The above stamp was issued in 1979 by the SA Post Office in honour of Dr Trevor Wadley (1920 - 1981), the inventor of the Tellurometer EDM a land surveying device, the Wadley Loop receiver tuning system for greater stability in communications receivers and the Ionosonde or chirpsounder, is a special radar for the examination of the ionosphere. .
Dr Trevor Wadley was a research scientist at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) in South Africa. The Council for Scientific and Industrial Research is South Africa's central and premier scientific research and development organisation. It was established by an act of parliament in 1945.
Wadley was born in 1920 in Durban, South Africa. His father was the Mayor of Durban and Trevor was one of 12 children. He attended Durban High School where he excelled in mathematics and science but was uninterested in any sport. The exception was one year when he entered the annual cross-country athletics event and predicted that he would win in record time and his record would stand for 15 years. He went on to do exactly as he had predicted. His training method involved calculating the time he needed to run each section of the course and then training himself to run at the required pace for each section.
He then went to Howard College (now the University of KwaZulu-Natal), where he studied under Hugh Clark and Eric Phillips. He had the habit of rarely, if ever, taking notes in lectures due to his near-eidetic memory. GR Bozzoli noted in is book Forging Ahead – South Africa’s Pioneering Engineers that Wadley "would very occasionally take out a small pocket notebook and write a word or two in it using a blunt, stubby pencil. His remarkable mind understood and remembered every item of a lecture".
In 1941, during World War II, he joined the Special Signals Services (SSS) of the South African Corps of Signals which was engaged in developing South Africa's own radar system based on the British experience which had been communicated to them. Wadley and other colleagues including Jules Fejer, the Hungarian-born mathematician, were trained on the British RADAR project.[4] His association with Fejer would continue for many more years. Wadley was not keen on mathematics but Fejer proved each of Wadley's concepts mathematically.
In 1946, Wadley was employed as a designer of radio equipment and instrumentation in a special division of the Telecommunications Research Laboratory (TRL), created at the behest of Prime Minister Jan Smuts and located at the electrical engineering department of the University of the Witwatersrand (under Basil Schonland). The TRL relocated to the South African Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) and was renamed the National Institute for Telecommunications Research (NITR) (under Dr Frank Hewitt).
In 1948, Wadley started working on an urgent project for the South African Chamber of Mines to provide a means of radio communication underground for rescue purposes. After a feasibility investigation Wadley wrote a report indicating that it could be done and detailing his recommendations. The Chamber did not pursue the matter for more than a decade.
Wadley retired in 1964 (aged 44) and lived on the south coast of KwaZulu-Natal until his death from cancer in 1981 (aged 61).
More information about this remarkable inventor is available by visiting the links underneath:
- Trevor Wadley
- Tellurometer
- The Wadley Loop HF Receivers
- The Barlow Wadley and Racal RA17 Radios
- Trevor Wadley, Inventor extraordinary, by Dr Mike Bruton (Video)
- Wadley Loop
Images: (Click on images for larger view.
