The next day, the Daily Mail’s front page reports:

That the Titanic has sunk, with no loss of life

In reality, the Titanic never talked directly to land, only to ships. It took the Olympic relaying more information to New York for the truth to come out. And it was not until 17 April that accurate news reached England.

18 April. 10pm, New York time.

More than 40,000 people are waiting on the pier for the Titanic’s survivors. They are cheered like people back from the dead. The New York Times rents an entire hotel floor to house 20 reporters phoning in their stories live. The event makes the front page, with photos of the captain and the survivors.

On that side of the Atlantic, the shock is such that US Senator William Alden Smith immediately launches an inquiry. The public hearings become an unprecedented media spectacle. They pick apart the technical and human failings that turned the “unsinkable” into a steel coffin. The impact of the sinking echoes around the world, far beyond a maritime disaster.

It is also on 18 April that England learns most of the passengers are dead, despite a few survivors. The press reveals that the Californian had radioed a warning about icebergs, to no effect. But also that wireless messages had allowed ships like the Carpathia to come to the rescue.

This dreadful toll of more than 1,500 dead could have been even worse without wireless. In the days that follow, Herbert Samuel, the British Postmaster General, declares:

Everyone who was saved, he says, was saved thanks to one man, Mr Marconi, and his marvellous invention.

And that intervention was Marconi’s wireless. But nobody mentions that the Californian’s operator had switched off his set, that commercial messages had sometimes been put before safety, or that the Mesaba’s crucial warning had been ignored.

The next day, the London Stock Exchange opens, and it is the day of Marconi’s IPO.

The shares soar to £3.5 at the open, close at £4 the same day, then settle around £2 after a few weeks. The sinking of the Titanic did wonders for Marconi’s public image, but it was above all the prospect of the British imperial contract, signed in July 1912, that drove the initial surge in the share price that followed.

Except that some people may have had that information… well before.