The Development of Telecoms - Belfast

This widespread area embraces the six counties of Northern Ireland covering 5,237 square miles. It is also the centre of the famous Irish linen industry. The remainder of the area is mainly agricultural and is renowned for its beauty spots.

The main town is the City of Belfast, which is well known for shipbuilding and engineering in particular the most famous ship of all time, Titanic. Harland and Wolff began construction for the White Star Line in 1909 and three Olympic-class ocean liners were built. Olympic (1911), Titanic (1912) and Britannic (1915). 

On 15th April 1912, Titanic sank in the North Atlantic Ocean, during her maiden voyage from Southampton to New York, after hitting an Iceberg. There were approximately 2,200 souls on board and the rescue of over 700 survivors was possible due to new wireless telegraphy equipment invented by Guglielmo Marconi and his vision of equipping ships with telegraphs. 

During the voyage, the wireless operators on board Titanic would spend time communicating with other ships and sending messages ashore for wealthy first-class passengers. Unfortunately this meant that the ships channels were jammed with passenger communications, so several ice warnings being transmitted over the same frequency were missed or ignored. 

Thankfully after the collision, when Titanic started to transmit distress signals, Harold Cottam, the radio operator on board Carpathia received the first message, sent by Jack Phillips and immediately informed the captain, who headed towards the last known position of Titanic, 60 miles and four hours away. 

If it had not been for Marconi and the wireless telegraph, there would have been no survivors. Many lessons have been learned from the Titanic disaster, the most important being that first-class passenger ships had to adopt a 24-hour radio watch, use the same wavelength to transmit signals and at regular intervals radio silence had to be maintained to listen for distress calls. 

There are 198 exchanges in Belfast, of which 156 are automatic, 43,366 lines, 70,139 stations, 309,378 miles of underground wire and 51,740 miles of overhead wire. The total staff, excluding operating force is 1,435 including 1,110 engineering.