An SOS distress call helped save the life of these survivors from the Titanic. That was the first time the actual 'SOS' distress call was ever used for real. After the tragedy, most big ships installed two-way radio systems for their safety.

What does SOS mean? Most people know that SOS is a distress signal that is understood pretty much right around the world, but there is some confusion as to where SOS actually came from… Why was it chosen and what does it mean?

Some folks believe the morse code emergency signal stands for ‘save our ship’ and others believe it means ‘save our souls’. But in actual fact it means neither of these things.

SOS is a morse code signal of three dits, three dahs and then three dits again. There is no extra spacing between the three dots and the three dashes, nor between the three dashes and the three dots. If there was a slight pause between them it would indeed be ‘SOS’ that was being sent, but without any spaces it is just a sound pattern… and it sounds like ‘didididahdahdahdididit’.

That is a bit hard to read or understand. (It is better if you can listen to it), so I will place hyphens between the groups to make it easier on the eye. Thus the signal would actually sound like dididi-dahdahdah-dididit (You can click the signal to hear the sound). But it can also sent by flashing a signal light, such as flashlight (electric torch) or a Navy aldis lamp, as still used for close ship-to-ship or ship-to-shore signals where they don’t want to use radio.

But the distress signal doesn’t actually mean S.O.S. It is not an acronym, nor is it an abbreviation. The SOS signal is just a distinctive sound pattern that was chosen so trained morse code operators could easily recognize when they heard it. And it was easy to remember and easy to send with a morse key.

Before the SOS signal was declared an emergency signal in 1905 by the German admiralty, morse code operators (radio telegraphists) had been trained to send the letters ‘CQD’ as a distress call. When the Titanic was sinking, the ships’ radio operators stayed at their posts and sent both ‘CQD’ and ‘SOS’ distress messages to call for help.

So the SOS emergency signal was invented many years before voice radios had been invented. Decades later, and even to this day, ship or aircraft radio operators are trained to call ‘Mayday’ when they have an emergency. (‘Mayday’ is actually the English pronounciation of the French word, M’aider! and that means ‘Help Me!’). It is repeated three times, and then other information is given… the name of the ship or aircraft, its exact location and the nature of the emergency.

A trained radio operator would never use voice to actually speak ‘SOS’, however an emergency call or a distress message is often referred to as an SOS call.

Reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayday_(distress_signal)

Picture credit: Image via Wikipedia.

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