Who invented the Global Positioning System?
May 23, 2006 gps navigation, misc news
…The Global Positioning System has revolutionized our society. It has greatly improved the accuracy of weapons. It has added billions to the economy with its applications in agriculture, trucking and many other industries. Many lives have been saved since hikers and others with GPS devices can more easily find their way to safety. Yet, there is disagreement over who created it.
Many are unaware of the controversy. Thus, readers of the American Heritage Magazine of Invention and Technology learned on page 58 of the Fall 2004 issue that:
[Brad] Parkinson was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in May for his leadership of the military project that created the GPS system. Along with Ivan Getting, an early proponent of GPS, and many others, Parkinson helped create a navigation and positioning system…
It all began in 1973, when then Colonel Parkinson, of the U.S. Air Force, was appointed to lead a joint military program to build an advanced navigation system. When he arrived, competing factions from the Navy, Air Force, and other services, each promoting its own technological solutions, were threatening to sink the project. “It was a mess,” he says. His first duty was to find a compromise plan that all the services could support.
Note that Parkinson does not state how much of each service’s technological solution was used in GPS. The magazine does include the phrase “many others”; however, since it does not mention any other individual, the clear implication is that Getting and Parkinson played a more significant role in GPS than anyone else…
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