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“SOS” by ABBA is a great song. Fun to listen to as well, because every time Agnetha sings the word “good” I hear a bit of The Muppet Show’s Swedish Chef voice sneak in. Anyway, SOS wasn’t the first electronic distress call.
--On This Day in History, Shit Went Down: January 7, 1904--
On January 7, 1904, the Marconi—that’s Guglielmo, the radio guy—International Marine Communication Company issued a directive that ships in distress would use Morse code to tap out CQD. The “CQ” stood for “sécu,” an abbreviation of the French word sécurité. It had been used on land telegraphs for years to signify an alert. The “D” was added to indicate “distress.” But typing it out was a comparative motherfucker: ▄▄▄ ▄ ▄▄▄ ▄ ▄▄▄ ▄▄▄ ▄ ▄▄▄ ▄▄▄ ▄ ▄
A little over a year later SOS was adopted to replace CQD. Most believe it stands for either “save our ship” or “save our souls.” But it doesn’t. I mean, it was fucking Germany that invented it, and if that was the intent the acronym would have been RUS. No, SOS was adopted for the simple reason that it’s easy as fuck to type out. Three dots. Three Dashes. Three dots.
Prior to the invention of radio, ships had to use flags and flares and horns to tell people that our ship is sinking, and we’d really like to not drown please come save our asses. There were other competing signals to SOS, but it won out via its simplicity. The first recorded “please come save our asses” use of SOS was on June 10, 1909, when the RMS Slavonia ran aground in the Azores. All on board were rescued.
Here is a fucked-up SOS story for ya. In 1982, Jefferson County Sheriff Harold Bray was on a United Airlines flight to California. Looking out the window while flying over the Colorado Rockies, he saw the telltale SOS signal via a flashing light. He told the captain, and rescuers were dispatched, climbing the 10,000-foot mountain in freezing temperatures to find 30-year-old Alan Lee Phillips. He was stuck in snowdrift and used the headlights on his truck to signal the distress call. His rescue made national news.
But almost four decades later, Phillips made national news again. On May 25, 2021, the Washington Post reported that he wasn’t some innocent traveler caught in bad weather. Rather, he’d recently kidnapped and murdered two female hitchhikers and was fleeing the crime scenes. Annette Schnee, 22, and Barbara Jo Oberholtzer, 29, were both hitchhiking separately on the evening of January 6, 1982, not far from where Phillips was rescued. Oberholtzer’s body was found the next day, and Schnee’s six months later. Both had been shot to death.
There was blood on Oberholtzer’s glove that wasn’t hers. Investigators solved the cold case by using “genetic genealogy,” tracing Phillip’s family’s DNA through databases to pinpoint him as the suspect. Phillips has been ordered to stand trial for the two murders.
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