ARCHIVE PHOTO OF THE DAY
Communications station in Libya, 1953
By Published: April 5, 2020
Ted Rohde ©Stars and Stripes
Tripoli, Libya, May, 1953: Airmen from the 1807th AACS Wing at Wheelus Field monitor messages at a state-of-the-art global communications station. The high-power trunk broadcasting and teletype network, put in place about a year and a half earlier, was described in a story as "a world of tape relays, switchboards with blinking green lights, 10,000 teletype keys pounding at once, banks of vacuum tubes feeding rhombic antennae with 240 words a minute of weather data, scrambled code, aircraft movement."
RELATED MATERIAL:
Stars and Stripes' 1953 story about the globecom network and the Wheelus station.
