The Tellurometer changed the business of land surveying with the introduction of a device that was the first in the world to use microwaves (radio waves) rather than light for distance measurement. It resulted from the search for an instrument that was lightweight and portable, required a small amount of power, and was accurate over several miles.
It could penetrate haze and mist in daylight or darkness, and did not require the landscape to be cleared of vegetation before being surveyed. The availability of these instruments reduced a 40-year land programme to survey and map Australia to about 10 years.
Invented by Trevor Lloyd Wadley of the Telecommunications Research Laboratory of the CSIR, it was covered by patents in at least 11 countries and is now part of museum collections in many of those countries - including the Smithsonian Institution in the US and the British Museum in London.
It was manufactured and commercialised by Tellurometer in Cape Town and one of the first products received its "baptism" along the rugged coast of the Aleutian Islands of Alaska in 1957.
Tellurometer was acquired by Plessey in 1967 and grew into what would be a R1,5bn business in today's terms. Plessey SA, in turn, was acquired by Dimension Data in 1998. The businesses that were not part of that transaction formed the basis of Tellumat.
About 20 years ago Plessey engineers recognised that GPS, the technology standard for global position fixing, would cannibalise the measurement business.
It was then that Plessey engineers began developing the communication technologies for the defence and telecommunication industries that form the basis of Tellumat as we know it today.
