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a thirty-two volt lighting plant, driven by a Lister engine. On the opposite side of the room, they installed a 50-watt
receiving and transmitting radio unit, which was to be the ‘mother station’ for the field experiments. A 17-metre
aerial mast was erected outside. The first trial was a telephone relay to their friend Harry Kauper in Adelaide.
The results were satisfactory. On 11 November 1926, Flynn and Traeger left for Hermannsburg Mission in the
Dodge utility with a heavy load of Edison copper-oxide batteries and other gear. Hermannsburg was to be their
first outpost. They had left a young telegraph operator in charge at Alice Springs. Their host at the Hermannsburg
Mission Station was Pastor F W Albrecht.
The first test was a complete failure. Flynn and Traeger drove back to Alice Springs, and discovered that the
young telegraph operator had put in the wrong coil. With the fault corrected, signals from Hermannsburg came in
loud and clear, although pastor Albrecht found it difficult at first to handle his Morse code. But the experiment was
a success and on 25 November Pastor Albrecht sent an urgent message from Hermannsburg to his wife in Tanunda,
South Australia—the first successful message in a scheme, as yet unborn, which was to transform the social life of
the outback. Flynn and Traeger then installed another outpost, at the police station at Arltunga. Traeger then carried
out a series of adjustments and within a fortnight, both field stations were communicating with the mother station
and with each other. This was the first triumph in the inland saga of Traeger achievements. Flynn’s dream, however,
was far from fulfilment The equipment which he and Traeger had so far used was too expensive and bulky while
it also required trained operators. Furthermore, the heavy copper-oxide batteries were quite impractical for general
use in the bush. But Flynn was sure that Traeger was the man of the hour. Traeger went back to his workshop in
Adelaide, on the payroll of Flynn’s Australian Inland Mission at 500 Pounds a year.
Though only of medium physical stature and a wearer of spectacles from an early age, he possessed the
extraordinary capacity to work early and late at his bench, winding generators and soldering delicate radio circuits.
Of an extremely shy and quiet disposition, he shunned clubs and public gatherings, but in personal conversation
he had a twinkling sense of humour and a boyish laugh. A typical characteristic was his conservative dress.
He invariably wore long, dark trousers with braces and declined to wear shorts even when working in the tropical
heat. One of the secrets behind his patience and perseverance was the fact that his work was also his hobby, and
he possessed a strong inborn Lutheran doggedness. He immediately tackled the problem of finding an economic
source of power in place of his big copper-oxide batteries, which he had used at Hermannsburg and Arltunga.
He first experimented with a hand-operated emery grinder fixed to a small generator. With brisk turning, he was
able to get an output of about 10 watts, but this was hardly a practical solution because it would take two people
to transmit messages. Traeger then tried bicycle pedals to drive the generator. He found that a person, seated,
without great exertion, could get an output of about twenty watts at a pressure of about three hundred volts. He then
proceeded to enclose the flywheel and gears of the generator in a cylindrical, sturdily constructed metal housing
with the pedals outside and with a cast base, which could be firmly screwed to the floor beneath a table. Turning
next to the dual receiver-transmitter, he ingeniously built this complete outfit into a rectangular wooden (later
metal) box with a master switch separating the crystal-controlled transmitter on one side and the newly improved
receiver on the other side.
Thus was born the so-called ‘pedal radio set’. On 11 September 1927, Traeger wrote to Flynn: ‘I have some
great news for you. After numerous disappointments I have at last managed to make a pedal operated transceiver
suitable for the job.’ Flynn gave him the go-ahead to manufacture ten sets. The cost was estimated by Traeger to be
less than 50 Pounds each. Official records show that Traeger was listed on the staff register of the Australian Inland
Mission in 1928–29 as ‘Chief Wireless Officer’ and that during 1928 he custom-built ten complete pedal sets with
aerials and accessories, and also a 200-watt telephone transmitter for a mother station. Flynn, in consultation with
his medical and aviation advisers, had already selected Cloncurry in Queensland as the pioneering base, and the
first flying doctor had been in operation since 15 May 1928.
In April 1929 Traeger and Harry Kinzbrunner, his newly appointed wireless assistant, arrived in Cloncurry
with their load of wireless equipment. Their first task was to install the new mother station in the vestry of the
Presbyterian Church in Uhr Street, with a Lister engine and generator in a small iron shed in the yard at the rear.
By September 1929 Traeger had also completed the installation of eight ‘pedal sets’ at various strategic points in
the Gulf country and western Queensland, covering an area from Birdsville near the South Australian border to
the shores of the Gulf in the north, with one station as far away as Mornington Island, about 150 kilometres by sea
from Burketown.
Flynn recognised the magnitude of Traeger’s achievement and he wrote at the time: ‘I must express my deepest
gratitude to him. He worked without ceasing and remained cheerful under the most trying runs of bad luck which
haunted us always in our preliminary work.’
The term ‘pedal radio’ became famous Australia-wide and it persisted long after pedals were no longer needed.
For many years it became a standard expression for outback people to say, ‘I heard you on the pedal!’ Traeger set
up a permanent workshop at 11 Dudley Street, Marrickville, with selected staff, and year after year manufactured
the various models of the ‘Traeger Transceiver’ for hundreds of people in the outback areas. This became his
lifetime work.
In 1933, he invented the remarkable typewriter Morse keyboard that became a regular accessory to the pedal sets,
for the succeeding five years enabling operators to type out their messages in Morse code to the mother station. This
was a further godsend to bush people during the early ‘pedal set years’, and until telephony became the regular mode
of communication. In the Northern Territory, early models of the Traeger Transceiver, working with the Cloncurry
mother station, were installed at Borroloola, Roper River, Milingimbi, Groote Eylandt, Victoria River Downs,
Hermannsburg, Elkedra, Erldunda, Rockhampton Downs, Hatches Creek, Anthony’s Lagoon, Mount Doreen,
Eva Downs, Nutwood Downs and McDonald Downs.