KVLY-TV mast

Blanchard, North Dakota, 1963. A guyed steel mast is the cheapest way to get an antenna very high, and this one went higher than anything else people had built: 628.8 meters (2,063 feet) when it was finished that August. It held the title of tallest man-made structure until Poland's Warsaw radio mast passed it in 1974, took it back when that mast collapsed in 1991, and kept it until the Burj Khalifa. A later antenna change trimmed it to about 605.6 meters. The photo, taken at the base beside the transmitter building, shows how little there is to it: a narrow lattice held up by guy wires stretching out across the prairie, carrying the signal of Fargo's KVLY-TV.