Wireless telegraphy in the Italo-Turkish War

The use of wireless telegraphy in the Italo-Turkish war was the first example of its large-scale military application, its origins dating from the end of the 1880s.

For the war in Libya, the Corps of Engineers established the first regular large-scale use of wireless in the field. The sole precedent – but on a more limited scale – was that of the German army during the Herero Wars in South West Africa (the present Namibia) in July 1906.

The Italian wireless stations became important in the wake of the initial landings, and were used for communications between the fleet and the Corps of Logistics. In charge of the wireless detachment in Tripoli was the then Lieutenant Luigi Sacco, who arrived in Libya on 9 October 1911 a few days after the outbreak of hostilities.

On 16 December he was joined in Tripoli by Italian inventor and radio pioneer Guglielmo Marconi, who with Sacco and in the presence of the commander of the Italian expeditionary force, General Caneva, conducted a series of tests with Italy using a simple wire aerial laid out on the sand.

Marconi's experiments demonstrated the feasibility of a wireless telegraphy network across a desert terrain lacking in infrastructure, as was the case in places such as Libya. During the following months the WT detachment would set up a network that was controlled from a 1.5 kW spark transmitter on the quayside of the Turkish fort at Tripoli. Other stations were set up at Misurate, Sirte, Misda and Beni Ulid.

One major problem was how to transport the WT stations across sandy desert tracks.