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Show FALL 2013 UHQ pp 304-385_UHQ Stories/pp.4-68 9/16/13 1:25 PM Page 325 J. WILLArD MArrIOTT LIBrAry, UNIVErSITy OF UTAh Isaac Russell’s Remarkable Interview with Harold Bride, Sole Surviving Wireless Operator from the Titanic By KENNETh L. CANNON II O n April 18, 1912, Isaac Russell scooped the rest of the journalistic world. The Utah native, who lived in New York City and wrote for the New York Times, talked his way onto the RMS Carpathia after it docked in New York with the survivors of the Titanic disaster on board. This photograph of Isaac Russell There, Russell interviewed Harold Bride— appeared on the cover of Salt the ship’s lone surviving Marconi wireless Lake City’s Progressive magazine radio operator—about the sinking of the on November 1, 1913. On the RMS Titanic. Without the services of Bride back of the original image, the and the other wireless operator from the ship following note appears: “Isaac and without the invention of Guglielmo Russell, reporter for the New York Marconi, it is extremely unlikely that anyone from the Titanic would have lived.1 Russell’s Times, ones [sic] of whose telling of Bride’s story covered most of the reports, on the sinking of the front page of the Times the next morning, Titanic, during which he worked and it is almost certainly the best-known eye- with Marconi, inventor of wireless witness account of the sinking of the Titanic.2 telegraphy, aboard the ship the When the New York Times reprinted Bride’s Carpathia, won honors for him.” Kenneth L. Cannon II is an attorney in private practice and an independent historian who resides in Salt Lake City. He has published extensively on legal and historical topics and is currently editing Isaac Russell’s unpublished manuscript about Greenwich Village. 1 U.S. Senate, Committee on Commerce, “Titanic” Disaster, 62nd Cong., 2nd sess., S. Rep. No. 806 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1912), 10–11; Michael Davie, Titanic: The Death and Life of a Legend (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987), 94–115. 2 [Isaac Russell], “Thrilling Story by Titanic’s Surviving Wireless Man,” New York Times, April 19, 1912. As with most news articles of the period, no byline identified the reporter who prepared the article. The introduction to the report stated that, “This statement was dictated by Mr. Bride to a reporter for THE 325 |
