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“Send SOS,” one of the Titanic’s radio operators supposedly said to another after the famous ship struck that infamous iceberg. “It’s the new call and besides this may be your last chance to send it.” That “new call” turned 100 years old this week.

In the past century, “SOS” has become a firm part of popular culture used in everything from DIY program titles to Abba hits. But it began in a far more serious setting after being adopted by the international community on July 1, 1908, as the globally recognized distress signal for ships at sea.

At that time voices could not yet be carried across the airwaves and sailors needed a standard means of saying, in Morse code, that they were in trouble. Until then, the most commonly used distress call was the “CQD” signal, which was open to misinterpretation. After much deliberation, SOS was chosen to replace it because the signal – three dots, three dashes and three more dots – is such a clear message to send in Morse code.

But not everybody was convinced, and it took the tragedy of the Titanic to reveal just how vital a universal system was. After the collision in April 1912, the ship’s radio operators sent out both the old CQD and the new SOS signals, but some ships in the area ignored both, thinking that they were having a party. They soon learned otherwise, as international headlines told how Jack Phillips, the Titanic’s first radio operator, and 1,500 others had been lost along with the “unsinkable” ship. The new SOS distress signal was rarely ignored after that.

From the Times of London