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Concept
Trevor Wadley
Summary
Trevor Lloyd Wadley, (1920 – 21 May 1981) was a South African electrical engineer, best known for his development of the Wadley Loop circuit for greater stability in communications receivers and the Tellurometer, a land surveying device.
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. 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).
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