World War: New Signal

At 3 roy p.m. one afternoon last week, at latitude 22:10 North, longitude 51:28 West—1,900 miles east of Havana, Cuba, on the regular trade route from Barbados to England—the wireless operator of the British tanker El Ciervo began tapping out an alarm: SSS...SSS...SSS...

Long familiar to landlubbers has been the distress signal SOS. Contrary to landlubber tradition, S 0 S is not an abbreviation—either for "Save Our Souls" or "Save Our Ship." It is simply one of the clearest, simplest signals that could be devised from the Morse Code: Dot-dot-dot dash-dash-dash dot-dot-dot.

S S S—three triplets of dots—is a new signal, invented and...

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