Measures for Progress: A History of the National Bureau of Standards

RADIO, RADIUM, AND X RAYS 141
various means of generating and detecting low frequency (long distance)
radio waves, while Dellinger concentrated on higher frequency waves, those
used by experimental broadcast stations. Considerably later his investiga-
tions moved into still higher frequency wave ranges, where they became the
short waves of long-distance transmission, and after that into very high
frequencies, where he first confronted the problems whose challenge con-
tinues to the present day, those found in communication via outer space.
It was also in 1911 that Frederick A. Koister was brought to the
Bureau by Dr. Rosa to investigate some of the difficulties in radio engineering
coming into the electrical division from industry. A former assistant in Lee
de Forest's laboratory in New York, Koister proved to be one of the most
inventive mechanical geniuses ever to work at the Bureau. As his first as-
signment, he went to the Wireless Conference in London as technical adviser
to Professor Webster.
.On the night of April 14, 1912, 2 months before the Conference, the
White Star liner Titanic, on its maiden voyage, struck an iceberg 800 miles
off the coast of Nova Scotia. The disaster disclosed how much an innova-
tion maritime wireless was at that time. The scarcity of trained telegraphers
often put ships' wireless in the hands of inexperienced operators who found
signals hard to catch, were hampered by the necessity of having to relay their
messages, and to send frequent repeats 'before their messages—most of them
for passengers beguiled by the novelty—made sense on shore.
Four ships were within 60 miles of the Titanic when it sent out its
first call for help. All at various times that day had warned the Titanic of the
ice fields in the vicinity. One, the Californian, was less than 10 miles away
when the CQD went out. But its wireless operator, rebuffed earlier by the
operator on the Titanic for interfering with private messages going ashore,
had shut down for the night. Of the others, only the Cunard liner Carpathia
58 miles away, dared to chance .the ice field in which the Titanic lay sinking.
When it arrived a bare handful of lifeboats and rafts drifted in the area
where the Titanic had foundered more than hour before.83
Shocked by the disaster but ignorant of the catalog of human errors
that had caused it, the Wireless Conference meeting in London gave its at-
tention to the technical aspects of radio it had met to resolve. Of the two
wavelengths then used by international maritime wireless, the Conference
agreed that the 600-meter wavelength be restricted to the use of ships at sea.
It also agreed that in order to reduce interference from the spark transmitters
on ocean liners, the decrement or rate of decay of the waves emitted by the
transmitting antenna should not exceed the log 0.2.
83Walter Lord, A Night to Remember (New York: Henry Holt, 1955), pp. 36—38, 171—
172; Logan Marshall, Sinking of the Titanic . . . (New York: John C. Winston,
1912), p. 299.