Knowledge without frontiers Knowledge Without Frontiers | Page 19

A creek being dammed in Kamina. Codelli is keeping an eye on the work while
leaning against a concrete wall. Slovene Ethnographic Museum.
The antenna tower in Togo under construction.
Slovene Ethnographic Museum.
IN AFRICA
One of his biggest achievements was the
construction of a radiotelegraph station in Togo.
In 1911 he and his colleagues started preparing
the terrain for the installation of nine antenna
towers in Kamina, a village near Atakpame. In
parallel, they constructed the central building
for the steam engines, generators, and oth-
At the beginning of the First World War the
er technical equipment. The work was mostly Germans blew up all the buildings with dyna-
the first radio transmission between Africa and mains of the radiotelegraph station are visible
completed by the end of 1913, when they made
Europe. This was an extraordinary achievement
for that time and a landmark in the develop-
ment of telecommunications.
mite and tore down the antenna towers. The re-
to this day and marked with a sign explaining
its history. The full name of only one person ap-
pears in the text on the sign – Anton Codelli.
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