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]

The irony I always return to is that to work on a liner like that was a really good job, and they were being paid well for comparatively light duty because the ship was so well and completely staffed up, and in the end that just meant more lives lost.

And being a wireless operator for the Marconi Company was a techie job, young men in a new field—the way every other person you knew in college was working IT. Jack Phillips was twenty-five, Harold Bride twenty-two. Cyril Evans on the Californian was twenty and Harold Cottam of the Carpathia twenty-one. You worked different ships, wherever the company sent you; you saw the world and you traveled for free. You got some steadier, shorebound job when you settled down. Out on the Atlantic, you were a community of your own. "Shut up shut up I am busy working Cape Race."

[strange-selkie.livejournal.com]

"What is the matter with u?"

-- From the Olympic, I think, but really from any kid with a text-capable phone, any time in the last hour...