And the night was alive with a thousand voices

[sovay]

I was not planning on posting anything for the sinking of the Titanic, but this came courtesy of derspatchel: the Titanic in her own words.

"This is Titanic. CQD."

There's the Carpathia, the Californian, the Caronia, the Baltic. Those are not actors reading the Morse transmissions that flashed back and forth across the wireless of the North Atlantic, jaunty, terse, desperate, encouraging, steadfast, frustrated, lost. Those voices are the product of speech synthesis software, only as capable of dramatization as the clicks and beeps of the telegraph key—ghosts speaking, but the ghosts in the machine, not the sea or our minds. Everything resides in the words. The words are devastating.

CQD. SOS. SOS. SOS. CQD.

Comments

[sovay]

then Capt. Rostron was equally an example of Proper Emergency Response.

"Rostron then did something which is often overlooked by many books and films; he ordered Carpathia's new course before checking that what Cottam was telling him was indeed fact, and not a garbled message of some sort, which was quite possible in those days of early communication, then he worked out the relative positions of both ships and set a more accurate course."

Here's to the Electric Spark of the Cunard Line. I'm sorry I didn't know about him sooner.