Word: sos
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...foggy twilight last week, New York radio stations suddenly stopped broadcasting and the air was filled with SOS calls. While radio listeners wondered what the silence might portend, there was administered in the outer reaches of New York Harbor what might be called perfect disaster treatment. It began when passengers on the British steamship Fort Victoria, inching along in the soupy mist toward Bermuda, heard the bedlam of fog warnings, the fierce, hoarse blasts of a whistle which seemed altogether too near. Then the prow of the Clyde liner Algonquin, outbound for Galveston, loomed out of the murk and buried...
...Signer Umberto Malossi, Fascist Police Inspector-General. Off the coast of Portugal the da Vinci wired that she was caught in a gale, then for two days while she was tossed and harried no word was heard. Captain Angelo Sturlese was on the bridge for 72 hours, the SOS of other ships sounding in his ears. When the Italian steamer Senatore Dali, foundering nearby, sent an SOS, Captain Sturlese despatched his tug to her. Dr. Modigliani in an ecstasy of apprehension made repeated trips to the hold; in case of accident he had the pictures, sculptures and ivories swaddled...
Guglielmo Marconi is clearly the father of wireless telegraphy, but between SOS. calls and the Happiness Boys lies a long period of experimental development. Many men have contributed to radio development; no one man can be called Father of Radio...
...whipped the North Atlantic into mighty combers. Seven hundred miles off the Virginia Capes wallowed the little Italian freighter Florida, bound for Naples. Its steering gear was broken, it was inundated by ferocious seas. For four days the crew lived on fruit and water. Frantically Capt. Giuseppe Favaloro flashed SOS signals. Several nearby vessels received them. But, not having radio compasses, which indicate the direction from which signals come, these ships could not locate the Florida...
Especially significant was Inspector Hoover's recommendation that admiralty laws be amended reducing the amount of salvage that may be claimed by masters of ships which answer another's SOS. Inspector Hoover pictured the reluctance of a captain in time of peril to incur the expense of salvage. "If the amount was reduced, the master of a ship in distress would not hesitate too long before asking for help...