AbstractIn 1957 Dr. (then Mr.) T. L. Wadley, of the Telecommunications Division of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research of South Africa, visited the United Kingdom to carry out trials on the Ridgeway and Caithness Bases of a new and quite revolutionary system of micro-wave distance measurement. Whilst hints of this new system had been circulating some two years earlier—it was, in fact, mentioned at the 1955 Commonwealth Survey Officers—Conference—no real details had been released previously. Dr. Wadley also gave a lecture at the Royal Geographical Society which was attended by most of the leading surveyors in the country. The year 1957 can therefore be looked upon as a milestone in survey history, and it was also in that year that the first Tellurometer Systems were produced commercially and became available to the surveyor. In the same year the first Tellurometer training course was organized, and it was after a four-day course—the week was cut short because the Monday was August Bank Holiday—that a team from the Directorate of Overseas Surveys set out to carry out the now well-known Isiolo to Malindi traverse in Kenya.