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Presenting history's best on PBS.
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In the cold and fog of the Atlantic.
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Suddenly 1,500 lives are in danger.
Their only hope, a young wireless operator.
Rescue at sea.
On the American experience.
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Hello, I'm David McCullough.
Welcome to the American Experience.
Our film is a sea story of two ships on the North Atlantic bound in opposite directions the winter of 1909.
Three years before the voyage of the Titanic.
One ship was the Republic of the famous White Star Line.
With 742 aboard.
Counting passengers and crew.
The other, the Florida, carried even more.
Making in all on both ships 1500 people.
What happened was extraordinary.
Living in the age we do, we think of transportation and communication as separate and different things.
But until comparatively recent times, they were one and the same.
Until the 19th century, nothing could be communicated any distance, any faster than a rider on horseback or a ship crossing the sea.
Even with the invention of the telegraph and telephone, ships at sea were out of touch for days, once out of sight of land.
They were alone, isolated.
If a ship was in trouble, if a ship went down, nobody knew.
It was the invention of the wireless that brought the great change that figured so dramatically in events off Nantucket the morning of January 23rd, 1909.
When introduced, wireless was considered a luxury, not essential to safety.
And ships were not required to carry it.
Like the Titanic, the Republic lies now at the bottom of the ocean.
Yet how many today have ever heard of her or the story of wireless operator Jack Binns, one of the most celebrated heroes of his day?
Rescue at Sea by producer Ben Loderman.
The Earth has always trembled under southern Italy, but never so fiercely as on the morning of December 28th, 1908, when an earthquake, unlike any other, brought entire cities to the ground.
It was called the worst calamity of modern times.
Initial reports of 20,000 dead were quickly revised to 10 times that number.
With nowhere to go, survivors boarded steamships organized by the government for a one-way trip to America.
On January 10th, the SS Florida sailed from Naples with 850 passengers and a cargo of dried macaroni.
She would be commanded by 28-year-old Angelo Raspini, who was making his second Atlantic crossing as her captain.
Moments before setting sail, 14-year-old Salvatore D'Amico, who'd lost his entire family in the quake, begged to join the Florida's crew.
Raspini, against his better judgment, agreed to take him on board.
The Florida's passengers were involuntary immigrants traveling in steerage.
They set off for America carrying little more than the hope of a better life.
Two weeks later, 20 friends gathered in Boston for a far more elegant farewell.
They had come to send off Eugene Lynch, a respected businessman and his wife Mary, who were bound for Italy aboard the SS Republic.
It would be their first trip abroad.
Boston papers reported the evening's centerpiece was a scale model of the Republic, a white starliner, fully rigged with the American and Italian colors flying.
The Lynch's had their doubts about the voyage, having heard it was bad luck to set sail on a Friday.
But the dinner guests assured them there was nothing to worry about.
In 1909, passenger lines competed to attract new transatlantic travelers like the Lynch's.
Lines like White Star and Cunard promoted either top speed or deluxe service.
It's very rare on the North Atlantic that you had one ship that answered both necessities, that it be fast and it be extremely luxurious.
You either built for dispatch or deluxe. Cunard went out with speed.
White Star renounced the idea of speed. They thought, leave that to the Cunards and we'll go for comfort.
And they used to say that you would spend six days at sea, but you'd have so much more comfortable a ship. It would be worth it.
In addition to steamer chairs and onboard barbershops, White Star now added a new amenity called wireless.
On a growing number of liners, makeshift cabins sprouted up to house the device.
For up to 200 miles, passengers could now send and receive personal greetings, track the latest stock quote, or read the news of the day sent by wireless telegraph and printed on board.
The wireless initially, I think, was perceived more as a frivolity almost, a luxury, a reassurance to passengers who might want the latest refinement, just as a driver of a new car would want automatic shift.
This was, in a sense, sort of automatic shift of the shipboard. This was another more guilt gingerbread on the whole creation that you could get on a ship that was in communication with the shore.
In 1909, wealthy Americans had discovered the cruise.
They flocked to Europe to broaden their education, present young debutantes at court, or simply escape the nasty winter.
The lynches of Boston were looking forward to the next two months.
Mary Lynch planned a Roman holiday.
Eugene Lynch wanted to visit the recent earthquake site in Sicily with his friend, the journalist James Connolly.
The lynches had booked a choice first class stateroom, number 34, on the uppermost saloon deck.
Connolly was staying on a lower deck in smaller second class quarters.
He had just been assigned to write an exclusive for the New York Herald about the U.S. Navy's relief effort in Sicily.
Next door to the lynches was the North Dakota banker William James Mooney, known to his friends as W.J.
Mooney, who was hoping to mix business and pleasure, was traveling with his new second wife, O'Kella.
I really think that she was the ringleader behind this trip, and I'm sure that W.J. was all for another trip around Italy in the middle of North Dakota winters.
Below the lynches were Henry and Hallie Davis, grandchildren of a wealthy West Virginia senator.
They were making the annual family trek to Europe.
They were able to go to Europe, travel around. Everybody with means did it.
An inveterate snooper, 10-year-old Hallie happened to pass the odd-looking cabin on deck occupied by a young wireless operator.
The operator was 26-year-old Jack Binns, whose services were leased to the steamship by the fledgling Marconi Wireless Company.
He showed her the whole thing, and she was fascinated.
It was called a wireless, and it didn't have any wires that she could see. And then I do remember her saying something about lightning.
It must have sent some sort of lightning effect, but I may be wrong on that.
The Republic's route Friday evening took her up the coast of Long Island and past Nantucket before heading out to open sea.
She would steam through the crowded waters near Nantucket Lightship, known as the Times Square of the Atlantic.
With up to two dozen ships crossing the dangerous intersection each night, east and westbound lanes were established on either side of the lightship, 30 miles apart.
At about 11 that night, the journalist James Connolly heard the ship's foghorn and went out on the freezing deck.
I studied the black water sliding past at full speed, and I wasn't liking it.
I had been on steamers before on foggy nights, but that was on the open ocean.
Here was a ship traveling a narrow line for the 200 miles between Sandy Hook and Nantucket Lightship.
The foghorn had startled Mary Lynch in her stateroom.
I'm not a bit timid, she told her husband, but it's dreadful to be racing along in this fog.
It's as if we were walking blindfolded among a lot of trolley cars.
Don't let the fog hurt me, will you, Gene?
Jack Binns hardly noticed the fog.
He would be up for several more hours sending a flurry of farewell messages before moving out of range of the Marconi Station at Sconset on the tip of Nantucket.
As the fog thickened, the Republic's 48-year-old captain Inman Seelby left the wheelhouse.
In very intense situations where they could hear another vessel, captains would go out on the wing of a bridge and stop their ships and just listen.
Captain Seelby hears very faintly through the fog the whistle of another ship.
He doesn't know the identity of that ship, but he knows that the sound appears to be getting closer and he begins processing what his options are.
Seelby decided to order a port or left turn and sounded his whistle, signaling the unknown vessel to do the same.
The unknown vessel was the Florida on the last day of her journey from Italy.
The steamer had lost her way in the fog and was desperately searching for the Nantucket light ship.
On the Florida, the quartermaster who was at the wheel may have actually inverted the order and instead of turning to port, turned to starboard.
The Republic's form materializes out of the fog.
Captain Rossini probably realizes that something is drastically wrong and at this point there really isn't any way of avoiding it.
It was 547, Saturday morning, January 23rd.
Binsey was asleep in his cabin.
All the last messages were sent, goodbye greetings, love letters and notes about the stock market.
And he had just gone to sleep when this incredible crashing came through and grinding like he said it was like an earthquake.
He was thrown from his bed, found himself soaking wet on the floor with pieces of his cabin sitting all around him.
His biggest problem was to find the parts of his apparatus and to ensure that they could work.
It would take Jack Binns nearly an hour to make his way several decks below and fish out auxiliary batteries to get his equipment running again.
Without ship's power, Binns' sending range was cut to barely 60 miles.
His only hope was to reach the wireless station at Sconson by now 47 miles away.
It was bitter cold. When he first went to go see Captain Seelby, Captain Seelby in fact told him not to be afraid.
And he said, oh sir I'm not afraid, it's just that it's so cold my teeth are chattering and I'm shivering but I'm not really afraid.
And indeed I don't think he really was.
Binns took Seelby's message back to his cabin.
It would become the first real test of wireless to affect a rescue at sea.
CQD. CQD. Here is MKC. MKC shipwrecked.
Republic rammed by unknown steamship. 26 miles southwest of Nantucket light ship.
Badly in need of immediate assistance. Seelby.
He prayed the message would be heard.
Before wireless, communication between ship and shore was limited to as far as the eye could see.
Imagine going out in a ship and all you have are semaphores and homing pigeons.
Once you can no longer see the shore, you are incommunicado, nothing until you get to the other shore.
That's the situation that people confronted in the 1890s.
Binns' hopes hung on a recent invention, the work of a young Italian experimenter, Guglielmo Marconi.
Marconi was not a theoretically trained scientist, he was not a university person.
He read and borrowed from the university trained scientists, but he tinkered.
He was good at finding a particular device that would work as a transmitter, another particular device that would work as a receiver.
If that receiver didn't work, he found something else to borrow from.
To make it all work, Marconi had to create a spark big enough to generate electromagnetic waves.
And the way Marconi generated that spark was by using something called a spark gap.
And you've seen something that looks like this in Frankenstein movies.
With these sparks radiating back and forth between these brass balls.
Well that's what Marconi used, and the way that he tried to moderate that was to make it conform to the Morse code.
So the spark gap was connected through an induction coil to a telegraph key.
And if you sent out short bursts, those were dots, and if you sent out long bursts, those were dashes.
And they would travel through the electromagnetic spectrum, what people mistakenly called the air,
and were received at a distance through a radio detector.
But a scientific breakthrough was not Marconi's goal.
He hoped to make wireless make money.
In the fall of 1899, he got his chance, courtesy of the New York Herald's editor, James Gordon Bennett.
James Gordon Bennett heard about Marconi's goings on in Europe, sending messages without wire.
And at that time there was the earth race, and he thought, gee, he was a racer.
He said, I can see if I can get Marconi to come over here to America,
and give us the scoop on who's winning the races that were going on off the Sandy Hook.
Hearing that Bennett's invitation included a $5,000 fee,
Marconi was eager to put on a wireless demonstration that could also win him much-needed publicity.
The newspapermen were asking him, what are you going to do here in America? Is this thing going to work? And so on.
And he says, I will be able to transmit without a doubt from so many miles at sea back to land,
and the copies will be in the newspaper just in a matter of minutes.
And people looked at this, and they couldn't believe this, and they felt he was a little bit of a young fellow.
He was a young fellow, about 20 years old or 19 at the time, and he felt he was a little bragging a little bit too much.
Marconi walks in with his contraptions, gets on board a ship, and begins following the yacht races for the Herald.
And what he does is he wirelaces the progress of the yacht races back to the Herald headquarters in Manhattan.
They immediately post the progress up on bulletin boards so people can follow the progress of the yacht races almost instantaneously.
What impressed America most, Marconi later said, was the extraordinary speed of the technology.
The public was less than 75 seconds behind the yachts, and in many cases less than 30.
Young boys were quick to try it themselves.
Gee, now you can talk without wires.
And I said, boy, Marconi, I saw where he did this, and he went further and further and further without wires.
And it, of course, it felt like you were part of it.
The young amateurs formed a club and convened their first meeting in New York on January 2, 1909.
Boys like 17-year-old Frank King from Manhattan, and Fei Tu Mun, also 17, from New Jersey, and Harry Hauck, 15, from Staten Island,
and W.E.D. Weddy Stokes, who at the tender age of 14 became the club's first president.
The amateur operator was basically the hacker of the early 20th century, and for a brief period he is greatly celebrated in popular culture.
There were books like the Radio Boys series, and Tom Swift and His Wireless Message,
and magazine stories with titles like In Marconi Land.
They celebrated the heroism and the adventures of young boys who put on their earphones and took to what was called the Great Void.
By the hundreds, young men signed up to learn Morse code and become wireless operators.
The young Marconi operators really were sort of a very select fraternity, and there was a wonderful convention they had.
They always intercerted O.M., which was Old Man, which is a sort of camaraderie greeting that they exchanged over the ether.
They called themselves Marconi Men, men like Jack Irwin and Jack Binns.
Binnsie became a Marconi Man when he was 12 years old, and first as a messenger boy.
It was a very exciting job for him because of the camaraderie of all the other Marconi Men who were so excited with this new technology.
Binns was assigned to White Starliners, ending up on the Republic.
Irwin manned the station at Sconset on Nantucket, the easternmost point of contact for sea traffic between New York and Europe.
Working around the clock, its operators mostly relayed mundane greetings from passing ships.
But their higher calling, they felt, was to be ready for a CQD.
CQ meant seek you or seeking you, I'm seeking you, are you out there, is anybody out there?
And the D was added to stand for danger, so that it was meant to mean I am seeking you, danger.
Until the morning of January 23, 1909, no Marconi operator had ever sent such a signal.
At 6.40 a.m. on Saturday, January 23, Jack Irwin was stoking his coal stove when suddenly he heard a loud crackle coming from his headphones.
He started to take down the message.
On board the Republic, Jack Binns surveyed his wireless cabin and felt lucky to be alive.
The walls of my cabin splintered up and fell in.
Had I been seated at the normal operating position, I would have been badly hurt in that mess.
While groping in the darkness, I knocked the key and broke it.
I had to hold the lever with one hand so I could send messages with the other.
I could see nothing outside in the fog and darkness.
I had no idea how badly our ship had been wounded or how long she might remain afloat.
Suddenly the sea is pouring in far faster than any of the ship's pumps can handle.
And one of the engineers heroically turned on what was called an injector pump, which actually helped to flood the boilers so that they wouldn't explode.
They literally had a matter of minutes before they were driven from their places.
By the time they evacuated the engine room, the Republic was sinking at the rate of a foot per hour.
But the brunt of the impact was taken decks above, by the first-class staterooms on the saloon deck.
I heard a dreadful crash, said Eugene Lynch, and a tremendous shock.
Some huge object was tearing the room to pieces.
It pushed broken timbers down on me that pinned me fast.
I heard one scream from my wife.
My God, Mary, I shouted.
There was no response.
You now have approximately 700 people, most of whom have been asleep, suddenly awakened by the jar of the collision.
They step out into the corridor. The friendly steward isn't there. The lights are out. You can't ring for the steward to ask what the problem is.
There was no lights, and you can imagine how traumatic that was for everybody, including a 10-year-old child.
Henry was terrified, her brother, but she was very calm throughout the whole thing.
In about five minutes, a man in charge of the staterooms came with a candle, and we dressed hurriedly and all went on deck.
This was the last we ever saw of our staterooms, our baggage, and my teddy bear.
I was very fond of my teddy.
Two decks below was the journalist James Connolly.
The noise of the bump came on our side of the ship.
I hesitated between a black topcoat and a tan raincoat.
I decided on the raincoat. It would be foggy and greasy around the deck.
I stuffed my notebooks into a pocket and hurried up the grand staircase.
I could barely make out the rail stanchions. I noticed six, maybe seven, staterooms lay in ruins.
My friends, the lynches, were berthed in one of those.
Passengers were coming running, women mostly, and most of them in scant clothing.
Several spied me standing there and asked, what's happened? What's happened?
To which I had one answer, nothing to worry about, everything's going to be all right.
One woman dressed herself before everyone on deck, while her French maid stood by and looked on.
Several men felt themselves lucky to have a woman's petticoat around their shoulders.
And a few women did not hesitate to don trousers and men's shoes.
Jack Binns was beginning to realize the fate of two ships and 1,500 people lay in his hands.
As he struggled with his sending key, the ship's crew tried to maintain order on deck.
They brought up steaming coffee and sandwiches.
Some of the stewards brought up whiskey and drinks were served.
Forty minutes after the crash, Captain Seelby sought to reassure the nervous passengers.
I want to advise you, he said, the steamer has been injured in a collision.
We are in no immediate danger, but prudence dictates that you be transferred to the vessel which struck us.
And then he makes a rather classic statement.
He says, remember, it is women and children first, then the first cabin passengers, and then all the others.
So you actually have class distinction being followed very rigidly on the Republic.
It will take some time, Seelby said, and I expect that you will be cool and not excited.
Take your time getting into the lifeboats.
The crew will be the last to leave this ship.
What now begins is a whole series of ferryings from the Republic to the Florida, which has luckily come back into view.
There had been no word from the Florida since the crash.
The impact of the Republic had crushed her bow like a broken nose, killing three of her crew in an instant.
She was holding water better than the Republic, but her passengers were threatening to riot.
The passengers on board the Florida were not able to cope with this major disaster that's now at hand,
coming on top of what they had already experienced in the earthquake, and panicked.
Justin Ruspini was obliged to break out arms and to use extremely forceful measures to maintain order.
It was now 7.15 on Saturday, an hour and a half after the collision.
Working in the dark, Binns was listening to see if other ships might have heard Jack Irwin's call from Sconset.
Irwin had been trying all morning to guide other ships to the stricken vessel.
Of the seven ships he had reached, the closest to the Republic was the Baltic, 90 miles away.
She headed straight for the sinking ship.
Two hours later, the Baltic was within range of Binns.
He sent another message to Sconset.
I'm on the job, he said, but the ship is sinking faster.
I was overheard by the wireless man in the Baltic who said, don't worry old man, we're bursting our boilers to get to you.
Binns figured the Baltic would arrive by 11 that morning, if they were lucky.
The cold was intense, chilling me through and through.
I could barely feel my hands, and finally had to put on gloves.
My steward had succeeded in scrounging a bottle of Scotch whiskey.
I do not think I ever tasted anything so refreshing in my life.
Throughout the rest of the day I slowly sipped that whiskey, a few drops at a time.
On the break, the transfer to the Florida began.
My mother's reaction to what has to have been panic, chaos, all of this drama mixed together.
My mother seemed to just be fascinated and just almost taking it in as though it were a movie.
With air and sea temperatures hovering near freezing, passengers began boarding lifeboats.
A critically injured Eugene Lynch was lowered by stretcher.
Binns was meant to leave with the rest of the crew, but insisted on staying behind with Captain Seelby and a handful of officers.
Also staying behind was Father John Norris, who had taken it upon himself to search for any remaining passengers.
When he reached the point of impact near the staterooms on the saloon deck, he paused.
Father Norris realized that Mooney had to be somewhere behind the couch and with tremendous effort.
He cleared the way to get to W.J.
Reports say that W.J. was terribly mutilated.
Some reports said that he was partially dismembered.
In any event, W.J. Mooney was still alive when Father Norris got to him.
I had found Mr. Mooney in a frightful condition, Father Norris wrote.
I then reached Mrs. Lynch and ministered to her.
She seemed to be conscious.
Before I left them, both were dead.
By 11 a.m., the Republic was listing badly.
The bins knew the Baltic had to be close and again relayed the Republic's coordinates to the Baltic's operator, Henry Tattersall.
But Tattersall wasn't the only one listening.
All along the East Coast, young amateurs tuned in to the drama unfolding out at sea.
They were soon joined by curious reporters.
As the news spread across the country, Skonset was flooded with inquiries, jamming the air to the point where bins and Tattersall could barely hear each other.
Throughout the afternoon, bins relayed the Republic's changing coordinates to the Baltic, somewhere out in the fog.
By 4 p.m., Tattersall's signal strength convinced bins the Baltic was very close.
But in which direction?
Wireless is a long-range tool that you could use if you were in clear weather. You can find your position and you can communicate that position to another vessel.
But you can't do that in thick fog, where you can't take a sighting, where you're dealing with two vessels moving through this thick pea super, trying to find each other and not finding each other with a crunch.
So they used to use what were called bombs, explosives that were set off to communicate position.
Baltic, we can hear a bomb to the west of us. Is it you?
Baltic, steer northeast at once.
Baltic, there is a bomb bearing northwest from me. Keep firing.
Baltic can hear your whistle faintly. You seem to be off our starboard bow.
With darkness falling, bins began to lose hope.
Hour after hour after hour at the key, bins' hand was literally frozen in the position and he was just experiencing the greatest difficulty in just manipulating the key and no food and no light and no heat.
And Tattersall, I think, realized that the man at the other end of his signals was a man who was under a great deal of duress and he sent a lot of encouraging messages to keep Jack bins going.
We traveled 200 miles in a zigzag course, recalled the Baltic's captain, and all within an area of 10 square miles.
As fast as I could get to one point of latitude and longitude, the Republic would have drifted to another.
Finally, the Republic used up all its bombs. The Baltic had only one left.
They were finally down to the last bomb and they had everybody, the remaining crew that is, on the Republic arrayed in a circle facing outward in the hope that when the last bomb on the Baltic went off, somebody could figure out what direction the sound was coming from.
But the only one who heard it was me.
The only one who heard it was Benzie.
And Benzie heard it, he said, because his ear was so trained to faint sounds coming through the telegraph that he could actually tell where it was and what direction it was.
I ran back to the wireless cabin and relayed the steering directions to the Baltic.
The last letter had scarcely sputtered out by the wheezy spark when the Baltic, faintly outlined in the mist by her blazing lights, loomed up.
It was the grandest sight that tired eyes ever saw.
The Baltic was a large ship with adequate cabin space and, more important, public room space to embark these passengers on board.
And they did. Despite the fatigue and exhaustion of the passengers who had already achieved one mid-ocean transfer to then ask them to submit to the same ordeal again.
They started at midnight. It would take 83 boatloads to ferry the more than 1,500 passengers and crew to the Baltic.
Never had so many people been transferred on the high seas without a single loss of life.
And they had done it twice.
Only one passenger refused to go. Eugene Lynch, badly injured and suffering from the loss of his wife.
If I've got to die, he said, I would just as soon go down with the Florida.
By Sunday morning, they were done. Two more rescue ships arrived and tried to tow the Republic. But it was obvious to Binns the ship was lost.
I was just about to go to the bridge when 4th Officer Morrow made his way toward me with Seelby's message. I think we are going to abandon ship.
But Seelby himself refused to go. He went down with the ship, only to bob up to the surface miraculously unharmed.
From the rescue boat, Binns relayed his last message.
White Star Line, New York. Republic sunk. All hands saved. Seelby.
Until now, newspapers had printed what few details of the disaster they could pick up from Sconson.
Now they clamored for a first-person account.
As the Baltic entered New York Harbor, James Connolly had just what they wanted.
A whistle came from a steamer and a voice hailed to ask if a James B. Connolly was aboard.
The voice said, I'm Smith of the New York Herald.
I wrap my thousand-word dispatch in tarpaulin and hove it overboard.
It led a special edition to the Herald in bold type on the front page.
Having learned of the drama in the Sunday papers, thousands came out to greet the Baltic.
Like many relatives of those on board the Republic, John Mooney Jr. caught a train after seeing an early newspaper report.
Only at the pier did he and the Lynch's relatives learn the full story.
My father was gratified, joyous that there were survivors, but a very heavy heart.
That W.J. lost his life, as did Mrs. Lynch buried at sea, and there was not a great deal that John Mooney could do about a situation as final as that.
As one New York newspaper reported, it was the only grief to be noticed.
No one came Sunday afternoon to greet the Florida.
Four hours after she arrived, shipwrights discovered the three bodies that had been crushed in the initial collision.
Among them was Salvatore D'Amico, the boy who had begged his way aboard.
Near death, Eugene Lynch was carried from the Florida.
He had two last requests, a brandy and that a medal be presented to the ship's wireless operator.
America had discovered a new hero, and his name was Jack Binns.
The crowds were incredible. He had a ticker tape parade, and he was astonished, frightened in a way.
For him, he had simply done his duty.
Binns became the stuff of legend and lyrics.
There's a hole in the side of the ship, Jack Binns, the captain above him cried.
Give a message at once to the wandering winds. Aye, aye, sir, Jack Binns replied.
The captain was brave, but braver was he who sat in his room with his hand on the key and steadily sounded his CQD to people there somewhere outside.
Jack Binns, Jack Binns, bravest of all the crew. Jack Binns, Jack Binns, the world loves and honors you.
He was sought out for autographs, offered contracts to perform vaudeville, even swarmed by chorus girls at the Hippodrome.
He was offered all kinds of ways to profit from his heroism. He didn't want to do that.
Instead, he watched as his story was turned into cheap entertainment by the Vitagraph movie company.
It was a very short film which purported to show him on the sending key and this upset him terribly.
Binns had hoped to use his celebrity to champion wireless as an instrument of safety.
He even testified before Congress on behalf of a bill to mandate wireless coverage.
Congress hailed Binns' bravery, but he felt ignored his testimony.
To become a caricature for Vitagraph, Binns decided, was the last straw.
So he sued Vitagraph and won the suit for invasion of privacy.
He returned to England to await his next posting.
The public, he felt, had missed the point.
To those who read about it in the press, to those who found there was almost no loss of life at all apart from the collision,
seemed then that this was a clean surgical rescue with none of the unpleasant death toll that would have tarnished it.
So any urgency or expediency Congress felt, for instance, to implement improvement in radio watch,
to have people on duty on radio around the clock, was stalled because the Republic made it seem too easy.
The rescue had produced a hero, but it would take a disaster to produce real change.
In April 1912, Jack Binns was assigned the wireless post on another white star liner, the Titanic.
But personal circumstances intervened.
He had fallen in love.
More than 1,500 lives were lost on the Titanic, the same number that three years earlier Jack Binns had helped to save.
Play the Rescue at Sea interactive game, save yourself or go down with the ship.
Cruise the Maritime Disaster Timeline and check out Wayback U.S. History for Kids.
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