Out & About …

… on the North York Moors, or wherever I happen to be.

Sleepy larch

On the col at Roseberry Common. The larch looks windswept and battered. I wonder if it were a young sapling in 1904 for it was on this day (7th January) in that year that the radiotelegraph company Marconi introduced its new distress signal, ‘CQD’, CQ standing for ‘seek you’, and D for ‘danger’. This was transmitted by Morse Code as -.-.–.–.. Different companies and countries had their own signal. Italy used ………-..-..-.. or SSSDDD but Marconi supplied equipment and operators to many shipping lines and for a time SOS looked set to dominate. Later the same year, the Germans introduced …—… which, unintentionally, formed the letters SOS. The German signal proved the one most efficiently transmitted and two years later SOS had been almost universally accepted. Almost universally. The Marconi operator on the Titanic still initially sent CQD as the distress signal on that fateful night in 1912 until another operator suggested he might try SOS too. Over time the popular belief developed that SOS stood for Save Our Souls or Save Our Ship. Completely unrelated to a larch on Roseberry Common.




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