Marémoto is considered to be one of the very first dramatic works created for radio. It began as a radio play written for a competition of radiophonic works organized by the newspaper L’impartiel Français, and it shared first prize with Paul Camille’s Agonie (a work never produced for broadcast.) It was credited under pseudonyms Pierre Cusy and Maurice Vinot. The latter can be identified as radio practitioner and theorist Gabriel Germinet, who discussed the production of Marémoto in Cusy and Germinet’s work Théâtre radiophonique: Mode nouveau d’expression artistique of 1926.

In October of 1924 a live rehearsal of the drama was broadcast on Cusy and Germinet’s Radio-Paris station, a radio band directly adjacent to that of station Tour-Eiffel. That night, listeners who had tuned in for a concert on Tour-Eiffel were surprised to hear a mysterious broadcast seeming to emanate from the imperiled crew of a sinking ship. Some of this confusion was intentional - the script calls for there to be no introduction which would frame the broadcast as fiction, and the novel addition of sound effects, or décors de bruits, created a “perfect illusion,” in Germinet’s estimation. The charade was revealed only at the end of the performance, and other details, such as the location coordinates given by the protagonists which situated them in the middle of the Sahara, or the fact that telegraphy, not telephony, was the only means of ship-to-shore communication available to mariners in that age, were included to ensure that the work was not taken for reality. Nevertheless, many listeners telephoned and telegrammed maritime authorities to warn them of the distressed vessel. This led to a successful ban on broadcast of the work orchestrated by the French Minister of the Navy. The notoriety achieved by the broadcast helped ensure that it would be broadly disseminated: it was ultimately translated and broadcast in eight languages, beginning with a BBC English-language version in 1925. The maritime catastrophe play soon became a radio genre in its own right. In 1937, Radio-Paris was finally permitted to broadcast the work. Recordings of these original broadcasts have not survived; the best-preserved production of the work was created for Radiodiffusion-Télévision Française by Georges Godebert.