The Republic’s stern plunged down.
Her bow rose in the air for a moment and
then shot downward, too. At 8:40 p.m., the
Republic disappeared into the deep water off
No Man’s Land, Martha’s Vineyard. But the
Gresham, the Baltic, and the Florida all made
it safely to shore.
ALTHOUGH THE CRASH had been a
disaster, “CQD Binns” was hailed as a hero.
Everywhere he went, his fans serenaded him
with a song in his honor: “Jack Binns, Jack
Binns, bravest of all the crew, Jack Binns,
Jack Binns, the world loves and honors you!”
But he didn’t let it go to his head.
“It was nothing,” Binns insisted. “Any fel-
low could do that much.”
Binns thought that the real hero of the
story was the wireless. The crash of the
Republic was one of the first times that wire-
less communication had been used in a
marine disaster. And it had been a huge suc-
cess: the wireless had saved more than 1,600
people from certain death.
Binns later testified before Congress, try-
ing to pass a bill to require wireless coverage
on all passenger ships. Congress didn’t pass
the bill. Some people thought that the wire-
less was too expensive to be installed on all
passenger ships. Others argued that only an
international law would be effective since
most passenger ships were registered in for-
eign countries.
Instead it took three years and another
maritime disaster for the world to take notice
of wireless: the Titanic. One year after that
disaster, an international conference was held
in London. Sixty-five countries finally agreed
to require all passenger ships to be outfitted
with a wireless.Guglielmo Marconi had read about the experiments
of Heinrich Hertz, a German physicist who had
detected electromagnetic waves from several yards
away without using wires. Marconi thought that
Hertz’s waves might be able to carry messages with-
out wires, unlike the telephone and the telegraph,
which used electricity to send messages along wires.
Marconi was also inf luenced by Nikola Tesla’s
experiments with wireless, which began in 1893.
In fact, credit for the invention of radio was hotly
contested between Tesla and Marconi. In 1943, the
Supreme Court posthumously awarded Tesla the
credit for the invention.
After years of tinkering in his parents’ attic,
Marconi developed a transmitter that used radio
waves to send messages in Morse code. He thought
that he had invented a powerful new technology.
Now messages could be sent across water and dif-
f icult terrain, unlike with the telephone and the
telegraph, which needed to be linked by wires. He
hoped to make a fortune by charging customers to
send and receive wireless messages, but his idea
was slow to catch on.
It wasn’t until Marconi sent the results of the
1899 America’s Cup yacht races from ship to shore
that people began to take wireless communication
seriously. Soon hundreds of young, amateur “Marconi
men” formed clubs, put on their earphones, and
taught themselves to use the new technology. Jack
Binns had begun as one of those amateurs.MARITIME MEANS
RELATED TO THE SEA.