ABOARD ITASCA, commanding officer Warner Thompson had a decision to make. Should he order the cutter to begin searching for Earhart right away, or should he wait? By his calculations, her plane had enough fuel to stay in the air for another hour or so. In that time she still might reestablish radio contact. She might even appear overhead.
And so Itasca waited. On deck, crew members shaded their eyes and peered into the blue sky, hoping for the glint of a plane wing. Meanwhile, in the radio room Leo Bellarts and the other operators desperately banged out Morse code messages. But the sky remained empty; the radio merely scratched and hissed.
Finally, at 1:45 p.m., Commander Thompson ordered Bellarts to send an all-emergency broadcast to “ALL SHIPS, ALL STATIONS: AMELIA EARHART PLANE . . . APPARENTLY DOWN AT SEA, POSITION UNKNOWN. . . . REQUEST SHIPS AND STATIONS LISTEN . . . FOR ANY SIGNALS FROM PLANE. . . .” Then he gave the command for Itasca to get under way. They would search the waters north and west of Howland Island. Explained Thompson, “The area seemed most logical” based on the position given by Amelia in her last broadcast.
As the cutter churned through the Pacific’s swells, every set of available eyes scanned the ocean. Was it possible the plane could be floating—intact—on the water’s surface? Or could Amelia be clinging to a piece of wreckage? Might she even have had time to inflate a life raft? But hour after tense hour passed without a sign of the flier.
Then miraculously, at six o’clock that evening, Itasca’s radiomen heard a weak voice behind the static. Unfortunately, none of the men could make out any of the words.
The radio operators quickly sent a reply. “YOU ARE VERY WEAK. REPEAT. PLEASE GO AHEAD.”
They waited.
No reply.
Minutes later they sent another message, and this time they tried something new. “PLEASE GIVE LONG DASHES [IN MORSE CODE] IF YOU HEAR US. GO AHEAD.”
For several long seconds, only static filled the room. Then the voice was back. Wrote radioman Thomas O’Hare in the ship’s log, “We hear her now. Very weak and unreadable voice.”
Chief Radioman Leo Bellarts stepped in. “IF YOU HEAR US PLEASE GIVE US A SERIES OF LONG DASHES,” he transmitted.
Bellarts got an immediate reply—an on-again-off-again signal he described in his log as “something like a generator start and stop.”
It was not the reply they expected. Normally, dots and dashes were sent by simply holding down and releasing a “sending key.” But what Itasca’s crew didn’t know was that Amelia did not have a sending key on her airplane. To make dashes, she had to hold down and release the push-to-talk button on her radio microphone. Every time she did this, it sounded like a generator going on and off.
Could Amelia have been using her radio microphone to send a message?
Since the radiomen did not try to decipher it, no one will ever know.
Minutes later, the generator sound was repeated. This time, Bellarts thought he also heard someone say the name Earhart.
But was it really the aviator? The radiomen weren’t sure. Wrote O’Hare in his log, “Signals on and off. Think it is the plane?”
Itasca called again in both voice and Morse code. This time a man’s voice answered. A man? Crewmembers didn’t know that Amelia had taken along a navigator named Fred Noonan. They believed she had attempted the journey alone. Hearing the man’s voice made them think the signal was a hoax. Logged O’Hare, “Guess it isn’t her now.”
Morse Code:
The Long and Short of It
Morse code is a way of communicating through telegraph lines, undersea cables and radio waves. Invented by Samuel F. B. Morse in the early 1840s, it uses a sequence of long and short sounds that represent the letters of the alphabet. Short tones are called dots; long tones are called dashes. A message in Morse code is sent by using a switch called a sending key to break the radio signal. The long and short tones between these breaks are then decoded into the letters of the alphabet, and the message is received.
A sending key similar to the one used by the radiomen of Itasca. Amelia did not have a key aboard her plane and would have had to use the on-off button on her microphone to break the radio signal.
Send a Secret Message in Morse Code
Of course, you don’t need a radio signal or a telegraph key to send a message in Morse code. You and your friends can send each other top-secret dots-and-dashes messages simply by turning a flashlight on and off, tapping a pencil, or even batting your eyelids. Want to know more? Go to www.education.com/ activity/ article/ Morse_Code and start signaling your friends today.
This chart of the International Morse Code shows how letters and numbers are represented by dots and dashes. (picture credit 3.2)