The Titanic and Memory
Titanic: The Night Lives On
– by David Eugene Perry
15 December 2025: Today, somewhere between the Pacific and memory, I am aboard ship – this time the lovely Seabourn Encore — talking once again about Titanic. Not about the iceberg — we’ve all heard that part — but about what followed: the moments when rockets flared into the night, radio operators reached for familiar signals, and ordinary people revealed who they were when certainty vanished.
Titanic didn’t simply sink. It exposed the fault lines between tradition and technology, between habit and clarity, between survival and conscience.
On the night of April 14, 1912, Titanic fired a series of rockets into the black North Atlantic sky. They rose cleanly and burst white, one after another, at regular intervals. Today, we assume distress signals must be red. In 1912, that assumption did not exist. White rockets were entirely acceptable under British maritime practice. Rockets were meant to attract attention, not convey color-coded meaning. Red rockets existed, but there was no international standard governing their use, and many ships — Titanic included — carried white rockets specifically designated for emergencies.
And the rockets worked. They were seen. However, they failed to deliver the needed message. A nearby ship, the Californian, watched those rockets climb into the night. Officers noted them carefully: eight white bursts, fired methodically, from a vessel that appeared stopped and strangely silent. Yet no decisive action followed. The wireless operator had gone off duty. The officers did not interpret white rockets as an unambiguous distress call. Captain Stanley Lord was informed, but reassured that the signals might be company communications or celebrations. There was no standing order that rockets alone required waking the wireless operator or steaming to assist. They saw the warning. Sadly, they failed to recognize its meaning.
Both the American and British inquiries would later conclude that Californian could — and should — have responded. Titanic’s rockets did not fail. Interpretation failed. Procedure failed. Urgency failed.
At the same moment those rockets were flaring, another transition was unfolding invisibly in the air: the language of distress itself.
For years, wireless operators trained by Marconi relied on a signal known as CQD. “CQ” meant “calling all stations.” The added “D” meant “distress.” It was not an international standard but a company convention — familiar, habitual, comfortable. By 1912, CQD was already becoming outdated, though many operators still used it by reflex.
The future belonged to SOS.
SOS did not stand for “Save Our Ship” or “Save Our Souls.” Those phrases came later, invented as mnemonic aids. SOS was chosen for one reason: its perfect simplicity in Morse code — three short signals, three long, three short. Symmetrical. Unmistakable. Nearly impossible to confuse, even through static. Iwas adopted as the official international distress signal in 1908. And yet, habits die hard.
When Titanic struck the iceberg, wireless operator Jack Phillips began transmitting CQD. His colleague, Harold Bride, reportedly joked, “Send SOS — it’s the new call, and this may be your last chance to send it.” Titanic sent both signals into the ether, straddling two eras at once: the old, company-based system and the emerging international standard.
This mattered. SOS was heard. Carpathia responded immediately. Rescue began because clarity finally broke through confusion. The failure was never the signal itself. It was the system surrounding it.
And then there are the stories that require no technology at all.
Isidor and Ida Straus were not celebrities aboard Titanic, though many recognized them. He was a German-born immigrant, a partner in Macy’s, a former congressman — a man who embodied the promise of American commerce. She was intelligent, resolute, and deeply devoted. Married for more than forty years, they were known for being rarely apart.
When the lifeboats were being loaded, Ida was offered a seat. Isidor was not. He refused to enter a boat before other men. Ida refused to leave him.
“We have lived together for many years,” she said. “Where you go, I go.”
She handed her fur coat to her maid and told her quietly that she would not be needing it. The Strausses were last seen sitting side by side on deck chairs, holding hands as the ship went down. They did not panic. They did not argue. They did not attempt to outwit fate. They chose fidelity over survival.
In the days after the disaster, Macy’s — so closely associated with Isidor Straus — publicly mourned. Like much else from Titanic, a belief has persisted that the store still hangs black crepe every year on the anniversary of the sinking. While the store did observe mourning in 1912, what endures is not a retail ritual but something far more fitting.
On Manhattan’s West Side, at Broadway and West End Avenue at 106th Street, there is a small, quiet space known as Straus Park. Established by the family in 1915, it is centered on a simple memorial fountain bearing words from the Book of Samuel:
“Lovely and pleasant were they in their lives, and in their death they were not divided.”
Isidor’s body was recovered and buried in New York. Ida’s was never found. Their names share a single memorial, as they shared a life.
More than a century later, Isidor Straus’s gold pocket watch — a gift from Ida decades earlier — resurfaced and sold at auction for £1.78 million ($ 2.3 million) reportedly stopping at 2:20 a.m., the moment Titanic disappeared beneath the sea.
The violin owned and played that night by Wallace Hartley, Titanic’s band leader. When Hartley’s body was found later, floating in a life jacket, the violin was still strapped to his body. It sold for £900,000 ($1.5 million) in 2013 and now rests at the Titanic Belfast Museum. Hartley lies buried in Colne, Lancashire, beneath a gravestone carved with a violin.
Both these tangible relics from that “Night to Remember” are but the most record-breaking icons. There are hundreds of other artifacts from the world’s most famous ship that continue to pop up at auction, and in museums around the world. Since the discovery of the wreck in September 1985, and exploration of the site, more are brought, literally, to the surface.
This is why Titanic endures: not because of the story of the ship, although that is compelling, but because of these most human of moments and the changes the disaster made on history, and navigation. It’s stories like this that continue to fascinate me, and others, to this very day.
