Law & Disorder / Civilization & Discontents

How the Titanic disaster pushed Uncle Sam to “rule the air”

Four months after the 1912 Titanic disaster, Congress passed the first law …

If you opened up The New York Times on April 15, 1912, you would have read one of the most famous news alerts of the 20th century. The Times reported that it had learned from the Marconi company's Newfoundland station that the world's biggest ocean liner, the Titanic, had hit an iceberg en route from Southhampton, England.

But not to worry, the newspaper assured its readers. Judging by past encounters, iceberg collisions were a survivable experience. "All Titanic Passengers Safe; Towing to Halifax," the article quoted a wireless message as saying. The London Times cited the dispatch as well.

Paper boy spreading news of the Titanic disaster.

Almost a century later, everyone knows that it didn't work out that way. Over the next few days, the world learned that the huge luxury vessel sank after the collision, and only a bit over 700 of the  2,223 people on board survived. For a while, even that ratio was uncertain. "ONLY 400 TITANIC SURVIVORS NAMED BY CARPATHIA" The Times reported two days later—citing a ship involved in rescue operations. "WIRELESS SEARCH OF THE SEAS FOR FURTHER NEWS."

But the tragedy has a connection to another wireless story that has almost been forgotten—the dawn of modern radio license regulation. Historical narratives vary on this subject. Even without the Titanic disaster, the government would have eventually asserted authority over wireless frequencies. But the awful event accelerated the process and gave it a reference point in the public mind. Four months after the sinking, private American wireless radio operators had to be licensed by Uncle Sam.

Are the Titanic disaster and your mobile ISP historically linked? Is there a time bridge between the sinking and AT&T's bid to buy T-Mobile and transfer the latter's licenses to itself? Absolutely.

Wireless frontier

By the early 20th century, the notion of the "self-made man" had hit a wobbly spot in the American psyche. The frontier had supposedly closed in 1890. More and more Americans worked for corporations. Where could red blooded guys show their individualistic prowess in this modern day and age?

Newspapers thought they found in the answer in Walter Willenborg, an amateur wireless maven operating out of Hoboken, New Jersey. "New wonders with wireless—and by a boy!" ran a 1907 feature on the enthusiast. Willenborg amazed reporters with his ability to pick up Morse code signals as far away as Clifden, Ireland. They trekked to his experimental lab and marveled at the results.

"Even today there are young folks who make the same mistake in thinking that all great things that are worth doing have been done;" a journalist opined after his visit. "All the great discoveries made; all the grand inventions finished."

The boys of wireless.

Willenborg wasn't just a lone maverick either. He was part of a generation of boys, who, thanks to the sudden affordability of wireless technology, had glommed onto the medium. Most were much younger than him. Before Edward Stratemeyer's Hardy Boys series appeared on the landscape, these lads pored over the "Build Your Own Wireless Set" manuals tailored to their demographic and read the "Radio Boys" novels that celebrated their exploits.

This included imaginary exploits, too—retail radio equipment seller and science fiction pioneer Hugo Gernsback blurred the distinction between real technological breakthroughs and conjured ones in stories that appeared in magazines like Modern Electrics. The magazine published both instruction manuals and his strange novel Ralph 124C 41+, which predicted video conferencing, electrical cars, and microfilm.

The readers and doers of Modern Electrics were the "latest incarnation of the boy-hero," writes historian Susan J. Douglas in Inventing American Broadcasting. "Trapped between the legacy of genteel culture and the pull of the new primitivism of mass culture, many boys reclaimed a sense of mastery, indeed masculinity itself, through the control of technology."

A few of them even became actual heroes, most notably young Jack Binns. In 1909, two ships, the Republic and the Florida, collided off the foggy rim of Nantucket. Both were packed with passengers, but only the Republic had hired Binns as a wireless operator. Over the course of three wet and freezing days he repaired his damaged Marconi machine and doggedly Morse coded for help, saving almost 1,500 passengers on both vessels who otherwise might have drowned.

A song for "wireless hero" Jack Binns (PBS)

The incident became a national sensation and Binns became a celebrity. He appeared on Vaudeville stages. Songs were written in praise of his courage (there's even a PBS documentary about the incident, and Binns fans have set up a website for him). At the same time, the state of telegraph equipment on ships became a public issue. Congress quickly passed the 1910 Wireless Ship Act in response. The law required a wireless operator on all boats entering or leaving US ports, provided they were carrying more than 49 passengers and sailing 200 miles or more.

But beyond stipulating that the vessel's Marconi system be able to reach 100 miles during daylight, the statute's requirements on the quality of equipment and skill of operators were vague. The Wireless Act didn't deal with the navy's claim that amateur interference was a problem, either. Although most "hams" dealt with the ether responsibly, naval officials insisted that an annoying minority engaged in broadcasts that interfered with ship-to-shore wireless activity.

Who ever heard of the navy, anyway?

One has to admit that some of the antics of these Morse code boys are amusing, at least in retrospect. "Some amateurs deliberately sent false or obscene message, especially to the navy," Douglas notes. "The temptation to indulge in such practical joking was enhanced by the fact that detection was virtually impossible. Amateurs would pretend to be military officials or commercial operators, and they dispatched ships on all sorts of fabricated missions."

The navy didn't think any of this was funny, of course. During one cited emergency, naval officials complained that they had to fight with amateurs to get control of a frequency. When a coastal operator told a Boston ham to "butt out" of the signal, he was told to get lost right back.

"Say, you navy people think you own the ether," the amateur retorted. "Who ever heard of the navy anyway. Beat it, you, beat it."

As radio historian Jesse Walker observes, the government also resented these boys because they were better trained and had superior equipment. "The hams' anarchic meritocracy outperformed the navy's society of status," Walker writes, "sometimes relaying rescue messages that the official radiomen had missed or mangled. This didn't exactly boost the seamen's self-image."

But, despite their prowess, by 1909, a critical mass of opinion was moving towards regulation of the airwaves. Even Electrical World applauded the prospect in an editorial:

It is high time to undertake friendly but extremely thorough regulations, for amateur seaboard stations are much in the position of amateur lighthouse plants, interfering with the legitimate safety precautions with respect to navigation, which are peculiarly the business of government. It may be contended that private persons have the right to experiment even with lighthouse lenses, but granting this, they should be compelled, and can be legally compelled, to desist from so experimenting as to interfere with navigation.

A craving for news

It was in this context that the Titanic disaster took place. Marconi stations across the Atlantic rim became scenes of chaos, reporters noted, inundated with queries from desperate passenger relatives "craving for news." Not surprisingly, everybody started blaming others for the dearth of reliable information. Marconi officials complained of "outside unrecognized stations" gumming up the works.

And editors, embarrassed that they had reported the Titanic's safe passage, joined the amateur blame-fest. The newspapers focused on an explanation for the "All Titanic Passengers Safe; Towing to Halifax" transmission, one provided by Herbert Haddock, captain of the Titanic's sister ship, the Olympic. According to this account, amateurs had botched the wireless transmission of the question "Are All Titanic Passengers Safe?" Haddock suggested they stitched it together with the steamship Asian's contemporaneous message "Towing oil tank to Halifax."

This was speculation, but it caught on. "Someone, perhaps in carelessness, perhaps in fear or in greed, sent false messages of rescue," Electrical World declared. This person "ought to serve a long term in prison."

Five days after the Titanic sank, the Senate Commerce Committee held hearings on the catastrophe at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York. Furious editorials against amateurs appeared in all major newspapers. "The blame was laid to the parties least able to defend themselves," one ham bitterly wrote to Scientific American, "as is usually the case."

Three months later, Congress tightened up the Wireless Ship Act. Vessels carrying fifty or more people now had to employ a minimum of two wireless operators equipped with their own power system. Soon after that Congress passed the Radio Act of 1912.

The normal wave

The Radio Act's central provision required any "person, company, or corporation" using a device for radio communication in the United States to have a license, issued by the Department of Commerce and Labor (a year later Congress established a separate department for labor; radio licensing remained within Commerce). Equally important, the law for the first time compelled radio stations to stick to a certain wave length "as the normal sending and receiving wave length of the station."

The statute exempted licenses for broadcasting on behalf of the United States government. Non-governmental operators had to operate their apparatus below 600 meters or above 1,600 meters (back in those days operators primarily identified frequencies by wavelength rather than Hertz). The navy now had unrestricted access to the areas in between, with "right of way" priority given to distress signals.

"All stations are required to give absolutely priority to signals and radiograms relating to ships in distress," the Radio Act stipulated. Stations had to stop all other kinds of broadcasting at that time, and focus on communications regarding the vessel in trouble.

Finally, any "private or commercial station not engaged in the transaction of bona fide commercial business by radio communication"—in other words, amateurs—had to broadcast below 200 meters. The law set up stiff penalties for "uttering or transmitting a false or fraudulent distress signal or call"—a fine of $2,500 or up to five years in prison.

The Radio Act of 1912 functioned as the law of the land until 1927, when the Radio Act of that year set up a Federal Radio Commission for the allocation of broadcast radio licenses. The FRC was replaced in 1934 by the Federal Communications Commission, which now oversees both radio transmission and telephony. The FCC allocates specific radio licenses under certain circumstances; more often it oversees their auction or individual sale.

But although the name of the agency and its ways of handling frequencies has changed, the assumption contained in the Radio Act of 1912 prevails. To this day, private entities borrow, lease, buy, or sell licenses to use portions of the wireless airwaves. Those licenses are allocated, defined, and regulated by the United States government.

Thus, when AT&T says that it wants to buy T-Mobile to transfer the latter's cache of FCC authorized wireless licenses, what it seeks are "properties" attached to a legal principle set in motion following the Titanic's sinking on April 15, 1912.

Congressional eyes

Does the Titanic really deserve some credit or blame for this condition? It's a point of disagreement among historians. The tragedy is "often cited inaccurately as the reason for drawing the Radio Act of 1912," writes broadcast regulation scholar Marvin R. Bensman. "The subcommittee of the Senate Commerce Committee had actually completed its work on this bill and the bill had been reported out prior to the Titanic disaster."

That's exactly right, but the footnote to this assertion comes from Captain Linwood S. Howeth's 1963 tome History of Communications-Electronics in the United States Navy. We have italicized the last sentence:


The Radio Act will commemorate its 100th birthday next year. Congress passed the law on August 13, 1912. It went into effect four months later, on December 13.

Further reading

  • Susan J. Douglas, Inventing American Broadcasting
  • Jesse Walker, Rebels in the Air: An Alternative History of Radio in America
  • Daniel Allen Butler, 'Unsinkable': The Full Story of the Titanic
  • Martin R. Bensman, The Beginning of Broadcast Regulation in the Twentieth Century

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