February 1, 2024 – Theme Week Day 4

We’re on day 4 of our theme week, 5 Things You Thought You Knew! Do you know what SOS stands for? It’s not “save our souls” or “save our ship”, the letters don’t actually stand for anything! It’s Morse code, a string of three dots, three dashes, and three dots. Because 3 dots form the letter S and 3 dashes form O in International Morse Code, the signal became known as SOS for the sake of convenience and it became a common way to remember the order of the dots and dashes.
Radio (or “wireless telegraphy” as it was known then) was developed in the late 1890s and was quickly recognized as an important aid to maritime communication. When wireless radiotelegraph machines started being used on ships at the turn of the 20th century, sailors in distress needed a way to attract attention and ask for help. Before this, ships used a variety of distress signals, like semaphore flags, flares, bells, and foghorns. The problem was, that different countries and organizations all used different signals, which was confusing and potentially dangerous.
So in 1908, a bunch of countries got together to try and establish an international standard distress call. Germany had been using SOS, and it was eventually chosen by the delegates because it was easy to remember, could be sent quickly, and was hard to misinterpret. Plus, it had visual appeal. Not only is it a palindrome (read the same way backward and forward) but it’s an ambigram, so it can be read the same way upside-down and right-side-up.
The first recorded use of SOS as a distress signal came just a year later, in August 1909. It was sent by the SS Arapahoe when the ship had been disabled by a broken propeller off the coast of North Carolina. Years later, with the development of audio radio transmitters, there was a need for a spoken distress phrase. “Mayday” (from the French m’aider which means “help me”) was adopted in 1927 as the spoken equivalent of SOS. Learn more here.