It was early in 1938 that the medical superintendent of Rand Mines, Dr A J Orenstein, asked Professor Basil Schonland, the director of the Bernard Price Institute of Geophysical Research (the BPI) at the University of the Witwatersrand, about the feasibility of radio communications underground in mines. Orenstein had long been concerned that firefighting and rescue teams were severely hampered by a lack of communication.

The war, radar and international events soon intervened as war with Nazi Germany loomed. South Africa declared war on 6 September 1939. From then the research focus of the BPI shifted inexorably. All its resources, as limited as they were, would be given over to the investigation of RDF, or radar as it was known in those earliest days. What followed was the formation of the Special Signals Services (SSS), as part of the South African Army’s Corps of Signals with Lt Col Schonland as its commanding officer. The SSS co-opted the services of engineers and physicists from South Africa’s major universities, one of whom was a young engineering graduate from Durban by the name of Trevor Wadley. It was that massive wartime effort at the BPI that was the spur to the formation of the CSIR which was formally established in October 1945 with Schonland as its president. And the CSIR’s first specialist laboratory to come into existence was the Telecommunications Research Laboratory with Wadley among its first members of staff.

Wadley and radio underground

Wadley’s genius was soon evident. He designed a revolutionary type of radio receiver that became the mainstay of British naval communication. Subsequently, he developed a distance-measuring device of quite unparalleled accuracy called the Tellurometer which revolutionised the field of surveying. Remarkably, he also turned his attention to the problem of radio communications in mines that had first been raised almost a decade before. Read this fascinating story of the development and ingenuity of underground radio in South African mines by Dr Brian Austion in the July edition of EngineerIT.