In 1897 the young Guglielmo Marconi succeeded in making wireless contact between an Italian warship and the shore at La Spezia about eleven miles away. This opened a new chapter for shipping in which contact with the shore could be maintained even after a ship had passed out of sight of land. In 1898, when the Prince of Wales was convalescing on the yacht Osborne at Cowes, Marconi put the yacht in radio contact with Osborne House so that Queen Victoria could be kept informed of the progress of her son’s recovery.

The equipment then comprised a high voltage spark sending out Morse signals. It was feasible only because nobody else was doing it, because the signals were untuned, just like those from a flash of lightning. It was not until 1901 that the trick of avoiding interference by tuning the signals to a given wavelength, viz 100 metres, had been learned.

In spite of the obvious advantages of having wireless equipment on board, progress in adopting it was quite slow and erratic. The great loss of life in the Titanic disaster arose mainly because the wireless operator on the nearby ship, Californian, had gone to bed after 16 hours on duty, so the distress calls sent out thereafter from the stricken ship were received only by distant ships that took a long time to reach the scene. Subsequently a watch for distress signals was required to be kept all round the clock.

The original distress call was CQD (Seek You, Danger), but in 1906 an International Conference recommended SOS, which was just a simple Morse signal (... --- ...) and stood for no actual words. The Mayday call came in the 1920s after radio telephony, introduced afloat by Marconi in 1914, was fully established; it was devised by FS Mockford, who was active in drawing up regulations for the use of wireless by civil aircraft.

In 1959 I had the thrill of speaking from the SS Mauritania in mid-Atlantic to my family at home in Harrow. That was not a simple matter of dialling my home number from my cabin. The call had to be arranged some hours in advance and, when the time came, I had to go to the wireless operator’s room and then shout over the crackles while the operator himself twiddled knobs to maintain the link.

In the last twenty years, ship-to-shore radio (wireless is now an old-fashioned term) has marched steadily down the amateur yachting market to the most humble boats as the gear has become both better and cheaper. The equipment for the offshore yacht is simple to use, but it is still on a ‘speak-and-over’ basis, and you can be overheard by anyone who cares to listen on that wavelength.

We are now on the threshold of a new stage in the extension of radio-telephony from afloat. The car phone is spreading rapidly amongst the motoring fraternity, and my own daughter is an addict. It offers true, straightforward telephoning to the dinghy sailor who cares to take his car phone afloat with him. The sailing GP can remain in touch for consultation; the yuppie helm on the Solent can instruct his New York stockbroker whilst going about, and anyone hoping for a change of wind can call the local Met Office for advice.

Now is the time for the cheap, submersible car/dinghy phone to appear!