The Origins of GPS

Today we take our navigation for granted. Just a few moments using our phone and we’ve got our quickest route home, the scenic drive to work, and directions to the nearest coffee shop. But have you ever stopped to wonder how it actually works, or who made it?

For a special sixth episode of the Create the Future podcast, we spoke to the winners of the 2019 Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering after they received the award from HRH The Prince of Wales, about their work developing the Global Positioning System – GPS.

Today, it is estimated that four billion people around the world use GPS. It provides an accessible service for all and a powerful tool that engineers can integrate with their own applications for free. It can help to track disease outbreaks, guide self-driving tractors, prevent shark attacks, and even improve the performance of sports teams. New applications for GPS continue to revolutionise entire industries, and its annual economic value has been estimated to be $80 billion for the USA alone.

In this episode, Dr Bradford Parkinson, Richard Schwartz, Hugo Fruehauf, and Anna Marie Spilker, on behalf of her late husband, Professor James Spilker, Jr, recount stories of how they started working on GPS, their individual contributions to the project, the highlights and challenges of the colossal innovation, as well as their thoughts on its future applications.

To read more about the winners, and the history of GPS, visit: qeprize.org/news/origins-of-gps

New episodes of ‘Create the Future: An Engineering Podcast’ every other Tuesday. www.qeprize.org/podcasts

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