[BVARC] From the Wayback Machine -- A little SOS History

Rick Hiller rickhiller73 at gmail.com
Mon Aug 19 08:06:45 CDT 2024


>From *Historyfacts.com*

“SOS” doesn’t actually stand for anything.

After more than a century of use as a maritime distress signal, “SOS” has
become shorthand for just about any emergency. You may have heard that it
stands for “save our ship” or “save our souls,” but that’s actually a
backronym, or an acronym made up after the fact. The letters in “SOS”
didn’t initially stand for anything; they were originally chosen because
they form a sequence of Morse code that can be transmitted more quickly
than others.

Morse code (named for Samuel Morse) is a way of transmitting phrases with
light flashes or electrical pulses; each letter and numeral has its own
sequence of between one and five short bursts (known as “dots” or “dits”)
and long bursts (“dashes” or “dahs”). In 1901, inventor Guglielmo Marconi
created a radio transmitter that could send Morse code signals across the
Atlantic, allowing ships to communicate with other vessels and land-based
stations. British operators were already using “CQ,” or “seeking you,” as a
signal to alert all stations, so Marconi’s wireless company recommended
“CQD,” or “seeking you, distress,” as an emergency signal. Meanwhile, the
United States usually used “NC,” the Germans used “SOE,” and Italians used
“SSSDDD.” But the problem with all of these is they required brief pauses
between the letters.

Delegates at the 1906 International Radiotelegraph Conference suggested a
simpler, more standardized distress call. The letters “S” and “O” — three
dots and three dashes, respectively — are extremely simple and easy to
understand without any spaces, so “SOS” could be transmitted on a quick,
continuous loop. Most countries officially adopted the code in 1908 and,
even though the U.S. was not among them, an American ship was the first to
use the signal when its propeller snapped. “CQD” remained popular with the
British even after other countries had adopted “SOS,” and when the RMS
Titanic sank in 1912, it signaled for help with both “SOS” and “CQD.” By
that time, the backronym had already taken hold. During the British
government inquiry on the Titanic disaster, Attorney General Rufus Isaacs
was under the impression that “SOS” stood for “save our souls.”

The year the U.S. phased out Morse code for maritime communications -- 1999

Also, did you know?  The distress signal “mayday” comes from a French word.

In the 1920s, there was a lot of air traffic between England and France,
and radio communication between pilots was spoken, not telegraphed. While
“SOS” is very practical to transmit using Morse code, it can be easily
garbled when said out loud — an “S” can sound like an “F” or even an “X.”
The term “mayday,” coined in 1923, is a phonetic spelling of the French
m'aidez, meaning “help me,” and was preferred for spoken communication.
Although the observance of the May Day spring festival predates the
“mayday” code by hundreds of years, it’s unrelated to the distress call.

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