The Night the Titanic Sank

On the night of April 14, 1912, one of the busiest rooms on the Titanic was a small radio cabin on the top deck. Inside, a young wireless operator called Jack Phillips was working through a long pile of messages. He had turned twenty-five a few days earlier. Rich passengers were paying to send greetings and business news to people on land. Phillips wanted to finish them all before the end of his shift. His assistant, Harold Bride, was asleep in the tiny room next door.

At around eleven o'clock, a loud signal interrupted him. It came from the Californian, a ship that had stopped for the night because it was surrounded by ice. Phillips was in the middle of sending messages to a station in Newfoundland, and the new signal was so strong that it hurt his ears. He told the Californian to stop and went back to work. On the Californian, the only radio operator, Cyril Evans, listened for a little longer. Then, at about half past eleven, he switched off his radio and went to bed.

Ten minutes later, at 11:40 p.m., the Titanic hit an iceberg. At first, many passengers hardly noticed. Soon after midnight, Captain Smith came to the radio room and told Phillips to call for help. Phillips began to tap out CQD, the usual distress call of the time. Bride, now awake, suggested that he also try SOS, the newer signal, and joked that it might be his last chance to use it.

Several ships answered. One of them was the Carpathia, fifty-eight miles away. Its captain turned the ship around and raced through the dark toward the Titanic, but even at full speed the journey would take hours. Meanwhile, the Californian was much closer, less than twenty miles away. Some of its crew even saw white rockets in the night sky. But nobody woke Cyril Evans, and his radio stayed silent.

As the water rose, Captain Smith told the two operators that they had done their duty and could leave. Phillips kept sending for several more minutes. At 2:20 in the morning of April 15, the Titanic disappeared under the sea. More than 1,500 people died, and Jack Phillips was one of them. Harold Bride survived.

The Carpathia arrived after the ship had already sunk and picked up the survivors from the lifeboats. If the Californian's radio had been on, its crew would have heard the calls, and the story might have been very different. Early the next morning, an officer woke Evans up. He switched on his radio, and within minutes he learned what had happened. All night, the nearest ship had been listening to nothing.