZ: Although from 1908, SOS was the internationally agreed sign, there were still some holdouts.
PAUL TYREMAN: Britain apparently continued with CQD for a bit longer than others.
HZ: Ugh. Just always gotta be different.
CHRISTIAN OSTERSEHLTE: But on the 15th April 1912, as we all know, the Titanic struck the iceberg. And the wireless officer, Mr Phillips, who perished during the disaster - his colleague, Harold Bride, survived - at first radioed CQD, but then switched over to SOS. Many ships got this message, but the Carpathia was most nearby, rushed to the scene, and then the very gallant rescue operations rescued about 800 survivors who had survived in the lifeboats; the Titanic had sunk. But without any wireless, the Titanic would have perished without any trace, and we wouldn't know today what had happened to her.
PAUL TYREMAN: I remember reading that the radio operators were actually still sending out personal messages for passengers all through that day. And they were among the last people off the ship. They kept signaling SOS until eventually the generator was in the water and they had no power for the radio, and that's when they stopped. They didn't stop before that.
CHRISTIAN OSTERSEHLTE: So the Titanic case was a mixed case between CQD and SOS. But the Titanic also triggered off many considerations and also regulations improving the safety of navigation. And in July 1912, there was a wireless conference in London held, concerning the lessons from the Titanic case. And this conference in London agreed that now the distress sign is SOS.
HZ: All it took for Britain to drop CQD and get in line with everyone else was the Titanic sinking and more than 1500 people dying. Typical.
Now, more than a century later, there are a lot more options for ships to communicate distress - but SOS is still in our vocabularies.
HZ: It's remarkable that SOS is so successful, because people who know no other Morse code, including me, do know that one, and we don't know any other distress call. Like if it was semaphore, I wouldn't know how to signal SOS in that.
PAUL TYREMAN: There were things that were used that were a little bit like semaphore. One was a helio graph which is like sending messages with flashes from the sun. But to be honest you could use your heliograph with Morse code anyway.
One of the beauties of Morse is it can go in there in almost any medium. You send it by radio; in the Titanic days they'd be sending messages by radio without any speech at all, before they'd figured out how to do speech on the radio. But you could send Morse code, because either there's a radio signal or there isn't. So I think it's that simplicity that really made Morse code catch on.
HZ: Paul Tyreman is the learning facilitator for science at PK Porthcurno, the museum of global telecommunications in Cornwall. And Christian Ostersehlte is the maritime archivist at the German Maritime Museum. And coming up in today’s Minillusionist, Paul talks about a few other distress signals that didn’t catch on - because they were probably made up. No acronyms though, for a change!
MINILLUSIONIST
PAUL TYREMAN: On the official big list of ways to signal distress is actually in speech to say "mayday". You wouldn't Morse code out "mayday" or anything like that. But once speech radio was invented, you could say “mayday” and it had the same effect as Morse code SOS.
HZ: “Mayday” is attributed to Frederick Mockford, who in the 1920s was the senior radio officer at Croydon Airport to the south of London. Aviation comms were moving from Morse code to speech by then, but SOS ran the danger of not sounding clear enough on microphone. The signal needed to be comprehensible to pilots and ground staff, in England and France, where most of the Croydon airport planes were flying between. Mockford came up with ‘Mayday’/’m’aider’ - in French it means ‘help me’. In English, it’s the 1st of May, however given the context you’re presumably not going to mistake it for the day when all the villagers dance around a maypole. Also, to ensure the message is clearly the distress call, you say “mayday” three times. Rumours are unsubstantiated that when you say “mayday mayday mayday” it summons a troupe of morris dancers.
<jingle of bells>
Also unsubstantiated are these distress signals that Paul Tyreman has heard about.
PAUL TYREMAN: You hear all kinds of stories about flags, and the one that I keep seeing is a national flag hanging upside down. never really convinced me, because so many national flags are symmetrical. And the Union Jack is so easy to hang upside down accidentally. How could it be a useful distress signal? I did look up some of those kind of non radio ways of signaling distress at sea over the years. And, and there's a huge list and it doesn't include hanging your flag upside down.
HZ: If I was in distress, that seems a time consuming thing to do.
PAUL TYREMAN: That's right. Yeah. The only reference I've seen to upside down flags is like "in the olden days, people used to", but there's never any sort of definitive story about it.
I've just seen another one here from the early days of flags: “The burning of a tar or oil barrel, or anything which gives a lot of flames.” But probably not your ship.
HZ: Yeah, what if that blew up?
PAUL TYREMAN: That wouldn’t be so good. One of the other flag signals that you can use for distress was to hang a square flag with a ball or something that looked like a ball underneath it, I'm pretty sure that pretty much everything that looks like a ball could be called a ball. So not sure why they needed to include that bit, but yeah, a square with a ball underneath, or a big orange signal, which you could also lay flat on the deck nowadays, if you could be seen from above. So a big orange rectangle with a black square and a black circle on it counts as that as well.
HZ: It seems kind of amazing to me that you could get such wide international cooperation on any of these things. Obviously it's important, but there's probably someone who's like, “no, I refuse to recognize the big orange thing or SOS. Mine is a small green thing."
PAUL TYREMAN: Oh, yeah, there’s bound to be. But I think, once you're out at sea, all of the considerations of people in committee rooms at home are out of the window, and if you see another mariner in distress, you're going to go and help.
HZ: Right. So maybe it's just being on land that makes us into awful people.
PAUL TYREMAN: Could be, could be.
HZ: Blame land!
The Allusionist is an independent podcast made possible by you listeners. I also make two other pocasts, Veronica Mars Investigations, where we have nearly completed recapping all of Veronica Mars episode by episode. And there’s Answer Me This - I should direct you specifically to episode 377, wherein I explain a bit about how Morse Code works and how the painter Samuel Morse got into communication methods after a personal tragedy. You can get that at answermethispodcast.com and the pod places. Episode 377 - we also talk about the origins of ‘bull and bear’ and whether when you’re applying for a job you should correct the company’s typos in the job listing. I’m sure some of you have very passionate feelings about that issue.
Your randomly selected word from the dictionary today is…
wabbit: adjective, Scottish: exhausted or slightly unwell.
Try using ‘wabbit’ in an email today. If you’re Elmer Fudd.
This episode was produced by me with Erin Wade. The music is by Martin Austwick. Thanks to Amanda McLoughlin from the Multitude family of podcasts for the ad sales.
You can find the show on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook @allusionistshow; you can support the show at patreon.com/allusionist; and you can find every episode in audio and transcript form, plus extra information about all the topics, and a lexicon of words covered in the show, and the full dictionary entries for the randomly selected words, at the show’s forever home theallusionist.org.
